AAC&U Board Alerts Members About Proposed Accreditation Changes
(May 16, 2007)

Over the past year, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has repeatedly expressed concern about the recommendations for change in higher education from Secretary Spellings’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Upon release of the commission’s report in September, AAC&U’s board of directors noted that “the commission [report] does not offer a coherent vision of the learning outcomes graduates actually need for work, life, and active citizenship in the twenty-first century.” The board noted further that the commission “proposes that colleges and universities of all sorts can improve learning through a very small set of standardized tests administered outside of a student’s regular course-taking…. AAC&U and many other organizations have called for more curriculum-embedded methods of assessment that would address a wide range of the most important learning outcomes…. Standardized tests that stand outside the regular curriculum are, at best, a weak prompt to needed improvement.” You can read the entire board statement on the commission report on our Web site.

Subsequently, the Secretary of Education has convened a team of negotiators to rewrite the current federal regulations governing the recognition of accrediting agencies. While the new regulations are still being discussed, the direction of the proposed changes to standard practice in accreditation provides cause for serious alarm.

In the forthcoming issue of our journal, Liberal Education, we are publishing a “guest message” from Judith Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation and member of AAC&U’s National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP). In that message, Eaton notes that “the suggestions for federal action [concerning accreditation]…would seriously erode the successful self-regulatory enterprise of the past hundred years.” “At stake,” Eaton warns, “is the longstanding leadership of the academy in determining academic standards and judging academic quality.”

If enacted, the department’s proposals would lead, de facto, to a federalization of ultimate decisions about acceptable standards and assessment practices for educational quality, thereby short-circuiting the academy’s own fundamental responsibility for both quality and accountability.

AAC&U has vigorously called on higher education to take responsibility for assessing the quality of student learning, but it has never envisioned the Department of Education as a credible arbiter of what counts as educational quality. In our board of directors' 2004 statement, Our Students’ Best Work: An Accountability Framework Worthy of Our Mission, we called on colleges and universities themselves to more clearly articulate and make public their learning outcomes, to develop intentional practices across the curriculum to advance those outcomes, and to set challenging standards for student achievement. We stressed in this statement, however, that accountability frameworks will be most productive when they focus on curriculum-embedded assessments, with standards set and made visible by the relevant faculty within individual institutions in ways reflective of each institution’s own mission. Through our Greater Expectations initiative, and in our ongoing work, we have provided rich resources to help each institution develop its goals and assessment practices to ensure that all college students achieve the broad aims and outcomes of a liberal education. And, drawing from the entire higher education community, our LEAP initiative has provided a framework for educational quality that is intended to prepare all students for work, citizenship, and fulfilling lives.

Instead of working with the higher education community to accelerate the progress we have already made in defining and assessing learning outcomes essential for twenty-first-century success, the Department of Education is pursuing a very different agenda. As Judith Eaton puts it in her forthcoming message in Liberal Education, “The Department of Education is seeking nothing less than a radical expansion of federal authority over accreditors. The national advisory committee charged to review accreditors would begin to function as a kind of Ministry of Quality…. The net impact…is a transfer of authority and responsibility for higher education quality that is unprecedented in our history.”

In concert with the educational associations chiefly responsible for federal lobbying, AAC&U’s board of directors urges the higher education community to give close and searching scrutiny to the department’s proposed changes to the rules governing accreditation.

The negotiated rule-making process is likely to conclude in early June. Sometime thereafter, the department is likely to publish their proposed regulations in the Federal Register and interested parties will be encouraged to comment. Later this fall, the agency plans to publish a final set of regulations.

At this time, we encourage you to consider taking one or more of the following four actions:

1) Familiarize yourself and your community with the proposed regulations and discuss with your colleagues what these changes might mean for your own institution. We encourage you to read the proposed language in the context of the commission report released in September. The language of the proposed regulations is vague and evolving (see proposed language (pdf) for S602.16 from April 26, 2007), but the commission’s recommendations on standardized testing provide an illuminating context for the department’s current efforts.

2) The Department of Education is sponsoring a series of regional summits across the country during the month of June. They will take place in Boston, Kansas City, Atlanta, Phoenix, and Seattle. We encourage you to register for one of these meetings by contacting the Department of Education and requesting an invitation. 

3) Reach out to your own elected federal officials so that they are aware of the actions the secretary is taking and so that they can consider these actions as they debate the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act currently being considered by both the House and Senate education committees.

4) Write directly to Secretary Spellings to express your own thoughts on the proposed changes in regulations and their potential impact on higher education.

AAC&U staff and board members will continue to monitor the actions of the department and will be participating in the upcoming regional meetings. We also will release next month a new monograph called A Brief History of Student Learning Assessment: How We Got Where We Are and a Proposal for Where to Go Next by Richard J. Shavelson of Stanford University. This publication includes a foreword cowritten by AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider and Lee S. Shulman of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. We hope this publication will further advance the national dialogue on these important issues and provide important perspectives as we work collectively to further our shared goal of improving access to and excellence in American higher education.

The AAC&U Board of Directors