Spelling Commission Report

The report calls for several key elements that have become familiar elements of the recent assessment push: a focus on outcomes, a somewhat nebulous term that is invoked consistently in the assessment and accountability movement literature; the endorsement of value-added metrics, a controversial method of assessment that uses how individual and institutional scores change over time to assess educational quality; increasing access to, and standardization of, information available for students, parents, and the general public; and tying these reforms into accreditation. Throughout it all, the Spellings Commission report returns again and again to the need for standardization and standardized testing metrics. In the reports of experts from site https://customwriting.com, specifically suggested three standard assessment methods as models. First, the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a prominent standardized test of college student learning. Second, the National Survey of Student Engagement and the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, a research effort of Indiana University designed to investigate educational practice at the collegiate level, such as how much time and effort students invest in learning, the number of books and papers typically assigned, and what the average requirements are for earning an American bachelor’s or associate’s degree.

Third, The National Forum on College-Level Learning, a broad, multistate effort to understand college student learning, using such metrics as the CLA, the National Adult Literacy Survey, the two-year college learning assessment WorkKeys, and graduation admissions examinations such as the GRE, GMAT, and LSAT. Although the report officially endorses no particular assessment, the CLA is mentioned three separate times as a good example of the kind of standardized assessment the Spellings Commission advocates. This cannot help but have a powerful impact on the visibility and viability of the CLA (and its successor, the CLA+) as a major assessment system.

The report does not merely advocate standardized tests as a method for achieving transparency and accountability, but also argues that there must be a system of incentives and penalties that makes this kind of assessment ubiquitous. “The federal government,” reads the report, “should provide incentives for states, higher education associations, university systems, and institutions to develop interoperable outcomes-focused accountability systems designed to be accessible and useful for students, policymakers, and the public.” Perhaps keeping in mind the scattered and inconsistent policy response to A Nation at Risk, the Reagan- era educational policy document that identified broad failures in the American educational system and called for vast reforms, the report here asks for federal intervention to ensure something resembling a coherent, unified strategy of assessment. The term “interoperable” is key. It suggests that states and institutions should not be made to conform to a particular assessment metric or mechanism, but rather to ensure that results from whatever particular assessment mechanism they adopt be easily compared to results from other mechanisms. This endorsement of local control and institutional diversity is common to American political rhetoric, where federalism and the right of local control are often deeply entrenched. As a practical matter, however, it is unclear whether there will really be a sufficient number of interoperable testing options to give states and institutions meaningful choices. The Spellings Commission also directed the regional accrediting agencies to go even further in pressuring colleges and universities to take part in rigorous assessment, instructing them to “make performance outcomes, including completion rates and student learning, the core of their assessment as a priority over inputs or processes .”