Our Trojan Horse

Outcomes Assessment and the Resurrection of Competency-Based Education

CHRIS W. GALLAGHER

September 2012, electronic portfolio research coalition meeting. A high -ranking official of a regional accrediting agency joins the group, led and largely populated by compositionists, to discuss how eportfolios might be used for accreditation purposes.

It's going well. Our guest talks about reflective, integrative learning and performance-based, authentic assessment. She talks about surveys in which employers favor eportfolios over standardized tests. She talks about "throwing away the bell curve" and providing all students opportunities to learn and to demonstrate their learning. In short, she speaks our language.

We happily nod along as she homes in on how eportfolios provide rich evidence of the kind of learning we all value. We are pleased to learn that accrediting agencies and the federal government are looking into eportfolios. Yes, we are told, eportfolios fit nicely into the Obama administration's renewed emphasis on quality assurance — on accountability. They will help with standard-setting and comparability. With rigorous documentation of bottom-line results. Transparency. Benchmarking. Outcomes.

Her seamless shift in language now has us shifting in our seats. When she informs us that the US Department of Education "is interested in breaking up the little monopoly campuses have right now," we realize what she's done: drawn us into another discursive orbit, aligning us with the Spellings Commission report, which had used the same monopoly metaphor six years earlier. Somehow we have moved, in the space of a few moments, from champions of learning for all students to perpetrators of an insidious plot to maintain market dominance by edging out suppliers of alternative goods or services. Our guest chides us for being selfish and out of touch, unaware that as the twenty-first century progresses, "less and less learning will happen in a traditional classroom." People learn all the time in all kinds of contexts, she reminds us: on the job, online, even while watching television. We must recognize that the future of faculty work is formulating and validating competencies, running diagnostics, evaluating student work, and coaching — in short, "more assessment, less teaching."

We are less happy now. We express a range of objections and worries — about the dismissal of classroom experiences, the stubborn digital divide, the fact that we got into this profession to teach, not merely to evaluate — each of which our guest deftly deflects with the kind of patient, patronizing smile usually reserved for the senile or otherwise infirm.

We coalition members have been drawn together by our shared commitment to exploring the teaching and learning affordances of eportfolios. We see eportfolios as technologies that allow us to deepen students' learning experiences. We also see them as social tools, allowing students to compose digital spaces in which they interact with a range of interlocutors and audiences. But it is now dawning on us that eportfolios are being conscripted into an outcomes-based agenda in which the learning experiences students have with us and with each other are quite beside the point: the game is for individuals to amass credentials based on learning that happens, as the saying now goes, "anytime, anywhere, in any way."

We have been bamboozled.

* * *

I have come to see the moment described above as emblematic of a larger reality in which composition finds itself in the age of austerity. While we continue to regard writing as a complex practice through which people make sense of and construct the personal and social worlds they inhabit, we are increasingly conscripted into a neoliberal agenda whose endgame, I have come to believe, is competency-based education (CBE). CBE is a highly individualized educational approach in which students amass credentials through demonstrated competencies, usually in a self -paced manner, rather than through "seat time" (i.e., courses and curricula). As I will show in this chapter, CBE has disastrous implications for composition. In this model, writing is understood as a discrete, commodified, vocational skill; writing students are understood as individual workers-in-training who need to "pick up" this skill for purely instrumental purposes; writing teachers are understood as success coaches to, or evaluators of, those individuals; and writing classrooms are quaint relics of a bygone era when we naively thought the best way to learn to write was to study and practice it with other writers under the guidance of a teacher who facilitated a set of coordinated learning activities. But before I describe CBE in more detail, and suggest how compositionists might respond to it, I examine compositionists' complicity in clearing the conceptual ground for CBE through our participation in outcomes assessment.

Outcomes Assessment: Our Trojan Horse

In a College English article called "The Trouble with Outcomes," I argued that outcomes assessment operates within institutional and ideological logics — technical rationality, instrumentalism — that serve the interests of the managed university (Gallagher 2012). I suggested that outcomes assessment tends to "limit and compromise the educational experiences of teachers and students" through its insistence on the primacy of (predetermined) "outputs" (43). Here I want to take that argument a step further to suggest that our participation in this practice — our tacit acknowledgment that results are all that really matter in education — has opened the door to CBE, which, in its worst forms, disregards the educational experiences of teachers and students altogether. Outcomes assessment has functioned as our Trojan horse: through our acceptance of it, we've unknowingly invited CBE.

CBE is an "outcomes-based approach to education where the emphasis is on what comes out of postsecondary education — what graduates know and can do — rather than what goes into the curriculum" (Soares 2012). This definition comes from the putatively "progressive" Center for American Progress, and it bears a striking resemblance to the way compositionist Michael Carter (2003) frames outcomes assessment for our field:

We're used to thinking about education primarily in terms of inputs: we designate a particular set of courses for students to take and when the course is completed we declare them educated and send them on their way. We assume that the inputs we provide for students will lead to certain outcomes, the knowledge, skills, and other attributes we believe graduates should possess. However, an outcomes-based approach to education does not rely on this assumption. By that method, faculty identify the educational outcomes for a program and then evaluate the program according to its effectiveness in enabling students to achieve those outcomes. (4–5)

This sounds like common sense, and I am aware from responses to my College English article that many compositionists believe outcomes are "merely" neutral tools. But again, my argument was that outcomes assessment is embedded in instrumentalist and managerial logics that produce certain tendencies, including — and here I drew on language from John Dewey — fixity and rigidity in the formulation of ends; diversion of attention away from the existing conditions for teaching and learning; narrow fixation on singular results rather than openness to emergent consequences; and imposition on students and teachers (Gallagher 2012, 45–46). Now I see that in aligning ourselves with an institutional practice and logic in which "outputs" are all that matter, we opened the door to those who argue that where and how and under what circumstances one learns are irrelevant. As we turned to outcomes assessment, we failed to insist that we were offering particular kinds of experiences that could not be attained elsewhere. We might have thought we were being good citizens. We might have thought outcomes were just a neutral tool. We might have thought we could have it all. If so, we were wrong.

Consider how outcomes assessment functions even in highly regarded programs run by well-known compositionists. In his contribution to the collection Writing Assessment in the 21st Century, Irv Peckham (2012) describes how his writing program at Louisiana State University used an online, end-of-semester, outcomes-based test to exempt some students from a second semester of composition. The test asked students to read 8–10 articles on an issue and write an essay "to explain what the issue was about" (174). Teachers were encouraged to use the test scores as a guide to grading (175). That the course grades of students who participated in writing classes were determined by a test on which they were asked to "explain" an "issue" shows clearly that a narrow set of outcomes are what really matter here.

Peckham also points out that the outcomes assessment saves money: "approximately $46,000 a year by exempting students from required writing classes; this was equivalent to the cost of 1.3 teachers at an average annual salary of $36,000" (176). He reproduces a letter he sent to his dean explaining how much money he saved. His letter doesn't explain that the outcomes assessment also had resulted in redefining the purpose of the first-year writing course as helping students pass a test and a consequent narrowing of the curriculum (176); a competitive environment in which instructors "gloat" about their students' performance relative to those of other instructors; less writing instruction for students; and less work for already poorly paid teachers. Instead of arguing that first-year writing is a valuable experience for all students and therefore worth paying for, Peckham accedes to a managerial logic in which his job is to save money by "identifying students who have shown that they clearly do not need another writing course to succeed in their other undergraduate courses" (177). Outcomes assessment functions to diminish the value and purpose of writing program, while burnishing its image in the eyes of efficiency-minded administrators.

The Endgame: Competency-Based Education

Follow outcomes assessment to its logical conclusion and you will find competency-based education (CBE). Several versions of CBE are emerging. Some, like those at Alverno and DePaul, retain courses and curricula but replace grades with competencies that students must demonstrate through performance assessments; others eschew these "outmoded" structures and rely only on competencies. Some programs offer students online modules through which they must work and others rely on "prior learning assessment," in which students are given college credit for life and work experience. In this chapter, I have in mind what proponents of CBE generally mean when they talk about this "game -changer": so-called "self-paced," mostly or fully online programs, typically offered on an "all you can learn" subscription model and organized not around courses or credits but around a set of competencies that students earn.

A number of CBE models are emerging, from programs and institutions that replace course grades with competencies but retain the basic course-and-curriculum structure to full-on competency programs with no curricula or courses. In any case, CBE is enjoying enormous momentum as a result of an increasingly supportive policy context; the forced competitiveness of cash-strapped institutions of higher education in the age of austerity; the emergence of a workable business model that often features collaboration with corporate partners and the capturing of customer bases previously thought out of range (working adults, those without sufficient funds for traditional education); the ever-growing availability of free online educational resources; and, not least, the deep pockets of predatory philanthropists.

The Obama Administration has made CBE a key strategy in the president's higher education plan, dubbed "A Better Bargain for the Middle Class." The plan extends the Race to the Top competition to higher education, with "special focus on promoting paying for value as opposed to enrollment of just seat time." It emphasizes hastening time-to -degree, encouraging states to "provide accelerated learning opportunities." To this end, the plan touts innovative use of new technologies such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs); credit for "prior learning"; and competency-based programs (White House Office of the Press Secretary 2012).

Early in 2013, the US Department of Education issued a letter to colleges and universities informing them that they may apply for federal aid for students enrolled in competency-based programs rather than programs based on credit hours. Although the letter was offered as a "clarification," it is widely viewed as auguring a radical shift away from traditional academic metrics — credit hours, seat time — and toward "direct assessment" (in fact, the letter seeks to address the "direct assessment" provision of the Higher Education Act; see Field 2013). A month after the release of the letter, the USDoE approved Southern New Hampshire University, a private institution, to receive federal funding for students enrolled in its fully online, self-paced College for America program.

Designed in collaboration with corporate partners, the College for America offers associates and bachelors programs and is billed as a low -cost alternative to traditional credit-hour-based programs ($2500/year for "all you can learn"). There is no curriculum and there are no traditional (i.e., classroom) teachers. The program assesses 120 competencies based on Lumina's Degree Qualifications Profile and the US Department of Labor's competency pyramids. Students access free, online resources to help them perform a task, which they submit for evaluation against the competencies after accessing free online resources. They are also assigned "coaches" and required to identify an "accountability partner." The tasks are evaluated by part-time adjuncts (Parry 2013). The assessments, some of which are automated, are overseen by an assessment expert from the Educational Testing Service, now College for America's chief academic officer (Fain 2013).

College for America is partially funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of two leading private foundations pushing CBE (the other is the Lumina Foundation, though other foundations, like Nellie Mae, also fund CBE initiatives). Between 2008 and July 2013, Gates has spent $472 million on higher education and Lumina has spent a little more than half that amount (Parry, Field, and Supiano 2013). Gates and Lumina promote "college completion" (read: anti-remediation), CBE, "value -added measures" for teacher evaluation, and workplace readiness. In other words, quick, efficient, low-cost education defined by the needs of business.

As public dollars have been drastically reduced, these private players have gained enormous influence, including impacting where the small number of public dollars go. States have been forced by austerity to buy into Race to the Top; in higher education, Gates has paid millions for the successful lobbying of the federal government to provide financial aid to CBE programs. The foundation also has established a range of media partnerships, donating to various outlets and sponsoring ventures such as Waiting for Superman. And Gates grants are so valuable in this age of austerity that many in higher education are loath to criticize Gates publicly. (On the enormous impact of Gates on education policy K–16, see Barkan 2011; Mangan 2013; Parry, Field, and Supiano 2013.)

Many of the claims the federal government now makes about CBE and the value of "personalized learning" (see http://www.ed.gov/oii-news /competency-based-learning-or-personalized-learning) can be found in the Gates- and Lumina-funded New America Foundation/Education Sector report Cracking the Credit Hour. This 2012 report, which showcases competency-based programs at Western Governors University and Southern New Hampshire University, encourages the US Department of Education to consider financial aid plans that cover prior learning assessment as well as learning "outside of traditional faculty and institutional boundaries" (Laitinen 2012, 19).

Despite market-driven reformers' purported commitment to data and bottom-line results, CBE is enjoying significant momentum without any evidence that it results in improved learning for students. This is doubly ironic, as CBE is not new. We could go as far back here as the "acceleration movement" of the late nineteenth century, when, according to Collins (1979), "utility-minded administrators attacked the 4-year curriculum as a useless tradition inherited from the medieval universities, and they introduced reforms to allow students to move through college at their own pace, acquiring training on an individual basis" (125; see also Rudolph 1962). But a more recent version of CBE emerged — with a vengeance — in the 1970s.