No sensible person would ask a building inspector to issue a certificate of occupancy on the strength of the blueprints, however handsome and formidable the renderings. One would want to know that the foundation had been poured, the wiring tested, and the stairs climbed by someone other than the architect. In education, though, we are now seeing the extension of the language of accreditation to schools that do not yet have students in their classrooms. In my August blog post, I suggested there must be a clear difference between recognizing promise and certifying performance. They are related judgments, but they are not synonymous. This month, I want to unpack my earlier distinction a bit further, since it is where the architecture of public trust can be most easily compromised.
Standards are the measure by which commissions exercise judgment when reviewing the institutions before them, to answer a central question: Is a school worthy of my confidence? An individual accreditation standard can require a school to demonstrate something specific, verifiable, and consequential, or it can invite a school to affirm, in its own preferred language, that it is doing approximately fine. At first glance, both versions would appear to be standards, but only one can bear the weight of public trust. So, how do we know whether a standard is truly a load-bearing wall, or just decorative molding?
An independent school's most cherished word is also its most easily misunderstood. Independence is written into mission statements, invoked at board retreats, and offered as an explanation for nearly everything a school chooses to do or declines to do. It is often treated as a synonym for autonomy in the fullest sense: freedom from oversight, freedom from external comparison, and freedom to define quality entirely on one's own terms.
In his reliably provocative manner, Yong Zhao suggests that a far better question is whether the work we’ve been assigning in schools was/is worth protecting in the first place. Consider the weight of such a question in leadership team meetings, faculty meetings, admission offices, or boardrooms.
