House Hearing on Program Length and Accreditation
Tomorrow at 10 a.m. the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and Labor is holding a hearing on program length and accreditation. This deals with the scathing and highly redacted memo (PDF) that the U.S. Department of Education’s Inspector General sent to the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) last December. The Inspector General recently followed that memo up with a longer report in late May (PDF) that recommend considering terminating HLC’s job as an accreditor.
For those who are interested in more of the context about this hearing, here is what I wrote about the alert memo and its findings after talking to the related parties back in April:
For those who are interested in more of the context about this hearing, here is what I wrote about the alert memo and its findings after talking to the related parties back in April:
We now know that the accreditor’s concerns about AIU stemmed from the school’s offering of 9 credits for individual undergraduate and graduate courses, mostly in the business department—classes that the alert memo refers as being “inflated in credit.” According to Jeff Leshay, a spokesperson for Career Education Corporation, AIU’s parent company, these were either accelerated courses that could be completed by students in five weeks or students could pass two of them simultaneously over the course of 10 weeks. A total of 186 undergraduate courses featured
QUICK Hits
Quick Hits is a short compilation of question-raising news stories, blog posts, and video clips that Education Sector team members are reading and viewing each day.
- Connecting the dots? Glue? Duncan’s outgoing COS reflects on her role. (Education Week)
- Want a cheap, low-tech way to get a whiteboard table (which, we are told, has become the very latest in brainstorming apps)? (Lifehacker)
- What sticks and carrots are some school districts using to induce experienced teachers to retire early?(MLive.com)
- How much will the politics behind the teacher jobs bill heat up before an outcome is reached? (Politico)
- How well are college presidents preparing for the future? (The Washington Post’s On Leadership)