Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Pushback Against Perceived Power Grab

Original Article

To be finished!
First of all, that's take a brief look at what is this all about. With the spread of words, public are well aware that education means a lot in their future( read: money!). Arguably, a lot of parents and students pursues education with career as their goal. The fail to find qualified graduates by corporations and, hence, the fail to find good career by graduates creates the out cry for the accountability of institutions.

I believe it is very well true that most institutions did nothing wrong intentionally since their grand past. My suspition is that the falling in quality might just caused by the failing of the incoming students. (Again, I am not blaming the K12. I think it's more of a society thing.)

The grand goal is, therefore, to overcome the culture of today's society by establishing accountability. We all know too well that accountability can only be established by independent entities. For example, the K12 should be evaluated by college engaged ACT/SAT(search 'shame on us' by College President Kevin Drumm in Fooling the College Board) and not the DOE. Just think about what if DOE lower the quality of the test and claiming that they did a good job in K12.

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Well. I don't know what institutions will think now. I am sure they all like freedom and don't like to be limited by DOE or accreditors.

An open testing environment in that graduates take tests and the result is made available to public could be a better model. With this, there's no need for direct investigation by DOE since the test is held by the third party. Institutions are free to do whatever they want to help their students. It is definitely true that the test may not show all the benefits students learned from the institution. However, with corporation involved in designing the test, the parts with practical use are tested. This isn't as bad as it sound. We all know that in our life there are things that you do just for the benefit of yourself. We should also realized that these things are dynamically evolved. Graduates with training that is not been tested but benefit his career will someday voice the benefit of that training. With enough evidence, that training will be included in the future test.