Unions and the academic community mount a response to calls for accountability
(part two of a two-part series)

by Christina Bartolomeo

As states explore every possible source of relief for serial budget deficits, it is hard for those who work in higher education not to view calls for greater institutional accountability and academic reform with suspicion. After all, higher education is already heavily scrutinized. Between accreditation requirements, program reviews, student evaluations, tenure and promotion practices and institutional studies, information on outcomes is widely collected. And the federal government has increased its reporting demands to comply with such bills as the Student Right to Know Act.

In the December 2003-January 2004 issue, we chronicled accountability initiatives under way in the states that are putting pressure on faculty and institutions. (You can read that story at www.aft.org/pubs-reports/on_campus/index.htm.) This month, we explore how the national union and AFT locals are shaping their response to these demands, so as to maintain membersâ professional rights and academic freedom.

The accountability debate as it's currently framed begs the question: What are meaningful measures of student achievement? Is it possible to quantify what a student should "get out of" a college education? And should the assessment of student achievement come from outside bodies, such as state boards, or be centered in the expertise of individual faculty?

Consider postsecondary standardized testing. "The idea that higher education should be producing some sort of uniform result for its students is wrongheaded," says AFT Higher Education director Larry Gold. "Applying a 'No Child Left Behind' approach to higher ed, for example, doesn't take into account the difference between K-12 and postsecondary education. K-12 schools are charged with achieving relatively uniform results for their students based on standards that every child is expected to meet. College students can pick the higher education they want, and have widely varying goals for that education. A policy based on uniform standards, and imposing rewards and sanctions for achieving them, makes no sense."

Seeking uniform measures of educational excellence also troubles United University Professions' vice president of academics Phillip Smith. "One of my fears about standardized, systemwide testing at the State University of New York is that the results are bound to leak out, even though the administration has said that the data will be used only for internal purposes," notes Smith. "When that happens, some campuses and curriculums will get beaten up. Say a college has an excellent program in languages. Maybe its students won't excel as much as students at other campuses on a standardized test of math and science. But that's why students went there, to that campus - because it has offerings that fit their educational goals."

Leo Welch, director of legislative and governing board affairs for the Illinois Federation of Teachers Community College Council, believes that an emphasis on standardized testing "will gut one of the strengths of higher education, which is its reliance on the professional expertise of faculty members. Faculty support accountability, but one of the strengths of our higher education system has always been a reliance on the minds and quality of faculty members."

IFT staffer Jon Nadler predicts eventual efforts to link standardized testing to state funding, which would harm institutions that have more open admissions policies.

"I taught physics in a community college for five years," says Nadler. "I never had control over what students came into my classroom. Some were really bright and others, bless their hearts, were trying. I had one student in an astronomy class who suddenly, one day in class, realized that the moon goes around the earth. She hadn't known that before. She went on to be an A student, but thatâs where she started from."

In Florida, the board of governors for the stateâs public university system created an "accountability committee" almost a year ago to develop a standardized test for postsecondary students. As Tom Auxter, president of the United Faculty of Florida/NEA/AFT, observes, "Any single test will be punitive to [less selective] institutions that take up the challenge of educating students who are not typical. To put a lockstep system of measurement in place is wrong. You have to look at each institution and be more subtle, as in accreditation."

Of course, any attempt to measure successful student outcomes bumps right up against the perplexities of quantifying the higher-level intellectual capacities and attributes that define an "educated person." President of the California Federation of Teachers Community College Council Martin Hittelman explains, "As a math professor, one of my goals is that students start doing math on their own and want to keep taking math courses. How do I measure that? Those things that are most important in higher education - such as enthusiasm and intellectual curiosity - you can't measure."

A standardized test and a standardized curriculum have another effect besides imposing a one-size-fits-all expectation on learning outcomes. They pose a risk to academic freedom, as Gold emphasizes: "Academic freedom will not mean a lot when a professor is worried about covering 15 points on a standardized test."

"Faculty are inherently familiar with outcomes management, and support accountability," says Welch, "but our concern is that standardized testing will require conformity of curriculum. You know that administrators will be tying the testing success to efforts to force faculty to teach to the test."

What faculty would prefer, in the best of all possible worlds, would be a system that leaves the discernment of student knowledge and intellectual development to the people who see students every day in the classroom. That, many feel, is what being a professional educator is all about.

"It's very difficult to put a success quota on teaching, and in doing so, we fail to treat professors as professionals," says IFT's Nadler. "We don't do this to doctors. What if we said to heart surgeons, 'You have to cure every patient.'"? Once during a bargaining session, an administration team member said, "We have to test for accountability because we have all these deadbeat faculty members out there." I called him on it, but that's the attitude we're facing among some testing advocates."

And, of course, the concept of standardized testing at the postsecondary level raises issues of societal fairness and abstract academic yardsticks. For example, historically black institutions are especially vulnerable to comparisons based on standardized testing data, as Auxter notes. "In the past, withholding funds from the least Îproductiveâ institutions has had a disproportionately severe impact on African-American institutions, such as Florida A&M. Those institutions are already struggling to overcome historical injustices at the starting gate of any measuring system."

"There's an assumption that every student in a class comes into the room with the same knowledge," says Sue Kaufman, president of the University Professionals of Illinois/AFT and an IFT vice president. "That just isn't the case. A professor's task is to determine what individual students are lacking and then contextualize course content in a way that keeps everyone engaged. You can teach to a test, but thatâs not learning in the sense of what a university education is all about. The university is the place where you learn to learn and analyze and think critically across a broad variety of disciplines, synthesizing and extrapolating ... knowing whatâs missing and learning how to go out and dig to find it."

If testing individual students has its pitfalls, some argue, at least regulating bodies, government and the public deserve to hold institutions to broad quality standards that include numerical indicators of success, right? Don't data such as graduation and retention rates, job placement percentages and licensure pass rates mark the excellence of any college or university?

The difficulty lies in that many of the institutional performance data are hugely influenced by factors outside of any individual institution's control. Take graduation rates, for example, a favorite benchmark of accountability proponents.

Says Gold, "Judging schools' success in terms of graduation rates is a mistake because the snapshot is completely out of focus. It fails to account for part-time students, who represent more than 40 percent of the student population. It fails to account for students who transfer between four-year institutions or between community colleges, and for students who simply get what they want from college in terms of job skills or personal enrichment. And it confuses two separate issues: the issue of dropping out of college and the issue of simply taking a long time to get a degree. For example, some students stay in college even though they have to switch from full-time to part-time attendance. Others have to drop out for a while to tend to a child or a sick relative, and then they return. Both these situations show up as failures in a six-year graduation snapshot, but such students are actually profiles in dedication and persistence."

AFT has highlighted the misleading nature of using college completion as an institutional benchmark. In a recent report, "Student Persistence in College: More Than Counting Caps and Gowns," the union makes a compelling case against snapshot graduation measures such as the new Massachusetts standards. Based on considerable research, graduation rates are far more a factor of studentsâ personal and financial challenges than of institutional quality, the report concludes.
 

THE UNION RESPONSE

As they respond to the wide variety of new accountability-related proposals, AFT unions are struggling for response strategies that balance institutional openness and faculty involvement in improving student achievement with a desire to protect faculty and institutions from accountability rubrics that are more punitive than productive.

In Illinois, as a postsecondary standardized testing pilot sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts unfolds, the unionâs strategy, in Welch's words, "is to inform the higher education community that this is taking place and slowly create a faculty leadership network that encompasses the other states in the study." Unions also must be vigilant and not permit accountability measures to infringe on facultyâs collective bargaining rights. Nadler points out, "One area where we can raise objections to the Pew program is how it might be used as a tenure criterion. Using these results to evaluate faculty would be a unilateral change in working conditions, and must be bargained."

In Florida, the United Faculty of Florida's strategy to combat a systemwide test modeled on the K-12 Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) is two-fold: First, to stop proposals for inflexible testing protocols with a combination of media pressure and activism by UFF's allies in the education and labor communities, including the state AFL-CIO. Second, to "organize, organize, organize," Auxter says. Since the budget cuts, the governor's reorganization of the university system and the testing proposal, UFF's membership has jumped. ãPeople are starting to feel threatened by what's happening," says Auxter. "That's why we have a thousand new members in the last year."

At SUNY, the faculty union is following a policy of watchful waiting while the faculty senate works with the administration to explore the implications and implementation plans for a systemwide general education testing program. The Republican-dominated board of trustees voted in favor of this last June. But UUP president and AFT vice president William Scheuerman is already speaking out to draw attention to the tough budgeting choices that the board's standardized testing would require. "It looks like one more unfunded mandate. The trustees donât ask for more state money that is critically needed to stabilize SUNY, but are busy passing unfunded mandates."

Scheuerman and his union want to ensure a real examination of the issue, and their staunch allies in the faculty senate will be the standard-bearers on every campus for faculty involvement in outcomes measurement. Scheuerman promises, "We're going to monitor the trustees' actions as the process moves forward. We're always on guard against efforts to chip away at student access and shared governance at the university."

In Massachusetts, Daniel Georgianna, president of the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth Faculty Federation, has been working hard to ratchet up the awareness of policymakers and the public that state accountability standards will be meaningless in a higher education system reeling from funding cuts and pay freezes. Georgianna's union, along with six others that represent employees of the University of Massachusetts system, picketed the State House every day that the Legislature was in session last fall, in a successful push to persuade state lawmakers to fund union contracts as negotiated and approved at every level. 

In California, the CFT's Community College Council continues to seek clarification from its accrediting body about what constitutes a measurable student outcome. For now, that involves raising the question at accrediting workshops and watching to see how the new Western Association of Colleges and Schools standard specifying measurement of student outcomes is applied in 2004's accrediting cycle.

The Washington Federation of Teachers knows that it must stand ready to fight any attempt by the Washington state Legislature to implement performance work contracts that would invalidate their hard-won collective bargaining rights, both for faculty and for other union members whose rights would suffer under waivers of existing laws and regulations.

"We're not sure how far this performance work proposal will go," says WFT president Sandra Schroeder. "If it does become a serious proposal, we'll have to fight back. We'll go out to faculty and to our labor allies and get together some good organizing and mobilization efforts."

One overarching issue unions must contend with is motivation. While some accountability proponents are well-intentioned, faculty leaders must remain cautious about an extreme right-wing political agenda that seeks to use punitive accountability programs to besmirch public education in all its forms, and to rein in faculty's influence on institutional decision-making.

As Gold sees it, "The other side is making a very clear calculation that the people who stand most in the way of reshaping higher education as a market business are faculty. Thatâs why they tout what we see as the loss of tenured jobs and a casualized, part-time workforce. The whole thing is a matter of who controls the curriculum - and what higher education is really all about."
 

THE BRIGHT SIDE

Academics and higher education staff have one cause for cheer. While some accountability "hawks" have shown a propensity to bash American higher education, the public feels differently. Americans consistently award colleges and universities high marks for the quality of their academic programs and the value of a degree, according to a June 2003 opinion poll commissioned by the Educational Testing Service and conducted by Democratic pollster Peter Hart and Republican pollster Robert Teeter.

The poll revealed that while the cost of college is a growing concern for U.S. families, 72 percent of respondents believe that the nation's higher education system is working well and needs few changes. A 2002 poll by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that 91 percent of respondents "agreed" or "strongly agreed" that higher education ranks among the most valuable of America's resources. In fact, the Chronicle's survey showed that "the public's confidence in private colleges was exceeded only by its trust in the U.S. military. Four-year and two-year public colleges ranked only slightly lower, just below local police forces."

"Higher education remains the jewel in America's education crown, according to students, parents, educators and business leaders," comments Kurt Landgraf, president and CEO of ETS.

In the near future, despite the public's satisfaction with the system, policy debates and policymaker interest surrounding higher education accountability will only intensify - and so must the efforts of unions to raise the real philosophical questions that can give substance and significance to the accountability issue. On the national level, the AFT is working with allies on and off Capitol Hill to try to ensure that the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, expected in final form sometime this year,  does not damage the interests of its members and the students they serve. And the AFT will continue to urge the federal government, states and schools to address students' financial barriers to college, provide preparatory and remedial programs and focus on the root causes of persistence problems.

On the state and accrediting fronts, union leaders will keep fighting misguided accountability efforts that would turn higher education into a numbers game and harm its precious traditions of intellectual freedom and institutional self-governance.

"The welfare and well-being of faculty and students, it's the same on the accountability issue," says Auxter. "The bottom line is, people still want the doors open to higher education, and they still want what our colleges and universities have to offer."