Here Comes the Unfunded Mandate for Your IT Department!

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > Here Comes the Unfunded Mandate for Your IT Department!

Opinion

Here Comes the Unfunded Mandate for Your IT Department!

2/22/2007

By Terry Calhoun

Six years into the current presidency, it is easy to feel a bit jaded when considering the earnestness or competence of senior administration officials. It was clear early on that one of the primary goals of some of the president's biggest supporters was to reduce the size of the federal government. One advisor is well known for saying that the federal government should be starved until it is weak enough to be drowned in the toilet.

One tactic was, apparently, to place rather incompetent people in positions over bureaucrats who might sincerely want agencies to run well. Remember "Heck of a job, Brownie?" There have been and are lots of "Brownies." Another tactic was to outsource, outsource, outsource, whenever possible, this reducing the ranks of those bureaucrats who might actually care about (or be capable of) providing good government services, enriching companies selected in many instances due to their owners' politics, rather than the companies' capabilities.

What has this got to do with information technology and higher education, you ask?

(It's time, also, to be sure that you know that these are my personal opinions and not necessarily those of my employer!)

In the Department of Education, one of the rare federal agencies with a competent person in charge, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, there is actually a sort of a "reverse thrust" thing going on regarding the size of the federal government. When it comes to education, this administration seems to want the federal government to play a bigger role, albeit not necessarily as a provider of more funds.

Primary and secondary education

You've probably read a lot about the No Child Left Behind Act, which many people in the K-12 education realm believe has created huge, unfunded mandates that are causing school districts to spend all sorts of money and time (and more money) on gathering and reporting data of various sorts. The Bush administration says it's about "quality;" others say it is about--here it comes again--weakening the strength of public schools (and thus the role of government in providing education) and, as a side effect, lining the pockets of entrepreneurs who want to cherry pick the profitable parts of primary and secondary education.

'Nuff said. Not my realm, anyway: My kids have all graduated.

Postsecondary (higher) education

How do you measure the quality of learning and teaching that went into a bachelor's or masters degree--or a Ph.D., for that matter? This administration thinks that you do it by demanding that higher education institutions provide more and more, and more detailed, information to the federal government, so that it can decide. Weird, isn't it, that's almost exactly the opposite of the "smaller government" perspective. (There are those who think that if higher ed just gave up and let the feds implement a single nationwide testing system, they'd fold on this; maybe this is all a build-up to that?)