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Who Is Sara Martinez Tucker?
Is it time to abolish the Department of Education?
by Stan Katz
Hers is not a household name, and it is not likely to become one. Ms. Tucker was appointed in late 2006 as the Under Secretary for postsecondary education in the U.S. Department of Education. She is holding the tiller of the department’s higher education programs at a time when her ship (the Bush administration) is sinking under the waves. Not that I feel sorry for her. The message she delivered at the Chicago conference held last Friday to commemorate the second anniversary of the report of the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education was the message that President Bush and Secretary Rice have been delivering for many years to recalcitrant foreign nations: “You know what you have to do.”
But of course Ms. Tucker was only doing what Secretary Margaret Spellings has been doing for the past couple of years, warning institutions of higher education that they need to become more transparent with respect to student educational outcomes. Spellings turned that warning into a threat on Friday, telling the university representatives in her audience that if they did not provide consumers with more and better information on student success rates, Congress will impose heavier burdens on them than they can now impose upon themselves. “I suspect that [Congress’s] solutions will likely not be as informed or sophisticated as what you would propose.” Perhaps. But Spellings has no enforcement mechanism, and these threats strike me as even weaker than those employed by her boss against the Axis of Evil.
I think we are almost certain to have a heavily Democratic Congress starting in 2009, and thus far there is no indication that the Democratic congressional leaders of relevant committees share the Republican preoccupation with truth in educational consumerism. Ironically, perhaps, the Democrats seem more prone to the traditional market solution — let the consumers decide. Caveat emptor is not my favorite legal notion, and I think it would have been good for the Bush administration to have found ways to let consumers know what they were getting into with subprime mortgages. But I think that in fact consumers of educational services have much better means of informing themselves about what they are likely to get in selecting colleges than borrowers did in the mortgage market.
What has most struck me in discussions of the Spellings Commissions over the past couple of years is the mere fact that we have a federal Department of Education. This country was always opposed to having a ministry of education, just as it continues to be opposed to having a ministry of culture. Many readers will not recall it, but in fact the department is one of the newest, founded only in 1980. There is of course no federal constitutional right to education (it is a constitutional right in each of the states), and the feds are involved only because of the huge amounts of student aid and other funds they provide. The Department has a $68.6-billion budget this year, but essentially no direct control over higher education policy. Its Web page says that its mission is “to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.” But in fact the Department has no effective way to implement those goals. And thank goodness for that.
I am a firm supporter of accountability in higher education. I do not think many higher-education institutions take accountability seriously enough but I doubt that the federal government will impose strict accountability upon us. I do think, however, that we in higher education, especially those of us in the private sector, should take the burden upon ourselves. Complaining about Spellings does not make us accountable.
— Stan Katz
Chronicle of Higher Education
2008-07-28
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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