> A little reality check from the front lines. All of the regional college
> and university accrediting bodies in the U. S. require assessment activities
> to be faculty driven.
Who all speak the same gobbledy-gook. I've seen it first-hand at two institutions, and the conversations are identical. This is not because there is some grand consensus about what constitutes learning and how it is best done, or teaching and how it is best done. It's because the language comes ready to-hand [my brain thinks heidegger, all of a sudden . . .], because this is all the stuff we're supposed to be talking about, and we know it. Talk about Foucauldian . . .
Beyond that, I don't have much to add to what others have said already, except that we can't forget the way that standardization is about rendering education efficient. But mostly it's not. And it's far from clear to me why this inefficiency should be understood as a flaw or weakness (except, of course, that inefficiency costs money). Alan's post actually makes this point very well.
I respect your experience, Miles, and I have not been teaching full-time as long as you have (although I have been formally teaching in one way or another for almost twenty years), but I really find it hard to imagine the standardized test that gets at anything meaningful in terms of either learning or teaching (and that's another way of talking that gets under my skin). That's not because I think in principle you can't tell whether someone has learned something. It's because it's a bad way of getting at learning. If we would give up on the chimera of efficiency in education and in assessing learning, we might have a shot at figuring something meaningful out. And that's even leaving aside the command and control issues noted by Doug, Carrol, Michael . . .