5 Misconceptions of High School Accreditation

Two insiders tout the value of peer reviews of practices of local school ecosystems

Even high-performing schools improve when they regularly examine their practices, challenge their assumptions about their strategies, consider the best practices in use across the educational landscape and invite external review of their peers.

That’s what one of us (Groves) discovered while serving as superintendent of a school district in Northern California for 23 years. The Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District found the accreditation process run by a regional accrediting body to be a vehicle for positive change, resulting in greater student learning.

The district, with its 4,300 students, experienced nine continuous years of measurable academic student test score gains that included narrowing of the achievement gap among student subgroups.

In Massachusetts, several school districts recently incorporated the accreditation process into their strategic planning and the hard work of improving teaching and learning. These districts are leveraging the accreditation framework to advance their educational goals and priorities, and their leaders see accreditation as a valuable tool to guide their improvement efforts.

“We have found the process and new standards very helpful,” says Bella Wong, superintendent of the Lincoln-Sudbury Regional School District, about 30 miles west of Boston. “We are premising our creation of a strategic plan on the work we are doing for the re-accreditation process. It is all dovetailing nicely for us.”

In the 2,100-student Fairhaven School District in southeastern Massachusetts, superintendent Robert Baldwin says he expects to extend the accreditation process from his single high school to the entire K-12 district. “Students are not born in grade 9, so using this school improvement process can benefit the practices vertically,” he says.