No limit Texas hold'em testing?

President Bush's blue-ribbon Commission on the Future of Higher Education has posted a half dozen position papers on financial, accountability and accreditation issues to its website. And The Chronicle of Higher Education says, I think quite correctly, the papers "may have just given colleges more reason to be worried."

In post to its News Blog dated Thursday, the Chronicle notes:

In an e-mail message announcing the release of the papers, the Education Department said the reports “are not formal recommendations by the commission, nor are they intended to reflect the views of the U.S. Department of Education.” Rather, it said, “their purpose is to inform and energize the public about key postsecondary issues and inspire continued national dialogue around the future of higher education in America.” The papers “may assist the commission in forming consensus around these issues,” the department said.

For all of the department’s protestations, however, people in higher education are likely to regard the papers as the first draft of the commission’s final report. And what they read may worry them.

Here's why. The papers look like opinion pieces. They have titles like "Assuring Quality in Higher Education: Key Issues and Questions for Changing Accreditation in the United States," "The Need for Accreditation Reform" and "A Transparent Approach to Higher Education Accountability: Developed and Implemented by The University of Texas System." The commission is holding hearings around the country, but this sounds like the work of people who have already made up their minds.

In fact, it sounds like the work of people who want to extend No Child Left Behind to higher education. It may sound like that because it is the work of people who want to extend NCLB to higher ed. Margaret Spellings, Bush's Secretary of Education, had a key role drafting the NCLB bill when she was a White House aide. And Charles Miller, who chairs the blue-ribbon commission, has a big stake in NCLB-style testing. When the commission was empaneled, The Chronicle reported in its Oct. 14 issue:

... if the chairman's past work is any indication, a major focus of the panel will be accountability. Mr. Miller has been promoting that concept since the late 1980s, when he chaired a Texas task force that developed a state accountability program that became a model for the No Child Left Behind Act.

As a member and later chairman of the University of Texas System Board of Regents from 1994 to 2004, he proposed new reporting requirements for the nine undergraduate colleges in the system and endorsed testing for all freshmen and seniors. The reporting system went statewide last year, and a test of students' analytical and verbal skills is now in the pilot stage.

And when he testified before Congress in 2003, Mr. Miller suggested that colleges test students in their first two years "to measure student learning at the undergraduate level across institutions."

"I don't have a middle name, but if I did, it would probably be accountability," Mr. Miller says.

The chairman insists he is not out to regulate colleges, but only to hold them accountable to taxpayers. He says policy makers and parents alike need better information about how colleges are performing. "I believe in giving institutions the maximum freedom to operate themselves," he says, "but we do want to see what the results are."

Whatever he means by that.

The position papers suggest it may mean replacing the regional accrediting bodies we have now with a single federal agency "governed by representatives of the public, institutions of postsecondary education, business and industry, and state and federal governments." It would be called the National Accreditation Foundation, and it would oversee a thorough revamp of accreditation procedures.

In October, The Chronicle listed the commission's 19 members and noted, " in addition to four [academic presidents emeritus, three professors, and an association president, includes five executives from such corporate giants as Microsoft, the Boeing Company, and IBM." Among the members are the CEO of Kaplan Inc., the standardized test prep company, and the president of Western Governors University, which describes itself as an "online, competency-based university." But the main tilt seems to be to think tanks and large corporations.

This kind of lineup led Ruth Flower, director of the office of public policy and communications at the American Association of University Professors, to tell The Chronicle she suspected, ""This panel looks like it's poised to move us away from a concentration on comprehensive education and toward a concentration on training for big business."

Well, we'll have to see how that shakes out. In the meantime, there are just enough Texans behind the panel's work, and they have just enough of a stake in the type of test-driven school reform that led to NCLB, it look's like we're in for a round of no limit Texas hold'em standardized testing in higher ed.