Spell(ings) Check
St. Lawrence University President Daniel Sullivan didn’t mince words this week when he very publicly blasted U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.
At the New York university’s commencement Sunday, Sullivan called a report by a higher education commission Spellings commissioned “a national embarrassment” that will dumb down education with a one-size-fits all system “far removed from intentional, serious, dedicated and demanding study.”
Spellings spoke recently at an Education Writers Association conference in Los Angeles that I attended.
Here’s what she said then about testing, college style.
“I think we would all agree .. with the principle that students who have completed a baccalaureate degree would have the basic ability to write, to think and to solve problems. Those are knowable values in modern psychometrics. Am I going to prescribe a one size fits all? No I am not. But I do want to invest with folks who are willing to pioneer on those fronts.”
What do you think? Should higher education be measured in the same way as K-12 systems, with a No Child Left Behind model of testing?
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