By: Stephen Langendorfer

As we enter a new decade, education is still plagued by one of the more misdirected assessment initiatives of the past decade:  No Child Left Behind. NCLB, unfortunately, arose from the faulty notion that simply by administering standardized tests, educational practices magically would be improved. Indeed, the most underperforming schools as measured by standardized test scores are punished and the children who need the resources the most are deprived of them.

Along the same mistaken line of accountability thinking, institutions of higher education were coerced into engaging in the misnamed Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA). The misguided idea behind VSA is that the primary focus of assessment in colleges and universities should be garnering some single standardized score by which an institution can compared to its peers. Although we know from the LEAP initiative that all institutions of higher education should share some common focus on liberal education as measured by the Essential Learning Outcomes, each institution must have its own unique mission and vision. No standardized test can come close to demonstrating the degree to which any institution is achieving its self-identified mission.

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