A Scary Story

It’s nearing Halloween, so I thought I’d write about something scary this week.  How about “States Demand That Colleges Show How Well Their Students Learn”?  Or “Not enough to graduate college: Now there’s an exit exam.”   Perhaps this will send a chill down your spine:  “Assessment: It’s the Law,” an article on the new requirement in Iowa for annual review of university assessment data by the College Board and the state legislature. 

We’re probably all familiar with No Child Left Behind and the measure and punish strategy it instituted in K-12 education in the US. The demand for “accountability,” with the underlying assumptions that teachers can’t be trusted to do what is best for their students, has been a favorite political theme for over a decade.  While NCLB has largely been considered a disaster by teachers, parents and students, vilifying teachers and schools has been a winning strategy for too many politicians. And nothing succeeds like success, right?  So we’d better be ready.

It would be nice to think this won’t happen, that state and federal busybodies, and the public at large, will take our word for it when we say that we know our students are learning.  That learning is so ineffable an achievement that it can’t be measured by anything other than the finely-tuned instincts of a professor.  Trust us. 

Yeah, good luck with that.  

The only way to head off the ham-fisted efforts of those who believe that anybody can teach, that teaching is nothing more than measuring test results, is to get ahead of those efforts and bend them in the direction we want them to go.  No one is more concerned about the effectiveness of our efforts than we are.  No one.  But without clear, tangible, convincing and continuous evidence to that effect, we’re vulnerable to claims by educational profiteers (financial AND political) who can point to the all-too-real shortcomings in student achievement and then, rather than accounting for the many variables that affect student learning, simply point at us and insist we do a better job.

One big obstacle to a greater understanding of what we do and how we go about it is the solitary nature of teaching.  While it may not SEEM solitary to be interacting with over 100 students every semester, the fact is that the vast majority of those interactions take place in a federally-protected private place, a black box, as far as the general public is concerned.  Students go into the class, and they come out with a letter grade.  And the “trust me, I’m the professor” argument is quickly losing its magic.

The push to develop learning objectives for classes and programs is one recent and widespread effort to counter that “black box” effect.  And assessment reporting can be another, if we make it what WE want it to be, rather than letting some political body define it for us.  If WE define the goals we consider most useful and valuable for our students, and if WE choose the assessment methods we think best suited to demonstrate the achievement of those goals, assessment becomes our process and our achievement. 

But if we want to keep the beast from the door, the only option we DON’T have is to do nothing at all.