Interesting column in today’s Wall Street Journal: Accountability 101: State Colleges Prepare To Measure Their Own Performance, by David Wessel:
The American medical and higher-education systems regularly boast, with some justification, that they are the best in the world. But in recent years they have been forced to confront tough questions: How do we know we’re getting our money’s worth? How do you know you’re doing such a good job? Is there some way to measure your performance that the rest of us can understand? …
President Bush’s education secretary, Margaret Spellings, and Texas investor Charles Miller, whom she picked to lead a commission on colleges, beat the higher-education establishment with a bat. Having imposed testing on K-12 schools through the No Child Left Behind Act, Ms. Spellings and Mr. Miller a few years ago began pushing colleges to measure and report performance. "If the academy doesn’t do it," Mr. Miller says, "it’s going to be done for them."
Colleges have, so far, successfully fought laws or regulations that prescribe testing. But they know they need an offense. Now the state schools — the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (big research universities) and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (the rest of them) — are about to take a significant step. … The state schools are designing a template for college Web sites that, for those that opt to use it, shows in standard format: (1) details about admission rates, costs and graduation rates to make comparisons simple; (2) results from surveys of students designed to measure satisfaction and engagement, and (3) results of tests given to a representative sample of students to gauge not how smart they were when they arrived, but how much they learned about writing, analysis and problem-solving between freshman and senior years.
The last one is the biggie. … Assessing individual performance, of course, isn’t new to universities; that’s what exams are supposed to do. But measuring a college’s performance and publishing the results is a change, one that might prod the best higher-ed system in the world to get better.
Rafael Gely and I closed our MoneyBall article, What Law Schools Can Learn from Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics, 82 Texas L. Rev. 1483, 1553-54 (2004), with similar sentiments:
A tsunami of accountability and transparency is sweeping across American law and society. One manifestation is the insatiable public demand for ever more and increasingly sophisticated rankings in all aspects of American life. …
In our view, law schools are faced with a clear choice. We can continue resisting public demands for accountability and transparency through rankings. But such resistance is futile, as a market that demands rankings of brain surgeons and heart-transplant programs will not accept protestations from the legal academy that what we do is simply too special to be evaluated with objective measures. Like the story of the boy with his finger in the dike, we face the prospect down the road of cascading federal- or state-imposed heavy-handed performance measures for determining organizational success and individual contributions to that success. We do not know the length of that road, but it is one that law schools need not go down. Instead, we can chart the course laid out in this Review Essay and embrace change and make it our own.
Like Michael Lewis, we have told a story about a profession and people we love. We are proud of the work law schools and law professors do in teaching future lawyers and producing legal scholarship to the betterment of American law and society. As institutions and as individuals, we have nothing to fear from the accountability and transparency spotlight. Indeed, we do our best work in the light. We should welcome the opportunity to tell the world what we do and help them measure our performance as teachers and scholars. If we do not, the story will be told by others and it will no longer be our own.
