Ask the Wrong Questions, Get the Wrong Answers
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’
accountability plan is a step in the wrong direction.

You don’t need a Ph.D. to recognize that colleges and universities are facing serious issues in the coming decades. Just ask the nation’s Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings — whose B.A. credentials have in no way kept her from pounding her bully pulpit and preaching for the fundamental reshaping of higher education in the United States.

Spellings has been traveling around the country since late September, clutching the final report from her 19-member Commission on the Future of Higher Education in her hot little hand.

Her talking points are the three A’s: accessibility, affordability and accountability. But it’s her views on accountability that are generating the most controversy.

That’s partly because of the language she’s using.

“We spend $80 billion in financial aid out of this department, and we just sort of hope for the best,” was what Spellings told Diverse in October.

“We have accountability in this government for Head Start children, welfare mothers and elementary school children,” she went on to say, “but we ask no questions about what’s going on in higher education.”

Those kinds of sound bites are guaranteed to get on the evening news,
but will they endear an education leader to the community she hopes to influence? Mmmm, not so much.

“We’re perplexed,” David Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, told the Wall Street Journal, after hearing the secretary argue that there wasn’t “enough information” available to decision makers and parents.

Now that I’ve studied Spellings’s plans to move the nation towards unitary standards — a national tracking system for students and a national standard for accountability — I’m thinking the nation needs to
borrow a line from another sweeping Republican initiative and “Just Say No.”