Reaccreditation at a Performance Standards non-compliant Private School: a Case Study

My first year of employment as a mathematics teacher and curriculum writer for a special needs focused private high school turned out to also be a year of reaccreditation. Though I tried to base my curricula off of common core standards, it turned out it simply wasn’t possible to hit those goals given our resource constraints and the diverse needs of our students. My students hit from 10–40 percent of common core standards for the courses in which they were enrolled. In the most extreme case, a handful of students enrolled in pre-calculus hadn’t covered a single content standard for the common core course by the same name, the ten percent that they did hit being exclusively “process” standards, which refers to experiences students should have rather than specific knowledge/skills students should acquire.

The dominant accrediting body in this part of the country is the SAIS/SACS. Their accreditation process, lasting a year, begins with a thorough self examination and finishes with an in person visit from a volunteer accreditation committee comprised of educational professionals from around the region. The in person visit, conducted in the Spring, lasts three days. Committee members stop by classrooms, speak with students and educators, and come to a final decision as to reaccreditation of the school. As you can read more about here, Academic accreditation does not entail adherence to any specific content standards.

I had the opportunity to speak with my committee twice before a decision was reached, once privately and once in a group setting with the other teachers (three of whom are blood relatives of the head of school), and once privately. I thought of myself as a “whistle blower” as I shared what I was certain would be shocking news of how flagrantly we had disregarded state Performance Standards in our Math curricula. I expressed concern that it was dishonest to award pre-calculus credit to students completing only 10% of the content considered to be pre-calculus in public schools; that the 2016 class of graduating seniors, with their A’s and B’s in pre-calculus, would be compared to public school students who had struggled through a much greater (1000% to be exact) breadth of material to earn that same credit. This fell largely on deaf ears. Despite apparent concern with this issue in the one hour meeting, there was no follow up, no interest in looking at specifically which standards were met and which were ignored.

We were reaccredited with flying colors. It will be another five years before the school is under this level of scrutiny again. That’s more than a full cycle of students who will have the opportunity to earn high school credit under deceitful pretenses.