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Independent schools, like colleges and universities, go through an accreditation process. There are many organizations that offer accreditation with varying degrees of State, national, and international recognition, but accreditation simply means that an external, impartial review team has evaluated a school and found that it meets certain minimal standards. An accredited school means that the school’s diploma has some value, that it will be accepted as good-faith evidence that a student with a diploma from that school has truly completed high school. It gives the diploma weight, especially with colleges, universities, and technical schools.

Once a school has obtained accreditation, it must periodically go through reaccreditation. This process assures that the school is maintaining the standards that earned it accreditation initially. Reaccreditation requires that school’s assemble an immense amount of documentation and evidence for just about everything: teacher transcripts, immunization records, employee leave forms, professional development records, attendance policies, fire extinguishers—and on and on and on. It’s a massive process that requires good record keeping and careful diligence.

Fortunately, “big boy” accreditation through organizations like Cognia only occurs every five years. About two or three years before the next reaccreditation visit, a school receives a “pre-visit” that largely checks in with the school to ensure it’s preparing for reaccreditation. That pre-visit also checks on the status of “Improvement Priorities” that were noted during the last reaccreditation. Every school must receive at least one “Improvement Priority,” and the school must demonstrate it is taking steps to address whatever those priorities may be.

The South Carolina Independent School Association (SCISA) administers several forms of accreditation, including through Cognia, that reflect the “independent” portion of its name. There are different standards, naturally, for different educational methods. For example, Montessori has a different set of standards from a more traditionally college preparatory school. I haven’t studied the Montessori standards to know how different they are, but because Montessori takes a significantly different approach to education, it naturally has different standards for accreditation. You can’t measure an orange against the standards of an apple.

Earlier this week I was part of a SCISA Cognia reaccreditation visit to a Christian school here in South Carolina. I have been through multiple Cognia visits as a teacher, but I’ve never been on one of the external review teams (ERTs). My only prior experience as part of a team was on a less rigorous three-year reaccreditation. That was earlier this year, and the “team” consisted of a veteran education professor and myself. There were many of the same requirements for documentation—I found myself checking every student file for immunization records, for example—but because the cycle is more frequent, some of the standards are slightly less rigorous. That doesn’t mean that the three-year accreditation is worth less than the Cognia one, it just has to be repeated more frequently because there’s a bit less involved; ergo, more oversight is necessary.

That’s all to say that being on the ERT for this Cognia visit was a first and, therefore, a learning experience. It illuminated why my administration often asked for things that were, at the time, baffling or seemed inconsistent. It also gave me a front-row seat to the nuts and bolts of both reaccreditation and independent school management that I’d only glimpsed from the edges as a teacher.

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