Bully Pulpits versus Just Plain Bull

The Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, has created quite a range of discussion and debate. That has been especially true of her calls for "accountability" mechanisms. She has yammered (in my opinion) for quantitative standards. Is that a positive or negative thing? I asked that question when a friend, who is an official in the accrediting association of orthodox rabbinical schools, wrote a piece for Inside Higher Education. He commented "In essence, Secretary Spellings did what education secretaries are supposed to do: she pushed higher education higher on the nation’s agenda, she stimulated a cauldron of healthy controversy, and she energized our college and university leadership in a way I haven’t seen before. I was one of those who disagreed most vigorously (but respectfully, I hope) with some of the secretary’s initiatives. And if circumstances warrant, I will not hesitate to venture an opposing view in the future."

What has bothered me most about the Secretary's attempts over the last year are two things which I believe are critical to any public policy process. She has been very sloppy with her use of facts. For example, she made the repeated claim that a third of all support for higher education comes from the federal government. That is possible only if you take the entire value of all federal research grants and all student loans and count them as single year expenditures - you then get close to a third. But that type of accounting would never be acceptable in any reasonable review of the influence of federal spending. She made the absurd claim that there is a paucity of information about colleges and universities. Somehow with this paucity her daughter was able to enroll in a prestigious liberal arts college in North Carolina - so at least for some people the information seems to be there. When she first made the claim, I wanted to test it so did a simple Google inquiry about a specific academic field and location in the country - in the space of less then 20 seconds, I had tons of information about the range of opportunities that would be available. Facts in public policy are important and anyone trying to make a change should begin with the facts. At the same time the Secretary has tried to do her assault from behind the veil of a managed image. For example, in every forum I have been with her in the last year she has spoken and then only been willing to respond to written questions. The "dialogue" she proposed to engage in was phony. If she has the courage of her convictions, she should be willing to engage. But her conversation is more of a diatribe.

There are two concerns I have about my friend's comments. First, I am not sure what education secretaries are supposed to do. I am still not quite sure whether we should have created a Federal Department of Education. The two most prominent Secretaries in the history of the Department spent a lot of time creating controversy but I am not sure they did more than generate activity. Are we better off because of the rhetoric of William Bennett or the enactments like No Child Left Behind (which is admittedly something that Secretary Spellings did not create - although she seems intent on extending the simple minded principles of that Act to higher education where the market is much different.) But second, I am also not convinced that inflamed rhetoric actually moves higher education. Getting higher education's attention is a tough thing to do. Higher education in the US is a diverse set of institutions with often conflicting and contradictory motives and interests. Thus, to lump all of higher education into a box, as the Secretary has tried to do, could well be counter-productive. But if the position of Secretary of Education is not a place to make the establishment uncomfortable, what is its purpose? And as importantly, how do we as a society get an institution like higher education to move forward.

In the last year, higher education has moved on some new areas of disclosure which will make it more understandable. In the last couple of years, all of higher education has begun to think more carefully about costs and prices. Some of that has come in response to the yammering of public officials. One could argue that without that hectoring, higher education would continue blithely on the path of least resistance. But I, for one, am not convinced that as my friend describes it - the "purgatory" is the best way to get the institutions to think creatively about how to change.