From The Editor: Assess Yourself
Paula Krebs
How is your campus handling the fallout from the report of Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education? If you’re asking, “What fallout?” and you feel lucky that administrators aren’t pushing you to address learning outcomes and accountability, then it’s time to start worrying. The call for assessment is not going away, and you are underprepared to enter the conversation.
Assessment is more than giving grades. It means trying to get a sense of the larger picture, whether that’s a picture of what a particular student has learned in his major or of what a bachelor’s degree recipient is taking with her when she graduates. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting that information.
The faculty authors of our cluster of articles about assessment are advocating for faculty control over the assessment process. Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein argue that identifying good educational practices that lie beneath all the different, nonstandard approaches we take to teaching would help us to identify useful standards for all of us. Steven Brint maintains that the best approach to the accountability movement is to take the professionalizing of our profession into our own hands. Electronic portfolios can help us to document student learning and avoid standardized testing, say Sharon J. Hamilton and Trudy W. Banta.
The AAUP itself also has detailed and useful suggestions for how faculty can retain control of externally driven assessment in its statement Mandated Assessment of Educational Outcomes, which can be found online at www.aaup.org/AAUP/comm/rep/MandatedAssessments.htm.
This issue features a number of other topics of interest to faculty across disciplines. After a particularly unflattering portrait of the AAUP appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education last summer, Cat Warren took a look back at a pattern of negative coverage of faculty and faculty issues in the newspaper of record for the academic community. Sharon Kaye wonders about the value of peer-reviewed publications while she jogs; I wish I could think about something so productive while exercising.
Steve Street keeps contingent faculty front and center when he asks us not to see support of non-tenure-track teachers as working counter to the interests of those on the tenure line. H. W. Elmore offers a comprehensive system for evaluating faculty performance, while Leon Trakman reports from Australia on various governance models for higher education.
The issue also contains important AAUP reports and the latest news relating to faculty issues.
Don’t forget to send us your own suggestions for articles and for issues you’d like to see covered in Academe.
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