Report from ELI 2008: Belle Wheelen

Currently presenting on 'Accountability in Higher Education,' Belle Wheelen (President, Commission on Colleges, Southern Association of Colleges & Schools and former Secretary of Education of Virginia) spoke of the enormity of 'twittering' while she presented - as a point of levity - in the context of student preparedness in IT coming out of high school and going into higher education. The key missing ingredient, according to Wheelen, is critical thinking skills. In order for this to happen - to change - we must change the way that faculty approach students.


Wheelen discussed the role of global competition, and our diminishing role and ability to keep up, including the types of jobs that American students are able to fill, versus students from other countries. One point here, that the blog poster makes, is that in the past years the New York Times reported on Sunday, 27 Jan 08 reports that "Many of the foreign students we shunned after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin: twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the U.S. We didn’t educate them, so we have no claims on their brains or loyalties as we have in decades past."

Prescriptions:

1. Service Learning: Students need to know what is happening in their community to appreciate the context of globalism. Course content and curriculum should be linked to local conditions to promote service learning
2. Basic strategies that assure that students actually matriculate. There are students who don't know how to ask questions, and who never get the strategies that lead to success in test taking.
3. Work with minority students while still in K-12 system to ensure they are college ready and prepared to enter higher education.

National Conversation - Spellings Commission:

• Access
• Affordability
• Private loans vs. federal aid
• Accountability (student learning outcomes; national tracking system)
  
• Transparency (grad rates; job placement rates)

According to Wheelen, these are at face value useful guidelines -- but the 'devil is in the details' and led a backlash because of the unrealistic uniformity of a single standardized set of tests. There was a major pushback from higher education because of the way that the Commission went about this. The Higher Education Act has not been reauthorized, thus the Commission Report (Sept 06) was the only guiding document. Accrediting community met with Spellings in Nov 2006 with 200 people were in the room. When it came time for questions, no one had questions -- so Wheelen said: Appreciation for being at the table; second -- accreditation is about continuous improvement -- 'you mentioned a summit, can you talk about that?' 'Yes,' said Spellings, 'That depends on what happens here today.'

Responses to the Spellings Report:

• ETS Report
  
• more -- all of the same issues originally identified by Spellings Commission, but with a different approach
• Truly focusing on student outcomes

"Your institution is one that students want to be ---"