UC San Diego was recently in the news and not for the best reasons. Following the publication of a comprehensive report written by faculty and administrators on the preparation of recent undergraduate admits, journalists and pundits across the political spectrum turned on the soundbite machine and got to work. The report was a clear sign of “educational decline”, wrote Megan McArdle in the Washington Post; “1 in 8 freshmen at UC San Diego don’t meet middle school standards in math”, noted the headline in the local NBC news report; the problem of education was clear, noted an op-ed in the New York Post, calling for “America’s public schools [to] go back to basics and teach reading, writing and math with time-tested methods proven to work”. Needless to say, the report provided fodder for critics of public education, particularly those on the political right who associated this dire situation to increased access to a college education.
Let me be clear: this is a real, tremendous problem. Our campus is perhaps the most extreme example, given its rapid expansion in recent years to meet the enrolment targets agreed between the Governor and the State Assembly with the University of California. The problems we observe in math, with students not meeting adequate grade standards, are also visible with reading and writing. Every single department on campus, whether tied to dexterity in algebra or the command of words, feels the pressure.
While many commentators have placed responsibility on the K-12 system, I will avoid doing so. The University of California has no role to play in setting the standards for public schools in the state. That is a problem for Sacramento, not Oakland, LA, Riverside or San Diego. Where the University of California has effective scope of action is in determining standards and processes for admission. Whether and how the state uses these as benchmarks for the design of the core curriculum of K-12 is a matter for the board of education and local school districts.
Yet someone is to blame. The University of California is a peculiar entity. Formally controlled by the Board of Regents, the University has often delegated decisions on academic matters such as admissions to the formal processes of its Academic Senate which, in close collaboration with the administration, maintains the institution’s educational excellence over time (aka, ‘shared governance’). Real estate developers and agents for Hollywood stars might be terrific at what they do, but they are rarely experts in education. They might even be good at managing investment portfolios (though I have a different rant on that), but they don’t necessarily understand which standards matter and how they should be implemented for, say, a degree in bioinformatics, history, physics or anthropology. That’s what faculty and educational experts are there for. This is why, traditionally, Regents have opted to defer to the expertise of consultative, expert faculty advice on critical matters concerning education.
Traditions break and, as we’ve discovered quite recently, institutions dissolve rapidly with the efforts of but a few individuals. In the past couple of years, the Regents of the University of California have taken a more active role in shaping educational policies than what they did before. For instance, they opposed reasonable Senate recommendations concerning academic programs, including rescinding a regulation discussed, voted, and passed by the Representative Assembly of the Senate to require a year of physical residence on a UC campus to obtain a UC degree. A key academic matter, determined by a Regental vote, against the principle of shared governance.
Most notably, the Regents repealed the use of ACT/SAT scores in admissions in 2020, despite a much more complex recommendation developed by the Academic Senate. While the suspension of the use of scores was reasonable amid a pandemic that had devastating effects on the educational sector, and while standardized testing scores are problematic because of how they carry the effects of socioeconomic inequalities into college, they provided an additional mechanism for evaluating proficiency in reading, writing, and math beyond heterogeneous and often incommensurable school transcripts. Two students with perfect grades in high school algebra might perform differently in the same test, partly reflecting—at least in some cases—variations in their proficiency not reflected in their transcripts.
Although COVID 19 precipitated the Regent’s intervention, discussions about standardized tests preceded the pandemic by more than a year, based mainly on widespread concerns about biases in ACT/SAT scores. To address these and related concerns, the Chair of the Academic Senate established the Standardized Testing Task Force (STTF) in January 2019. The task force was asked to answer the following questions.
- How well do UC’s current standardized testing practices assess entering high school students for UC readiness?
- How well do UC current standardized testing practices predict student success in the context of its comprehensive review process?
- Do standardized testing assessments fairly promote diversity and opportunity for students applying to UC?
- Does UC’s use of standardized tests increase or contract the eligibility pool compared to two other possibilities: 1) de-weighting standardized tests; or 2) eliminating the testing requirement?
- Should UC testing practices be improved, changed, or eliminated?
Armed with a wealth of expertise and data, the STTF reached a series of recommendations that, while critical of the ACT/SAT, considered the development of alternative means for evaluating potential admits, including a new standard UC test. Importantly, the task force was explicit in stating that it “[did] not recommend that UC make standardized tests optional for applicants at this time [January 2020]” nor did it support “adopting the Smarter Balanced (SBAC) Assessment in lieu of currently used standardized tests”. While they were problematic, standardized tests needed redesigning rather than eliminating.
Reading is fundamental, and it seems the Regents’s are below their grade-adequate Lexile. Despite the recommendations of experts, they eliminated the use of standardized tests, punting the development of an alternative evaluation system into the future and ignoring the risks of relying on indicators generated solely within the very heterogeneous K-12 system. A brief attempt to use the Smarter Balanced Assessment showed that it was inadequate to reflect the expectations for UC admission. And the development of a UC-wide admissions test was shelved indefinitely, as far as I know. As the Regents neglected the development of instruments that would serve as benchmarks for admission, they nevertheless spent time discussing the possibility of greater online education, fully online degrees, “campus climate”, and changes to procedures surrounding faculty discipline (which they considered too cumbersome and slow). A packed agenda with little taste for education.
The blame is there: in forms of Regental meddling in educational affairs that have had profound, unintended (but foreseen) consequences on the University of California. While the Regents may see Shared Governance as a limitation to their capacity to guide the university, they fail to understand it as an expert resource that fills the gaps to which their knowledge of real estate and Hollywood celebrities simply does not extend.
But that’s precisely the problem today, the cornerstone of attacks on higher education *in the public sphere*. That anyone with sufficient self-confidence and self-reassurance can fool themselves into believing they are experts while ignoring those who actually know a thing or two about the world.