Date sent: Wed, 5 Feb 1997 02:12:06 -0600 (CST)
From: LindaP (Texas)
Subject: Alliance - Tucker 1

>Subject: Alliance - Tucker 1
>
>April 13, 1994
> 
>Alliance for Learning: Higher Education Must Do
>Its Part
> By
>Mark Pitsch
>Kati Haycock recalls the time she was giving a speech to Kentucky educators
>charged
>with implementing the state's breakthrough education-reform plan. She had
>been invited in
>her role as director of an initiative to bring K-12 districts and colleges
>and universities
>together in the spirit of collaboration.
>After her talk, an elementary school principal sought her out and complained
>that faculty
>members in Kentucky's colleges of education were bashing the state's reform
>effort and
>failing to train teachers to understand the new way of thinking.
>"That was two years ago, and that used to happen to me only periodically,''
>Haycock
>recalls. "Now, it happens everywhere I go. There is clearly a growing anger
>among K-12
>people over what they perceive as higher education's being out to lunch, away
>from the
>[reform] table. They're realizing they're not going to succeed without help
>from higher
>education.''
>There is ample evidence that educators and policymakers intent on improving
>the nation's
>schools have indeed become increasingly critical of colleges and universities
>for sitting on
>the sidelines. Even more vexing than the fact that higher education generally
>has not
>helped in the effort to bring about fundamental changes in the way public
>schools are
>organized and operated, they say, is that it has impeded precollegiate reform
>by failing to
>get its own house in order. The effect, many say, is that the two systems are
>actually
>working at cross-purposes.
>For Patrick M. Callan, the executive director of the California Higher
>Education Policy
>Center in San Jose, higher education's position is consistent with its
>longstanding
>resistance to change. It has always been behind the curve when it comes to
>social change,
>he says, pointing to higher education's initial recalcitrance about embracing
>the G.I. Bill,
>which provided military personnel with money to attend college after World
>War II, and
>the civil-rights movement, which pressed the academy to open its doors to
>black students.
>"Everyone's favorite change is the change someone else has to make,'' Callan
>says. "I
>believe that we have the intellectual firepower, and we have the energy to
>address these
>problems, but all of the energy is being used for denial and in our own
>internecine warfare.''
>For Marc S. Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the
>Economy,
>higher education's failure to participate in perhaps the most sustained
>domestic
>public-policy debate of the late 20th century represents the abdication of
>leadership in
>higher education.
>"I think what we are in right now is the second of the two great
>transformations in
>education in this century,'' he says. "The first was at the turn of the
>century, the second is
>now. And what's remarkable to me is that American higher education has not
>played a role.
>That astounds me. The academy has been wanting at every stage in the game.''
>Tucker and others note that few higher-education leaders consider school
>reform a critical
>issue facing their institutions. Not only are presidents and chancellors not
>paying enough
>attention to their schools of education and teacher training programs, most
>aren't even
>focusing on the problems affecting undergraduate teaching and learning. Even
>if college
>and university executives have a personal interest in school reform, few are
>willing to
>tackle the subject in public and risk alienating their own faculty.
>"I'm not optimistic about presidents having any influence that's substantive
>in those
>universities,'' Tucker says. "I think they're among the least powerful
>executives in the
>country. We've arranged the institutions so that faculties are accountable to
>themselves.
>That's the definition of a university.''
>The complaints against higher education from the K-12 sector range from the
>poor training
>and continuing education of teachers to the lack of harmony between the
>curricula of the
>two systems; from the rigid admissions standards of institutions of higher
>learning to the
>declining academic rigor of a college education; from the disdain in which
>many academics
>hold precollegiate education to the lack of opportunities to work together on
>matters of
>mutual interest.
>"Higher education's historically patronizing attitude toward K-12 has created
>some
>resistance'' among precollegiate educators, Callan says. "No one wants us to
>act like Santa
>Claus, showing up with a bag of goodies and asking about how we can help you
>do your
>job better.''
>Nevertheless, Callan and others believe that higher education must become
>involved in the
>K-12 reform effort and that K-12 reformers must find ways to make it
>comfortable for
>higher-education officials to do so.
>At risk is no less than the success of the standards-and-assessment movement
>that has
>become the centerpiece of current school reform. New methods of
>assessment--portfolios
>and tests that demonstrate the acquisition of skills and knowledge rather
>than the
>memorization of facts--will require changes in university admissions
>policies. Curricular
>reforms that rely on integrated and collaborative learning will require
>education schools to
>revamp the way they train teachers. And, if the content and performance
>standards now
>being developed for schools are to work, colleges and universities must
>provide incentives
>for students to meet these high standards, and they must modify their own
>undergraduate
>programs to account for the changes in precollegiate education.
>In January 1993, the National Governors' Association convened 30 leaders from
>secondary
>schools, higher education, and education associations for a two-day
>conference in Vienna,
>Va., to discuss college-admissions standards and school reform. The N.G.A.
>had been
>hearing from K-12 reformers that college-admissions policies had been
>impeding reforms
>designed to develop new curricula and assessments.
>At the very time "secondary schools are rejecting old distinctions among core
>classroom
>subjects and are moving away from traditional curricula and graduation
>requirements in
>order to improve student achievement,'' N.G.A. consultant Mary J. Houghton
>says in a
>report on the conference, "most colleges and universities are continuing to
>evaluate
>applicants on the basis of conventional admission criteria.''
>"The trend at colleges over the past decade has been to reinforce and raise
>admission
>requirements based on core courses and Carnegie units,'' she adds, concluding
>that the
>two systems are working at odds.
>Indeed, higher-education officials are wary of the move toward content
>standards and
>performance assessments.
>James B. Appleberry, the president of the American Association of State
>Colleges and
>Universities, says public colleges and universities, because they receive
>state tax dollars,
>need objective admissions criteria--class ranks, grade-point averages, and
>standardized-test scores, among them--to determine a student's eligibility.
>Portfolios and
>performance assessments are too subjective, he adds.
>Others simply say such assessments are "a fad.''
>"People think it will solve lots of problems. I don't. I would lead the
>battle if I did,'' Lee R.
>Kerschner, the interim president of California State University at
>Stanislaus, says in the
>N.G.A. report. "This discussion about outcomes assessment may be useful. It
>may help
>public schools do a better job. But so many other issues are far more
>important.''
>Moreover, academics question the validity and reliability of
>performance-based
>assessments.
>"There is no predictive validity to portfolio assessment yet,'' says David A.
>Longanecker,
>the U.S. Education Department's assistant secretary for postsecondary
>education and a
>former state higher-education executive director in Colorado and Minnesota.
>"You need
>some shorthand method that is reasonably reliable, and performance assessment
>is not. A,
>B, C, D, F is.''
>While he concedes that "performance assessment has a tremendous future,''
>Longanecker
>contends that most "of the teachers who are conducting portfolio assessment
>these days
>know nothing about assessment.''
>Critics say the attitude projected by Longanecker and Appleberry is typical
>of
>higher-education officials who cling to present assessment practices despite
>their proven
>shortcomings and are unwilling to accept the possibility that performance and
>portfolio
>assessment might be at least as good. Instead of carping, critics ask, why
>don't leaders in
>higher education acknowledge the new assessment movement and work with school
>reformers at all levels to make the assessments as reliable as possible. That
>way, they say,
>both systems would be moving on the same track.
>Moreover, they say, assessments that demonstrate whether students have
>actually
>attained proficiency in a certain subject would be far preferable to cryptic
>letter grades and
>norm-referenced standardized-test scores that frequently tell little, if
>anything, about a
>student's proficiency. Such an assessment system would reduce redundancies
>between
>higher education and secondary schools, as well as the need for postsecondary
>remediation.
>"This is one of those issues where each party has a lot to share,'' Haycock,
>the director of
>the American Association for Higher Education's K-16 project, says.
>The mismatch between K-12 and postsecondary education is also evident on the
>issue of
>standards. A central premise of the school-reform movement is that all
>students can and
>should learn more than is demanded at present. This, in turn, has led to
>efforts to specify
>what students should know and be able to do in commonly taught subjects,
>often known
>as "content standards.''
>With financial assistance from the federal government and private
>foundations, teachers
>and scholars are now working to craft such standards in at least seven
>academic
>disciplines.
>Although members of college and university faculties are serving on some of
>the
>standards-setting panels, higher education itself has paid little attention
>to the standards
>movement. Indeed, critics charge, higher education is not even paying much
>attention to
>its own academic standards, opening it to charges that many institutions are
>little more
>than glorified high schools with soft courses, grade inflation, and no way of
>measuring
>student achievement. Even pop culture is noticing: "Doonesbury'' creator
>Garry Trudeau
>has skewered universities in a series of cartoon strips about a ponytailed
>fraternity member
>suing a professor over a B+ grade.
>"It's gotten to the point where each person should be issued a college
>diploma [at birth]
>instead of a birth certificate,'' says Albert Shanker, the president of the
>American
>Federation of Teachers. College "is sort of a place that says to anybody
>who's over 18 and
>breathing and has some educational problem, 'Come here and bring your
>tuition.'''
>Shanker and many of his colleagues applaud the effort to raise standards
>among
>elementary and secondary schools. But they say that movement will not succeed
>without
>active collaboration by higher education, that colleges and universities must
>add some
>stakes to the school-reform movement by adjusting their entrance
>requirements.
>Higher education's admissions standards have always had a strong influence on
>high
>school curricula and graduation requirements.
>"Kids understand incentives,'' says Robert Schwartz, the director of
>education programs
>for the Pew Charitable Trusts. "This for me is the make-it-or-break-it
>question around
>school reform.''
>According to Columbia University scholar Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, the
>Carnegie
>Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in the 1920's required colleges
>and
>universities to establish admissions standards according to units of
>instruction time in
>order to be admitted to Carnegie's pension system--now known as
>T.I.A.A.-CREF. What
>became known as the "Carnegie unit'' led to similar graduation requirements
>for high
>schools.
>The foundation, which had taken as its mission the improvement of American
>education as
>a way to "furnish standards for a democracy,'' as Lagemann writes, followed
>that up with a
>call for standardized testing as another criterion for college admissions.
>Again, high
>schools followed suit by urging their students to take the standardized
>tests. Both
>admissions methods prevail today in high schools and higher-education
>institutions alike.
>"Colleges and universities provide a major part of the incentive for
>elementary and
>secondary schools,'' Shanker says. "And that is a perfect illustration that
>whatever state
>colleges and universities set up becomes the standard that high schools,
>middle schools,
>and elementary schools are geared to meet.''
>Consequently, some see the standards-setting movement as the perfect K-12
>reform
>vehicle in which higher education should take an interest. And, they suggest,
>that might
>prompt colleges and universities to undertake a little reform
>themselves--like establishing
>content and performance standards for what undergraduates should know and be
>able to
>do, paying more attention to cognitive research on how students learn, and
>developing
>assessments that better measure student achievement during the undergraduate
>years.
>Ultimately, observers say, the K-12 school-reform effort will make itself
>felt on the campus,
>whether or not higher education welcomes it.
>As one former Oregon state education official notes: "In the past, higher
>education has
>pretty much dictated, for those students who wanted to go to college, what
>they need in
>terms of course requirements. And that has dictated the K-12 curriculum. Now,
>we are
>asking what we want our students to know and be able to do for the 21st
>century, and
>have higher education work with that.''
>But most K-12 reformers are pessimistic. They feel that higher education is
>"in denial''
>about growing public impatience with rising tuitions and the lack of
>efficiency and
>accountability on campuses. If higher education is unable or unwilling to
>recognize the
>need to change, then it is not likely to understand why the schools are
>changing and the
>stake it has in their success.
>Marc Tucker, for one, believes that U.S. colleges and universities cling to
>the notion that
>they are the best in the world, and invoke that claim whenever outsiders
>rattle the
>postsecondary cage. But while that distinction applies to the nation's
>graduate and
>research universities, he says, it is not true of most undergraduate
>education.
>"The message that goes out to American high school kids is that it makes
>absolutely no
>difference how well you do because it doesn't matter,'' Tucker says. "That is
>a national
>tragedy, and one in which higher education is more than complicit. If they
>are unhappy
>with the quality of the incoming students, they have no one but themselves to
>blame.''
>"You would think that in an era when for the first time in our history we are
>debating what
>our standards should be, we would come to grips with what a liberal education
>is,'' he
>adds. "You would think that higher education, which considers itself a
>repository of a
>liberal education, would jump into the fray.''
>So far, it hasn't. But soon it may have to.