Among the controversies in American higher education are the perceptions that many students arrive at college underprepared to do the rigorous work required, that too many graduate without the requisite skills to survive the modern workplace, and that there is inadequate accountability in higher education.
It is seductively easy to confuse these issues and propose oversimplified solutions. For example, the U.S. Department of Education suggests that greater accountability in higher education will solve the other perceived problems. This proposal misses the mark, uses the wrong weapon and aims at the wrong target.
The call for greater accountability in higher education has undeniable merit, but its pursuit will fail to solve the problem of student underachievement. That poor student performance results from poor instruction is far from a universal truth and an oversimplification of a complex issue.
Public education has always been part of the ever-changing fabric of American society. Designed in the 1800s to produce an educated populace that would support democracy, it started in a social and economic context that was quite different from the conditions in which we live today. Even its expectations are dwarfed by those of today. The child born in 1890 is not the same child who sits in today’s classroom.
We don’t exist in a vacuum. Each one of us is subject to multiple influences in our lives. Children who spend six hours of each day in school are subject to influences outside the school that include poverty, racism, discrimination, fragmented communities and families, physical and mental health, learning disabilities, handicaps, the quality and commitment of the school, and many more. Taken together, these myriad influences overpower the influence of even the most effective teacher.
While this is certainly true for K-12 education, it is equally true for higher education. In higher education, however, we see the additional stressors of adult responsibilities – students with children, jobs, disrupted families – as well as the ordinary challenges of young adult development. The highest level of undergraduate instruction, however it is measured, simply does not have the strength to trump the other mitigating factors in students’ lives.
After World War II, public education enjoyed widespread support because it was viewed as the currency necessary for the white middle class to achieve the American dream. Schoolchildren left their homes to learn the “basic skills” that would enable them to gain respectable, secure and long-term employment.
But the society changed significantly throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, and those changes – social, political, demographic and economic – necessarily changed the context of public education. Schools began to see students with social, health, economic and psychological needs that did not previously concern them and soon discovered that out-of-school problems impeded students’ learning. Public schools continue to adjust to the necessity of addressing these other “non-educational” needs for instruction to be effective and students to be successful.
Now public higher education must do the same. Overstressed students hardly can be expected to get excited about our lectures on 16th-century literature without understanding that there are connections to their own lives.
The college professor no longer has the luxury of delivering a lecture and expecting that at the end of the hour, the job is complete. In spite of modern K-12 adaptations, too many students still arrive in the college classroom with an education (and community) that failed to acknowledge and/or address their social, economic and psychological needs. And as young adults, they must cope with a wide array of distractions.
Higher education is being criticized for its lack of accountability, and perhaps deservedly so. But installing accountability measurements will not address the social, economic and psychological context in which students live and learn, nor how well our students are prepared for rigorous college work.
For hundreds of years the academy has basked in isolation and independence. We have successfully rejected John Donne’s thesis that “no man is an island” by protecting our unassailable domain. We do need to examine how well we do our jobs, but instructional improvement will not necessarily improved student success. What will produce that outcome is consideration of the modern student’s social, economic and psychological context. Students will learn to the extent that their context supports their capacity.
There are those who continue to claim that the job of the school is to teach, not to provide supportive social services. That may have been true in 1890, and even in 1950, but it is just not consistent with today’s reality. The answer is to examine the students’ context and figure out how higher education can fit, not the converse. As our society grows and changes, so must our public education system, or it will become irrelevant and unable to support our democracy. •
Jerry M. Hatfield is chairman
of the department of human services at the Community
College of Rhode Island.
