TESTING THE TEACHERS
BY DAVID BROOKS
NEW YORK TIMES
There’s an atmosphere of grand fragility hanging over America’s colleges. The grandeur comes from the surging application rates, the international renown, the fancy new dining and athletic facilities. The fragility comes from the fact that colleges are charging more money, but it’s not clear how much actual benefit they are providing. Colleges are supposed to produce learning. But, in their landmark study, “Academically Adrift,” Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that, on average, students experienced a pathetic seven percentile point gain in skills during their first two years in college and a marginal gain in the two years after that. If you go to the Web page of the Association of American Colleges and Universities and click on “assessment,” you will find a dazzling array of experiments that institutions are running to figure out how to measure learning. The challenge is not getting educators to embrace the idea of assessment. It’s mobilizing them to actually enact it in a way that’s real and transparent to outsiders. The second challenge is deciding whether testing should be tied to federal dollars or more voluntary.
Must-Read Op-Eds for Thursday, April 19, 2012
Must-Read Op-Eds for Wednesday, April 18, 2012
MONEY RULES IN WASHINGTON POLITICS
REPUBLICAN RHETORIC OVER THE TOP
DEMOCRATS BATTLE BACK AGAINST REPUBLICAN ‘WAR ON WOMEN’
FAREWELL, THE NEW FRONTIER
AMERICA’S CRISIS OF CHARACTER