Entrevista sobre el rol de los community coleges otorgada por la Subsecretaria del Departamento de Educación de los EE.UU., Martha J. Kanter, en París, durante la realización de la Conferencia Mundial de Educación Superior.
Q&A: Martha J. Kanter, New Under Secretary of Education, at a Unesco Conference in Paris
By AISHA LABI
The Chronicle of Highr Education, Paris, July 8, 2009
Two days after being sworn in as under secretary of education, Martha J. Kanter was on her way here to attend the 2009 World Conference on Higher Education, held by Unesco, the United Nations education and science agency. She sat down for a talk with The Chronicle on Tuesday, the second full day of the conference, which concludes today.
Like Jill Biden, who leads the U.S. delegation here, Ms. Kanter is a longtime veteran of community colleges. The unaccustomed international focus the conference has put on the role of those institutions in American higher education is generating keen interest among the delegates to whom she has been speaking, Ms. Kanter said.
Some countries, like Canada and Denmark, place institutions like America’s community colleges within “a culture of segmented, or more distributed, education segments,” and they understand how those elements work together to create an educated society, Ms. Kanter said. In other countries, the concept is brand-new.
“So what we’re really excited about,” she said, “is to be able to share the model that we have, which is decentralized and distributed, with the federal role and the states’ roles really supporting the education of the population, and sharing our best practices. We’re being asked, How did these systems start? Where did this come from?”
Following are some highlights of Ms. Kanter’s conversation with The Chronicle.
Q. What have you learned at the conference about other higher-education systems? What are you taking away?
A. I am impressed with the global commitment by so many countries to really advance higher education in their countries as we are doing, in terms of broadening access, and also focusing on quality assurance and accelerating achievement, and new models for partnerships between public-public and public-private sectors, and the use of technology, like open resources. Every session I’ve been involved in has been flooded with people who are looking at, What role can we play in civic society, in global society? So I think there is a lot of commonality, in terms of the challenges. Each country has its own problems, of course, but I’m struck by how much commonality there is and how much we can learn from other countries.
Q. Do you think genuine policy shaping will come out of the conference?
A. I absolutely think so. Everyone is interested in how to educate students who have had less education, from communities that haven’t had as much human and capital resources as other communities. There’s a real commitment here at Unesco to say, What can we do differently, to get more of the population more highly educated? And there is a philosophical sharing that I’ve been struck by. I think a lot of the last 100 years has been around opportunities for a very small number of people, and as the years have gone by, we’re opening up the doors. And that’s what ‘s tremendously exciting to me.
Q. What can the United States learn from other countries in terms of broadening access? And what are other countries asking you?
A. They want to know about the community colleges. They want to know how you build a system that is linked to the work force and to advanced education and baccalaureate and graduate degrees, and how can you do this in one place.
We were just asked a good question about, Can you create just two- and four-year institutions that don’t have a research requirement? And how do you then stimulate innovation and research? That was a great conversation. Because although we have always, in the community colleges in my career, stimulated and encouraged research, we haven’t required it. We have focused on teaching, but we’ve wanted all of our faculty to be part of the academic community and the professoriate, and to be part of professional associations that are now globalizing.
And they want to know specifics. They want to know how you educate the pipeline, they want to know about adult education, they want to know about lifelong learning—that’s been a theme of the conference.
And what about privatization? They’ve asked, How do you work with proprietary institutions and public institutions, and what do the partnership agreements look like? We have transfer agreements from community colleges to universities, public and private, and we encourage that.
They want to know about quality assurance: How do you know that these are institutions of quality, and what does your program review look like?
Q. What policies will you press for at the national level?
A. We have to stretch with our public and private partners … [to], for example, … look at the learning outcomes we want all students to achieve when they have a bachelor’s degree.
There’s tremendous work that has gone on in [the Association of American Colleges and Universities] about to what extent do students express cultural relevance and cultural competencies. To what extent do students engage civically in their communities, and to what extent are we seeing students behaving more ethically and having better judgment and better critical thinking, and higher levels of scientific and language literacy.
On the other hand, does the wider community—the corporate sector, the academic institutions, four-year, two-year …—buy into these criteria, so we can say, This is what an American degree means, and these are the criteria, and this is how we evaluate that? And to what extent can we increase the quality of everything we are doing? There have been a lot of conversations about, for example, are the literacy levels as high as we expect for our country? We can move up the ladder and hopefully be the most highly educated, most competitive work force in the world. … We want to increase achievement rates for good reasons, but what is the quality of that achievement? Who are these students that we’re graduating? Are we meeting the needs of industry? Are we meeting the needs of the local community? Are people giving back to this country? These are big questions.
Q. What are your priorities?
A. The president’s agenda of increasing achievement is critical for our future. So that’s going to be a huge centerpiece. Opportunity is another big piece, and the federal student-aid system is step one. We really want to simplify a lot of the burdensome requirements on institutions, and I think reducing the federal student-aid application from 20 pages to 10 is a great first step. So you’ll see me focusing a tremendous amount on achievement and opportunity. I want every family to have access to college.