Accountability in Higher Education and the Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards, 2008

In recent decades, an accountability movement has swept through higher education with hundreds of colleges and universities subscribing to instruments that assess academic performance, among them the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA), the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), and the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). Meanwhile, social work education has proceeded on a tangent, relying on a subjective framework, the Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) of the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), to determine the efficacy of professional education. In 2011, the inferiority of CSWE’s strategy came into sharp relief when higher education researchers found that undergraduate majors in social work and education scored far below engineering/computer science, communications, health, humanities/social sciences, and science/math on the CLA; only business majors fared worse (Arum & Roksa, 2011). Disturbingly, the researchers ‘‘observe[d] no statistically significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills for at least 45 percent of the students in our study. An astounding proportion of students are progressing through higher education today without measurable gains in general skills as assessed by the CLA’’ (p. 36). Defensively, the President of the National Association of Social Workers editorialized that ‘‘increasing student skills in critical thinking, reading comprehension, and writing [are] essential to career success’’ (Anastas, 2012, p. 3), but failed to note the pernicious influence of EPAS. If social work education is to burnish its academic image, it should institute a validated instrument to assess professional training. Since its promulgation in 2008, EPAS has been referenced primarily as a backdrop for articles about pedagogy (Grady, Powers, Despard, & Naylor, 2011; Heidemann, Fertig, Jansson, & Kim, 2011; Holosko, Skinner, MacCaughelty, & Stahl, 2010; Morrow, 2011; Regehr, Bogo, Donovan, & Anstice, 2012). Prior to its 2008 iteration, EPAS required social work programs to document learning outcomes of students. Adhering to that format, faculty at California State University, Long Beach determined to evaluate student outcomes through a combination of self-efficacy instruments (the Multicultural Counseling Inventory, the SelfAppraisal Inventory, the Knowledge Inventory, and the Comprehensive Skills Evaluation), complemented by student focus groups, assessments by field instructors, and an alumni survey. This effort to alter educational programming vis-a-vis student performance was interrupted with the introduction of the 2008 EPAS. ‘‘The consensus of the Assessment Team members now is that it is as if the team is back at the starting point as we begin to tackle the new standards,’’ noted the Long Beach academics with regret (Meyer-Adams, Potts, Koob, Dorsey, & Rosales, 2011, p. 504). The 2008 EPAS modified accreditation standards by replacing learning outcomes with student competencies, the achievement of which was to be determined by educational programs as they saw fit. The most recent version of EPAS, thus, imposed two quite different requirements on social work programs: ‘‘measurable educational outcomes, which [have] traditionally been interpreted through a positivist lens’’ and ‘‘a desire to respond to changing practice and educational approaches to diversity and difference, rooted in a postmodern perspective’’ (Jani, Pierce, Ortiz, &Sowbel, 2011, p. 297). It is noteworthy that postmodernists continue to misconstrue empiricism, applying dated criteria from the humanities that were in vogue during the 1970s and 1980s, a position refuted by Thyer (2008). Karl Popper contended that empirical falsification is logically superior to positivist verification, a position widely adopted by the scientific community (Calhoun, 2002, p. 372). Thus, postmodernists, in disputing positivism, erect the equivalent to a conceptual straw man. Regardless, postmodernism became formalized in social work accreditation, a repudiation of the profession’s adherence to the logic of science as the optimal method for determining efficacy. Using diversity as a pretext, postmodernism effectively sabotaged the possibility of empirical analysis of social work education: