“Learning Outcomes” means two different things, depending on whether it K-12 schooling or higher education. U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, of course, started out in the Bush administration as the principal advocate of No Child Left Behind. NCLB bundled together several reforms but the central one was systematic nationwide testing at several intervals (4, 8, 12th grades) meant to determine how much students had learned in particular subjects. The particular subjects qualification is crucial. NCLB wasn’t intended to measure the growth in students’ knowledge across the board, but in the subjects that matter most: reading and math. You can presumably measure such progress if you keep testing in the same subject, because you have a baseline and a record of improving performance (or not-so-improving performance.) Teacher unions and other complained about “high stakes testing” and being forced to “teach to the test,” but outcomes assessment for K-12 makes basic sense. Why send kids to school unless the schools actually advance student learning?
The college side of the picture is rather different. When Secretary Spellings moved from the White House to the U.S. Department of Education to replace the hapless Rod Paige, her main idea was to apply a NCLB logic to higher education. She did the usual thing, appointing a carefully-constructed committee to study the matter, which came back with the recommendations she wanted. She pretty much brushed aside the obvious differences between K-12 and college education. One of those differences is that, unlike K-12, where there is an agreed-on core body of knowledge and skills that all students are supposed to acquire (e.g. reading and basic math), college curricula head in a thousand different directions. We have degree programs in the U.S. that range from accounting to zoology, and among the nearly 4,000 colleges we have pedagogical approaches as different as anything-goes Antioch and great-books St. Johns.
So what would “outcomes assessment” look like if applied to colleges? It would make no sense at all to have a series of standardized national tests applied to college students enrolled in myriad programs, where even programs in ostensibly the same subject taught at different colleges might be as different as night and day. Spellings was not daunted. She played with the idea of establishing some national outcomes for all college students. But then she realized that her only available tool to impose this testing regime was her control over accreditation.
Accreditors were already on the assessment bandwagon. They climbed up in the late 1980s as the Total Quality Management craze was cresting in the corporate world. TQM appealed to the accreditors for the simple reason that it absolved them from having to enforce any substantive standards. Everything became a matter of how well the colleges they accredited were fulfilling their respective missions. If a college’s mission was to spread self-esteem among its students, so be it. The accreditor would then just check to make sure that all the parts of the institution were dutifully contributing to the production of self-esteem. If the students ended up as dumb as fence posts but possessed of ineffable happiness about their condition, the accreditor would be satisfied.
That sounds like parody, but we exaggerate only slightly. When it comes to academic context, the accreditation system checks only what the college says it seeks to accomplish. And that explains why we end up with a large percentage of college graduates who are ignorant of so much basic knowledge.
Secretary Spellings’ opening was to tell the accreditors that henceforth she would hold them responsible for making sure that colleges actually measure the progress of student learning in all the fields in which they teach. They would have to test the students at the beginning of the program to create a baseline, and test them at the end to prove that the program had improved their knowledge.
This approach might have excellent result in some areas of higher education, where there is reasonable agreement about what students should know and reasonable ways to assess it. Accounting and zoology could both benefit. But there other subjects—indeed whole colleges and curricula—that don’t easily fit this mold. What should students know about philosophy, religion, literature, economics, or international relations? Smart people disagree over basic principles in these fields, and the entirely reasonable result is intellectual pluralism. Different colleges offer programs that head in entirely different directions—and students get to choose which program at which college they want to attend.
This is the insurmountable problem with Secretary Spellings’ “Learning Outcomes” initiative. A one-size fits all set of “outcomes” fits reasonably well with teaching reading and math in grade school. It doesn’t fit at all well with teaching humanities and social sciences in colleges. It doesn’t even fit well with many of the sciences, where beyond a basic core of knowledge, the students move to the frontiers, where no one is sure what will happen next.
Secretary Spellings has always explained her college reform as a matter of ensuring that college graduates have the skills to get good jobs and to contribute where American business needs them. We are sympathetic to this concern. At the same time, her top-down approach has a central-planning quality that ignores the capacity of students and employers to work out their own accommodations. If employers don’t want to hire dumb-as-fence-post college graduates, they should by-pass the colleges of self-esteem and the universities of post-modern obfuscation. If students want good jobs, they should seek out colleges where they can get good educations—which may not be the ones that are currently “hot” in U.S. News Rankings, or covered with prestigious layers of ivy.
Lastly outcomes-based assessments overall are the enemy of classical liberal education. What Secretary Spellings wants to do is to treat higher education as the acquisition of a collection of discrete skills. Classical liberal education aims at shaping a student’s whole mind. It attempts to move the student to the point where active inquiry, reasoning, reflection, insights into the ideals and principles of our civilization, abundant knowledge of great books, and capacity to express one’s thoughts lucidly and persuasively come together as a whole. A lot of what passes as liberal education, of course, isn’t. But it still exists at Yorktown University, for instance. And being forced to present it through the iron grid of outcomes-based assessments isn’t helpful—it’s destructive of liberal education.
