The white noise of accountability

Grab your cup of coffee, relax, and settle down with this article from today's Inside Higher Ed. It's long and it will require re-reading for full understanding, but the questions Adelman asks and the thinking his questions might provoke make it worth the effort. A quote to get you going...

We are now surrounded by a veritable industry producing enormous quantities of data and information on various performances of institutions of higher education in the name of something called “accountability,” and it is fair to ask where this production sits in terms of the potential meaning of its banner. It is also necessary to note that, in the rhetoric of higher education, “institution” is usually the subject of sentences including “accountability,” as if a single entity were responsible for a raft of consequences. But, as noted below, when our students attend three or four schools, the subject of these sentences is considerably weakened in terms of what happens to those students. The relationship is attenuated.

For now we start with a postulate: however we define accountability, we are describing a relationship in which obligations and responsibilities dwell. Our questions sound simple: What kind of relationship? What kind of obligations? What kind of responsibilities? What actions within the relationship justify its type? The exploration is conducted not to convince you that one configuration is “better” than another, rather to make sure that we all think better about the dynamics of each one.

And now, for the rest of the story...