Snake oil and 'Texas-style accountability'

I'm cross-posting this item to my blogs on newspapering and education, for reasons that should be obvious as we go along.

Are we seeing the beginning of an orchestrated effort to discredit American colleges and universities? After months of being mostly ignored by the news media, Charles Miller, the chairman of a blue-ribbon federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education gives an interview to his home-town paper. He blasts higher ed, and he blasts the members of his commission who dispute his rhetoric. Staff writer Ralph K.M. Haurwitz of The Austin (Tex.) American-Statesman reports in Friday's paper:

Charles Miller expected a fight from higher education administrators when he agreed to head a national panel for his old friend, Margaret Spellings, the U.S. secretary of education. He's getting one.

The Commission on the Future of Higher Education issued a draft report this week recommending academic and fiscal reforms. Some higher education leaders, including a few on the commission, have criticized the draft as overly harsh in tone and too quick to condemn academia.

Miller, speaking from Houston on Thursday, a day after the commission met to review the draft, didn't sound like someone interested in backing down on substance and perhaps not too much on tone.

"I've been advised to say things in moderate terms, to not criticize the academy," Miller said, declining to say who offered such advice. "It's almost like being censored. Some of the language ... could be toned down, but the real issue is putting responsibility on the higher education system for things it's not doing well. It has some really bad flaws."

The headline catches the tone of Miller's remarks: "Chairman defends panel's call for reforms in higher education." But his proposed reforms - which are not yet the commission's because they haven't been adopted yet - have been roundly questioned in The New York Times and a few papers like The Boston Globe in major metro areas where the commission has conducted hearings. (The Harvard Crimson, a student paper with an understandable ax to grind, has followed the commission more faithfully than any of the dailies.) So why does Miller answer his critics in a paper down in Texas and not The Times, The Globe, The Harvard Crimson or the papers that have covered the commission's debate? And why, for that matter, does The American-Statesman write up Miller's defense without interviewing his critics?

Now I'm going to assume The American-Statesman down in Austin got the story on its own. Miller is a former chairman of the University of Texas Board of Regents, and he might have mentioned it back home. Word might have gotten around town, and the paper might have decided to get to the bottom of it. Sometimes that's the way we got stories when I was on the courthouse beat. Of course Miller could have leaked it to a friendly paper, too, but I have no way of knowing that. So I won't speculate.

Miller's friend Margaret Spellings was in the news last week, too. At an international conference in Athens, Greece, she spoke on "higher education and the benefits of partnering with the private sector to prepare students for jobs in the 21st century." And by golly, she just happened to mention the Miller commission:

In launching this Higher Education Commission, we recognized that to remain a quality system we had to ask the tough questions and anticipate necessary changes that can and must be made if we are to have a robust system 50 years from now – especially as needs for all become greater.

As a nation, we spend more than $300 billion dollars a year on higher education – a third of which comes from the federal government. Yet, we have very little information on what we are getting in return for that investment. And what we do know is cause for action.

I can't find any evidence on the internet that the media picked up the story, but Secretary Spellings' remarks were helpfully posted on the U.S. Education Department website.

Miller noted the same statistical factoid in his interview. Here's how The American-Statesman reported his remark and put it in context:

The federal government covers a third of the nation's higher education spending but less than 10 percent of the K-12 investment. Yet the federal government exercises more control over primary and secondary education — through Texas-style accountability that Bush parlayed into a national policy — than it does over colleges and universities.

Miller, former head of the University of Texas System Board of Regents, said Thursday that he regards significant change as not only urgently needed but inevitable.

"If you have a very inefficient and very expensive enterprise, which higher education is now, and huge changes in technology and a cultural change in how people use this technology, that's almost a guarantee that some entity somewhere is going to develop a very effective way to deliver these skills at a much cheaper price," he said. "It could be in a country where they don't have a set of institutions to be angry about change.

"It'll have such demand that you'll have explosive growth that could sweep the higher education system like a tsunami. Supply creates a demand sometimes, not the other way around," Miller said, citing as an example the advent of personal computers and software to run them.

Miller said he knew from the start of the commission's work last year that some in higher education circles would be highly skeptical of his leanings. "I was from Texas and a businessman and worked on accountability and a Bush friend," he said. "I was in about the worst category you could be in."

On that note, the paper segued to Miller's recommendations: Streamling and increasing financial aid, better record keeping," encouraging "colleges and universities to develop new and better methods of controlling costs and improving productivity," and encouraging "states to require public colleges to measure student learning using tests, such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment, that examine critical thinking, reading, math and other skills."

All of this bears watching, but Miller's last points bear especially careful scrutiny. The membership of his commission is weighted toward industry and people with a vested interest in test prep and for-profit educational venures rather than academicians, and consistently he has touted one specific standardized testing product every time he mentions the subject of testing.

What it is that makes this old courthouse reporter think if Miller and his friends from Texas are peddling snake oil, and if they have their way, somebody, somewhere is going to make a big ole Texas-size pile of money as we move into the future of higher education?