NCLB Goes to College By Way of "Outcome Based Funding"
By Anthony Cody.
Wisconsin governor Scott Walker made headlines recently when he tried to change the mission of the state university system there, removing the “search for truth.” In its place, the university’s mission was changed to “meet the state’s workforce needs.” This blatant attack on the higher mission of our universities was turned back. But Scott Walker’s vision may well be achieved in less dramatic fashion through something called “Outcome Based Funding,” now being promoted by the Gates Foundation and the Obama administration.
The Gates Foundation has sponsored a new report that concludes that higher education will improve with a heavy focus on outcomes, and that government funding should be tied to these outcomes, similar to No Child Left Behind. And the colleges that will be hardest hit, just as with NCLB, will be those attended by African Americans and those in poverty.
The report titled “Driving Better Outcomes,” available here, was written by HCM Strategists. I want to describe the substance of the report, but first it is worth noting the way a Gates Foundation insider described their process in supporting reports of this sort. In an interview with researchers Sarah Reckhow and Megan Tomkins-Stange, a Gates informant, said this:
It’s within [a] sort of fairly narrow orbit that you manufacture the [research] reports. You hire somebody to write a report. There’s going to be a commission, there’s going to be a lot of research, there’s going to be a lot of vetting and so forth and so on, but you pretty much know what the report is going to say before you go through the exercise.
Working from what we know about the Gates Foundation framework, we can guess the imperatives at work. Lower costs, increase top down management through standardization and tests, and serve corporate employers. Here are the specific grants HCM Strategists has received:
In 2012 HCM Strategists got a grant for $800,460, “to lead an effort designed to assess the empirical and political feasibility of ways federal student aid investments could incent higher completion and attainment of high-value credentials.” In 2013, they got an additional $461,480 in order to “to identify high leverage strategies for reducing cost to students in higher education institutions”.
Now on to the content of the report.
The report opens with this paragraph, as an overview and background:
Tying funding to successful outcomes is a concept with inherent appeal, particularly so when tight budgets demand heightened efficiency and impact for each dollar. Today’s fiscal climate and economic need for expanded postsecondary access and completion have fueled a resurgence of interest in and state action regarding performance funding policies, which tie a portion of state appropriations to metrics that gauge institutional performance on various indicators.
This sort of boilerplate statement has become the background to assumptions driving educational policy. The essence of this statement is “we have to provide more value to employers at a lower cost.” Before we go NCLB Goes to College By Way of "Outcome Based Funding" - Living in Dialogue:
