Assessing Basic Academic Skills in Higher Education

The Texas Approach

Richard T. Alpert, William P. Gorth, Richard G. Allan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780805803365
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136465482
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Addressing the growing concerns about reading, math, and writing skills of freshman-level students, this volume provides different perspectives and approaches to the assessment of basic academic skills in higher education. The book provides an in-depth investigation into the Texas Academic Skills Program (TASP). More generally, the book provides insights into the construction of testing programs and their evaluations.

The development and implementation of testing programs is discussed by outstanding educators involved and will be of great value to program administrators, policymakers, deans and faculty members of colleges, state legislators, and educational professionals working directly with institutions of higher learning.

Part One

Access to Quality:

The Challenge for Higher Education

Testing from a Legislative Perspective

Wilhelmina Delco

If I were to offer a subtitle for this presentation, it would be “Why are nice people like legislators in the business of dealing with testing?” After I authored the bill requiring basic skills testing in public institutions in the state of Texas, a lot of educators were publicly, and with some degree of hostility, asking the same question. They asked the question because there is a real feeling that legislators and people who form public policy ought to be in the business of appropriating money and should leave the business of educating and decisions about how to spend that money to educators.

If all things were equal in the world, that system probably would work out just fine. The truth is that some of the most critical education policy decisions in the history of our country have been made by people outside of the enterprise we call education. Take, for example, this question: “To whom should education, this wonderful vehicle for upward mobility, be offered?” For years, most educators felt that education belonged to a small, fairly restricted group. W. E. B. DuBois defined them as “the academically talented ten.” It was public policy that determined that all people who had the ability to learn ought to have access to the learning process and that public funds ought to be appropriated to support that policy.

Determining Funds for the Enterprise of Education

Every state in the United States has as a constitutional responsibility the charge to educate its people. And today education means much more than just the development of a literate citizenry. Education for many states is truly the cornerstone that spurs economic growth and develops a state’s competitive edge among other states and nations. Most states spend up to half, and some spend even more than half of their state budgets on the enterprise of education. Such appropriations were accepted when state resources were rather plentiful and demands for state money were few. However, because education programs, like all programs that deal with human services and special populations, are being abandoned at the federal level and returned to the states, we are for the first time in many states seeing competition for limited dollars. Legislators, who are trying to determine priorities for limited dollars, must ask why education should get so much money. Even more importantly, they must ask how educators will spend this money, and how the legislature can monitor the expenditures. In other words, we must ask, “Can we take the word of educators that all is well with the enterprise?”

In K-12 education the response was the National Commission on Excellence in Education’s 1983 report A Nation at Risk. All over the country there was a wave of reform. In the state of Texas there was the perception that there was something wrong with K-12 education and the acknowledgment that we had to spend more money. However, along with the appropriation of funds was a counter-concern for accountability of the money that would be spent.

When the committee on postsecondary education was formed, all the members did not share the same notion about postsecondary education. As a matter of fact, at the opening meeting the governor, lieutenant governor, and speaker of our House of Representatives (who were, by act of the resolution, part of that committee) commented that the enterprise of postsecondary education in Texas was doing well. Most people felt that education in the state was in good hands and just needed fine-tuning. In the minds of a lot of people, that meant we were spending too much money frivolously or unnecessarily and needed to figure out how to tighten the enterprise. We looked at the priorities that had been established essentially by the institutions and the administrators of those institutions. We questioned whether the appropriations that were being allocated for those institutions were right. More importantly, we asked whether postsecondary institutions were really meeting the needs of the students and whether those students were receiving from those institutions what they were led to believe was there for them. From such questions you get the conflict of appropriations and accountability. Legislators asked, “Are we getting our money’s worth?”

Legislators, who are ever sensitive to the concerns of warm bodies that can vote, started asking such questions in our state and in all states. It is so easy to ask those questions because in most states the colleges and universities are out there with their budgets naked on a line. And when you have problems balancing a budget, it is very easy, if an institution is not in your district, to draw a line through its appropriations. It is very easy to rationalize a delay tactic: “When times get better.… When the need is greater or the fuss is louder or the crisis is felt, we will return the funds. But in the meantime this is not as high a priority as other things are in our state.” We see legislators across this country asking questions: “What are we defining as higher education? Who can participate? What do they gain from participation? What is it costing us? What do we get for our money?”

Asking for Accountability through Testing

In Texas, it is with such questions that the issue of testing came in. Testing provides the easy, objective answer in the minds of legislators. Educators are telling us that they, from a professional perspective, expose people in our state, from very young to not so young, to a body of material, and they give them some kind of certification, some kind of diploma, that says they have in fact mastered this material. And they are telling us that such services cost a lot of money. Legislators in turn are saying there ought to be some way to measure whether we in fact have gotten our money’s worth, some way to show that people’s diplomas are worth what they imply.

Legislators are not picky about how you measure that, and are not terribly responsive to the argument that testing hurts some groups more than others, because that then becomes painful. The point that legislators are making in the increasing hue and cry for testing is that if you say that given enough resources you can educate a person in our state, then there ought to be some way to demonstrate this. There ought to be some way to compare the capabilities of students who have been exposed to a body of material with the capabilities of students who have not. The way to do that is left to the experts. The message I bring to you is that this process of what you may call legislative meddling is not going to go away. The number of state legislators who have jumped with both feet into the testing business has grown. Over the years the number of states putting demands and strings on funds attached to some kind of accountability has increased. And the rationale for that increase is the perception that what you say you do as educators can and must be measured.

The extent to which the educational vehicle is not developed to the satisfaction of the legislators, and the people who elect those legislators, is the extent to which your dollars are threatened. It is the extent to which alternatives to your institutions are being developed.

This is a critical issue and I would commend it very forcefully to you for your consideration. There are too many other groups with needs in our country today, and they are in line demanding the money that many of our educational institutions receive. There are too many mothers of young children, young mothers of young children, who are saying, “My kids may never get to college. Indeed, I may never get to college.” The need is urgent and the need is now. There are not enough resources to provide adequately for all of the needs. We have to establish priorities.

Also consider that in the United States we have an aging population. The number of people who are over 65 exceeds the number of people who are under 18. As people age, they vote more frequently. When they vote they say to their legislators, “We have nothing against public schools. We have nothing against colleges and universities. But if we are to enjoy the fruits of our labors, we want some focus placed on our needs.” The college population today is older. It is part time. It is working. It is increasingly female. And so the thrust in most institutions is more utilitarian than educational. It is more “now” oriented than “long-term” oriented. Community colleges are flourishing precisely for that reason.

As people become involved in the political process and see that funds are limited, they are voicing the concerns that legislators reflect in their decisions about funding. And in that vein I want you to understand that this is an important issue. I have no quarrel with the validity of testing. I have no problem with the concept of testing. My problem is with the sole reliance on testing. I do not believe that a test has been devised that can stand as the sole criterion for anything. I say this from having served four years on the board of trustees of the Educational Testing Service, where I became chairwoman of that board. I believe that tests must be coupled with other things. So the charge to you as educators is to develop the best instruments you can and to use those instruments to glean the kind of diagnostic information that you need to do the best job.

Educators and Legislators Together in the Glare of Public Light

You as educators have to be aware that you do not operate in splendid isolation. As long as you use public funds, the eyes of the legislature are on you. And as long as the eyes of the legislature are on you, people are constantly going to say, “Why are we spending this money to do this?” If you as educators are in fact performing a critical public service, and I believe you are, then you have to perform that service in the full glare of public light. What you do is important. Education is critical to the survival of our country and of all the people in our country. But it is no longer the exclusive property of the professionals in education. It is now in the public arena, and every step of the way questions are going to be asked that legislators believe can be answered through the use of testing programs. If questions are raised that we cannot answer, we will turn to you. If you do not make a good effort to answer them, we are going to turn someplace else.

This is a national issue. It is a national priority. And as we talk about turning the corner in economic development and competition in this country, one of the key tools is education. But before we appropriate the money now, we are going to ask for accountability. We are going to ask for some measure of the results that educators say they can produce. We are going to look at the diversity of the populations in our states and we are going to ask questions. We want to know why there are still groups that do not do well on tests and why there are constituencies that are literally afraid of tests. We want to know how much importance we ought to put on tests. If you as educators do not think we should rely so heavily on them, you need to tell us that and why. If we cannot put a lot of faith in testing as an accountability tool, what are the options?

It seems to me that the educators’ charge is as serious as that of the legislature. Educators are as much in the arena and the spotlight of public policy as we are. And it is critically important that you keep in mind that the people who appropriate the money are not the villains. They ought to be the partners in this enterprise we call education, because they are essential to the process—and if the process does not work, we are all losers.

Wilhelmina Delco is a member of the Texas House of Representatives and chair of its Higher Education Committee.

TASP:

An Opportunity to Regain Opportunities Lost

William Sanford

A presentation on the policy issues underlying the development and implementation of the Texas Academic Skills Program (TASP) might best take as its theme a part of a poem by Augustus de Morgan titled “A Budget of Paradoxes.”

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em.

And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

The great fleas themselves in turn have greater fleas to go on,

While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.

Public policy develops on the basis of decisions made within a social context. For one to understand the choices we are making in Texas, I must begin with a brief summary of some of the historical, demographic, and economic elements that under gird the nascence and nurturance of the program.

Historical, Demographic, and Economic Elements behind the TASP

Historians of the Southwest have suggested that the development of Texas can be summarized in this sequence of terms: the horse, the six-shooter, the windmill, the plow, the barbed-wire fence, and the oil well. It is our hope that the terms for tomorrow will be the computer, the satellite, and the test tube. A popular slogan during the last session of the legislature—which focused much of its attention on higher education—was “Brains are the oil and gas of the future.”

The state’s economic mainstays were first ranching and then farming, until oil was discovered. Until recently, Texas was a rural state. Now, it is in transition.

In an environment of cattle and oil wells, the fundamental role of higher education has been “access.” Texas is a state in which, from World War II through President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society to the present day, the public has seen higher education, above all else, as a means whereby all citizens have an opportunity to raise themselves from poverty to economic well-being.

This goal has been manifest in the last two decades by a series of actions designed to place an institution of public higher education within 50 miles of every citizen in the state. And this process has been 98 percent successful. One of the products in Texas of the Johnson vice-presidency and presidency was the establishment of 47 junior colleges. In the five-year period between 1968 and 1973, 15 new public senior institutions were created.

During the same period, student enrollment increased 42 percent, compared to an increase of only 16.5 percent in the college-age population. This 42 percent also contrasts with a national average of only 25 percent.

Texas is a large state, but in education it is poor. Some 205 of the 254 counties of the state contain poor school districts; 83 percent of the districts in east Texas and 95 percent of those along the border with Mexico are considered poor. In all, 60 percent of Texas’s 2.9 million school children reside in poor districts.

In 1980 approximately 66 percent of the 14 million Texas residents were Anglos, 21 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Black, and 1.3 percent Asian and other. But between 1970 and 1980 the Mexican-origin population increased by 70 percent, compared to 22 percent for Blacks and 15 percent for Anglos. Of all Mexican-born persons in the United States, Texas has one-fourth. (California has one-half.)

During the last decade Hispanics accounted for 63 percent of the one-quarter million student increase in the public schools. Among children under age 15, Anglos will cease being a majority before the turn of the century. During the next 50 years, Hispanic enrollment will rise from less than one million to almost 2.4 million.

In 1985–86 there were more than 3.5 million children between the ages of 3 and 19 enrolled in schools in Texas. By the year 2000 there will be 4.4 million.

More than 70 percent of all Anglos aged 25 or older have completed high school and 20 percent have finished at least four years of college. The respective proportions among Hispanics are 35 percent and 6 percent. Among Blacks, 50 percent have completed high school, but only 9 percent have had four years of college.

In the proportion of residents aged 25 or older who have completed high school, Texas ranks thirty-eighth among all states. In 1983, 27 percent of the half-million children in the state three and four years old were members of families below the federal poverty line. Almost 31 percent of all Black households have no husband present.

Texas spends about 45 percent of all state revenues on education. But it ranks forty-fifth among the 50 states in taxes per $1,000 of income. And in 1987 school children’s SAT scores also ranked ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One Access to Quality: The Challenge for Higher Education
• Part Two Components of the Texas Approach