Achieving Accountability in Higher Education: Balancing Public, Academic and Market Demands (review)

In his preface to Achieving Accountability in Higher Education, Joseph C. Burke provides three distinctive goals for the volume: (a) an examination of the "major approaches to accountability . . . and the jurisdictions and governance that affect their implementation," (b) a study of "potential linkages" among these approaches, and (c) a proposal for the key aspects of "a comprehensive accountability system" (p. x). The chapters that follow, almost all written by different experts and sufficiently self-contained as to be independent articles, fulfill the first goal superbly. Burke's success in achieving the latter two goals is less complete.

Burke has relied on more than a dozen "associates" to assure that this book is the best comprehensive summary of accountability in higher education up to 2004. He chose those associates wisely. Who better than Peter Ewell to write about assessment, or George Kuh to reflect on student and alumni surveys, or Robert Zemsky to explore the usefulness of reputational ratings? Burke's summary includes the major drivers for accountability, the key players in implementing strategies for accountability, and most, if not all, of the most prominent tools now in use to help colleges and universities respond to demands for accountability. Each chapter places its particular area of interest (such as accreditation, assessment, audit, testing, performance funding, state grading, or reputational rating) in a historical context and provides a strong analysis of its current or potential impact on accountability.

Some of the chapters are stronger and better written than others, but without each of them the book would have suffered. Thanks to the breadth and depth of its chapters, and the excellent set of citations at the end of the book, Achieving Accountability in Higher Education will serve as a key resource for all future students of accountability in higher education in the United States.

The "potential linkages" that Burke proposes rest in part with the conceptual and visual construct he provides in the introduction. "The Accountability Triangle," he argues, captures the "major challenge of accountability": "balancing the response of higher education to state priorities, academic concerns, and market forces" (p. x). The Accountability Triangle is equilateral in shape, with the point of each angle marked by one of the three competing priorities. A strong and effective accountability program, Burke suggests, would be located somewhere in the middle of the triangle, about equal distance from each point.

Evidently each of his associates to a greater or lesser degree accepts this interpretation of the complex nature of accountability in U.S. higher education. Each chapter makes reference to it, and the discussions allow Burke to locate a specific existing program somewhere within the triangle. Visually, then, if not explicitly, the reader can see that no existing program comes close to hitting the center, although several authors suggest strongly that the program they advocate might get there, given time, commitment, and some fine-tuning.

Multiple cross-references within the chapters themselves are another way that the book identifies "potential linkages." They highlight connections useful to readers who would like to know whether any of the discrete existing components of accountability really share common ground. And clearly they do, at least among programs that cluster toward one or another point of the Accountability Triangle.

When Burke finally plots out the visual image resulting from the chapters, we find programs in the Academic Triangle much more bunched around Academic Concerns or State Priorities (p. 307). If Market Forces is an equal priority in defining higher education accountability, not much of what we do today gets very close to measuring it. (It is worth noting that the chapters related to market forces ignore the forces that seem to be fueling the for-profit sector in higher education.) And despite all this cross-referencing, one strives in vain to find many potential linkages that get us toward the middle of that triangle. Only in his concluding chapter does Burke quickly propose some...