Fellow tipsters,
I just received permission from the Chronicle of Higher Ed to post this
recent article to the list. Thought that some of you who are unaware of this
project to generate grades for each state, would find this of interest.
Grades will be assigned for 5 of 6 categories, focusing on ed and training
through the baccalaureate level. The 6th category (how well students learn)
will not be assigned a letter grade.
Sandra Nagel Randall
Saginaw Valley State University
University Center, MI
Copyright 2000, The Chronicle of Higher
Education. Reprinted with permission. This article may not be posted,
published, or distributed without permission from The Chronicle.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
>From the issue dated March 3, 2000
http://www.chronicle.com/weekly/v46/i26/26a03001.htm
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A Report Card for Higher Education: How Will the 50 States Measure Up?
A new method of evaluating colleges and universities has some officials
worried
By JEFFREY SELINGO
Many books and magazines rank the best colleges. The National Research
Council rates graduate programs. And many states tie budget dollars to
performance goals they set for their public institutions.
Now the marketplace for grading colleges is about to get a bit more crowded.
This fall, an independent research group plans to issue a report card on how
well the 50 states deliver higher-education to their residents. It will mark
the first-ever attempt to evaluate public and private colleges in all of the
states, by giving them letter grades in access, affordability, and economic
and civic benefits, among other areas.
"The most constant question asked by states is how they're doing in respect
to other states," says Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center
for Public Policy and Higher Education, which will publish the report card.
"Most of our measuring sticks, like U.S. News, are institutional. We need a
more powerful tool that policymakers could have that is grounded in data,
and not just in people's opinions."
The goal of the project is simple: To make higher education a kitchen-table
issue. Leaders of the effort want to get people talking about whether their
state's colleges make the grade on an easy-to-understand report card, and in
turn, prompt lawmakers to develop better policies. And for the graders
themselves -- the higher-education policy center -- the project could be the
venture it needs to raise its national profile.
For the most part, state higher-education leaders say they welcome the
evaluation. But like anxious kindergartners hoping for their first gold
star, many of them are somewhat uneasy about what grades they may get, and,
ultimately, how the evaluations will be received by their bosses --
trustees, legislators, and governors.
In some states, higher-education officials have operated off the political
radar screen for years. If the buzz created by the U.S. News rankings is any
indication, the report card could generate significant media play possibly
before the November elections (when control of legislatures is up for grabs
in several states). Some politicians may look to blame college leaders if
their state gets a few bad grades.
The concern among higher-education leaders is that they know very little --
if anything -- about the report card. The policy center's methodology and
data gathering are being guided by a 16-member advisory panel -- a who's who
of higher-education officials and researchers, as well as some scholars and
state officials.
While Mr. Callan has recently disclosed a few details of the forthcoming
report at some higher-education meetings, he says he deliberately did not
"test the political waters" in order to maintain the integrity of the
results. The chairman of the advisory committee, David W. Breneman, dean of
the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, declined to
comment on the report card, and he encouraged other panel members not to
talk about it.
But some college officials are engaging in a little grade-grubbing. Like
presidents and deans who look to gain an advantage in ever-changing campus
rankings, a few state and college officials have made suggestions to ensure
that the methodology would not penalize particular characteristics of their
state systems.
"No one really knows what they're going to do with this data and how they're
going to display it," says Warren H. Fox, executive director of California's
postsecondary-education commission.
For his part, Mr. Callan says he has received tips about "what to do, and
what not to do, from self-interested people." But he quickly adds that he
has not tried to judge their motivation.
"Obviously, there are people out there concerned about it," says Robert T.
Tad Perry, executive director of the South Dakota Board of Regents and a
leader within the State Higher Education Executive Officers, a national
association. "The higher-ed people most concerned are those pushing an
agenda. When you get this report card, it could quickly change the focus of
that agenda. It puts another player at the table."
Cheryl D. Blanco, who tracks education policies for lawmakers at the Western
Interstate Commission for Higher Education, says a national higher-education
report card "was inevitable." Already, she says, many states grade their
public schools or link budget money to school performance.
Many college leaders declined to publicly discuss the report card. Nearly a
dozen trustees and other higher-education leaders said they didn't want to
unduly influence their own marks or didn't know enough about the project.
But a few said they could do without the grades.
"Higher education is much too complex to be reduced to a grade," says a
regent of a large public university in the Midwest, who asked not to be
identified. "Should higher education deserve a critical look by competent
researchers? Absolutely. But please, not a grade."
In a way, higher education has enjoyed a free pass until now. Report cards
have become standard in many policy sectors as a response to the growing
demand among lawmakers for accountability, says William T. Gormley Jr., a
professor of government and public policy at Georgetown University and
co-author of Organizational Report Cards (Harvard University Press, 1999).
Increasingly, those report cards feature grades, although A's and F's are
still not as common as number rankings. "Letter grades are bold, arresting,
and difficult to ignore," Mr. Gormley says.
The higher-education report card will focus on education and training
through the bachelor's degree. States won't be graded on how much they spend
on higher education, but how they spend it. The report will evaluate states
in six categories, although the sixth -- how well students learn -- will not
carry a letter grade because a precise measurement is difficult in most
states, Mr. Callan says.
Each of the other five categories will be graded on a curve -- states that
perform the best will get an A, and the rest will fall below. States won't
receive an overall grade because final scores could vary significantly
between categories. The categories themselves are fairly broad. For example,
in the participation category, states won't receive a grade specifically on
how well they provide access to minority students, who tend to have lower
college-going rates than white students in many states. Instead, raw data
and trends relevant to such areas as equity, cost-effectiveness, and changes
over time will accompany the graded portion of the report card for each
state in an effort to "get beneath the statewide averages," Mr. Callan says.
Of some concern to state officials is how researchers will collect their
data and how they will compare so many distinct states.
Statistics for the report card are "already in the public domain," Mr.
Callan says, from such sources as the U.S. Education Department, the
Educational Testing Service, and the College Board. To grade states on how
well they prepare students for college, for instance, researchers will look
at high-school-graduation rates and what courses students take in high
school, among other things.
"We wanted information collected in the same way across the country, by some
entity thought of as disinterested in the outcome," says Mr. Callan, himself
a former state-higher-education chief in California, Montana, and
Washington.
Moreover, states won't be punished for how they have chosen to configure
their colleges. Performance will be measured in similar ways across state
lines. For example, states where public-college enrollments are low could
still score high in the participation category if the state has a large
number of private colleges, as well as a grant program that encourages
residents to attend those institutions.
Still, some college officials maintain that it is nearly impossible to
compare states and then put grades on them, because significant differences
exist even among institutions within states. For instance, many states have
placed their public colleges in a tier system to ensure that they fulfill
various missions. As a result, lower-tier institutions could pull down the
averages of some states that have elite public and private universities,
putting the states on par with others that have average institutions across
the board.
That scenario is "theoretically possible," Mr. Callan says, but he adds that
every system has its strengths and weaknesses. States such as California,
with an extensive two-year college system, could perform well in the
participation category, but poorly in the persistence category because many
students never complete their degrees or transfer to four-year colleges. The
goal of the project, Mr. Callan says, is "not to dictate a specific setup or
a specific set of policies."
Even so, lumping all a state's institutions together for a grade is unfair,
says Tahlman Krumm Jr., chairman of the Ohio Board of Regents. While he
thinks the report card will be a useful tool, Mr. Krumm says that he would
rather it focus on results, such as how much a student has learned or how
much higher education has contributed to a person's life.
Mr. Krumm admits he doesn't know how to measure those results, although one
way could be to require students to take the SAT or the ACT again before
they graduate from college. "We really don't need another survey telling us
how much money we put into our institutions, and then ranking us on how well
we do that," Mr. Krumm says. "I'm concerned that institutions have not
looked at what they do and how well they do it."
Eugene W. Hickok, Pennsylvania's secretary of education, says grades should
reflect the academic standards of colleges, not the subsidies taxpayers give
to them. Report cards such as Education Week's "Quality Counts" survey --
which grades elementary and secondary schools and is a model for the
higher-education report card -- focus too much on state spending, Mr. Hickok
says. In that survey, Pennsylvania consistently gets good marks in some
categories, he says, partly because the state's teachers are well paid.
"The conversation is hardly an effort to see what the money is buying," Mr.
Hickok says.
But Mr. Callan says states have only themselves to blame for a paucity of
academic measurements. In his search for data, he says he found that "most
states seem to know less about how students learn than almost anything
else."
Indeed, any fallout from the report card may encourage states to improve
their data collection, says Ms. Blanco, of the higher-education commission
for the West.
Some states may just ignore the report card altogether, particularly if they
score low. Says Stan Jones, Indiana's commissioner of higher education:
"It's like most things. If we do well, we'll tell everyone about it. If we
don't do well, we won't say anything or say the survey is flawed."
Not everyone wants high grades, however. Straight A's may suggest to
legislators that all is well with their state's higher-education system -- a
judgment that some college officials fear. In Oregon, for instance, the
state's environmental agency had a hard time securing money for additional
water-quality inspectors after it received an A on a statewide report card.
Even so, says Mr. Gormley, the Georgetown expert on report cards,
organizations obviously prefer better grades. "In an era of scarce
resources, no organization can afford the perception that it is doing a bad
job," he says.
If a state gets bad grades, someone will have to offer an explanation to
lawmakers, says William H. Pickens, executive director of the California
Citizens Commission on Higher Education. State higher-education chiefs are
the people "most concerned," about the report card, he says. "One of the
most difficult things is that they're going to have to explain things, some
of which they have little control over or aren't responsible for."
But state lawmakers who describe themselves as education advocates suspect
that some colleagues won't take the time to study the report card.
"After a while, you become list-weary," says State Sen. John J.H. Schwarz of
Michigan, a Republican and president pro tem of the Senate. "I'd like to
know how we stack up as adjudicated by people not from Michigan, but I doubt
if it will move the Legislature one way or the other."
Mr. Callan says he expects criticism of the report card, and some of it, in
the end, may be justified. But critics will have a chance to analyze and
review the data themselves. The center plans to publish the report card in a
data book and on the World Wide Web this fall.
The report card is the largest project his center has undertaken since it
was created in 1998. And it could also be the one that the center needs to
put it on the map. To continue to get the financial backing of foundations,
the center needs to justify its existence, says Barry Munitz, the former
chancellor of the California State University System and current president
of the J. Paul Getty Trust.
"They have to produce something that is major and could make a difference,"
Mr. Munitz says. "The stuff they've produced so far has gone nowhere. They
have a zero track record."
Mr. Callan says he hopes to produce the report card annually, or at least
every other year. He has yet to place a final price tag on the project, but
says the center is seeking additional support from several foundations.
"I could really understand that no one has done this before, and why some
people are nervous about it," Mr. Callan says. "But none of those are
reasons why we shouldn't move ahead with this."
Advisory Panel for State Report Card
David W. Breneman, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University
of Virginia; chairman of the panel.
Robert H. Atwell, consultant and former president of the American Council on
Education.
Julie Davis Bell, program director at National Conference of State
Legislatures.
Anthony P. Carnevale, vice president for public leadership at the
Educational Testing Service.
Ronald R. Cowell, president of the Education and Policy Leadership Center.
Alfredo G. de los Santos Jr., former vice chancellor for educational
development at Maricopa Community Colleges.
Virginia B. Edwards, editor and publisher of Education Week.
Emerson Elliott, former commissioner of the National Center for Education
Statistics.
Milton Goldberg, executive vice president of the National Alliance of
Business.
Elaine H. Hairston, former chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents.
Mario Martinez, assistant professor of education management and development
at New Mexico State University.
Margaret Miller, president of the American Association for Higher Education.
Michael Nettles, professor of education and public policy at the University
of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Alan Wagner, principal administrator of the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development.
Richard D. Wagner, former executive director of the Illinois Board of Higher
Education.
Joan Wills, director of the Center for Workforce Development at the
Institute for Educational Leadership.
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