Alliance for Learning: 'Higher Education's Help Badly Needed'

By P. Michael Timpane

In the course of education reform during the past dozen years, higher education has been, for the most part, a minor player and a missing voice. To be sure, the school-reform movement has engaged the energies and absorbed the commentaries of numerous academic commentators. It has, nevertheless, proceeded without clear guidance or persistent intellectual or political support from the leadership of higher education--at the institutional, system, or national level.

In fact, to the contrary, there have often been acute tensions between the two education sectors, particularly in the competition for scarce resources.

There have been occasional efforts by individual--or small groups of--college presidents to provide guidance and support; but they have been minor, largely inconsequential, episodes in the progress of precollegiate school reform. There certainly has been nothing resembling the business community's continual and concerted response to the...