Having been in academics for quite some time, I have seen fads come, go and stick. Way back in 2004 I witnessed the arrival of assessment at my university. While I initially thought it might be a passing fad, almost a quarter century later I am still serving (in perpetuity) on the General Education Assessment committee and completing yearly assessment plans and reports for Philosophy & Religion. As with all such things, assessment arrived with acronyms and buzz words. Those more cynical than I would say that all acronyms of administrative origin (AAO) amount to B.S. But I would not say such a thing. While I diligently engage in assessment, I am still aware of reasonable concerns about it.
One concern was succinctly put by a fellow philosopher: “you don’t fatten the pig by weighing it.” The criticism behind this homespun remark is that time spent on assessment is time taken from the core function of education, namely education. At the K-12 level, the burden of assessment and evaluation has become quite onerous in many places. At the higher education level, the burden is not as great—but we spend considerable time on it.
A sensible reply is that assessment is both valuable and necessary: if the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of education is not assessed, then there would be no way of knowing what is working and what is not. A counter is that educators assessed their efforts before the rise of modern assessment and there is the question as to whether these new efforts have improved education.
Another concern is that in addition to the time spent by faculty on assessment, a bureaucracy of assessment was created. Some schools have entire offices devoted to assessment complete with staff and administrators. With higher education facing financial woes and students confronting ever increasing tuition rates, it could be argued that assessment should be cut in favor of better serving the core mission of the university. A reply is to argue that funding an assessment office is more important to serving the core mission of the university than more faculty or lower tuition would be.
Another common concern is that assessment is part of the micromanagement of public education imposed by state legislatures. These are, unsurprisingly, usually the same legislators who speak loudly about getting government off peoples’ backs and cutting regulations (for business). This, some critics contend, is part of a campaign to discredit and damage public education.
One reply is that a state legislature has the right to insist that public schools provide evidence that the (ever-decreasing) public money is being well spent. If the legislatures showed real concern for the quality of education and were committed to public education, this reply would have considerable merit.
A final concern is that the results of the previous assessment must be applied to improve each academic program, and this seems to rest on an assumption of perpetual improvement. Unfortunately, due to budget cuts and administrative policies, faculty rarely get raises and salary compresence is a serious problem. So faculty are supposed to better each year, but get paid less because inflation and the rising cost of living reduces the value of the salary each year. As such, the system demands perpetual improvement of faculty and schools, but there are usually no incentives or rewards—other than not getting fired or not being punished. Interestingly, the folks imposing this system claim that taxation and government impositions hurt business. That is, they seem to think it is bad for businesses to have less money and be regulated too much by the state, then it will be bad. This view does not extend to education. But there might be an ironic source of hope as education is being “businessified” and perhaps once the transformation is complete, the universities will get the love showered on corporations.
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