Accreditor Can Certify New Institutions Once Again, Education Dept. Says

Washington — The Education Department restored the American Academy for Liberal Education’s full accreditation authority on Tuesday, granting it federal recognition for the next three years.

The academy, which serves a group of private, religiously affiliated liberal-arts colleges, has been unable to accredit new colleges since last July, when Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings withdrew its recognition at the advice of her National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. The existing accreditation of colleges was not affected by that action.

Naciqi, as the advisory panel is known, recommended last December that the secretary restore the academy’s right to accredit, but Ms. Spellings did not act on that recommendation until yesterday.

In a letter to the academy, known as the AALE, Ms. Spellings said she would grant the agency recognition for three years, rather than the five years requested by AALE, because she remained concerned that the AALE is not doing enough to monitor colleges’ efforts to measure student learning.

The AALE has been cited by Naciqi several times since 2001 for either not having clear standards for measuring student learning or not collecting and reviewing data on how its institutions measure such outcomes.

Ms. Spellings also ordered the AALE to submit two reports to the department demonstrating its “continued implementation of student achievement standards and monitoring mechanisms.” —Kelly Field