Is your school district accredited by NEASC? NEASC is the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. They even claim that they can attest to a school’s “high quality and integrity.” Or is this, as some have suggested, just a big scam on the taxpayers who have to pay for it?
According to NEASC, they are “founded in experience and expertise of practicing educators since 1885.” Their accreditation is “respected, effective, and time-tested methodology for school improvement and growth.” But are taxpayers and parents getting the quality out of their school district as NEASC claims?
Manchester High Schools are accredited according to NEASC. But Manchester students have struggled to meet proficiency in the core academic subjects. Now they have another Superintendent leaving to go somewhere else.
Here is what NEASC claims they can provide to the schools. But what do former school board members in New Hampshire think about NEASC? Is it worth the thousands of dollars they charge each district to become accredited?
Several years ago, a former school board member in Hollis wrote this report in her local paper:
NEASC accreditation irrelevant
Friday, September 2, 2011To the Editor:“The New England Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation deemed irrelevant.” According to Hollis Brookline High School Principal, Cynthia Matte, this was the response that she received from prestigious Dartmouth University and the University of New Hampshire when she asked them about the importance of the NEASC Accreditation.This bombshell was disclosed at the Aug. 17 Co-op School Board meeting when Vincent Bennett, a resident of Hollis, approached the microphone and asked that very question.His follow-up question to the Co-op School Board was very simple.Are you asking the taxpayers of Hollis and Brookline to potentially pay more than half a million dollars for portable classrooms to meet the space requirements of NEASC when the two major colleges of New Hampshire have deemed this accreditation irrelevant?It is time we put substance over symbolism. We need to focus our resources on ensuring all our students are receiving a great education.We all know a quality education is achieved through exceptional teachers and a first rate curriculum; not square footage.DEBBIE PUCCIHollis
Another former board member in another New Hampshire town sent me this:
While I can’t speak to the administrative end of things, I can tell you that the accreditation team comes in and pretty much turns your school upside down for a week. We went throgh this process back in 2008 for Prospect Mountain High School. The team from NEACS came – They talk with students, staff, and teachers. They inspect classrooms, schedules, class offerings, etc. – they are into every aspect of the school – from art to the finance office. Most of the members of the accreditation team came from Brown University, which is part of NEASC. Ironically, BU is accredited by…. NEASC. Go figure. They left after 3-4 days, and we received a report, along with their recommendations for improvements, and the certificate of accreditation about three to four months later.
What opened my eyes to how evasive this process was, was when the principal at the time (who is very “unestablishment” – a rebel of sorts – in a good way) said, at a board meeting, on camera, “I wonder who accredits NESAC?!” He was put out by the pomp and circumstance, and we had to defend the money we had in the budget that year for the accreditation process – I think we’d budgeted around $15K that year for everything.
In all of this – we had no issues with students not being accepted to the college of their choice from the time we opened in 2002 until 2008. We had one student not get accepted to a college that she had applied to because of accreditation, but that college was not her first choice – in other words, we saw no harm come to the students graduating that our school was not accredited.
Let me know what else you’d like to know… In my opinion, NEASC is a joke – it’s another player in the game of getting more pubic tax dollars away from the students and someone else telling you how to run things that were running just fine to begin with…. Who made NEASC so darn powerful? It’s another group we should say NO to.
Then there was this report by another former school board member from several years ago:
NEASC accreditation is an issue that we successfully defeated last night at our district meeting with common sense and persistence. Here is the strategy we used:
- College Board is the ultimate authority in the college admissions process. On their website they list the top 10 things that matter most to student admissions for college, ask the following question; where in the top 10 items listed does accreditation fall on their list? The answer is that it is not even on the list. Better yet type is NEASC accreditation in the search box on the College Board website and see how often it comes up…the answer is zero.
http://professionals.collegeboard.com/guidance/applications/decisions
- When Massachusetts was #1 in education in the country, what did their administrators think about NEASC? Please see the letter that was written to NEASC from both EDCO schools and Reading. Read highlights from these two letters and that will stop your school system from pushing the NEASC accreditation.
http://www.edcollab.org/?p=1617
http://homenewshere.com/daily_times_chronicle/news/reading/article_3a0cfb98-34e3-11e3-bf06-0019bb2963f4.html
- Our school was using NEASC to pitch a school expansion that we do not need, compare the quantity of pages between NHED306 (minimum standards) and the NEASC (6 pages of standards) of which have no minimum academic standards…common sense tells you that NHDOE with 64 pages is much more thorough that 6 pages of NEASC.
https://cpss.neasc.org/downloads/2011_Standards/2011_Standards.pdf
www.education.nh.gov/legislation/documents/ed306-2011.pdf <http://www.education.nh.gov/legislation/documents/ed306-2011.pdf>
- The reasons that the schools do not want to use the NHED306 standards is because they are very simple and clear-cut. For example, part of our expansion was to enlarge our cafeteria and NHED306 says that the minimum standard is that the school must provide a seat and a sufficient amount of time for the student to eat their lunch. NEASC wants them to be able to have a positive culture conducive to conversation, comfort, and 21st century dining which apparently costs millions of dollars.
The additional piece of information that we used is that we highlighted how a fire code violation was used to deliberately misinform NEASC and our community and showed how this information changed over time in the NEASC reports.
And finally this:
My experience with NEASC was when I was CFO of a small private college.
The group which came on our site to do the Accreditation Review was comprised of school teachers or school administrators asked to serve a cycle on the team. My experience is such folks are often on official leave of absence from a school. Perhaps there may be a recent retiree in there but, in effect, when their NEASC time is up most members will go right back to their classroom or piloting their admin desk. So, reflecting the composition of the team, its recommendations will of course be the most “progressive” or “pie n the sky” or “optimal” and take no consideration of cost to implement.
NEASC threatened the college with loss of accreditation because (a) we didn’t have enough PhDs on the faculty to teach students working on Masters Degrees, (b) faculty salaries were lower than the norm and (c) the college was not providing adequate funding for faculty continuing ed opportunities (workshops, seminars, conferences, etc.).
In my experience, NEASC recommendations are made by educators for educators and don’t have much to do with bettering students. In other words, it’s a closed loop – this year I’ll do a NEASC stint and come to your school with a bunch of recommendations, then next year you’ll put in time with NEASC and come to my school with a bunch of recommendations.
When the Superintendent insists that your school is accredited, and that taxpayers fund it, make sure you ask questions and challenge that decision.
