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I just spent four months immersed in the world of performance metrics as part of a panel of six members of the RP's Center for Student Success. We were charged with the task of reviewing performance metrics for the AB 1417 performance accountability framework project. This project required the State Chancellor's Office to establish a comprehensive performance accountability framework with a set of metrics for the California community colleges by March 2005. The State Chancellor's Office asked the RP's Center to work with them on it; we had 75 days to assemble our proposed framework and have it reviewed by both an external panel of experts as an internal oversight panel. We completed five drafts of the framework in 2 1/2 months. This month the Board of Governors will review and approve the performance framework and transmit it to the Legislature and Governor.
There are 13 performance metrics in the proposed framework, all of them well-known to the colleges; I think they will provide a reasonable picture of district-level performance for state policy makers and district level leadership. Hopefully, this performance framework will resolve the issue of accountability for the State, and close this long chapter of our history that began with the Partnership for Excellence reporting metrics in the 1990s.
Missing from the 1417 performance framework are performance measures focusing on student engagement and experience within the college environment. There are metrics for course success, program completion, transfer, and degree and certificate completion, all measures that give the colleges some indication of student achievement, but provide little information about the students' relationship to academic work, to faculty and to other students.
Decades of research on post-secondary education consistently confirm that three of the critical elements in a student's undergraduate experience are the levels of engagement with other students, with faculty and with the work itself. We need metrics that can tell us at least something about those engagements because unlike background variables (such as prior knowledge before attending college; or socio-economic status), our institutions can do something to change the level and quality of engagement among students, faculty and the learning experience itself.
I think it is time for the California community colleges to consider a new set of metrics that provides our colleges and our faculties with more refined information about our students' experiences, not just degrees, certificates, course success and transfer, but measures of how well our students are connected to our learning environments and how they are using those environments to achieve new understandings of subject matter and learning strategies. The colleges should be able to compare those metrics across institutional boundaries to promote both system-wide dialogues as well as conversations within the colleges themselves. And since the State already has its metrics, these new metrics should not be used for accountability purposes, but solely for the benefit of improving our teaching and learning environments within the colleges.
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