Under a headline "Future of Higher Education Is Divisive Topic for Panel," reporter Sam Dillon writes:
At one end of the table was the chairman of Kaplan Inc., complaining that he could not get Kaplan's for-profit, Internet-based law school accredited because it has no law library. At the other end was former Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. of North Carolina, white-haired and distinguished, pleading for more federal aid for needy students.Nothing remarkable there. But the Times report mentions Nation at Risk too many times for it to be sheer coincidence. Somebody is obviously pushing it:
The two are members of the Bush administration's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which concluded a two-day meeting here on Friday. And the person keeping them all laughing was Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economist who suggested that some college students who take six years or more to graduate from college might be too lackadaisical to deserve government aid at all.
"They're climbing rock walls, they're playing, they're drinking — and they're getting Pell grants?" Dr. Vedder said.
The 19 members of the commission represent disparate opinions and interests, and finding common ground is not easy. Refereeing was the chairman, Charles Miller, a private investor and former head of the University of Texas Board of Regents, who wondered aloud how to build consensus among this cacophony of views.
"We may have to duke it out, or have a jump ball," Mr. Miller said.
In an interview during the meeting, Mr. Miller said he hoped the commission's report would galvanize the Bush administration and Congress to legislate broad reforms in the nation's system for financing and regulating higher education. If it is punchy and well-written, he said, it could be as influential as "A Nation at Risk," the 1983 report commissioned by President Ronald Reagan that inspired a movement for higher standards and accountability in America's 90,000 public schools.And, after a paragraph of background about this year's commission, this:
Mr. Miller's frequent mention during the commission proceedings of "A Nation at Risk," which excoriated the sorry state of America's elementary and secondary education, has left some members nervous.What may be another straw in the wind appeared May 22 on the conservative opinion magazine National Review's website. In the magazine's weblog, education writer Candace de Russy blames the colleges and universities for the "pathology" she sees in the nation's public schools:
"We've talked in private to him about that," said David Ward, a commission member and president of the American Council on Education, the largest association of colleges and universities. "If he means that 'A Nation at Risk' had a rhetorical flair that got people's attention, that's certainly true. But the pathology of the public schools in the 1980's is not comparable to higher education today. Our colleges and universities are successful — just not successful enough to confront the challenges of globalization without significant change."
In fact, since the 1960’s, evidence of pathological trends in higher education -- relating to curricula, campus activities, educational outcomes, academic freedom, ethics, and finances -- continues to mount. So who’s to say which educational sector is most diseased or abnormally functioning?All of this is fairly standard right-wing rhetoric. What makes it troubling this time around the mulberry bush is that hardly anybody else is paying attention to it, and nobody -- at least not in the public media indexed in the Google news page -- is bothering to refute it.
Moreover, not only does the pathology in public schools endure, but a convincing case can be made that their “constitutional breakdown” -- failure to teach basic skills, disdain for knowledge, divisive multicultural studies, and collapsed discipline -- was incubated on our campuses.
The ideas and practices born in the academy are seminal to all other institutions. In particular, the greatest conduits of pathology to our elementary and secondary schools in recent decades have been our degenerate humanities, social-science, and teacher-education programs.
Yes, honorable Commission members, this nation remains at risk, and higher educators deserve much blame for the dangerous pathology afflicting it.
Nor is anybody bothering to question the original assertions in A Nation at Risk. While it was accepted uncritically by the mass media and it helped politicize K-12 education for evermore, it was a hodgepodge misleading statistics and rhetorical overkill. Gerald Bracey, a frequent contributor to Phi Delta Kappan magazine who has made a cottage industry out of debunking political rhetoric on the subject, sums up the case in a brief overview written on the report's 20th anniversary:
It has been 20 years ... since A Nation at Risk appeared. It is clear that it was false then and is false now. Today, the laments are old and tired -- and still false. "Test Scores Lag as School Spending Soars" trumpeted the headline of a 2002 press release from the American Legislative Exchange Council. Ho hum. The various special interest groups in education need another treatise to rally round. And now they have one. It's called No Child Left Behind. It's a weapon of mass destruction, and the target is the public school system. Today, our public schools are truly at risk.And now, apparently, so is higher ed.
