Education Sector, a think tank that promotes education reform, issued a new report yesterday on state higher education accountability systems.  It ranked West Virginia, along with 26 other states, as “in progress,” meaning that less-than-complete efforts are underway.  

Several minor errors in the Education Sector report quickly raised questions in my mind about the quality of their work.  First, the report abbreviates West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission HECP, instead of HEPC, at the beginning of the report.  Second, the report lists HEPC’s master plan “Charting the Future” as the Community and Technical College System’s (CTCS’s) plan.  So I decided to give the report a closer reading.  My observations, which appear below, did not give me a lot of comfort about the quality of their work:

• In what has to be the quote of the day, Kevin Carey, policy director for Education Sector, says: “Accountability isn’t just about gathering information; it’s about doing something useful with it.”  AMEN!  It is fairly easy to gather information and present it in an attractive publication.  It is much more difficult to gather USEFUL information and then USE that information in your decision-making.
• Bizarrely, the report’s West Virginia cover page lists one of the strengths of West Virginia’s higher education accountability system as “aligning state priorities with concrete goals for achievement.”    The report itself, however, says: “The state’s ‘Master Plan’ (actually the HEPC master plan) has five planning areas – economic growth, access, cost and affordability, learning and accountability, and innovation – that each have recommendations.  The recommendations are non-specific goals like ‘enhance outreach to all residents to participate in higher education’ and ‘contain costs.’  They are unaccompanied by numeric targets.”  It goes on to say that the “Compact for the Future of West Virginia” (actually the CTCS master plan) “does list some numeric goals, but the plan does not include blueprints for their attainment, baseline data or interim targets.”  In the latter case, these actually can be found in a separate set of documents the researchers obviously did not locate.  Regardless, if Education Sector sees no numeric goals, no baseline data, no interim targets and no blueprints for achievement of the goals, how can it claim “concrete goals for achievement” as a strength, much less West Virginia’s only strength?  
• Equally bizarre, the report gives West Virginia a “best practice” mark in only one area: alignment with Pre K-12 education.  Does this mean that West Virginia has created a “seamless curriculum” (the buzzword for K-12/higher education alignment) for students transitioning between high school and college?  Of course not.  It just means that West Virginia produces a report (actually ACT produces it) showing how students from various counties and high schools fare on the ACT exam and in their first year of college.
• The report notes that West Virginia does not have a formal mechanism to tie institutional performance to funding levels.  This technically is not true for the Community and Technical College System, which earlier this year promulgated a finance rule that rewards institutions for enrollment in high-cost/high demand programs and for getting students to certain momentum points, such as successful completion of developmental (called “remedial” a few years ago and a pejorative term before that) education courses and graduation with a certificate or associate’s degree.
• The report notes that West Virginia, like the vast majority of states, does little to measure student learning.  Actually, all HEPC institutions utilize the Collegiate Learning Assessment and all CTCS institutions utilize the National Survey of Student Engagement to a limited extent, but it would be almost impossible for someone to figure out objectively whether a student at Marshall University or West Virginia Northern Community College actually learns anything based on published data.  Everyone needs to do a better job in this area.

In conclusion, the report says that West Virginia higher education needs to improve the overall quality of information it produces.  I couldn’t agree more, but I could say the same thing about Education Sector based on the quality of its West Virginia score card.