Making the grade keeps getting harder

It was not a pleasant meeting. Shortly before the start of the school year, Dr. Richard Chavez, the principal of Centennial High School in Compton, Calif., held a get-together with incoming seniors and their parents to pass on some bad news: Centennial had lost its accreditation.

"It was a shock," says Tamara Moore, a 17-year-old junior. As the district's student representative on the board of Compton Unified School District, Tamara had heard the news a few weeks earlier. Now, everyone had questions for her. "A lot of people in the community didn't know what it meant," she says. "My mother didn't know."

Centennial, with 1,307 students, is one of three high schools in Compton, a suburb of slightly more than 93,000 people in Los Angeles County. Compton may be known best for having high crime rates and for nurturing gangsta rappers such as Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, although it would probably prefer to be known for producing tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams. Because Centennial is renovating its older buildings, students are attending classes in low gray buildings placed row upon row, making the campus resemble an army barracks. Some blame the move to the temporary structures, which occurred a week before an accreditation committee came to visit, for the trouble.

Although exact numbers are hard to come by, at least a few dozen primary or secondary schools in the United States lose accreditation each year, leaving parents and students angry and bewildered. Students at these schools suddenly find their futures threatened, but they're not sure how. Since teachers and administrators don't usually prepare for losing accreditation, anyone with questions about the consequences may have trouble getting answers.

Accreditation refers to a stamp of approval granted by one of six regional accrediting associations in the United States. The associations are nonprofit, nongovernmental entities whose purpose is to evaluate colleges and schools. The oldest accrediting association, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), was founded in 1885. The youngest, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, was founded as merger of smaller organizations in 1962. At present, about 30,000 primary and secondary schools in the United States - more than 70 percent of the total number - are accredited, according to Mark Elgart, executive director of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, one of the six regional associations. At the high school level, more than 90 percent are accredited.

The movement to start accrediting schools originally began because, until recently, there were no national standards, or in some cases even statewide standards, for evaluating schools. This changed with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which gives the federal government a larger role in monitoring school performance. In addition, most states have independently passed initiatives to make schools more accountable. Most schools now must meet these federal and state requirements as well as those of the accreditation organizations.

"You're looking at three levels of demand," explains Charles McCarthy Jr., associate director of the Commission on Public Secondary Schools for the NEASC. "Many principals and superintendents feel they're under pressure to serve too many masters."

While the expanded role of federal and state government overlaps with that of the accreditation agencies, however, accreditation remains important for now. It has a longer history and is based on more in-depth inspections, including on-site evaluations of schools. Parents check on the accreditation status of schools when they choose a neighborhood.

College admissions officers use accreditation to ensure that applicants are coming from acceptable schools. High schools use accreditation when deciding whether transfer students will receive credit for work completed at another school. Accreditation can affect everything from community morale to property values.

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