In almost any conversation about accountability for private schools, accountability for public schools is assumed. This is a dangerous myth. By assuming that the edifice that states and the federal government have created over the past several decades actually holds schools accountable, school choice advocates immediately find themselves in an…

The Center for an Urban Future (CUF) released a report last November asserting that, with a six-year graduation rate of 28 percent, City University of New York (CUNY) community colleges "should be doing much better." The report declared graduation rates "lackluster" and criticized community colleges for "not yet delivering…

As part of his quest to help the United States reclaim its status as the world's top producer of college graduates by 2020, on July 14 President Obama introduced the aptly named American Graduation Initiative (AGI). The sweeping proposal would, if approved by Congress, pump an unprecedented $12 billion into the nation's community colleges to help…

Noting that access to higher education has expanded dramatically in the past several decades, Sara Goldrick-Rab and Kia Sorensen focus on how unmarried parents fare once they enter college. Contrary to the expectation that access to college consistently promotes family stability and economic security, the authors argue that deficiencies in current…

According to a February 9, 2006 "New York Times" story headlined, "Panel Explores Standard Tests for Colleges," a new accountability era is descending upon a resistant higher education domain. The story describes the deliberations of a Bush-appointed commission considering imposition of standardized tests on college students. Ten days earlier, the…

As Harold Lasswell and his colleagues observed of the rhetoric of power (Language of Politics, 1965), some words become magic, with "inexplicable powers" attributed to them. "Access" has become such a word in the discourse of higher education. The sloganistic use of the term implies that someone, somewhere, is preventing somebody from doing…