A magical, mystical fix-all for America’s still-best-in-the-world higher education system from the lady who replaced America’s primary and secondary education curricula with teaching to the test: …(wait for it)…(wait for it)…(have you guessed what it is yet?)…THAT’S RIGHT, High stakes testing! Please, hold your applause.
<>Secretary of Education Margaret “The Testinator” Spellings has set her sights anew on the hallowed halls of American higher learning. With a plan to provide “matching funds” to universities and colleges that begin administering standardized tests and tracking student graduation rates, Spellings vows to wake our institutions from their lazy and slothful slumber. And why shouldn’t we trust her judgment? After all, she did such a wonderful job of correcting the deficiencies of our elementary and high schools and sending them down the right path to improved test-preparation training, why shouldn’t we want the same quality from our universities and colleges?
Of course, were I a university or college president salivating at the thought of those matching funds, I would probably be wise to hold off on any expensive testing plans until I saw the green of Spellings’s cash. Administering standardized tests is grossly expensive, and the more likely the test is to measure actual knowledge beyond test-taking ability, the more expensive it is. The rhetoric that accompanied No Child Left Behind promised funding to offset the additional financial burden states and school districts would bear in administering the federally required tests, but alas, said funding never really materialized.
It is interesting that Spellings, who is part of an administration that likes to privatize (including armed security forces in
Since there are already organizations efficiently and effectively fulfilling some of the major functions of Spellings’s proposed scheme, one is led to examine the charge of higher education’s complacency (read: college graduates are dumber these days; I mean, just compare the average college grad today to intellectual powerhouses like Spellings and W and you’ll see they’re right). My personal, longitudinal observations of higher education (as a nearly continuous college student for the last thirteen years) suggest this is probably inaccurate. But if college grads are less qualified than their earlier counterparts, then we could well argue that the root problem is not watered down curricula, but rather that public institutions of higher education have become so reliant on tuition for their funding that they are being forced to do whatever it takes to keep those tuition dollars coming in.
Frankly, No Child Left Behind was nothing more than a gimmick to promote the privatization of public education. There’s no reason to think this new scheme isn’t meant to justify the diminishment of public colleges and universities.
