Spellings Calls for Tracking Of Students' Performance

College Accountability Needed, Education Chief Says

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, shown last year, urged colleges to keep costs down. (By Michael Robinson-chavez -- The Washington Post)

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings called yesterday for greater fiscal and academic accountability in higher education and endorsed a controversial plan to keep long-term records on students that would track performance from the time they enter the system in grade school to show how their educations progress.

Responding to the final report from her Commission on the Future of Higher Education, Spellings also implored schools to hold costs down for low-income students. She pledged to seek more financial aid for students but largely sidestepped the commission's bold proposal for a substantial increase in need-based Pell Grants.

The commission, which Spellings appointed, in general painted a bleak picture of a prohibitively expensive higher education system that serves the wealthy and whose schools are not held accountable for student performance.

The panel proposed that college students undergo testing to ensure that the schools are meeting their academic promises and goals, the results of which would be part of a public database that would help students and parents assess and choose schools. Spellings made the point that few objective measures for judging the quality of a school are available to parents.

At the commission's recommendation, Spellings is offering financial incentives to schools that voluntarily report student assessments.

"Our universities are known as the best in the world, and a lot of people will tell you things are going just fine," she said in a speech at the National Press Club. "But when 90 percent of the fastest-growing jobs require postsecondary education, and fewer and fewer Americans are getting one, are we satisfied with just fine?"

The commission recommended increasing the value of Pell Grants to cover 70 percent of the average in-state tuition at public colleges; the grants now cover only 48 percent of tuition. Spellings did call for a complete overhaul and streamlining of the unwieldy college aid system and acknowledged that more money is needed, but she stopped short of endorsing increases in Pell Grants.

David L. Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said: "I found that quite remarkable, because it was the key recommendation from the commission. Yet she endorsed a unit record database, which would be enormously expensive to implement."

The association and other school groups oppose a data collecting system that would track individual students, because they worry it would infringe on privacy. But Warren acknowledged that some form of data collecting is needed to improve the system.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), the senior Democrat on the education committee, criticized Spellings for not embracing the Pell Grant proposal and for not addressing the massive student loan industry, which he called "the most troubling aspect of higher education today."

Some advocacy groups complained that Spellings put too much of the blame for high costs on schools and not enough on government. "State support is the lowest it's been in 25 years, and public colleges are turning to parents to bridge the gap," said Lawrence Gold, director of higher education for the American Federation of Teachers.

Still others expressed concern about Spellings's suggestion to increase use of adjunct professors over tenured teachers to cut costs.

"Although I agree with the secretary that more research is needed on the teaching effectiveness of adjunct professors, I strongly believe that we will not dramatically improve the quality of postsecondary education with a part-time teaching force," Lee S. Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, wrote in an e-mail.

Educators have also balked at the commission's call for colleges to conduct student assessments and make them public, saying it would be virtually impossible to develop a uniform national academic measure because of the many diverse subject disciplines and concentrations.

But Mark G. Yudof, chancellor of the University of Texas system, argued that there should be "as much disclosure as possible, as much data as possible."

In an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters yesterday, Yudof said school presidents who oppose academic assessments "are wrong."

"I think they're dead wrong to say [higher education is] too ephemeral," he said. "I think this is going to happen with or without" them.

Staff writer Susan Kinzie contributed to this report.