Accreditation

Pros

The public has a crucial stake in the quality and caliber of educational administration program accreditation: The organization, management, and evaluation of preparation programs are the rationale for accreditation in educational administration. Nationally noted accreditation expert Kenneth E. Young and his associates in their 1983 Understanding Accreditation presented five aspects or themes of institutional and specialized accreditation. Although written two decades ago, these guidelines remain relevant today, especially in the field of educational administration:

• 1.
  Accreditation is a valuable—perhaps even essential—social tool whose usefulness and effectiveness have not been fully appreciated and whose full potential has yet to be realized.
• 2.
  Accreditation began as a voluntary, nongovernmental process and should remain so if its inherent values are to be preserved and enhanced.
• 3.
  Accreditation is a process that, at its heart, consists of guided self-evaluation and self-improvement and serves as a centerpiece to the little-understood, informal, but elaborate commitment to self-regulation in postsecondary education. The primary value of accreditation is to be found in the process itself, not in the formal results of the process—that is, the announced decision of whether a program is accredited.
• 4.
  Accreditation should be judged by its effectiveness in encouraging and assisting the program to evaluate and improve its educational offerings. All other outcomes and uses of accreditation are secondary to this objective and should not undermine it. To be effective, accreditation must focus primarily on the program, just as education must focus on the student.
• 5.
  Accreditation is highly vulnerable to misuse and abuse by those who wish to turn it into other purposes. But there are enough countervailing forces to offset perversions of the process or power plays.

Accreditation is the principal mechanism whereby university preparation programs in educational administration review, renew, and improve their preparation of school leaders. Accreditation serves the interests of the students enrolled in our programs as well, by signifying that the preparation they are receiving meets or exceeds the standards of what our profession has judged appropriate academic preparation. Accredited programs attract more highly qualified candidates, and more highly qualified candidates have greater potential to improve practice as education leaders and increase student success.

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