The ongoing battle over the standards for accreditation of
law schools by the American Bar Association Section on Legal Education and
Admissions to the Bar burst into general public view just over a week ago with a Chronicle
of Higher Education story. The story
reported on the budding debate concerning proposals that would require law
schools to identify a set of comprehensive learning objectives and then assess
whether their students actually achieved an appropriate level of proficiency in
those identified objectives.
Some background about the context of the debate might be
useful. Legal education, like all of American higher education, is a
regulated industry through the practice of accreditation. The Section on Legal Education is approved by
the U.S. Department of Education as the accrediting body for American law
schools. The Department requires
federally approved accrediting bodies to examine their standards for
accreditation regularly and comprehensively. The Section’s preliminary
proposals for stated learning goals and assessment methods come as part of that
comprehensive
review process. The proposals
respond to longstanding criticisms that the current standards are too oriented
toward inputs rather than outputs. Thus,
current rules look more at faculty size and library resources and less at the
institution’s success in teaching
lawyering skills.
The drive for measurable outcomes is not unique to legal
education. It is part of a major trend generally in higher education
accreditation practice to make the rules more output rather than input
oriented. For example, the regional accreditors for colleges and universities
now have made assessment of learning outcomes a major component of their standards. Specialized accreditors, such as those for medicine, pharmacy and nursing also
require institutions to establish focused learning goals and assessment
rubrics.
So why are law schools resisting efforts to refocus accreditation
on learning outcomes? The objections to
the Section’s proposed standards come in a variety of forms. Opponents
argue that requiring formal assessment unduly increases the costs of law school
programs, interferes with institutional autonomy, and stifles innovation.
None of these objections are trivial and their ultimate force depends greatly
on the precise details of the standards the Section ultimately adopts.
The more profound issues with the proposals have not yet been made
explicit. They relate to internal law school politics and battles for the
soul of legal education. No law school would want to commit publicly to
having its students learn only a narrow range of skills. Both students
and employers would insist on a broadly based learning agenda. By identifying such an agenda, a law school
would necessarily be obligated to devote the resources to support such
learning. Thus, I believe a significant source of the angst about the
proposals is the well founded belief that, because the total resources
available to a law school are not likely to grow, the new standards would lead
to a major reallocation of institutional resources from faculty scholarship to skills
teaching. My assumption is supported by the interest group politics
exhibited to date. The major supporters of the proposal are the organized
groups representing clinicians and legal writing faculty. So stay tuned. What looks like a modest
debate about accreditation may lead to a deep discussion about our future.
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