ACTA's Must-Reads
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Take 2
The Commission on the Future of Higher Education has issued a second draft of its report. Summarized at InsideHigherEd.com and available there also as a PDf download, the draft is a kinder, gentler version of the original, whose uncompromising tone so offended some that it was virtually impossible to have a constructive discussion about the report's actual recommendations.
Perhaps that softened tone will now make visible both the report's promise and its shortcomings. This draft focusses on the need to control the cost of college and to track student outcomes, to prepare students better for college and to ensure that they graduate once get there, to reform the financial aid system and to create a system for comparing the effectiveness of institutions. Ease of access, maximization of opportunity, and institutional accountability are the watchwords of this draft.
These things matter. But in emphasizing them the report sidesteps the difficult but pivotal question of what colleges actually teach their students, how undergraduate education is structured, and whether serious reform of the curriculum is needed in order to ensure that colleges really do graduate educated students. The report recommends innovative pedagogy (by which is seems to mean "the use of technology in teaching") and it also recommends increasing funding for science education. Concern is expressed about the numbers of students who graduate with marginal literacy, numeracy, and reasoning skills, but that concern is allowed to float free of any observations about how the current shape of undergraduate education--with its smorgasbord approach to course work, its rampant grade inflation, and its failure to define a solid core of knowledge that all students should have--selects for just this type of incapacity.
ACTA president Anne Neal has noted that the single most important thing the Commission can do is give a mandate to governors--and the trustees they appoint--to restore a genuinely substantive core undergraduate curriculum. It's distressing indeed to see draft two pay even less attention to this issue than the first draft did.
Posted by acta online at July 17, 2006 05:00 AM
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Comments
I'm very skeptical and cynical about this attempt to implement "No College Student Left Behind" (as if the lower school version has been such a great success).
Time does not permit a detailed analysis. Let me take just a snippet from the post:
'The report recommends innovative pedagogy (by which is seems to mean "the use of technology in teaching") and it also recommends increasing funding for science education.'
Sure, how many "innovative technology" fads have I lived through in my lengthening lifetime? How many technological panaceas?
And how many attempts to get more science taught through "innovative methods" and "more funding for science education"? As if a huge amount weren't being spent already in college. As if there were an academic discipline of "science education" as opposed to teaching science pretty much as it's always been done, of course with a lot of updates in content and technology.
Sure, computers are useful, power point can be nice, animations are surely useful at times. Computerized homework is even beginning to be useful. Color pictures in the textbooks are useful, though not at the contemporary USA Today level. But Newton's laws are pretty much the same as when they were published in 1687. Understanding them and learning to use them is pretty much the same as it must have been then. Read the stuff, think about, stare at it a while longer, work some examples, go talk to someone when you get stuck. When you're really stuck, go for a walk or go have a couple of beers -- OK, the last not recommended for college freshmen -- come back and try again.
Posted by: Michael Kellman at July 17, 2006 12:53 PM
"the single most important thing the Commission can do is give a mandate to governors--and the trustees they appoint--to restore a genuinely substantive core undergraduate curriculum"? Huh? The governors and trustees need a mandate to do this? Apart from the question of whether they want any such thing as to restore a genuine core -- my understanding is the governors and trustees, not this D o Ed commission, are responsible for running the colleges and universities. Why do they need a mandate from anyone else? And who else has the authority to bestow such a thing?
Posted by: Michael Kellman at July 18, 2006 06:01 PM