Accreditation of Primary and Secondary Education
In the United States, educational accreditation has long been established as a peer review process coordinated by accreditation commissions and member institutions. The federal government began to play a limited role in higher education accreditation in 1952 with reauthorization of the GI Bill for Korean War veterans. With the creation of the U.S. Department of Education and under the terms of the Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended, the U.S. Secretary of Education is required by law to publish a list of nationally recognized accrediting agencies for higher education. There is no similar federal government list of recognized accreditation agencies for primary and secondary schools. Public schools must adhere to criteria set by the state governments, and there is wide variation among the individual states in the requirements applied to non-public primary and secondary schools. There are six regional accreditors in the United States that have historically accredited elementary schools, junior high schools, middle schools, high schools, as well as nearly all public and private institutions of higher education that are academic in nature. In addition, it is common for national and regional associations of independent or religious schools to provide accreditation for their members. Some of the regional accreditors, such as AdvancED, and some independent associations, such as the Association of Christian Schools International, have expanded their accreditation activity to include schools outside the United States.
In Canada, some primary and secondary schools are privately accredited by Canadian Accredited Independent Schools (CAIS), previously known as SEAL Canada.
Read more about this topic: Educational Accreditation
Famous quotes containing the words primary, secondary and/or education:
“At the heart of the educational process lies the child. No advances in policy, no acquisition of new equipment have their desired effect unless they are in harmony with the child, unless they are fundamentally acceptable to him.”
—Central Advisory Council for Education. Children and Their Primary Schools (Plowden Report)
“Cloud-clown, blue painter, sun as horn,
Hill-scholar, man that never is,
The bad-bespoken lacker,
Ancestor of Narcissus, prince
Of the secondary men. There are no rocks
And stones, only this imager.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)