In what may be the college equivalent to President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, college students nationwide may be forced to take government administered standardized tests to evaluate the quality of their American collegiate education if a U.S. Board of Education commission finds it necessary.
Margaret Spellings, secretary of education for the Bush administration, has named a commission to investigate the status of higher education and examine whether standardized testing should be implemented at the university level.
Spellings noted in the release that, following standardized testing implemented from the No Child Left Behind Act, scores of elementary and secondary students show they are more prepared to enter college. Now, the administration’s challenge is ensuring that opportunities for higher education are available to these students.
Spellings’ new commission, the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, appointed last fall, has until August to issue a report on issues concerning accountability, cost and innovation of implementing a standardized college exam.
Commission Chair Charles Miller said, in an Feb. 13 article in The New York Times, that while he does not envision the creation of a single set of standardized tests to administer to all higher education institutions, he does think publicly reporting on the status of collegiate learning through testing would be useful to students, parents, taxpayers and employers.
Miller was head of the Regents of the University of Texas when it administered standardized tests to the university’s nine campuses to gauge students’ learning.
But university officials and specialists in higher education question if imposing standardized testing is the solution to making higher education more reachable and affordable to America’s increasingly diverse population.
Although members of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education agree the higher education curriculum needs to be further evaluated, but does not necessarily need standardized tests.
“I believe there needs to be a greater emphasis in higher education on student learning outcomes and I support curriculum assessment,” Eileen O’Connor said on behalf of Judith Gill, the Chancellor of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education. “But standardized tests are not the answer. Appropriate assessment tools must be developed by faculty not by an academic testing company.”
Walter Haney, professor for the Department of Counseling and Developmental Psychology and Research Methods at Boston College, said standardized testing is not the answer to evaluating higher education.
“I suspect what they are trying to move to is the use of standardized testing at the post secondary level analogous to the No Child Left Behind Act,” Haney said.
Haney added that he thought the plan was “ill-conceived” and “a largely destructive way of testing in a high-stakes, ill-run way” and called the plan “unprofessional.”
“I would say there are two broad possible explanations,” Haney said. “The benign explanation is that policymakers like President Bush and Secretary Spellings are misinformed and have a very little understanding of higher education in the United States. A less benign explanation is a somewhat Machiavellian effort to undermine education in the United States.”