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With many immediate tasks consuming the school day and year, attaining accreditation can take a back seat. After all, accreditation is an extended process, in some regions taking years to complete. The term “accreditation” provokes winces and moans from educators. Why then would a charter school seek accreditation and how can charter schools transform an onerous task into a program for school cooperation and improvement?
Most importantly, the accreditation process can be a tool for internal improvement and accountability. However, to gain the most benefit, a school must have a desire to learn and a desire to improve. Institutions that enter accreditation without a serious interest in examining their institutions, will not receive the fullest, strategic benefits from this process. In these cases, accreditation can be a waste of time and money. In such instances, even if accreditation is granted, the school loses a valuable opportunity to reflect on specific improvements required to move a school from good to great.
An objective third-party, the accreditor identifies certain categories that must be examined to determine whether a school is functional. These include academic achievement, finances, special education, facilities and teacher quality, to name a few. Thus, the accreditor requires that the school invest in the time and money required to complete the reporting process and engage in site visits. On occasion, and only when the accreditation process is coming to a close, an accreditor may make recommendations for school improvement. Only in rare cases might these recommendations have to be accepted in order to attain accreditation. Recommendations are provided in the spirit of school improvement by clarifying deficiencies and identifying strengths. Schools not meeting the basic standards of the accreditor will not receive accreditation. The most important task of accreditation takes place when the school conducts a self-study, the document that reports on current school procedures and culture. Self-studies might be broken down into two general categories. I have coined these categories descriptive and prescriptive.
Descriptive Self-Study
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Descriptive self-studies allow individuals to look
closely at school policies, procedures, facilities, pedagogy, and academic
achievement by reporting on what is happening in the school. Different
accreditors will have different descriptive requirements. Most will require
schools to report academic scores from state tests, among other things.
Some accreditors will have detailed forms to fill out, while others ask
open-ended questions. If accreditation includes a descriptive process,
then archiving the school culture to date, especially pedagogy and curriculum,
can be an extremely useful tool for the present and the future. A self-study
that documents school procedures, facilities and policies provides organizations
with the opportunity to step back and examine current practices. |
Moreover, as the life of the school continues, this document can be invaluable in instructing future school leaders about the history of the school, allowing the leaders to remember institutional lessons learned in the early years of the school’s existence. Such archiving allows the school to recognize patterns of success and patterns of failure. As a result, a school can attempt to maintain and highlight areas of competence and excellence while isolating areas that need improvement. While the school may not outline future goals, this descriptive document provides an opportunity for the staff to align on precisely how the mission of the school is interpreted and brought into practice. For example, do the teachers agree on how the mission statement of the school is interpreted? If they do not agree, which interpretation of the school mission statement can the school leaders agree upon? Is this an interpretation taking place currently in the school, or simply an ideal that the school has pursued since the beginning? Must the school consider revising its mission in conjunction with revelations and changes that have taken place since the original chartering? Such conversations will require school leadership and/or the steering committee to have a willingness to remain objective, as some topics will inevitably draw on each educator’s personal beliefs and individual commitments to education. As a result, even a descriptive self-study may assist the school in addressing internal tensions and inconsistencies arising between different constituencies involved in the school. |
Prescriptive Self-Study
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Prescriptive self-studies
take this process a step further by allowing a school to engage in strategic
planning, action plans or the development of a school improvement plan.
This kind of self-study requires the school to 1) document what is happening
in the school and 2) respond to what is happening with future goals for
improvement. In the latter case, prescription does not refer to a plan
provided by the accreditor to which the school must submit in order to
become accredited. Rather, it is a prescription that the school community
writes for itself, as a guide for future sustainability and excellence.
While both self-studies can provide internal benefits to the school, thoughtful,
prescriptive self-studies may enhance sustainability by allowing the school
community to articulate and focus on shared future goals. |
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Setting goals, however, cannot be done in isolation from current practices and challenges. As a result, prescriptive self-studies require a descriptive account of the school as a foundation for future growth. Such self-studies might be limited to a brief response to issues of concern or areas that demand attention. More extensive self-studies may provide detailed accounts of sequenced curriculum or professional development plans, in some cases resulting from consultation with outside experts. The level of detail will directly reflect the school’s investment in the process and their sheer logistical ability to invest time in the self-study. Finally, rallying the school community to approach accreditation pro-actively will allow the school to reap the benefits of the process. A reactive approach, in which the school reluctantly submits to accreditation, suggests that the school is not inherently interested in excellence, improvement or sustainability. These kinds of school leaders will never draw from or experience the potential benefits of self-study. |
Site Visit
While the self-study is the most important part of the accreditation process,
accreditation also requires a multi-day site visit. This site visit draws on
a team of educators to evaluate the accuracy of the self-study. This allows
the site team to address questions arising from the self-study, and closely
examine the school climate by interviewing parents, teachers and school leaders.
The site-visit is a valuable opportunity to gain insight from other educators
and an opportunity to show-off successes.
Different accreditors have developed a variety of expectations for accreditation. Just as education has been left to the states, accreditation has been left to different regions of the country: North Central, Middle States, Southern, Western and North Eastern. Fortunately, now charter schools can choose between two accreditors: their regional accreditor and/or the Charter School Accreditation Program at the American Academy for Liberal Education (AALE). Non-charter public schools do not have an option and must work with their regional accreditor. As a result, each accreditor offers their own requirements for reporting, site visits and fees. Curiously, the founding of AALE’s Charter School Accreditation Program in 2001, marked the first appearance of a national K-12 accreditor, as well as the first accreditor devoted exclusively to charter schools. Unlike the regional accreditors, AALE accredits schools based primarily on curricular substance, pedagogical excellence and performance output rather than input. As a result, a school that has acquired average functionality but has not attained distinction in these areas will not be likely to attain AALE accreditation, while they may more readily acquire regional accreditation.
Is accreditation optional? Technically, yes. Is accreditation desirable? Absolutely. The most professional and highest performing charter schools seek accreditation as a matter of course. Charter schools must seek accreditation to prove their worth to parents, state officials, charter authorizers and their local communities. A reluctance or refusal to seek accreditation indicates 1) that a school has something to hide (which incites suspicion) and/or 2) a school culture that rejects feedback, evaluation and assessment. While the former will simply attract state or district examination and discourage parents, the latter suggests a myopic and unprofessional school climate. Third-party review is especially helpful to charter schools precisely because the heart-felt commitment required to start a school often demands an insular focus, a focus that gains balance and perspective from the observations of experienced, objective educators.
Since accreditation can take from seven months to four years (depending on the accreditor), charter schools must build this process into their school calendar and leaders must take the initiative to organize and inspire the process. Better yet, charter schools can reflect on accreditation standards when writing their initial charter, allowing them to address all areas of school excellence from the very start. In order to detect areas of immediate concern, some charter schools have used school inspection / consulting services such as the UK-based Cambridge Education (CE). These services are used prior to accreditation in order to insure that the school does not have glaring deficiencies that would cause the school to be denied accreditation. Such schools want to be certain that the time and energy invested in accreditation results in an award of accreditation. To initiate this process, schools should acquire copies of accreditation standards in order to determine which standards and which self-study process best suits their community.
Sarah Cunningham currently serves as Director of the Charter School Accreditation Program at the American Academy for Liberal Education. She was founding Dean at The Oxbow School in Napa, CA and has trained teachers through The Bernstein Center and Vanderbilt's Center for Teaching. She has taught philosophy at Vanderbilt, University of Maine and Belmont University. She regularly presents papers on education and aesthetics at conferences nationwide. Sarah received her BA from Kenyon College and an MA from Vanderbilt University. She is completing a PhD on the relation between analytic thinking, education and the arts.
