Can You Say NACIQI? Go here for the full text. http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/12/05/naciqi I have excerpted a section on the action and discussions related to WASC FYI. …Perhaps more importantly, some of the reports the panel’s staff prepared for this week’s meeting were perceived as pushing accreditors harder and further on measuring learning outcomes than they have been pushed before. And the one accreditor that had a chance to respond Monday — the Western Association of Schools and Colleges’ Accrediting Commission for Senior Colleges and Universities — was firm in pushing back. The staff report for the Western accreditor found four areas in which the agency needed to improve, including a need to “clarify how it will evaluate the quality of an institution’s effectiveness based on the student outcomes data it collects and to outline in its procedures its expectations for institutional improvement (student learning) throughout the accreditation cycle.” Although the staff recommended that the Western association be re-recognized for the standard five years, it urged that the accrediting agency be required to report back in a year on its progress in fixing the perceived deficiencies. When it was his turn to speak, Ralph A. Wolff, president and executive director of the Western association’s senior college commission, conceded three of the department’s four points but challenged the finding on student outcomes data, which he and other officials from the accrediting group said essentially would require it to tell colleges what performance measures they should meet. He defended the agency’s “exceptional record” in holding the colleges it accredits accountable for their performance in educating students, and accused the committee’s staff of changing the standards midstream. “I want to say that you, as an advisory committee and decision making committee, when new rules are applied, I would raise the issue of consistency and fairness, that they be applied equally and consistently to all accrediting bodies,” Wolff said. “To have it applied singly to our agency, we would submit, unfairly burdens our institutions beyond what we are are already doing.” Members of the committee, its staff and the Western association proceeded to spend nearly an hour trying to reach agreement on exactly what the commission was asking for, and how big a chance it represented from what the committee has asked previously. John Barth, the Education Department’s director of accreditation and state liaison, said that Western officials themselves had identified “triggers,” such as graduation rates, that they would use to gauge colleges’ performance at various points in the accreditation process. “What we are requesting of the agency” is that it identifies “a somewhat brighter line about how they’d let us know how they’re going to make a decision about [how a college has performed on] those triggers.” Richard Winn, associate director of the Western association’s college commission, said it would be a “major new regulation” for NACIQI to ask accreditors to set what he called “bright line indicators” for what is acceptable performance for an institution. Requiring accreditors to set benchmarks for performance by the colleges they oversee, Wolff said, would represent a new and unacceptable level of federal intrusion. Referring to Spellings’s statement at last week’s accreditation forum that the department planned to “do this with you, not to you,” he added: “To impose that on a single agency at this point, with no further discussion, would be to us.” A recent addition to the accreditation panel, Arthur Keiser, president of the for-profit Keiser Collegiate System, said he thought it was legitimate for accreditors to set minimum levels of performance. Citing a hypothetical institution that graduates as few as 3 percent of its students, he said, “I don’t think institutions can abrogate their responsibility.... It is not acceptable for us to say that that institution is demonstrating success. At some point we have to be able to say that that [level of performance] is just not acceptable. That’s our role. We can’t just ignore this thing.”…
