This year, Utah lawmakers debated whether to require private schools to obtain accreditation to participate in the Utah Fits All Scholarship program – but decided not to.
The discussion around accountability – and perhaps accreditation – will likely continue into future legislative sessions. If so, it’s worth diving into the history and purpose of accreditation and how it can get tangled up with government initiatives.
Ultimately, Utah lawmakers should be cautious about requiring private schools to be accredited in order to participate in education choice programs.
Accreditation basics
Accreditation signals a school’s quality. It’s a typically nongovernmental, peer-evaluation process that enables schools to establish their quality against certain standards, their transferability to other schools, and their credibility with the community, including employers. The practice of accreditation has been around since the late 1800s, when colleges in America created the first accreditation agency to establish guidelines around curricula and degrees. Today, there are many accrediting agencies for both higher education and K-12 schools.
Most often, we hear about accreditation in higher education. Universities and colleges seek accreditation from one of the major accrediting institutions for all the reasons listed above, but also because the federal government has conditioned federal financial assistance for students on accreditation. The issue of accreditors serving as gatekeepers to this massive amount of federal money and advancing political agendas has been a growing concern, with the current administration taking serious steps to reform accreditation for this very reason.
There is significantly less research and attention on the accreditation of K-12 schools across the nation. In fact, according to an internal review, most states do not require accreditation for K-12 private schools but offer it as an option, since many private schools seek such credentialing.
In Utah, private schools are not required by law to be accredited. At the same time, an administrative rule issued by the Utah State Board of Education (USBE) requires that secondary public high schools offering credits toward graduation be accredited. That said, the USBE makes recommendations for public or private schools seeking accreditation; Cognia, formerly AdvancEd, is its recommended accreditor. Even without a mandate, however, many Utah private schools voluntarily seek accreditation to attract families by showcasing their quality and compatibility with college admissions.
Accreditation and government programs
The history of higher education accreditation and the federal government should be a tale of caution for those seeking to make accreditation for private schools a requirement for participation in a government program.
Shortly after the 1944 GI Bill provided funds for GIs returning from World War II to attend college, many schools sprang up to enroll them. As a result, the federal government required schools to be accredited to receive funds. This started the relationship between accrediting colleges and the federal government, which has never gone away.
When Congress passed the Higher Education Amendments (HEA) in 1965, which offered students federal loans and grants, it also required that any schools receiving these funds be accredited. When vocational schools and trade schools became eligible to receive this federal aid, the same requirement was extended to them. Likewise, the introduction of the Pell Grant meant more schools wanted these funds, and new accreditors also began cropping up.
By the 1992 reauthorization of HEA, Congress became more muscular, telling accreditors what to do and which indicators they had to have standards for when approving institutions. At the same time, it created formal roles for the state and federal government in accreditation. Controversially, this reauthorization also gave the U.S. Secretary of Education new authority to set standards for approving accrediting agencies. By 1998, pushback against such strict accreditation requirements led to the elimination or softening of many requirements for states and accreditors. This deregulation continued in 2008.
With quality and abuse issues remaining a question, the Obama administration pursued accreditation reforms that required certain student outcomes in accreditor review criteria and eliminated one of the biggest accreditors for for-profit schools. The Biden administration released guidance saying schools needed reasonable cause before finding a new accreditor, reducing flexibility. Under the Trump administration, there have been efforts to make accreditation more flexible, allowing institutions to change accreditors more easily and review potential new ones. Beyond that, Trump’s administration has used stripping accreditation from schools as a tool to advance or reverse political agendas.
This history is useful because it shows that when the government makes accreditation a condition for state programs or funding, there is a natural tendency to regulate or insert new agendas into the process.
K-12 education choice programs and the question of accreditation
Just as “nongovernmental” accreditation has become entangled with government in higher education through federal dollars, so too can accreditation become entangled with government if states condition participation in education choice programs on accreditation.
A recent ExcelinEd article titled “Accreditation Roadblocks: Restrictive State Policies Can Limit School Choice Options for Families” highlights the realities of accreditation and its impacts on education choice programs.
Accreditation of schools is intended to reduce instances of misuse of funds or abuse of consumers, but it also has real-world impacts on cutting out new players in the school option landscape, especially innovative ones.
Alarmingly, the study of eight states with universal private education choice programs found that without accreditation, 80% of private schools were available to families, while only 50% were available with accreditation rules.
Some might argue this is evidence that quality control is working, but others might argue that it restricted options before parents could judge the quality themselves, as they determine their own satisfaction with the school.
The report also shows that many of the states leading the way in education choice policies do not have accreditation requirements, like Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, and West Virginia. Where they do exist, they appear to significantly decrease the percentage of schools available to families.
For education choice programs, this matters. While accountability and quality are important, parents deserve a robust set of choices.
Conclusion
Utah legislators should be very thoughtful about the impacts of introducing an accreditation requirement for private schools for participation in an education choice program or at all. Parents seeking an education choice scholarship are usually seeking freedom from the standardization that accreditation can sometimes bring. And at the same time, there might be parents who care deeply about accreditation and will use their scholarship dollars in the marketplace only on those that are.
Lawmakers should be cautious about introducing a requirement for accrediting private schools in education choice programs.
Sutherland Institute policy intern Sophia Rolie contributed research to this article.
