Spellings Commission Misses Boat on What
Students Need to Know
Daniel F. Sullivan, President, St. Lawrence University
August, 2006
If policy-makers at the federal and state level take the guiding
principles of the so-called “Spellings Commission Report” seriously,
it could be the single greatest blow ever landed against the pursuit
of excellence defined in terms of student learning outcomes in
the history of American higher education.
The federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education—the
so-called “Spellings Commission” since convened by
Margaret Spellings, our current Secretary of Education—has
just released its report, meant to be a bold outline for how higher
education in America should be reformed to meet the needs of students
and the nation in the 21st century. Instead, it is
in its major thrusts a national embarrassment. Much of the
report is critical of both the system of higher education in America
and the performance of the thousands of individual institutions
that make up this system. While some of the criticism is
deserved, if not uniformly across all sectors within higher education
or across all institutions, the report is a crude document which
makes sweeping claims about the quality and effectiveness of higher
education as a whole.
But the medicines proposed for curing the problems will in most
cases only make things worse. I focus here on the Commission’s
total failure to provide coherent guidance on what a high-quality,
21st century higher education should in fact be. There are
only brief suggestions in the report that reading, writing, critical
thinking, problem-solving, mathematical and scientific literacy
should be important learning outcomes from higher education. In
contrast, much more space is devoted to the need the Commission
sees to reduce barriers students might encounter as they seek to
transfer credits from one institution to another or from for-profit
institutions to traditional colleges and universities even
as institutions are criticized for rates of retention to graduation
that are too low. The vision of higher education
that this suggests is of a cafeteria, a “grab and go” system
about as far removed from intentional, serious, dedicated, and
demanding study as one can get.
Let me contrast this vision to that of the Association of American
Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), of which St. Lawrence is
a leading member and on whose board of trustees I sit. St.
Lawrence and literally hundreds of the nation’s liberal arts
colleges, by formally signing on as sponsors, have endorsed a vision
that champions “liberal education—for individual students
and for a nation dependent on economic creativity and democratic
vitality.” Called “Liberal Education and America’s
Promise,” this vision is described in AAC&U’s inspiring
report: Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning
as a Nation Goes to College, and it “makes strong recommendations
about the knowledge and capacities all students should acquire—regardless
of backgrounds, fields, or chosen higher education institutions.”
Greater Expectations, in very brief summary, calls for
all students to become “intentional learners who can adapt
to new environments, integrate knowledge from different sources,
and continue learning throughout their lives.” They
should also become “empowered learners through the mastery
of intellectual and practical skills” by learning to “effectively
communicate orally, visually, in writing, and in a second language;
understand and employ quantitative and qualitative analysis to
solve problems; interpret and evaluate information from a variety
of sources; understand and work within complex systems and with
diverse groups; demonstrate intellectual agility and the ability
to manage change; transform information into knowledge and knowledge
into judgment and action.” They should become “informed
learners” by “investigating human society and the
natural world” to learn about: “the human imagination,
expression, and the products of many cultures; the interrelations
within and among global and cross-cultural communities; means
of modeling the natural, social, and technical worlds; the values
and histories underlying U.S. democracy.” And they
should become “responsible learners” because “the
integrity of a democratic society depends on citizens’ sense
of social responsibility and ethical judgment.” Their
liberal education should foster: “intellectual honesty;
responsibility for society's moral health and for social justice;
active participation as a citizen of a diverse democracy; discernment
of the ethical consequences of decisions and actions; deep understanding
of one's self and respect for the complex identities of others,
their histories, and their cultures.”
AAC&U, and we
at St. Lawrence, call “for a new national
commitment to provide an excellent liberal education to all students,
not just those attending elite institutions and not just those
studying traditional arts and sciences disciplines.” This,
I believe is a vision for a 21st century higher education worthy
of center stage in the National Commission’s report. Instead,
what we have there is a hollow concern for quality with a practical
encouragement of educational and intellectual haphazardness.
