|
QUICK |
|
(Excerpt
From: “Old Autonomy and New
Accountability: Assessing, Reporting,
and Funding Campus Results,” by Joseph C. Burke, presented at the AACSB
Outcomes Assessment Conference, Chicago, Illinois, March 6, 2000) …Common Challenges Performance Funding and Budgeting have many of the same challenges as Outcomes Assessment and Performance Reporting. They include choosing performance indicators, assessing higher education results, and protecting campus diversity and autonomy. In addition, all of these performance programs must confront the problems of the timing of program planning and implementation, the costs,, of data collection and analysis, and the changes in state priorities and leaders. In addition, performance funding also raises the specter of budget instability. Implementing complex and controversial programs takes time. Complexity of program design, controversy over critical components, consultation with multiple stakeholders, and collection of required data demand a lengthy period for planning and implementation. Achieving results in higher education also takes time. State priorities and program requirements must continue long enough to allow campuses to produce and evaluate the desired and demanding results. Despite this need for continuity, state priorities fluctuate with changes in governors and legislators and shifts in constituent interests and pressing issues. The costs of data collection and analysis for tracking and assessing institutional results add another burden to strained campus budgets and staffs.
Characteristics
Successful Programs
The history of assessing, reporting, and funding results suggests the following characteristics of successful programs (Burke & Modarresi, 2000). 1. Collaboration
between state and campus leaders. Collaboration among all these stakeholders is essential. It ensures the delicate balance between the public needs voiced by external officials and opinion leaders and the professional concerns expressed by campus faculty and administrators. 2. Goals of institutional improvement, external accountability, meeting state needs, and increasing state funding. State-funded programs for public colleges and universities cannot survive for long without satisfying the two goals of external accountability and institutional improvement. Campus leaders often prefer institutional improvement and complain about external accountability. Governors and legislators naturally demand evidence that performance programs increase accountability, but they also desire improvement in programs and services. Meeting state needs can constitute a viable goal, but state leaders should take care that specific objectives do not divert the emphasis from the traditional purposes of teaching, learning, and research. The prospect of increasing state funding offers a needed incentive for campus cooperation. 3. Policy values stressing quality more than efficiency. Quality is the hallmark of higher education. All public programs should incorporate both quality and efficiency, but the fundamental purpose of pursuing quality in educational institutions makes it a primary priority. Even state policy makers acknowledge that efficiency, while desirable in itself, is diminished unless coupled with quality programs and services. 4. Sufficient time for planning and implementation.
5. Neither too few nor too many performance indicators. Too few indicators ignore too many of the multiple objectives of colleges and universities. Too many indicators trivialize major priorities of higher education. A reasonable number for comprehensive programs might run from eight to 15. 6. Assessment of the desired knowledge and skills achieved by graduates. Commitment to assessing student outcomes will not ensure the stability of performance reporting, budgeting, and funding, but success is unlikely without it. Satisfaction surveys can assess good practices and perceptions of quality in student learning, while work continues on more objective ways to measure the desired knowledge and skills of graduates, especially in general education. 7. Success standards emphasizing institutional improvement or quality maintenance, supplemented by peer comparisons. The diverse types and multiple missions of public campuses make institutional equity an essential element for all performance programs. The fairest standard of success looks first at institutional improvement and then at performance in comparison with similar colleges or universities. The first consideration supports campus differences; the second ensures comparable standards. Programs should avoid competition among institutions. Such competition only produces the undesirable characteristics of arrogance or envy. The best and fairest competition for institutions and individuals is competing with themselves to improve their past performance. 8. Limited but substantial and discretionary funding. Limited funding prevents budget instability. Substantial funding recognizes the priority and difficulty of producing results in higher education. About three to six percent of state general fund support seems a reasonable amount. Discretionary spending makes even small sums effective, when mandated expenditures absorb almost all of campus budgets 9. Additional rather than reallocated resources as the funding source. Additional money makes performance funding or budgeting a desirable project on campus. It becomes a funded initiative rather than another activity competing for limited resources. 10. Continuity of state priorities and program requirements. State priorities and program requirements must continue long enough to allow campuses to produce the desired and demanding results. Performance programs require a patience and persistence rarely founding in state policy making. If governors and legislators want improved performance from state colleges and universities, they must abandon their penchant for swift solutions and instant successes. 11. Recognition that Autonomy is rarely absolute. The only fully autonomous institutions are those that are fully self-supporting. And no college or university - public or private -- meets that requirement. Academics must recognize that autonomy and accountability are inseparable. Academic autonomy cannot survive unless it assumes accountability for its activities and actions. 12. A stake for Internal campus units. Success demands consequences for schools and departments. Performance programs are often instituted by states, coordinating boards, system officials, or campus administrations. As a result, they are frequently invisible or ignored at the level of schools or departments, where the performance is produced. Results are assessed, reported, and funded for institutions, but seldom required for schools and departments. For example, performance funding applies to institutional performance on the designated indicators. But those same institutions continue to fund schools and departments based on current costs, enrollments, and inflation, with no consideration of their performance. Performance programs must apply to internal units as well as total institutions. Conclusion The faults of most performance programs flow mostly from detailed prescriptions, inadequate consultation, poor design, hurried implementation, and -- where funding is involved -- either too little or too much money. But the fatal flaw is the reluctance of the academic community to identify and assess the knowledge and skills that graduates should possess. Unfortunately, the debate over these programs has not centered on fixing those faults or that flaw. Champions, mostly from state capitals and the business community, focus on the attractive possibilities of those programs. Critics, mostly from campuses, fixate on what they consider intractable problems. The former tend to ignore the complexity of those programs and view campus complaints as a refusal to accept accountability for performance. The latter often dismiss even the possibility of assessing results in higher education, and view any effort as a plot to run campuses like businesses. Public higher education has become too important to states and their citizens to consider only resource inputs and ignore campus results. The public is unlikely to accept forever the proposition that performance should count in all endeavors, except in higher education. We academics are too good at criticizing the results of outside organizations to plead the impossibility of assessing our own performance. Given my name, I naturally have a series of Burke's Laws. One Law states that the interest of academics in accountability is in direct proportion to the distance from our campuses, schools and departments. We may persuade state officials that only academics can define and assess the outcomes of undergraduate education. But they will never accept the response that it cannot be done. Results will eventually count in assessing, reporting, and funding the performance of public colleges and universities. The real questions are how to assess their performance, and whether academics will lead, or leave the action to outsiders. References
|
Copyright © 2000