Is Accreditation the Most Important Factor When Choosing an Online School for Your Child?
The chipped rim of Lila’s coffee mug clinked against my kitchen table last April, her laptop propped open between a crumpled school flyer and a napkin covered in scribbled bullet points. Her 15-year-old son Jax had just left his public high school after a month of bullying over his after-school tide-pooling hobby, and they were deep in the rabbit hole of picking an online high school. “Every article I read says accreditation is the first thing to check,” she said, pointing to a tiny school that had popped up in her search for marine science electives. “This one only has state accreditation, not the fancy regional stuff everyone says you need. Is that a dealbreaker?”
I nodded, because I’d been in that exact spot three years earlier, when my niece Mia needed to switch to online school after her public school couldn’t accommodate her dyslexia. I’d made a color-coded spreadsheet, crossed off every school that didn’t have regional accreditation within the first 10 minutes of searching. I was convinced accreditation was the only thing that mattered, until Mia’s special ed teacher pulled me aside and showed me a small school that specialized in structured literacy for dyslexic kids. It was only 7 years old, still working through the regional accreditation process, but it was fully accredited by our state board of education, and every single teacher was trained in the specific reading program Mia needed.
Here’s what I’ve learned since then: accreditation matters, but it’s almost never the most important factor once you’ve ruled out the fake, unaccredited schools that are just diploma mills. Most people don’t realize that accreditation comes in a lot of flavors, and a lot of perfectly good newer or niche schools don’t check the “gold standard” box simply because the process is expensive, slow, and geared toward larger, more established institutions. Fake schools will make up their own accreditation bodies to sound legitimate, so the first step is super simple: spend two minutes searching for the school on the U.S. Department of Education’s database of accredited institutions. If it doesn’t show up there, walk away. That’s non-negotiable.
When we did that for Jax’s school, it popped right up, accredited through the California Department of Education, recognized by the DOE. The only red flag anyone could point to was that it didn’t have regional accreditation yet. But when we called the admissions office at Cal State Long Beach, the school Jax has wanted to attend since he was 12 and went on a field trip there, the admissions counselor told us they accept all state-accredited high school diplomas, no exceptions. If the school is recognized by the state your kid lives in, that’s enough for most in-state colleges, which is what 70% of high schoolers end up attending anyway.
Once you’ve confirmed the school is legitimately accredited, the most important factors are the things that actually impact your kid’s day to day. Does it have the elective your kid cares about that their old school cut? Does it have the specific support your kid needs for a learning difference, anxiety, or a disability that their current school can’t provide? What’s the average class size? How quickly do teachers get back to parents and kids? For Mia, the big regionally accredited online school she could have attended had one counselor for every 300 kids, and no specialized dyslexia training for teachers. The smaller, state-accredited one has one counselor for every 40 kids, and every teacher is trained in the Orton-Gillingham method she needs. Her reading grade went from a D to a B+ in one semester. That’s the thing that mattered, not the type of accreditation hanging on their digital wall.
Don’t get me wrong, there are cases where the type of accreditation does matter. If your kid is dead set on attending an Ivy League school or a private out-of-state college that’s super picky about accreditation, you’ll want to make sure your school has the regional accreditation most of those schools expect. If you’re paying for college credits through an online high school, you’ll want to confirm that the accreditation is accepted by the college you want to transfer those credits to. But that’s a specific case, not a one-size-fits-all rule that makes accreditation the most important factor for every family.
I’ve talked to so many parents who get stuck on accreditation, crossing off every school that doesn’t have the top-tier label, and end up settling for a big, generic online school that doesn’t meet their kid’s needs at all. It’s easy to treat accreditation like a shortcut, a box you can check to know you made the right choice. But education doesn’t work that way. What works for one kid won’t work for another, even if both schools have the same accreditation.
Jax started at his online school back in August. Last month, he texted me a photo of his first project: a 10-page report on ocean acidification’s impact on local tide pools, complete with photos he took on a recent trip with Lila. He’s presenting it at a youth environmental symposium next month, and he’s already talking to his online school teacher about helping him edit it for a statewide competition. Lila still has moments where she second-guesses herself, scrolling through parent forums at 10pm reading people argue about accreditation. I tell her what I tell everyone: if you’ve confirmed it’s a legitimate accredited school, and it fits your kid’s needs better than any other option you’ve found, that’s good enough. We don’t have to pick the school that checks every arbitrary box on a random blog list. We just have to pick the one that works for our kid. Right now, that’s enough for Jax, and that’s enough for Lila. We’ll see how college apps go next year, but for now, that’s all that matters.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Is Accreditation the Most Important Factor When Choosing an Online School for Your Child