Letter: Spellings commission’s report is unfocused

Monday, Aug. 14, 2006 | 7:27 a.m.

A federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education was established last year by the U.S. Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, to study the problem of increasing tuitions that are limiting access to educational opportunities. This week that commission approved its final report, which shows that they far exceeded their mandate.

One proposal included in the report is that public universities should use standardized tests to measure learning. That sounds like an extension of the deeply flawed No Child Left Behind Act for elementary and secondary education. Since the federal government failed to adequately fund testing at the lower levels, it is likely to also do so for this proposal which would further increase college costs, exactly the opposite of the commission's mandate.

A further, and much more frightening, proposal in the report is for federal monitoring of college quality. It would include setting up a national database of student progress which certainly raises privacy issues. This Big Brother intervention would be the death knell of the vital and respected concept of academic freedom which has made American universities among the best in the world.

The chairman of the commission stated that the next step will be to set up a "national dialogue" with governors and corporate leaders about the report. Why were educators and students left out of the dialogue?

The commission needs to go back to the drawing board and next time stick to the issues they were convened to study.

Wallace J. Henkelman, Henderson

Editor's note: The writer is a nursing professor at Nevada State College at Henderson.