For those of you who think the federal government isn’t concerned about education in this country….

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spelling recently announced proposals to improve higher education and, as Carolina Journal’s Shannon Blosser notes, “it’s clear that many of the programs that she desires would ultimately increase the federal government’s role in higher education.”

Monday’s lead News & Observer editorial focuses on Spelling’s plan to administer standardized tests to see how much students actually learned during their four (plus) years on campus:

University officials who live in the cloistered world of campus bureaucracies don’t take kindly as a rule to being examined and possibly — gasp — critiqued. Indeed, Spellings’ quest to determine whether higher education is delivering on its promises has drawn resistance from a group of private schools on privacy grounds. That seems a stretch, given that measurements could be gathered in a way that wouldn’t violate any student’s privacy. Is it possible that these school simply don’t want any more windows opened as to their performance?

In advocating that universities, through tests, take a measure of just what students have learned, Spellings says she’s not suggesting that there’s some kind of “one-size-fits-all” equation. But she says universities can seek to test student learning, and that she will try to get them some matching funds for testing if they do.

Colleges and universities that aren’t afraid to take stock of their strengths and shortcomings deserve that kind of support. They should look at the increased scrutiny envisioned by Spellings as an opportunity to do better, not a potential embarrassment.

But do universities really think this way? Do they not generally assume that they’re providing students with the appropriate mental software to make it in the world? It’s part of the academic naivete’ that conservatives love to slam.

As many lead editorials do, the N&O has a bit too much of the big picture in focus. Instead of worrying about potential embarrassment, universities will be too busy wondering how to administer standardized tests and, more importantly, how to pay for them.