U.S. Education Department’s Official on Accreditation Leaves Job
According to a Jan. 29, 2007 article titled “U.S. Accreditation Official Out of a Job” written by Doug Lederman that appeared in Inside Higher Ed, John W. Barth, the director of accreditation and state liaison at the Department of Education, has transferred to a position at the Federal Student Aid Ombudsman’s office. The article said, “The department’s official stance, through a spokeswoman, was only this terse statement: ‘John Barth has accepted a new position at FSA.’ Another department official framed Barth’s decision as routine and his choice, but the available evidence overwhelmingly suggests otherwise.”
Although the move looks routine it has raised suspicions because of its timing and its abruptness. Lederman reported, “Barth’s shift comes in the wake of some publicly visible conflict over the department’s approach to accreditation. In the wake of the report of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, the department’s top officials have pushed aggressively on a range of fronts to carry out its recommendations, particularly those that would require colleges to better measure and report how much their students learn.
Department officials have focused significant attention on accreditation as a wedge for doing that, because changes in accrediting standards — some of which department leaders believe can be accomplished without the need for new laws or rules (and therefore without the approval of Congress) — have the potential to directly influence hundreds or thousands of colleges.”
National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity
The Department of education holds a semiannual meeting “that reviews and regulates accrediting agencies,” the article said. “In the months before each meeting, the Education Department’s staff prepares a report on each accrediting group up for review, and the advisory panel uses those reports as the starting point for its own deliberations about whether to renew the group’s authority to operate. As the top career staff person (which in Washington parlance means not a political appointee) on accreditation issues, Barth oversaw those staff reviews,” Lederman reported.
More interesting, the article said that, “three accrediting agencies discovered that their staff reports had been rewritten to add new issues or significantly change the findings against them, all in ways that left them in hot water. In two cases, involving the Western Association of Schools and Colleges and the American Academy of Liberal Education, the agencies were confronted with heightened requirements about how they measure student learning; in the other, the American Bar Association’s accrediting arm was told that it faced punishment if it did not alter a standard it used to ensure racial and ethnic diversity among law school student bodies.”
Changes in the Political Climate
There really is no hard evidence as to why Barth was transferred to a new position. However, with so many changes in Washington it may be due to new political pressures. Lederman reported, “The suddenness of his departure — and the fact that it came about so quietly — is widely seen as evidence that the department’s political leaders are moving as aggressively as they can, through any and all avenues available to them, to bring about the changes they want in accreditation, and in higher education generally.
‘Any administration has the legal authority to move a senior civil servant from one job to another,’ said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education. ‘What causes concern in this case is the fear that someone who was tough but fair will be replaced with someone who is tough and unfair.’”
The article reported that Hartle said, “The simultaneity of this change coupled with the initiation of negotiated rulemaking before Congress has acted on reauthorization suggests that the department is very anxious to impose a new agenda on accrediting agencies.”
Accreditation ensures that institutions of higher education meet acceptable levels of quality. There are agencies that oversee accreditation and those agencies are then overseen by the U.S. Department of Education. Changes in accreditation could affect the types of federal loans for which colleges qualify, especially online institutions; therefore it is important to check a college’s accreditation before enrolling.
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