Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Nevada picked to assess higher education

College students who think they got away from assessment tests when they graduated from high school should think again.

If the Bush administration is successful in recrafting the Higher Education Act to include elements of the No Child Left Behind Act, a new student assessment test could be created to find out how much college students know before they graduate.

And Nevada could play a key role -- it's one of five states chosen for the initial assessments of college students' academic performances.

"The general expectation is that there will be changes (in the Higher Education Act) that will be in closer alignment with the No Child Left Behind Act," Chancellor Jane Nichols said. "And the act puts more responsibility on schools and states to require more quality education and ensure more of an opportunity to learn."

When it comes to implementing standardized tests before college students graduate, educators say the writing is on the wall.

A strategic plan put out by the Education Department asks states to collect more data on college student performance to evaluate it. Lawmakers are poised to rework the Higher Education Act to reform colleges and universities.

While President Bush has been silent about his plans for higher education, a five-year strategic plan released by Education Secretary Rod Paige provides some insight.

Paige said the administration plans to use the No Child Left Behind Act as its "North Star" for guiding future policies and legislative proposals in higher education. His 92-page report explicitly said that he would incorporate more state accountability measures into "the next reauthorization (of the Higher Education Act)."

Jane Glickman, an Education Department spokeswoman, said Paige's plan was not necessarily indicative of the final outcome of Bush's higher education policy.

"We're not in a discussing mode (for assessing students) yet," Glickman said. "It might be a goal, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be incorporated into the act."

Some university and college advocates are concerned about the notion of assessment tests, and some faculty members are critical of any attempts to use the No Child Left Behind Act as a template for higher education.

"The No Child Left Behind Act is not something that most educators are enthusiastic about," said Jim Richardson, a lobbyist for the Nevada Faculty Alliance. "People jokingly call it the No Child Left Untested Act. And if anybody is considering moving into the higher education arena with this same kind of simplistic mentality of standardized tests ... it hinges on the ridiculous."

Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel for the American Council on Education, was also critical.

"We don't have a one-size-fits-all higher education system or a one-size-fits-all evaluation system for American education," Steinbach said. "It's foolhardy."

Steinbach said that applying methods used to test 17,000 third graders in a school district on a given subject is not comparable to testing students at 3,600 colleges and universities because of the large differences in the information learned. He also drew a distinction between an open-enrollment college and an Ivy League school.

Nonetheless, Nevada finds itself at the center of the assessment wave, having joined Oklahoma, South Carolina, Illinois and Kentucky in a national project designed to gather and analyze data that will lead to the ability to test the intellectual abilities of college graduates.

Margaret Miller, director of the National Forum on College-Level Learning said the Bush administration's intention to measure college-level learning is long overdue.

"I think we have put off too long measuring what a degree means in terms of intellectual capacity," Miller said. "Public patience has run out long ago. We need a better sense of what kind of value added we are getting out of this major public investment."

Miller said the testing system will differ from the No Child Left Behind Act because it will not be mandatory or punitive for institutions and will focus on state, not national results. The cost, she said, will also be a tenth of what schools pay to administer tests to K-12 students.

Miller said college seniors in Nevada will be tested this spring. The results will be published in April as part of the National Center for Public Policy on Higher Education: Measuring Up 2004 Report.

Aside from the mandate created by the No Child Left Behind Act to test students every year of school from third to 12th grades, the biggest problem, some say, is that the federal government left local districts to pick up the tab -- and if that happens to higher education, it could be problematic.

"If they are going to do the same thing in higher education as they did to school districts, then I hope higher education has the money to pay for it," Augustin Orci, Clark County School District deputy superintendent, said.

Orci said the school district spent $1.3 million to buy computer software to handle all of the required testing data and it continues to spend another $500,000 a year to test students.

Nichols says she worries about the potential costs.

"I would say that if we were to get a mandate for standardized tests, that would be negative."

Nichols said there may be positive aspects coming from the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, such as plans to simplify the federal financial aid form, efforts to decrease barriers for low-income students to attend college and stronger financial aid incentives.

Congress has amended the Higher Education Act every six years, and additions to it have included subsidized student loans so that banks would be encouraged to lend to students, Pell Grants to reach out to low-income students and loan origination fees so that banks received more money.

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