NCLB Higher Ed? No, Not Really

Alex Kingsbury has an informative state-of-play piece in U.S. News & World Report about measuring student learning in higher education, and how that information might be used to hold colleges and universities accountable for doing a good job teaching their students.

There's an extremely reductive way of talking about these issues, which goes something like this:

"The Bush Administration, which ruined K-12 education by imposing an insulting, simplistic, wrong-headed NCLB accountability system based on low-level standardized tests, is now trying to screw up higher education in the same way. This is wrong."

That's really not what's going on. There will be no NCLB-HE. But there are things the federal government can and should do to start getting more information about higher education quality out into the hands of the public, and to create incentives for universities to do a better job of teaching undergraduates. The difference between this and the accountability nightmare described above is mostly a matter of being smart, judicious, and reasonable--qualities that are admittedly not exactly in surplus within the Bush administration on the whole. But overall I think the Secretary Spellings is doing the right thing here. There was no great political outcry for her to take on the difficult issue of higher education reform, that she did so anyway is to her credit, and her efforts so far have been worthwhile.