Assessing the assessors: A study of the standards documents of the six regional accrediting commissions of higher education in the United States

This study examines the documents published on the web sites of the six regional accrediting commissions whose role in higher education is to establish and assess the standards of institutions of higher learning. Accreditation is a form of assessment that establishes the legitimacy of the institution being assess, but also requires that the agency itself be granted the necessary legitimacy to carry out its practices. Accrediting agencies may be legitimized by both the public and the government stakeholders for a variety of reasons, but the educator in a higher institution of learning is a stakeholder that may or may not grant legitimacy to accreditation on theoretical and epistemological grounds. Stakeholders not only differ in basic beliefs about the nature of knowledge and how knowledge is acquired, but also in beliefs about how learning is assessed. This study is a textual analysis of the rhetorical structures of the documents of the six regional accrediting commissions. The study is from a viewpoint of an educator who intends to discover the extent the underlying beliefs about knowledge expressed in these documents may or may not support or conflict with contemporary views as articulated in the field of English studies, particularly the research and theories that form the basis for the assessment of writing.