Are We Bona Fide?
Dealing with the issues of accountability:
To many parents, the Classical Christian School movement of the last 30 years seems somewhat “experimental” even though our avowed purpose is to recover the established and historical notions of education from the discard pile. Thus, on the one hand I have a smile on my face when folks ask some form of the title question – Are you bona fide or legit? – and yet on the other hand I do take the question seriously. This is for several reasons: A) I do wish to have the trust and confidence of our school’s parents, B) I do desire to see our school pursuing excellence and at its heart, that is at least half the question being asked (“Will you set my child in good stead with this program?”), and C) I do love the notion of accountability, of having an answer when asked about the mission and vision of our school. For those reasons, I will try to break the general question down into its constituent parts and address each in turn with the hope to summarize at the end with a positive, “yes,” to the overarching question of our “bona fide” nature.
What does it mean to be accredited and are you such? I pose the question this way because usually folks just ask, “Are you accredited?” and I am not sure if they understand what they are asking. They usually will be fine with a yes or no, but they know it’s an important question. The notion of accrediting is that of comparison. It is the attempt on the part of a school to demonstrate that they are “equal” to the programs of other schools. I certainly believe we are much more than equals, but the pursuit of accreditation is necessary for our school.
At the heart of accreditation is the production by a school of a “self-study.” This large document, often encompassing 1,000 pages or more, states in written form the vision, mission, strategies, policies, procedures, instructional programs, and demographics of the school. Once this document is made, usually after an intense two year project, the school is ready for their visit. Depending on the agency they are seeking to be accredited by (which is a good question in itself), they can expect from one to as many as ten “visitors” to schedule a tour and interviews at the school, usually over a three day period. At the end of that period the visiting team will produce an initial report stating the commendations and recommendations that they are making. During their visit the whole focus of the team is on answering the question, “Is this school what its self-study says it is?”
Some accrediting agencies have set criteria that a school must meet, but many only judge the school on the basis of its own self-study. If the school is what it said it was, then it is given status of accreditation. If it has fallen short or failed to meet its own standards, it is either given probationary status or denied any status. Usually an accredited school will expect to be revisited every five to ten years to ensure it is maintaining its status. That is why CCS wishes to seek accreditation through the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) agency as soon as our school reaches the minimum requirements, which will be a few years yet as we put our program in place. We are putting in place the necessary documents to generate our self-study even now.
Most folks inquire about accreditation for two reasons: A) they want to know that the school is a good school, and this offers some measure of objective affirmation, and B) they want their child to be able to attend the college of their choice and believe that accreditation will aid that desire. We have seen how “A” is accomplished by the process itself, if the school writes a self-study with high standards and vision/mission. “B” is addressed below so I will withhold from that until you get down to the question, “Will my student be able to enter university if they attend your school?”
What does it mean for teachers to be certified and are your teachers such? Currently, every state’s Education Department has a set of criteria for certifying whether a teacher is fit to teach for them or not. In most cases it boils down to having taken a prerequisite number of the right educational courses, passing some standardized tests, and continuing your education on a regular basis. It is founded on the notion that the best teachers are learners themselves. Certification is a good idea, but the practice today is in disrepute even among teachers in the public sector. Our school does not require its teachers to be certified. We do have some who are or who have been but have not spent the money to keep up something not required. As was mentioned above, the agency doing the certifying determines the legitimacy of the paper the certificate is printed upon. In future years we hope to see agencies in place that will certify our teachers according to the vision and mission of classical and Christian standards. Pray with us for such certification to be possible in the near future.
I would add that all our teachers receive a high level of training, engage in ongoing study, writing, and discussion about their craft, and are expected to maintain for themselves and their students excellent standards of academic progress. We firmly adhere to the notion that a teacher who stops learning is no longer truly a teacher.
Do you take any forms of standardized tests and what do they tell you? Our school administers the Stanford Achievement Tests to our Second through Eighth grade students on a yearly basis. Parents receive a test score sheet from these tests. We do find that many of the modern standard tests are seeking only to measure one aspect of learning: factual acquisition. We focus on developing the skills of a life-long learner and these are much harder to put into multiple choice tests. But we do carefully examine both the individual and grade wide results hoping to see trends in both student and class progress. We are usually scoring very high as a school (in the upper 80’s in percentile rankings) so we are mainly looking for disciplines that seem markedly behind our other progress. If, for instance (purely fictional), we saw that our students were scoring low in reading comprehension as a group, it would make us look into the possible causes and concerns such scores would indicate. We value these tests, but we do not teach toward them, pre-test our students, or evaluate our teachers solely upon the results of such testing.
Do you belong to any larger organizations and what authority do they have? What are the benefits to your school of such things? At the moment, CCS is a proud member of two educational organizations: the Association of Classical and Christian Schools (ACCS) and the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), both of which have websites. ACCS is valuable in helping us coordinate with other schools regarding our programs, helping us recruit new teachers, and providing us with resources for growing our school. ACSI provides some of those benefits and also gives us entrance into a number of regional activities for our students to compete academically. Their only authority is derived from the minimal requirements for membership, which include some basic fees and program requirements (ACCS for instance requires all member schools to have a Latin program).
How do you know you are accomplishing your lofty goals? Because we state clearly that we are seeking to cultivate Wisdom and Virtue in our students by means of contemplating Truth, Goodness, and Beauty through developing the skills of the Seven Liberal Arts in our students, we recognize that these goals are very tough to quantify. In the end, the best and perhaps only real answer is found in the lives of our students themselves. But we do have such things as curricular benchmarks, standardized testing, end of year exams, and the constant input from our parents to watch our progress as well.
Will my student be able to enter university if they attend your school? College is a very highly competitive entity these days. Due to the incredible cost of such a venture, many parents are no longer just worried about entrance, but gaining whatever scholarships and incentives that are available as well. In the modern age of public and private schools, as well as a huge group of home schooled kids, colleges are working to keep the skill levels of their students up. They are doing this in three major ways: A) college entrance scores (SAT, ACT, etc), B) student resumes, including co-curricular and para-school activities, especially in leadership roles, and C) interviews.
So let us examine each way and discuss the possibilities at CCS. At the moment, we are a grammar school, so all our “graduates” go on to other high schools before seeking to enter college. Even now, but especially when we have a full K-12 program, we will continue the trend of most classical Christian schools who have historically cultivated the skills necessary to shine in academic endeavor, including college entrance exams. Many CCE schools regularly place students in National Merit programs, honor societies, and the other means of accomplishing an “A” in academics. Our emphasis on character and developing the skills necessary for leadership include a focus on sending our students out into the community, so “B” should be addressed as well. And finally, when it comes to cultivating eloquence and excellent “interview” skills, our students shine because we have been focusing on such concerns as logic and rhetoric for years with them, both formally and throughout the instructional program. Our students should be greatly helped in entering the best universities by their preparation at our school.
In the end, the notion of trust is huge to the success of any school. Accountability is central to building such trust. Our school becomes clearer about its mission every day. With that clarity, it is easier to find ways to hold us accountable to that mission. Independent assessment of our mission is coming very quickly. At the heart of any good school are parents and faculty who are both aiming at the same targets and trusting each other to get there together. That is the essence of being bona fide, or having “good faith.”