No God Left Behind

Over at Inside Higher Ed, William Durden resorts to satire in response to the Spellings commission report:

In the nation’s current zeal to account for all transfer of teaching and insight through quantitative, standardized testing, perhaps we should advance quantitative measurement into other areas of human meaning and definition. Why leave work undone?

I suggest, for example, that a federal commission propose an accountability initiative for those of faith (not such a wild notion as an increasing number of politicians are calling the traditional separation of church and state unhealthy for the nation). This effort should be titled No God Left Behind. The federal government would demand that places of worship, in order to be deemed successful, efficient and worthy of federal, state and local tax-support exemption, provide quantitative evidence of the effectiveness of their “teaching.” (Places of worship are not unlike colleges and universities in that they are increasing their fund-raising expectations — their form of “price” — because of increasing costs.) The faithful, in turn, would be required to provide quantitative evidence of the concrete influence of their respective God upon behaviors within a few years of exposure — say four years.

The bulk of the article is actually devoted to arguing that quantitative assessments miss much of the point of real education, something I’ve said often enough that I don’t really feel like repeating it. I thought some people hereabouts would enjoy this bit, though.