Links for 2/7/11

Doug Lederman

the Education Department's two-day forum on higher education accreditation…

The basic gist on which there was general agreement:
• Higher education accreditation is imperfect (seriously so, in the eyes of some), with many commentators citing how rarely the agencies punish colleges and how inscrutable and mysterious their process is to the public.
• Politicians and regulators are asking accrediting agencies to do things they were never intended to do, like make sure colleges don't defraud students.
• Despite those flaws, most seemed less than eager to try to create a wholly different system to assure the quality of America's colleges and universities, because they see it as either difficult or undesirable…

Michael Pomeranz

Louisiana's Board of Regents have engaged in one of the most rigorous reviews the nation has seen in recent memory. It will serve as a model for other states. The Regents reviewed every student program. Those programs that have failed to graduate more than a handful of students, the Regents designated as "low-completers." Each campus will have the opportunity to explain why the low-completers make sense both from a financial and from a mission point of view for the school; the Regents will then terminate failed, redundant, and costly programs…

Peter Wood

The university needs science, but how much does science need the university?

Steve Peha

People have had a decade to take shots at NCLB. Many started shooting before it even passed. (I’ll admit to being one of them.) Now we get the chance to fix all the things we said we never liked about it…

People don’t like AYP. Fine. Come up with a better way to tell schools and the people who go to them how they’re doing. People don’t like testing. Fine. Come up with a better way—a viable, actionable, scaleable way—that we can get a read on how kids are doing in school. Same goes for teacher quality. Don’t like VAMs and being held accountable for student progress under measures you don’t trust? Propose other approaches that help teachers improve, reward people for results, and increase the respect of the profession…

I find it hard to see how weakening accountability, giving back more control to the states, or removing sanctions and labels—as odious as they are—will make things better…

It’s easy to look at the decade before NCLB and the decade after and see that NCLB has made a positive difference—at least to the degree that increasing student achievement, especially for poor kids and those of color, is now a topic we discuss regularly, profess to care about, and occasionally take action toward…