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Weeks after reversing a critical review of the Cobb County School District, the head of the state’s largest accrediting agency says it’s changing the way it evaluates schools.
But it may not be enough to appease Republican lawmakers. In the wake of the review of the state’s second-largest school district last fall, they’ve advanced legislation in the Senate that changes accreditation criteria for Georgia’s K-12 schools. The bill now awaits a vote in the House.
“We are embracing the state’s wishes to improve, where appropriate, the accreditation system in Georgia,” Mark Elgart, CEO of the accreditation agency Cognia, said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We have no problem with that.”
But he’s worried about unplanned ramifications of the legislation — a concern also voiced by the leader of the Georgia Accrediting Commission, the state’s other accrediting agency.
Elgart blamed the Cobb review debacle on the use of volunteers — often current or former educators with decades of experience — to evaluate the school system rather than professional staff. He said their findings were not entirely based in fact.
Cognia is addressing that issue by moving away from using volunteers to conduct special reviews, Elgart said.
“We’re finally at a stage where we’re introducing — beginning next year — only professional evaluators,” he said. “No more volunteers.”
It’s a step that may be too little too late for Sen. Lindsey Tippins, R-Marietta, who authored a bill that would limit what criteria accreditation agencies can use to evaluate schools. The bill would put the focus on student achievement and the use of taxpayer dollars.
It would remove school board governance from the equation. That was a key factor in Cognia’s original review of Cobb schools and the only portion of its critical assessment that it did not retract.
“I do not think that an agency of the standing that Cognia had would disavow a finding as they did if it were not laden with problems,” Tippins said. ”The focus of my bill is that the purpose of accreditation needs to be reoriented for looking at the core business of the reason schools exist — for teaching and student learning.”
Elgart said that the retraction of most of the special review’s findings was part of due process, and should bolster public trust in Cognia. He warned the bill won’t be the fix that lawmakers are looking for.
Georgia would be the first state to reject the regional accreditation system in favor of a state system if the bill becomes law, Elgart said.
Elgart and Phillip Murphy, executive director of the Georgia Accrediting Commission, said the change could make students less competitive when applying to out-of-state colleges that aren’t familiar with the state-specific system.
Murphy previously told the AJC that the purpose of accreditation is not student achievement.
“It’s getting a student enrolled in college,” he said.
Tippins disagreed that the bill could pose a problem there. Colleges are looking at student accomplishments, he said, not the performance of the school or school board.
With Tippins’ proposed system focusing on student achievement, low-performing schools would be at a higher risk of losing accreditation, Elgart said. That, in turn, could make students ineligible for the state’s HOPE scholarship, which requires they graduate from accredited high schools to get tuition help.
“There are some elements of the bill that have unintended consequences,” Elgart said.
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