The Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia
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A magazine for Curry students, alumni, faculty, and friends |
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Spring 2007 Curry
in the News - - - |
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A Curry Voice in a National Debate Posted May 19, 2007 |
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Not surprisingly, this latter issue and the proposals for addressing it have became fodder for a national controversy, with higher education leaders often on one side and the U.S. Department of Education on the other. “This issue is very controversial, very complicated, and very political,” says Margaret “Peg” Miller, professor of higher education policy in the Curry School of Education and director of Curry’s Center for the Study of Higher Education. Long before this was a hot issue, Miller had devoted a significant portion of her career to questions of evaluating student achievement in higher education and assessing the quality of education provided by the nation’s colleges and universities. From 1987 to 1997, she served as chief academic officer for the Virginia’s State Council of Higher Education, where she oversaw the development of campus-based assessment plans. From 2000-2004 she directed the Pew-sponsored National Forum on College-Level Learning, a five-state pilot project assessing the intellectual capacity of the college educated in way that enabled state-by-state comparisons. For the past seven years she has served on the National Advisory Board for Measuring Up, along with Curry School dean David Breneman, who has chaired the project’s advisory board since its inception. The biennial national report card on higher education grades states on the effectiveness of their systems of higher education. Given Miller’s expertise, it was no surprise when she was invited to a national higher education summit in fall 2006. The summit aimed to set the course for carrying out the recommendations of a report prepared by the Department of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Miller was one of three educational leaders invited to open the summit with a presentation. She says she was the strongest voice in favor of assessment that permits appropriate comparisons of learning outcomes across similar campuses. She concedes, though, that “it’s not a popular position.” Most college leaders have acknowledged the need to know more about how much their students are learning, Miller says, and to talk about these data publicly. But few want to do so in a way that permits their results to be compared to those of other institutions. For a second summit convened in March 2007, Miller was assigned to serve on a working committee to prepare recommendations on college student learning assessment as it relates to accreditation. Three hundred invitation-only participants from across the spectrum of federal and state government, accreditation agencies, business, and higher education worked on a variety of higher education issues at the meeting. The tone was congenial and the summit seemed productive, Miller says. Afterwards, the Department of Education began to push accreditors to require institutions to set standards for learning, and tensions between the Department and the accreditors have become increasingly strained. Miller recommends the following documents for readers wishing to learn more about this topic and the ongoing debate: Measuring Up 2006 - http://measuringup.highereducation.org/ The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education - http://www.highereducation.org The National Forum on College Level Learning final report – http://collegelevellearning.org Related articles from Inside Higher Ed: "Who’s
Who at the Spellings Summit" "Assessing
the Spellings Commission" "The
Kinder, Gentler Summit" "Pushback
Against Perceived Power Grab"
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Publisher: Curry School of Education Foundation PO Box 400276 Charlottesville, VA 22904 |
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