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Education

When programs with a treatment or personal growth emphasis offer schooling, we generally expect educational services to be basic, but responsive to the needs of the students.  We do expect what is done to be done competently and appropriately.  We do expect schools deliver what they promise.  We expect these schools and programs to examine the educational needs of students before admitting them and decline to admit students whose needs cannot be met. 

We prefer that schools be regionally accredited, although we don't quarrel when regional accreditation is not obtained if the program is clear about that in their promotion.  However, we frankly do not have confidence in most regional accreditation organizations being rigorous in holding schools in these programs to the letter of the law.  If a program identifies its school component as meeting regional accreditation standards we expect all published standards to be met whether or not the accrediting agency holds the school accountable for those standards.

We further expect that within the education staff of the programs there is internal recognition of the accreditation standards and customary expectations of schools and educators and effective self monitoring apart from the need for non-educators to intervene to maintain those standards and pursue aggressively the resources to meet such standards. 

When the highest ranking managers and leaders within the education component of a program do not lead in this manner and/or need to be redirected by the non-educator managers to meet that standard, then we do not view those ranking managers within the school as competent to hold those positions and call for their replacement by better qualified educators. 

We recognize and respect that some programs have a school that is actually a branch of another school which holds licensing and/or accreditation to operate a school.  While we do not object to those arrangements, we do not see them as justification for allowing the program not to have staff on their own site that would be required to meet the standard called for in the previous two paragraphs, and for the "branch" to meet accreditation standards based on the resources on its campus.  At the risk of being redundant, we don't object to a program providing educational services by having a branch campus of another school, but if it represents its school to hold certain credentials, then we expect it to meet the standards that qualify the school to hold that credential, on its campus, and not need to refer to resources on another campus to demonstrate that it qualifies for the credential at issue.