A report published by Uwezo,
an education advocacy organization based in East Africa revealed that only 75% of pupils in class
five could read and add at the level expected of a class two pupil. This report
raised, unsurprisingly, the questions and debate on weather our kids were
learning, and what they were learning.
In my opinion the question
of weather learning is occurring must be asked at all levels of education. I
think we must direct our focus to what is going on in our universities,
especially the quality and caliber of our graduates.
We must think about how to
hold our professors accountable to the modest but considerable public resources we
spend on higher education.
In an Op-ed piece published
April 19 in the NYTimes, David Brooks writes that there is fragility hanging
over America’s colleges. This fragility Brooks writes comes from the fact that
colleges are charging high tuition but it is not clear what benefits they
provide.
Brooks cites the seminal
work by Arum and Roska in their book, “Academically Adrift”, in which they
found that nearly half the students showed no significant gain in critical
thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills during the first two years in
college.
Here is an excerpt of David
Brooks column, Testing Teachers.
“In 1961, students spent an
average of 24 hours a week studying. Today’s students spend a little more than
half that time. This is an
unstable situation. At some point, parents are going to decide that $160,000 is
too high a price if all you get is an empty credential and a fancy car-window
sticker.
One part of the solution is
found in three little words: value-added assessments. Colleges have to test
more to find out how they’re doing. Colleges and universities have to be able to provide
prospective parents with data that will give them some sense of how much their
students learn.
In 2006, the Spellings
commission, led by then-Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, recommended
a serious accountability regime. Specifically, the commission recommended using
a standardized test called the Collegiate Learning Assessment to provide accountability
data. Colleges and grad schools use standardized achievement tests to measure
students on the way in; why shouldn’t they use them to measure students on the
way out?
The challenge is not
getting educators to embrace the idea of assessment. It’s mobilizing them to
actually enact it in a way that’s real and transparent to outsiders. The second
challenge is deciding whether testing should be tied to federal dollars or more
voluntary. Should we impose a coercive testing regime that would reward and punish
schools based on results? Or should we let schools adopt their own preferred
systems?
Given how little we know
about how to test college students, the voluntary approach is probably best for
now. Foundations, academic conferences or even magazines could come up with
assessment methods. Each assessment could represent a different vision of what
college is for. Groups of similar schools could congregate around the
assessment model that suits their vision. Then they could broadcast the results
to prospective parents, saying, “We may not be prestigious or as expensive as
X, but here students actually learn.”
This is the beginning of
college reform. If you’ve got a student at or applying to college, ask the
administrators these questions: “How much do students here learn? How do you
know?”
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