How does term accountability from a legal viewpoint impact higher education - Research Paper Example

Introduction The concept of accountability, with regards to higher education, is one that has myriad different meanings. Traditional ways of accountability include accreditation reviews and actuarial data, that shows the percentage of students graduating, etc. Increasingly, however, states are legislating and mandating that colleges demonstrate that they are teaching students what they need to learn. This is quite different from traditional methods of accountability, as, just because a school has a high percentage of graduates does not necessarily mean that this school is teaching its students adequately. Because the legislators are mandating these measures, and, as such, has the means for enforcing the measure, this would be considered to be legal accountability. This is in contrast to constitutional accountability, which means that the higher education institutions are not only accountable to the legislature and courts but also to myriad stakeholders who enforce accountability. The constitutionally accountable higher education institutions tend to have more autonomy from state legislatures than the legally accountable institutions. This paper will focus mainly on the legal aspects of accountability, and how this impacts higher education. 2. What is accountability? To understand how accountability occurs, in general, in a higher education setting, first the standard definition must be examined. According to Burke (2005), accountability is “an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one’s actions” (Burke, 2005, p. 2). Burke also said that the term accountability places six different demands on the higher education institution. The first demand is that the institution can show that their powers were properly used. The second demand is that the institution can show that it is working to achieve the priorities that are set by the organization. The third demand involves transparency, in that the institution must report on its performance. The fourth demand involves efficiency and effectiveness, in that the organization must demonstrate that they can account for the resources that they use and the outcomes that they create. Fifth, the university must account for the quality of the programs and services that it produces. Sixth, and last, the university must demonstrate that it caters to the public needs (Burke, 2005, p. 2). So, generally, a university is held accountable by being transparent with its mission, goals and effectiveness, and must answer to a variety of stakeholders, including the public and the student body. Similarly, Leveille (2005) states that accountability has three prongs. The first is performance. This simply means results, with absolute performance as a benchmark for accountability. The second is transparency. For Leveille, this means that the public is made aware of the university and college performances, and the way that these institutions do business is similarly subject to public scrutiny. This enables key stakeholders to ascertain how well a certain institution of higher education is doing, and how their business is conducted. The third prong of accountability, according to Leveille, is culture of evidence. This simply means that the higher education institutions consider routine evidence at all levels when contemplating and planning action. Thus, the culture of evidence prong is satisfied when an university uses its accountability practices to learn about itself, its strengths and weaknesses, and uses this knowledge to improve itself and its operations, taking its mission and stakeholder values into account (Leveille, 2005, pp. 9-10). 3. The concept of legal accountability Mortimer (1972) states that there should be a delineation between legal accountability and constitutional accountability. Legal accountability means that accountability is enforced through legal means – the courts and disciplinary control of departments. On the other hand, constitutional accountability means that universities and colleges are not necessarily only beholden to courts and disciplinary control of departments, but, rather, universities essentially have more autonomy in that administrators have discretion, and this discretion is integral to the organizational environment. Instead of only being accountable to the courts and disciplinary control of departments, these universities are accountable to an array of stakeholders, including interest groups, the chief executive of the state, the legislators of the state and courts of the state (Mortimer, 1972, p. 8). For instance, as indicated below, many states are increasingly demanding accountability from their universities by mandating that these universities demonstrate, through the use of report cards, that students in these universities are learning what they are supposed to be learning. Because these universities are accountable to the state, in that these report cards are issued by the state, this would be example of a legalistic way of accountability. On the other hand, the Virginia legislature, in 2005, issued new levels of autonomy for its universities, which means that their universities are able to detach themselves from bureaucratic regulations (Leveille, 2005, p. 1). Thus, Virginia appears to be more of constitutional with its approach to accountability, while the states that issue mandates appear to be more legalistic. Also constitutional as opposed to legal is the state of California whose legislature created four branches of government, with the university system being the fourth. Thus, California schools are autonomous, like the Virginia schools, and the legislature in that state “basically turns over money to use without many rules about how to spend it” (Leveille, 2005, p. 5). Getting back to the issue of viewing accountability from a legal standpoint, one of the main sources of accountability is the state, who has an interest in ensuring that their universities are held accountable, therefore the state legislatures become assertive in promulgating legislation and regulations that mandate the universities to undertake certain assessment practices and ensure that the universities undertake and implement performance indicators (Bogue et al. 2010, p. 2). This is because of the fact that the universities are accountable to the public, and, as such, the legislatures, who serve the public needs, have to make sure that the universities become accountable to the public, and the best way to do this is through legislation and regulations (Benjamin & Klein, 2006, p. 2). Thus, states are increasing using their power of the purse to hold universities and colleges accountable (Leveille, 2005, p. 5). As such, the level of accountability in universities has shifted over the years, as the public is increasingly becoming invested in how well universities are working, so that universities increasingly must show, due to legislative mandates and regulations, how they are helping students acquire skills, knowledge and abilities that the students need when they graduate (Benjamin & Klein, 2006, p. 3). A parallel to this new mandate is the mandate in K-12 schools to show that they are adequate in teaching our K-12 students, so the federal government implemented “No Child Left Behind” legislation, which mandates accountability, annual academic assessment and sanctions for public schools that fail the assessments (Bush, p. 3). Because of this, states are increasingly enforcing policies which mandate that universities demonstrate not just the usual accreditation reviews and actuarial data, such as graduation and minority access rates, but also how much students are actually learning. As of 2006, 44 states have mandated this kind of accountability from their universities, including 27 states who issue “report cards”(Bogue et al., 2010, p. 2) with benchmarks that universities must meet with regard to the actual level of knowledge their students acquire at each university (Benjamin & Klein, 2006, p. 3). In this way, accountability has expanded, through various legislative efforts, to include learning outcomes, which are in addition to the usual benchmarks that universities try to meet, which includes the accreditation reviews and actuarial data. To meet these goals, universities increasingly must demonstrate knowledge, and, as such, just like with K-12 schools under the “No Child Left Behind” mandate, these schools must test the students over subjects that they are supposed to have learned and skills that they were supposed to have acquired. Several reports through the years have emphasized this shift in accountability definitions with regards to universities and colleges. One such report that has generated heated debate is the Measuring Up 2000, which bills itself as “the first state-by-state report card for higher education” (Measuring Up 2000). Measuring Up 2000, which has been reissued every year since the year 2000, measures state higher education by using five categories: preparation, participation, affordability, completion and benefits. The Measuring Up 2000 website states that it enables “state leaders, policy makers, researchers and others with the capacity to compare any state with the best-performing states in each performance category, compare indicator scores and state grades for any performance category, obtain source and technical information for indicators and weights, and download or order the report” (Measuring Up 2000). Thus, an individual can assess a given state’s higher education system at a glance. Additional reports which have been issued with regards to university and college accountability are Kenneth Mortimer’s 1972 monograph that is entitled “Accountability in Higher Education”, where Mortimer asserts that it is important for universities to demonstrate what comes out of their universities, as opposed to strictly focusing on what goes into them (Bogue et al., 2010, p. 2). In 2005, the National Commission on Accountability in Higher Education released its Accountability for Better Results: A National Imperative for Higher Education, which was a report about higher education that was the result of a special study commission created by the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO), which is “comprised of a national assembly of higher education administrators, government officials and corporate officers” (Bogue, 2010, p. 2). Thus, colleges are increasingly expanding their testing programs. Where, traditionally, they tested incoming students as to the students’ abilities to handle the course work, and those who do not do well in these entrance exams are placed in remedial programs, and colleges and universities have also traditionally tested incoming students on basic reading, writing and math skills, colleges and universities are increasingly having to ascertain the best way to test for students’ knowledge that is actually acquired at the university (Benjamin & Klein, 2006, p. 4). Traditional methods of assessing this have been unsatisfactory, as the traditional method of assessing student’s knowledge is by testing, both mid-term and final, term papers, classroom participation and other evidence that goes into assessing students’ grades. The problem with this is that it is not standardized – each professor is idiosyncratic, therefore it is impossible to tell how well the student body as a whole has progressed in learning (Benjamin & Klein, 2006, p. 4). Benjamin & Klein (2006) have argued that there must be a better way for universities to fulfill the state mandate of demonstrating how well their universities and colleges have prepared students with the obligatory knowledge. They argue for the use of standardized testing, and the scores that are attained on these standardized tests may be compared to the students’ grades on the SAT and ACT to see if the students are doing better or worse on an outcome measure, given their level of ability coming into the university (Benjamin & Klein, 2006, p. 8). So, if student A has a high score on the standardized university exam, and also had a high score on his ACT and SAT exams, then this would be taken into account. However, if student B had a low score on the ACT and SAT exams, yet scored the same as student A in the hypothetical standardized university exam, then this obviously would be evidence of a higher level of knowledge attainment then with student A. In this way, colleges and universities would not be penalized, as it were, if it has a large percentage of, say, underprivileged students, in that these students entry level of knowledge is taken into account. So, if that school scores more poorly on standardized university exams than another school that attracts mainly students from prepatory and private schools, this would not necessarily be a negative because the students coming in had much less knowledge than the other school that is more elite. What matters is the difference between the two scores – if college A has a large number of underprivileged students with low SAT and ACT scores, if these students improve, even if their standardized scores are not very high, then this school would get a better report card than the elite school with high standardized scores which are not appreciably different from the students’ incoming scores. Benjamin & Klein (2006) also state that these measures would not just be helpful in that it gives the state a good indication of how well the schools are doing, therefore the schools may be entitled to more substantial funding from the states, but also for internal accountability. These scores may be used by individual universities to see how well they are doing in certain areas, and what areas are in need of extra attention. From there, they can revise and revamp their curriculum, pedagogy and programmatic structure, as well as allocate resources more judiciously, so that they can better prepare students in area in which they are weaker (Benjamin & Klein, 2006, p. 8). That said, there are those who disdain this kind of micromanagement that states do to hold higher education institutions accountable. These individuals see this kind of accountability as intrusion upon autonomy, not to mention unnecessarily expensive in terms of time and resources. This is because these standards are seen as overly “complex, overlapping and duplicative” (Leveille, 2005, p. 6). At the same time, these standards take away institutional autonomy and diversity, worry these critics, as accountability principles are increasingly focused away from traditional accountability measures, such as accreditation, and towards “government-mandated, standards-driven accountability systems” (Leveille, 2005, pp. 6-7). 4. Conclusion Legal accountability means, in a nutshell, that universities are accountable to the legislature in demonstrating that its students are learning what they are supposed to be learning. States are increasingly using the power of the purse to ensure that its universities are teaching students fundamental skills and knowledge that will prepare these students for the 21st Century and beyond. States then use this information to issue report cards and fund the universities and colleges. This makes sense because the public also has a stake in how well the universities and colleges prepare our students, in that their taxpayer’s dollars are going to these institutions if they are state-run. The use of standardized testing, much like what is currently used in K-12, due to the “No Child Left Behind” legislation, is a good benchmark to ascertain how well the schools are doing in this regard, provided that these scores are compared against the student body’s incoming ACT and SAT scores. Although individuals within these colleges see such measures as intrusive and evidence of micromanagement, they remain the best barometer of how well a certain university is doing and the best way to uphold the principle of transparency that is the public’s right. The public needs to know that their taxpaying dollars are being used by these universities in a judicious way. This is the basis for legal accountability in higher education, and is a sound one. Sources Used Benjamin, R. & Klein, S. (2006) Assessment versus accountability in higher education: Notes for reconciliation. Available at: http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/files/53749/11840803645Benjamin.pdf/Benjamin.pdf Leveille, D. (2005) An emerging view on accountability in American higher education. Center for Studies in Higher Education. Available at: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=54 Bogue, G. & Hall, K. (2010) Corporate, political, and academic perspectives on higher education accountability policy. Available at: http://web.susla.edu/administration/Documents/PAR/SACSCOC/2010/cs-87%20bogue%20SACS2010ACCOUNTPAPER.pdf Burke, J. (2006) The many faces of accountability. Available at: http://www.rockinst.org/pdf/education/2004-10-achieving_accountability_in_higher_education_balancing_public_academic_and_market_demands_chapter_one.pdf Measuring Up 2000. Available at: http://measuringup.highereducation.org/ Mortimer, K. (1972) Accountability in higher education. Available at: http://eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED058465.pdf Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………….1 What is accountability?...........................................1 The concept of legal accountability………………………3 Conclusion………………………………………………………….11 Read More