Talk:American Academy for Liberal Education

Recognition of Accrediting Agencies
In the United States it is the Secretary (not the Department) of Education that has the statutory obligation to publish a list of recognized accrediting agencies. One often hears of recognition by the Department, but this is strictly speaking inaccurate: http://www2.ed.gov/admins/finaid/accred/accreditation_pg3.html#Recognition http://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/06/us/a-new-group-will-accredit-some-colleges.html

For this reason I have changed "Department" to "Secretary" in a few places. Tillander 03:55, 6 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Although media reports made it appear that Margaret Spellings took a personal role in respect to recognition of AALE, it doesn't seem valid to describe recognition of accreditors as a personal function of the Secretary. Many U.S. government duties and functions are statutorily assigned to the President or a Cabinet secretary, but are in fact delegated to and carried out by others, and are normally described as functions of an organization, not as acts of the President or Secretary. All of the other Wikipedia articles that touch on the role of the federal government in accreditation describe recognition as a function of the Department of Education. (For example, see Higher education accreditation, Higher education accreditation in the United States, Regional accreditation, and List of recognized higher education accreditation organizations.) Why should this particular article uniquely suggest that the Secretary of Education personally recognizes accreditors? --Orlady (talk) 05:35, 6 March 2013 (UTC)


 * You make some good points, and I confess I'm now unsure what to think. The legislation is here and here, and it was on this that I based my comments, but as you say it is not at all uncommon to speak of recognition as a departmental function. I suppose it all depends on exactly what one means by "a personal role" or "personally recognizes". You must surely be right that the actual work isn't done by Arne Duncan, and yet I can't help but think that it would be desirable in some way for the relevant Wikipedia articles to at least make reference to how things are at the level of the law while perhaps also acknowledging that at an operational level these functions might in practice be more accurately described as departmental. But I am as I say now in some doubt about this. Tillander 08:21, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

Ability of AALE to accredit institutions and programs
All the Secretary of State is doing when he or she extends recognition to an accrediting agency is, essentially, saying that institutional accreditation by this or that agency can be the basis for federal funding: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/23/aale It's not as though the federal government is licensing accreditors. I'll try to make this point clearer in the article. Tillander 04:35, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
 * It seems to me that that's a bit of an oversimplification, as a number of states have made accreditation by a recognized accreditor a condition for state approval or licensing of degree-granting higher education institutions. Regardless, this article would not be the place for a lengthy exposition on the significance (or lack thereof) of accreditation, since Wikipedia has a number of focused articles on accreditation that can be hyperlinked. (See the list I posted above.) --Orlady (talk) 05:42, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I may be mistaken (and I'll look into this more when I have the time), but my impression is that it's the reverse: it is state approval or licensing that is typically a condition for accreditation. In any case I agree that this article is not the place to go into this, except to the (probably rather limited) extent that it might be needed to make the AALE's situation clear. Tillander 08:41, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

Past tense
I notice that the Accreditation section in the article is written in the past tense. Are they really entirely out of business? They still have a list on their website of places they accredit, and at least for the ones outside the U.S. the issue with the Department of Education is presumably irrelevant, as I should think it also is with respect to institutions of secondary education. Even for the post-secondary institutions in the U.S. it seems to me that it should be clear that it's not that they are no longer accrediting but rather that AALE is no longer recognized by the Secretary/Department of Education. Accreditation had a long history in the U.S. before the federal government ever became involved in it, and as far as I know there's nothing in the law to stop the AALE from continuing its activities. Whether others will think those activities (especially institutional accreditation) are of any consequence in the absence of federal recognition is of course another question. Tillander 09:04, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I've edited that section to correct the verb tenses. As you note, lack of Department of Education recognition did not mean that the AALE stopped doing accreditation. The reference citations in the section still refer to versions of the AALE website as it existed several years ago, which might lead a person to think they were out of date. However, the current website still appears to support the content. --Orlady (talk) 13:31, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

Email conversations with AALE officials
For the record, I have had email contact with officials of the AALE who were concerned about misrepresentations in the article. I've made some changes to the article that they requested, including correcting the verb tenses noted above. Also, I removed a statement that indicated that AALE was lax in standards for student learning. I have not recently seen the full text of the Chronicle of Higher Education article that was cited in support of that statement, but (1) the portion of that article that I can see does not support it and (2) the statement was inconsistent with information reported by other sources. I've made other edits to the article that were not requested by the AALE officials, but were based on sourced information I found while looking into the AALE's history and current status.

I've also been informed that Charles Butterworth is now the president (not just acting president) of the AALE, but I've not changed the article text yet because I've not seen this documented by a published source. --Orlady (talk) 13:46, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * I have a question about one of the external links. With link #4, why is it relevant to this topic and what does it contribute to the article? Megan.e.thompson (talk) 17:03, 22 September 2018 (UTC)