It’s a response to the this post about “educationism.”
Money sounds nicer than assessment (because it is), but I doubt assessment would be a problem except for the money.
It looks to me like accreditation reports are an attempt to inject accountability into a subsidized industry selling a non-commodity product. And “assessment culture” is (as far as I know… which isn’t that far) is an outgrowth of that.
Here’s a hypothesis (please correct me where I’m wrong!): The GI Bill and HEA made accreditors the gatekeepers to federal money. As that pile of rents increased, the ranks of administration grew. Throw in gold old fashioned American Calvinism and you’ve got a bunch of well-meaning bureaucrats looking for something to do. Administrators see QA engineers doing a good job producing commodity goods and don’t quite realize that, despite their reports, education isn’t something that fits into neat little boxes. At this point, we know the problem at the macro-scale, but the micro-scale solution requires administrators to go out on a limb and risk looking like an idiot by breaking with the herd.
I was on vacation the last week in Vermont and left my computer at home. I just now realized that this comment hd been languishing in the approval queue for some time.