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Accreditation Tells You a School Is Capable. It Never Tells You Whether It's Ready, and With AI in the Building That Gap Is Now Everything.
Not the lightest choice, I know. But school quality is my work, and it's the thing I keep circling back to, so it was always going to end up in the pile.
Summer is my reflective time. Startup life doesn't leave much room for reading properly, so this is the stretch of the year when I finally get to sit with something long enough to argue with it.
Here's what stayed with me.
Everyone is fine
What I remember from accreditation, back when I was inside a school, is the binders. A season of tidying up. A lot of evidence gathered for someone else's benefit. And a quiet collective confidence that we were going to be fine.
We were fine. Everyone is fine.
To be fair, schools can't just shrug this off. Accreditation is what makes the diploma count, what lets credits transfer, what colleges look for when your students apply. Opting out isn't really on the table.
Which is rather the problem. Everyone needs it, so almost everyone gets it. More than 90% of schools that seek accreditation receive it. Fewer than 2% land on probation.
So the badge and the quality are two different things. Having one has never meant having the other. I suspected that at the time and felt faintly guilty for thinking it, as though I was being cynical. I wasn't. It's just true, and the people who run the system are the ones who put the numbers in print.
The convenient answer
The authors know exactly what those numbers imply, and they don't dodge it. Their answer is that the value was never the badge. It's the self-study, the long stretch a school spends looking honestly at its own evidence while peers ask the awkward questions. You get out of it only what you put into it.
I believe that. I've also seen what it means in practice.
The schools with slack get the most out of it. The ones drowning produce the binders. "Put more in" is good advice and a slightly convenient answer. If a system has almost no consequences, asking schools to supply the motivation themselves isn't really a design. It's a hope.
That's my main quarrel with the book, and I offer it as a quarrel, not a dismissal. They are describing the mechanism honestly. I just think the mechanism leans hardest on the schools least able to carry it.
The chapter that ruined a perfectly good afternoon
The chapter I keep chewing on is by Cristian Talbot, who runs the Middle States Association. It is a startlingly honest thing to publish about your own industry.
His argument, roughly: accreditation is good at raising the floor. Minimum standards, drawn from research-backed practice, sensibly applied. But it has no way of raising the ceiling. It has no mechanism for a school chasing something that doesn't have an evidence base yet, because there are no best practices to point at and few peers qualified to judge. And on a five to ten year review cycle, it cannot keep pace with AI.
He calls the failure mode the integration trap. Bolt new technology onto old practice and nothing transforms. You just make the old thing faster.
I have watched this happen. Not as a theory. As a teacher handed a tool, later as the person deciding which tools a school should take on, and now from the side that builds them.
The pattern never changes. The tool arrives, it lands on whatever the school already does, and it faithfully speeds that up. Including the parts nobody wanted sped up. The dashboard automates a report nobody was reading. The AI marks faster, and the feedback still doesn't change what happens in the next lesson. We call it a rollout. Mostly it's a mirror.
Talbot quotes Philippa Hardman on where this goes with AI, and she's blunt about it: it will accelerate, automate and scale traditional, broken methods of instruction.
I could not agree more. It isn't about speed, and it never was. It's about being mindful and meaningful. Faster is just more of whatever you already were.
Then he reaches for E.O. Wilson, and I haven't been able to shake it since. Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, god-like technologies.
Wilson's point is that the three parts of us move at wildly different speeds. Our instincts are ancient and haven't budged. Our institutions are slow and hierarchical, built for a world that no longer exists. Our technology is extraordinarily powerful and getting faster by the month. The danger lives in the mismatch. We keep building things our institutions cannot govern.
That is a school, more or less exactly. Human beings, inside a structure that hasn't fundamentally changed in a century, now holding a technology none of us can keep pace with. And accreditation, the thing meant to sit in judgement over all of it, runs on a five to ten year cycle.
The quiet admission
The part I respect most is easy to miss.
There is barely any research on whether K-12 accreditation improves anything at all. Not thin research. Barely any. The authors say it outright. They note they had to lean on their own experience and their colleagues to write the history, because so little exists. And then they ask the field for more.
Sit with that for a moment. A process nearly every school goes through, a year of work each cycle, and almost no evidence about whether it does what it says on the tin. The people running it are the ones telling you.
I don't read that as a scandal. I read it as unusual integrity, and as an open invitation. Most industries bury this. These two published it and asked for help.
The sentence I'd add
If I could add one line to the book, it would be this.
The self-study asks whether a school is capable. It never asks whether it's ready. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where most of the tools I've watched fail actually died.
Capable is a general property of the school. Are the teachers qualified, is the curriculum sound, is leadership competent, does it meet the standards. That's what a self-study measures, and it's a judgment about the school as a whole, on a five to ten year horizon.
Ready is specific, relational, and time-bound. Ready for what, and ready right now. It isn't a property of the school alone. It's a property of the fit between the school and the particular thing arriving.
Which is why a very capable school can be completely unready. Picture a good one, accredited without fuss. An AI marking tool arrives. Teachers have no free period in which to learn it, the network sags every afternoon, it doesn't talk to the system they already run, and the deputy who championed it leaves in July. The tool dies quietly and everyone agrees it was a bad tool. It wasn't. The school was capable. It was not ready, and nobody had a way of knowing that in advance.
I didn't arrive at that from the outside. In the classroom, and later in the seat where I decided what we would adopt, nobody ever asked me whether we were ready. They asked whether the tool was good. It was often a fine tool. We were often not ready. There was no word for that, so we called it a failed rollout and moved on.
It's why I ended up building on the other side of the table. Not because schools need more software, they don't. And not because they need to get things done faster, which is the trap Talbot is warning about. But because that question kept going unasked, and it turns out to be the one that decides everything else. It's the question Novana exists to ask, and to keep asking.
There's a tension in that I should name honestly. Novana is a startup. We move fast and we execute relentlessly, because that is what building something new demands of us.
But I have never thought schools should run that way, and I have no interest in turning them into startups. They shouldn't be. A school cannot afford to be wrong on Tuesday and fix it by Friday, and it shouldn't have to. Its job is to be steady for the people inside it, most of whom are children, and steadiness is not a bug in the design. The speed belongs on our side of the table, not theirs. What a school should get from us isn't urgency. It's clarity, and the patience to do the unglamorous groundwork before anything gets switched on.
Readiness isn't a box you tick once, either. It moves. Staff turn over, budgets tighten, the network sags, the person who championed the thing leaves. A five to ten year cycle cannot see any of that, and was never built to.
Accreditation raises the floor, and the floor matters. Talbot is right that the ceiling needs a different instrument. I'd only add that the first step towards any ceiling is knowing, honestly and continuously, what ground you're standing on.
Who should read it
Heads of school and senior leaders. Read it for the self-study chapters and for Chapter 15, which is essentially a list of everything schools get wrong in the process and how to avoid it. If accreditation currently lives with one exhausted coordinator and a shared drive, this book will tell you, kindly, that you are wasting the most useful year you have.
Teachers and middle leaders who've survived a cycle. Read it to see the machine from above. It reframes a lot of what feels like pointless evidence-gathering, and it will give you language for the parts that genuinely are pointless.
Anyone who cares about school quality and is tired of proxies. This is a book about the difference between looking good and being good, written by people with every incentive to pretend there isn't one. They don't pretend.
People who build or sell for schools. Read it because you almost certainly do not understand what schools are actually held to, and you are making product decisions as though you do.
It is not a light read. It is a better book than it needed to be, and it is honest in places where it could easily have been smug.
I came out of it with more questions than I went in with, which is the best thing I can say about a summer's reading.
A thank you to Barry R. Groves and Marilyn S. George. They have spent their careers inside this system and could easily have written a defence of it. Instead they wrote something candid, self-critical, and generous enough to hand the field its own unanswered questions. That is a harder book to write, and a far more useful one to read. Thank you for it.
Connecting the Dots of Accreditation: Leadership, Coherence, and Continuous Improvement, by Barry R. Groves and Marilyn S. George.