Sea Change

News today in Inside Higher Ed that the N'tnl Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges is considering developing their own accreditation system, one that would compare places to other places of a similar type. Of course, I've just read the quick IHE story on this, but it seems to me that it's an effort (and I'll hold off on levying any assessment of the effort - I certainly don't have enough information on that...) to deal with the ever looming question of how to assess. The Department of Ed has provoked lots of thinking about this, certainly, though from what I hear (from being at conferences and listening around my own campus) that thinking was going on... it's just not clear how productively, across the board. NCLB is clear evidence of what doesn't work; there are bunches of smart people trying to think about what does. I find the whole question both engaging (on one level) and terrifying (on another). It's clear that a sea change is in the works - anyone in higher ed who argues that things should stay the same, or be like they were 20 years ago, or any kind of argument about preserving, I think will be squashed as flat as the leader's nose in "Sleeper." But who/what are the engines driving the steam roller that's doing the squashing, and what can we do about it? (And who is we?) These are all questions, in fact, that I'm trying to tackle in this book of mine... and right now, I'm swimming in them.

I just finished reading Good to Great and Good to Great for the Social Sector, and before anyone starts laughing (if anyone is reading, in fact!), I thought they were quite interesting... GtG more for the methodology and the analysis - since I am sort of repulsed by, say, the success of Phillip Morris in a declining economy - but the method was quite interesting, and, again, so was the analysis. A couple of the points that Collins and his team make keep circling around - one is that good to great companies (/social sector agencies, which is closer to where we are in ed., certainly!) identify the things they do well and just keep at them (this is the "hedgehog concept,") and the other is that gtg companies (and I'm not sure if this came up in the discussion of agencies) focus on being successful despite systemic problems. Now, I'm not sure that one makes a lot of sense for my own purposes, but it's a thought. (And I will come back to the Inside Higher Ed story in a minute.) If one of our goals is to change conversations about writing/writers to affect public policy, how can we do that without changing the systemic problems? Or should we (and who is we?) focus on the hedgehog thing, instead? What are the things we do well? It's a strange way to think about a field (and not just a specific class). I am betting that NCTE is thinking about this - or a similar question - and will endeavor to learn more about this. To return to the IHE story, it seems like the Land Grant Universities and Colleges folks are *also* thinking about this, as well.

One more thing about that IHE story that is under my skin, and then diyenu for the day... they talk about developing metrics to measure outcomes. What kinds of metrics? Based in what kinds of paradigms of assessment? As a person whose work is based in a field where "growth" does not look linear, this concerns me.