WU

Institutionality

Ross Woods

An applicant for accreditation needs to be able to show that it is a responsible school and that it will not soon cease operations. Criteria for institutionality have become fairly standardized; for example, accreditors require schools to have a board of governors, to maintain a permanent address, to be financially solvent and responsible, and to legally registered with the government. This chapter sets out to identify "schoolness" in general and look especially at it role in nontraditional education using TEE as a particular example.

Characteristics of Schools

Even defining the concept of "school" in formal education is a little arbitrary; as mentioned above, the distinction between accreditor and school is a little vague.

Houle mentions five formal procedures which can identify a school: enforcing admissions requirements, providing instruction, assessing student performance, awarding formal credentials, and giving professional licensing.

Nevertheless, all of these can be delegated to other institutions outside the school. Other organizations can provide student selection services, and some open access schools have successfully done away with them altogether. Teaching is not always necessary; assessment schools evaluate learning obtained elsewhere. In other cases, teaching and assessment are organizationally separate; the university can hold examinations and delegate teaching to its colleges.

Evaluation can be contracted out to specialist organizations in educational testing. The accreditor might award the degree. Many professional organizations have their own registration procedures, so that a degree alone is inadequate as a professional license. (Houle, 1973:19-44)

It is better to say what a school is in relation to accreditation. That is, a school may delegate some of its procedures, but it must ultimately take responsibility for them. For accreditation purposes, it is the legally constituted body which authorizes the issue of diplomas as formal qualifications. It has a board of governors which takes responsibility for the school's activities through given lines of authority and accountability. Being a school implies a measure of permanence, with continuing responsibilities to its graduates.

Schools intend that students develop some kind of knowledge base commensurate with a formal qualification. It is often academic in some way, except in some strictly vocational schools. In any case, it has standards of acceptable performance and a means by which it can be accountable for the evaluation of its students.

Schools and Non-schools

Perhaps the first differentiation to make is whether or not a program is a school, that is, whether it is formal or non-formal education. If a program is not a school, then it cannot become accredited, and for accreditation purposes, it almost ends there. Schools are very different from non-formal training programs. One aims for some type of knowledge base commensurate with a formal qualification while the other simply aims for the ability to do the job. Students in formal study need to see this difference themselves; a student who does not see his study as contributing to a degree need not feel irresponsible if he drops out.

This differentiation does not help distinguish between extension and campus education. It is wrong to assume that extension education can only focus on non-formal training while campus programs focus on schooling, for extension can be formal schooling and campuses can hold training programs. In fact, an extension school has far more in common with a campus school than with a non-formal extension training program, because schools share certain common characteristics.

The differentiation is not absolute. A few kinds of non-school training programs do not wish to be seen as schools, but they are so accountable that they are schools in all but name. As sources of transfer credit, no further evaluation of their students or credit is necessary (cf. USNY, 1986; Valley, 1972:117). Even without accreditation or "schoolness", their graduates can translate their learning into transferable credit through formal assessment.

Similarly, some institutions would not readily agree to being classified as schools. For example, some government departments and professional societies act as examining boards, and some government departments supervise separate teaching institutions and issue degrees for them. A major accreditor, the CNAA in Britain, awards degrees, a function normally reserved for schools.

Some programs cannot become legally incorporated for local reasons, but they intend to be schools and have all other characteristics of schools. Some become autonomous departments within sponsoring institutions, such as a denominations; others give diplomas that are academically equivalent to degrees. The ATA accreditation guide allows for such situations and implies that it could give accreditation (1987:28).

Choosing between Formal and Non-formal Education

Many nontraditional programs would be better off being training programs and not claiming to be schools. For example, Patterson's TEE program in Honduras is not in any sense a school and is clearly not accreditable. Without being academic in any way, it focusses entirely on ongoing practical training and seems to have very effectively produced competent people. (Patterson, 1980)

An excellent training program is less glamorous and perhaps less instant, but it is a better choice in some circumstances. It might be less expensive, and it could avoid many problems, especially by reducing administrative load and avoiding the formation of a new legal entity. By having no academic aims and issuing no degrees, it need not be concerned with academic standards, internal academic accountability, or qualifications of teaching staff. The program is successful if its constituency is satisfied with what students are learning. Even if it closes down, it is not as bad as a school which closes down, because it has promised less and has fewer responsibilities to its graduates and its constituency.

Students might be unable to commit themselves to a regular, long-term schedule. There might be no intention of establishing a permanent institution, or no need of formal recognition. In some cases, teaching might be an update on previous learning rather than an addition to it. Non-formal and continuing education now have a separate body of literature.

An implication of the difference between schools and non-schools is that very weak applicants to a school need to be excluded from for-credit study, no matter how sincerely they desire to learn. If they cannot meet the learning goals of their program, then they might come and listen, but they cannot continue as students. In contrast, they might be far better suited to some kinds of training programs.

The TEE movement has shown signs that it might divide into a schooling camp and a non-schooling camp. This would be of great detriment to the movement because each kind of education has a valuable but separate role, and "non-schooling" might really be "anti-schooling."

Frame (1984) has suggested dumping the "academic model" with its emphasis on degrees, accreditation, etc. in favor of a learning community, the members of which minister to each other and develop their ministry in the outside world (e.g. pp. 379f). At least as Ferris presents Frame's view, several issues are more appropriately discussed under later headings. One is the issue of the type of school and another is the model of curriculum. Frame seems to prefer a non-school, but his intentions could just as easily be manifested in a school that functioned as a community of scholars and used humanistic and means-ends curriculum models.

For much the same reasons, Ward and McKinney hold that evaluation, grades, credits, and degrees are incompatible with the task of theological education. McKinney even goes so far as to say that the very nature of TEE is incompatible with schooling (p. 38), because she sees TEE as contextual, experimental, developmental, and church-based, while also emphasizing servant leadership. (McKinney, n.d.:29f)

At the risk of overgeneralization, Ward and McKinney are probably correct in implying that most schools adhere the practices of evaluation, grades, credits and degrees. By predefining TEE according to particular curriculum models, however, they have not argued against schooling; they have simply over-identified schooling with particular models of curriculum. First of all, they need not have identified evaluation with schooling; students in non-formal programs also need evaluation. Besides, the question of schooling begs the question of the task of theological education; if it is no more than training, then non-formal programs are better than schools. On the other hand, a school is more appropriate for students who need formal recognition and a structured knowledge base.

Apparently more to the point is that these practices easily tend to imply attitudes such as these:

People with degrees are more capable than those without them.

Students should compete and some of them should be losers.

People with low grades are somehow inferior to people with high grades.

Students with many credits know more than those with few credits.

Students cease studying when they graduate.

Competence is more important than the "trappings" of education.

Excepting degrees, schools can avoid these attitudes if they wish; they are not necessarily part of formal education. In fact, they tend to reflect only the instructional institution model of school discussed below.

A degree signifies that its holder has learnt something, that he has been evaluated and certified as having met program requirements. This need not imply that non-students have not learned the same things, even though schools earnestly intend that people will learn more by taking a degree program than by staying away. In the same way, schools hope that more credits mean more knowledge. Perhaps more of a problem is that degree-holders sometimes feel that they are an elite class, and Ward's implied criticism is echoed in the "servant leadership" literature.

On the point of competition, formal education can avoid competition by using individualized education, assessment schools, and pass-fail evaluation (including criterion referencing). As for differing grades, the fault, if there is one, lays in the paramessage which demeans weaker students. Then again, nobody doubts that students vary greatly in ability, maturity, and motivation, and even non-formal education has weaker students.

That study stops when a person graduates is too often true. The issue is more complex than it appears because older people learn quite differently (the present term is "androgenous learning"), and long-term, part-time study sometimes approximates lifelong learning. Besides, an increasing number of schools discourage students from ceasing study on graduation; many now provide continuing education or professional graduate degrees. Perhaps almost all prefer to think that students develop learning skills which will be useful after graduation; part of the meaning of many degrees is that graduates are equipped to do lifelong study at that academic level.

Types of schools

Schools come in different types, which influence how they are run, what sort of degrees they will give, and the role of staff and students. Actually these are models; in reality, they tend to overlap and seldom occur in pure form. The list of possibilities is not limited to those below:

Instructional institutions. Most schools conceive of education as a commodity or a service for sale, as is most easily seen in their advertising to recruit new students. Students are paying consumers; they apply to the school, pay the required fees, attend classes where somebody teaches them, sit the examinations, and get a diploma when they finish. The students presumably are not experts and the teachers presumably are, so the two groupings are distinct. The staff are a well-defined class of people who get paid for their services and have rights to determine what students must do to graduate. These schools have a bureaucratic administration, and tend to be managerialist. If the staff closely control and tightly structure the learning experience, higher education can become no more than more high school. For the vast majority of students, however, it is also the most useful concept of a school simply because they need someone to teach them.

Even among many nontraditional educators, this is the most common concept of a school; in fact, some people have trouble conceiving of a school in any other way. Accreditors seem to tend to presume that their accreditees could only be instructional institutions.

Scholarly communities. Some schools function mainly as fellowships of scholars, whose main task is to engage in scholarly discussion and research. Especially among the older universities in the West, degrees are essentially ranks or statuses within the community, and education and teaching are simply the means by which someone learns enough to become a peer with the other scholars. This style also has long been found in professional guilds, and is still found in some professional organizations. It implies a democratic administrative system and tends to reject managerialist values.

Research institutes. Some schools exist mainly to produce good quality publishable research. They require only research for particular higher degrees, and the degree is simply a recognition of a major piece of research. There need be no classes as long as students stay in contact with their supervisors, and institutions tend to specialize in fields where they have most expertise, as a good pool of expertise is essential to the school's success. Compared to course work, this kind of program suits fewer students because it so heavily emphasizes independent study with minimal guidance.

Assessment schools. A number of schools do not teach; they assess learning obtained elsewhere through formal, non-formal, or informal education and grant credits and degrees on the basis of assessment results. In schools which exist mainly to accept transfer credit, the school assesses the transfer credit, not the student.

This type of program especially suits countries where permits to grant degrees are very difficult to get. Small teaching schools can group together to form a central school, which does not teach but provides assessment degrees for its members, which act as its representatives. In some cases, it can be correct to say that the member schools are accreditees of the central school.

Some assessment programs draw upon the British university tradition, hardly differing from some teaching institutions in the way they depend heavily on formal, written examinations. They assume that the degree is basically a measure of cognitive, academic knowledge, so it is hardly possible that students could learn enough through life experience to pass the assessment.

Some nontraditional schools, however, use behavioral objectives to assess technical and technological knowledge learned apart from formal study. Degrees with practitioner majors can also be examined in part through practicum and through non-research writing projects, but assessment schools have not yet made full use of them despite their widespread use in taught programs. Perhaps the majority of schools assess on a course work basis, but sometimes it is equally valid to provide summative examinations for an entire degree program if they major on a field of expertise.

Practicum programs. On-the-job training is called "apprenticeship" in vocational education, where it can easily comprise a program's entire delivery system. It is called "internship" or "practicum" in higher education, where degrees with practicum always include formal study as well. In either case the learner must master certain applied skills under the supervision of an expert and then be evaluated.

Nontraditional education has explored the possibilities of the assessment school rather extensively in the last twenty years. Unfortunately, however, it has not examined the innovation potential of the scholarly community, the research institute, and the practicum program.

Institutionality Criteria

Criteria for schoolness require all schools to be uniform in some way. As modern accreditation encourages programs to be diverse, the question is, "What must be uniform?"

Even a small school is quite complicated. It requires an institutional mission, program objectives, distinctives, and a constitution. It needs capital, a supportive constituency and financial base, administrative procedures, and accurate records. It needs to gives degrees, statuses, or credit transcripts and therefore needs a stable description of their requirements. Any school needs people: administrators, members for its board of governors, qualified staff, and secretarial help, all of whom need job descriptions. Very few schools can survive without students and a student recruitment strategy.

The methodology of accrediting institutionality belongs to a later chapter and it is enough here to emphasize internal accountability. While by no means the only issue involved, it is essential to being a school. This is quite different from the use of the term "accountability" in the present literature, where it usually means the way in which government schools are accountable to government to provide value for money. In contrast, "internal accountability" refers to the way in which the board of governors take responsibility for all the activities of its school, and implies an administrative structure.

It has many consequences. An accreditable school needs to show that it has a board of governors taking responsibility, that it is not an autocracy. It needs to be able to show to its funders that it is honest and responsible with money. Students, graduates, and staff want to know that their school will not close down in the foreseeable future. Evaluators need especial accountability for examinations and results so that the school has a basis for giving credits and degrees.

The ATS considered accountability to be a central factor in maintaining quality, and its schools could not extend its accreditation to off-campus programs away from full accountability to the central institution. (1986:119)

Accountability can be the main dissimilarity between a good school and a degree mill. For example, it is the main difference between University of London's graduate research degree program and that of the now-defunct New Jersey degree mill, Marlowe University, to which students posted checks and theses. (Hefferlin, 1974:151)

Teachers (for those schools that have them) are responsible to their administrators for upholding the school's standards. They can do this by keeping records of what students are supposed to learn in the form of such things as subject descriptions, thesis proposals or theses, practicum contracts, and self-teaching texts.

Among schools which have both academic and training aims, it is easy to give an irresponsible over-emphasis to the training element. It is tempting to allow experienced practitioners to teach academic subjects for which they are academically unsuited, or to give passing grades to failing students if they are sincere and show promise as practitioners. (To be fair, there is the opposite problem of allowing over-emphasis on academic studies at the expense of practitioner training.)

The more education becomes "nontraditional" and the wider it extends geographically, the better its accountability systems need to be. By having less control over the teaching-learning process, schools are less able to monitor informally students' progress in the classroom. For example, the kind of student-teacher communication might mean that the school knows little about the student's response to the teaching-learning process. In other cases, the school which delegates its functions needs to be sure that it can still be responsible for them. Some schools need be more sure of their student assessment because they depend on it so heavily. Extension teachers can easily compromise the program by giving unwarranted exemptions and dispensations. Distance makes practicum harder to supervise adequately, especially for part-time students with domestic responsibilities who must find study time outside employment hours.

TEE's Problem of Institutional Instability

TEE schools provide some important warnings for nontraditional education. In its early days, the TEE movement greatly exaggerated what it could do; openminded people were tempted by the idea that they could instantly found a good, well-run school very cheaply by buying special books, choosing a name, and hanging up a sign outside. The idea of teaching many potential students over a very wide area was extremely attractive, especially as it supposedly required few full-time staff, little expertise, and minimal formal qualifications. The thought of great numbers of competent trainees and graduates was hard to resist. Before long, however, many schools were deluged with problems which they did not fully understand. It is not only interesting that Kornfield and Mulholland could identify schools in the TEE movement so distinctly, but also that they could generalize so broadly on their weaknesses without much fear of contradiction:

The teacher lacks time with his family because he does so much travelling.

Students lack exposure to a variety of teachers.

Travelling can be very costly.

Teachers have difficulty evaluating student ministry firsthand.

Teachers might only emphasize cognitive knowledge because they lack time with students.

The program lacks written and human resources between the teacher's visits. (Kornfield, 1976:24)

TEE depends too much on expatriate leadership.

TEE programs are often institutionally unstable. (Mulholland, n.d.:19-23; Harrison, n.d.:6f; Ward, 1977)

Accreditors are in a good position to require that extension schools adequately solve these problems, which destabilize them and reduce their administrative effectiveness.

For many schools, extending beyond their resources has been a threat to institutional stability. They have mistakenly assumed that they can reach great numbers of students over a very wide geographical area because teachers need not spend long with their classes. Staff are tempted by a distant class with good students, and rationalize that this is the meaning of extension.

It is easy and dangerous to overstretch resources in teachers, time, and communications. In fact TEE can only reach a large area when communications are exceptionally efficient and reliable, or when regional branches do most of the routine administration and decision-making. In geographically widespread programs, communication can be difficult. Paperwork is problematical. Staff who find it difficult to confer with other staff have less influence in decision-making processes.

Harrison likened the problem of institutionally unstable TEE to fireworks--a great deal of exiting noise and color followed by a rapid fizzle into oblivion. It easily becomes a spectacular failure. Ward thought that some kinds of TEE programs were sincere but poorly planned and overambitious, promising much and delivering little. (Harrison, n.d.:6f; Ward, 1977)

Overextension causes many of the problems mentioned earlier: excessive funds and staff time committed to travel, lack of time with students, lack of resources between teachers' visits, and institutional instability. It also contributes to overdependence on expatriates by requiring more from its staff.

Funding is also a problem. Both the TEE and the nontraditional education movements claimed that their programs cost very little and can easily become self-supporting. However, Keegan and Rumble concluded that distance teaching universities are not always less expensive than campus education, although the cost structures are complex and very different. (E.g. Keegan and Rumble, 1982b: 242f; Harrison, n.d.:7; Markowitz, 1987; see also Rumble, 1987)

It is easy to underestimate the true costs of a school which depends heavily of extension principles. They include administration and transport costs, equipment, salaries, the value of office and classroom space, and the production and distribution of materials. Long-term programs produce graduates very slowly without necessarily compensating in terms of short-term benefit. On a cost-benefit basis, a given group of students can also be very expensive if a few drop out or if some are marginal.

Heavy dependence on expatriates and their funds exacerbates the problem. It is not enough to ask whether a school is presently self-supporting, but whether it would be fully self-supporting at the same level without expatriate help. The Asia Theological Association have seen this difficulty and require that the budget include expatriate salaries, and that each school must show that it has improved in developing local support rather than being overly dependent on foreign funds. (1985:10, 11; cf. also ATESEA, 1984:22)

In practice, solid funding is essential; present accreditation criteria for off-campus education are unanimous. For example, the American Association of Bible Colleges says that extension programs require more resources than is normal for a [campus] Bible college, mentioning specifically financial support and faculty. "Extension programs should not . . . create stress with respect to financial stability." (1976:66) The California State Department of Education requires that income exceed costs and that there is cash on hand. (CSDE, 1982:13) The NAPNSC holds that schools should have an accurate budget and a positive financial balance after all expenses (1982:131-133). The Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada wisely say that starting an extension school requires "sufficient additional financial resources", adding that a school cannot justify starting a new extension program only on the basis that it will probably be financially self-supporting. (1984:61) The message is clear--a school that wants accreditation needs a sound financial footing.

The above authors mention how TEE schools too often tended to make excessive demands on staff. Earlier advocates of TEE underestimated the need for full-time staff. It is true that some need very few full-time staff and can survive and even flourish by relying on part-time teachers. In theory, an accreditable school could have only part-time staff, but more likely it needs some full-time people to ensure that all management, teaching and secretarial functions are responsibly carried out.

Teachers easily become overloaded in time spent travelling and in the number of classes they can take. Traditional criteria limiting the number of semester hours do not help because there can be too many variables to determine easily how much time they can spend in class each week. (See e.g. ATA, 1985:17) These factors include the number of subjects allotted to a teacher, how many of them he has taught before, the kind and amount of preparation, the academic level of the subject taught, his amount of experience and ability, and whether or not he is writing or still studying. Other variables are the amount of time spent in class, supervising practicum, talking with students, travelling, and administrating. He might have limits on how much can be away from home, or he might be consulting or in professional practice.

For example, a teacher might be more than full-time teaching one new Master's subject in a distant location, writing a book, and supervising a difficult research project. Yet the same person could have a very light load teaching a certificate subject in six nearby places if he already knew the subject well.

The earlier TEE literature decreased some demands on teachers by encouraging the idea that they did not require subject matter expertise. Part of the reason was the dependence on self-teaching materials (often PI texts) and partly because they wanted students to become practitioners rather than subject matter experts. Admittedly, staff need less expertise to use self-teaching materials than to teach the same subject by lecture because the book takes on most of the teacher's job. In such cases, staff are tutors whose responsibilities are limited to leading tutorials. They do not determine the content matter or its evaluation, and they can have lower qualifications than normal teachers. In fact, using tutors is normal practice in many countries, even in prestigious universities.

On the other hand, many TEE delivery systems use self-study rather than self-teaching materials, and depend very heavily on the subject matter expertise of their staff. Even complete dependence on self-teaching materials and tutors does not mean that schools need no subject matter expertise. For a school to be responsible for what it teaches, it needs staff with enough expertise to write or evaluate textbooks, to consult on subject matter, and to defend the distinctives of the school.

Accreditors, then, need to pay no less attention to TEE schools in the same kinds of accountability and stability that they require of other schools.