Links for 2/17/11

Kevin Carey

If people talk about the budget in a way that identifies certain very broad categories of expenditure like “education” as inherently virtuous and all Obama proposals to cut programs within that category as, by definition, a betrayal of the progressive cause, we’re basically doomed to waste large amounts of scarce public resources forever. And in the future when there’s no money to support some vital new cause, this will be one of the reasons why…

Jay P. Greene

Inside most public policy wonks is a mini-dictator, waiting to come out. They dream about how things ought to be organized… if only they were in charge…

Scott Jaschik

The University of the South on Wednesday announced that it is cutting total student charges (tuition, fees and room and board) by 10 percent -- one of the more dramatic shifts in tuition policy announced by a competitive private college in recent years…

Sewanee's decision is based in part on competition with public flagship universities and in part on the conviction of the new president, John McCardell, that current economic trends for liberal arts colleges like his are "unsustainable" and may even represent "a slow death scenario."…

April Kelly-Woessner

in the midst of reflecting on what our students should do and know, we found ourselves acting out a scene from George Orwell's 1984. Adopting the correct "assessment" language seemed to take priority, and we circulated lists of approved and forbidden action verbs…

Although the goal of assessment is to improve teaching and learning, some faculty members argued that, in an effort to articulate what we could most easily measure, our new learning objectives actually reduced and narrowed our expectations of students…

The public is not demanding evidence of learning as much as it is demanding evidence of efficiency…

But institutions of higher education have chosen to ignore the efficiency aspect of accountability…