Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings gave a televised speech at the National Press Club today outlining her agenda for higher education. The impetus was the released of the final recommendations of the "Commission on the Future of Higher Education," which she convened last year. All in all she did a good job; while the speech was lacking in some needed specifics, it hit the right notes and pointed the way toward a future of real higher education reform.
Two big themes. First: our higher education system has a lot to offer, but it falls short to a degree and in ways that many people don't realize. Second, the best way to fix that problem is to create far more public information about quality for students and parents choosing colleges.
That's why the Secretary endorsed the creation of the privacy-protected "unit record" data system that has been the source of much controversy and which has been repeatedly attacked by representatives of the private college sector. It's also why she proposed new matching grants to colleges and universities willing to evaluate how much their students are learning and make the results public.
It's too bad the Secretary wasn't able to put a dollar figure on the amount of additional need-based financial aid the administration is going to support, or provide more specifics about how this year's push to increase high school preparation will succeed where previous attempts by the administration have fallen short.
And of course she didn't endorse any brand-new, envelope-pushing proposals, such as (to take a completely non-random example) the proposal Education Sector published last week to fundamentally re-order the existing status hierarchy in higher education by replacing the curent U.S. New & World Report rankings sytem with an entirely new rankings regime based on how well colleges teach students and help them learn, graduate, and succeed in life.
But given the political challenges inherent in taking on the often sclerotic higher education establishment, this speech was a good step in exactly the right direction. Now the question is what the Department of Education will do in the coming months and years to turn these recommendations and those of the commission from good ideas into real change.
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