ACCREDITATION OF SCHOOLS!

Question asked by Prof. (Dr.) B. L. Handoo
Q: How is Accreditation of Schools going to improve education?

The HRD Minister and the CBSE Chairman have proposed Accreditation of Schools as an initiative to improve Quality in Education. The Schools are wary. The parents want to know the benefits. The students and teachers think exploitation will cease. The managements fear exposure. Good Schools are hopeful of benchmarking their best practices. Some see Business prospectus and the general fear is dilution of standards in the name of Quality, since unscrupulous elements are vying for a piece of the pie.
(Location specific: India)

Answers from Friends from various walks of life

Virendra Pratap Mishra: Professor at Institute of Productivity & Management, Ghaziabad

Accreditation shall surely help. The process need to be set right.
Maximum weight age- 75% and above- should be given to the views and performance of passing out students in last few years. Say pass outs of last one to five years. Accreditations should be derived based on ratios of fees charged by institutes and salaries earned by pass outs in next five years. Minus weight age should be given for un-employment periods beyond six months of just passing out students.

Accreditation ranking should be published and institute be asked to display it prominently at every point of soliciting students.
Admissions to institutes be based on one single all India or state entrance score and no technical or other university should try to fill seats in affiliated colleges. Let all institutes fill their own seats based on their rankings, fees, common entrance scores and candidate preferences.

Accreditation should essentially be done by a private organization and 100% objective based on preset criteria scores. Accreditation agency should not have a subjective decision criterion

Michael Lyubomirskiy: consultant, project manager, inventor, programmer at Lyubomirskiy Consulting, lyubomirskiy@gmail

Government accreditation is not good because it easily gets corrupted and subverted to serve the goals and ideologies of the government. By contrast, private accreditation by private bodies/associations - that's not bad. E.g. if I think that Association 1 is a gang of morons and Association 2 is a gang of thieves, maybe I will go to Association 3 which is not reputed. Or maybe I will start my own Association... Naturally, these various organizations would quickly develop their reputations, and you, as a parent or government official, would have some notion of what their accreditation means.

Incidentally, MIT is, imagine that, not accredited by anybody. Their engineering programs are accredited (otherwise graduates could not have called themselves engineers) but the university itself has no accreditation. Believe it or not, they do fine :-)
Oops, no, I was incorrect. "MIT is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, Inc., through its Commission on Institutions of Higher Education."

I distinctly recall reading 12 years ago about how MIT lacked some common accreditation and didn't care about it, but I cannot track down this tidbit anymore.

Rajesh Venkatesan: architect @HCL

I think the intention of an accreditation is good...but as everything else in India, implementation is a whole different nightmare...
I see this as no different from engineering colleges going like mad after getting deemed university status. The schools eventually will work out a strategy to get the accreditation whether they have the right infrastructure/staff/methodology or NOT.
My opinion is that even now some schools are flooded with applications for admission because they are good at what they should do - Education. I don’t see really Good Schools even caring about accreditation as they will get it de facto. It MIGHT serve as motivation for the other schools to better their state of affairs. That might be the only crucial point for me to favor accreditation. I think even if 20% of schools improve, I will support it.

Craig Eyermann: Instructor at University of Phoenix

Accreditation is not well correlated with the ability to achieve meaningful goals in education. For example, most of India's public school teachers are accredited, yet fail to adequately perform their jobs (see second link.)

The current move to accredit schools should be viewed as an attempt to suppress competition from private schools, where the instructors are incented to show up and teach (unlike India's public sector teachers). It's little more than a political power grab intended to take the pressure to perform off the public sector teachers by making it more difficult for private schools to be established to compete with them.


Wallace Jackson: Multimedia Producer and i3D Programmer for Acrobat 3D PDF, JavaFX, Mobile & Virtual Worlds

Any system is prone to corruption under the wrong sequence of events. Time will tell.


Al Macintyre: Computer Professional in IBM Midrange

Depending on what organization sets the standards, and manages the process, there is a potential to let parents know what schools are meeting what standards, so they can select best education for the students.

Ramesh Kumar: CTO & one of the Top 10 All time experts at Linkedin

Accreditation helps the schools which do not have a proper system in place. There are thousands of schools that are affiliated with some board or other and no one knows if the norms are properly implemented.

There are some schools which are more than 100 year old and have best practices in place. They know the importance of infrastructure and teaching practices.

Accreditation brings in some uniformity and the schools will be required to follow certain norms. And these will be reviewed at regular intervals.

Personally, I feel it is good as the accreditation requires minimum requirements for the school. The students, teachers and parents will be happy. However, managements may have to shell down more money for creating the infra required for accreditation. However, the problem is that the managements may try to recover the additional costs from students in one way or other!!

Ramesh
The Human Search Engine

Rayaprolu Sarma: Owner, SASU Academy Pvt. Ltd

First of all Accreditation of Schools will stop the commercialization of education. Following up the accreditation with tough criterion for setting up schools will allow quality and education to prosper rather than mere literacy.

Like many say India's problem is not unemployment, it is un-employability. The problem is not demand, the problem is supply. Accreditation will help in streamlining standards which will enable the best practices to reach out to the deserving people.

Accreditation will also allow the Govt. or Corporate sectors to involve in Global Citizenship and design methodologies of handling socio-economic insecurities which prevail not just in the students but also in the teaching population of the country.

Accreditation should allow the banning of schools which do not match the standards set, there by ensuring only quality to exist. A road map should be sought and enforced in to place by the Govt. to enable the good schools to become better and the better ones the best.

Accreditation if followed by stringent close down measures, will also bring to the fore, innovative low cost high quality interventions which will allow a better reach to the deserving candidates of the rural areas.

My take on the whole topic is that accreditation clubbed with action on low quality schools will be helpful. Lack of follow up action will render the accreditation useless.

Steve Taylor: Instructor at SAU Tech, Manager of Alien Productions, Freelance Video Producer

Obviously, in the US accreditation has failed. Anything that is controlled at the federal level will eventually fall prey to corruption and ultimately failure. Let the free market decide. If a school has graduates who are getting jobs upon graduation, that school will see an increase in students. If a school has graduates who are not getting jobs upon graduation, that school should see a decrease in students. All schools are not created equal. All instructors are not created equal. No mandate from the government (accreditation) will ever make them of equal value to society.

Christoph Knoess: Founder and President, Engaged Minds Inc.

I think the best analogy to accreditation is the government mandated annual inspection of motor vehicles. It sets some minimum standards, but says little about the best schools (or cars). As governments get deeper and deeper into financing education, it is inevitable (and good stewardship) that it will insist on minimum standards for all schools and institutions that receive government funding.

Schools and institutions of course see accreditation as an imposition and a constraint to their academic freedom and pursuit of their educational mission. However, the purpose of accreditation is to protect students and tax payers, not to serve educational institutions.