Accrediting Body May Lose Federal Recognition

CCE Said to be Concerned about Collateral Damage

In July of this year, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) terminated the City College of San Francisco’s (CCSF) accreditation effective July 31, 2014 for not following certain federal rules. What followed is a massive response and complaints from a host of interested parties including the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) to the United States Department of Education (USDOE).  

The USDOE investigated based on the complaints and found that the commission did not comply with a handful of federal regulations including:

• The accrediting commission did not have enough academics on the CCSF evaluation team.
• A potential conflict of interest existed in the team’s inclusion of the spouse of the accrediting commission’s president.
• The accrediting commission did not provide “adequate due process” to CCSF when it characterized its complaints in a 2012 report as recommendations. “By using the term recommendation to mean both noncompliance with standards and areas for improvement,” the DOE letter reads, “the agency does not meet the regulatory requirement to provide a detailed written report that clearly identifies any deficiencies in the institution’s compliance with the agency’s standards.”
• The commission allowed CCSF to be out of compliance for more than two years.

Now, in December 2013, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) is about to defend itself before the same USDOE Advisory Committee – the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) - that the Council on Chiropractic Education (CCE) is also slated to sit before in an effort to convince NACIQI that the CCE has resolved the 40 + violations of Federal Recognition Criteria cited in a previous report.

Since City College has an enrollment of 90,000 or more students there is a great deal riding on the government hearing. There are reports that in addition to the concerns outlined by the Committee another issue is a failure to represent the community of interest. This is the same allegation made against the CCE back in December 2012.

However, the CCE never had to address this particular concern because the CCE lobbied the Assistant Secretary of Education and had this concerned removed by painting a picture of the groups that lodged over 4000 complaints to the USDOE against CCE as “fringe groups”.

The actions of the ACCJC and the government and the similarities between the concerns, are believed to have been the impetus behind the CCE recently reaching out to the International Chiropractors Association (ICA) to engage the ICA in discussions regarding ongoing Governance issues within the CCE. The dialogue apparently occurred through a small controlling faction of the Summit Group known as the Roundtable which is made up of the following groups:

The Federation of Chiropractic Licensing Boards (FCLB)
The National Board of Chiropractic Examiners (NBCE)
The International Chiropractors Association (ICA)
The Association of Chiropractic Colleges (ACC)
The Congress of Chiropractic State Associations (COCSA)
The American Chiropractic Association (ACA)
The Council on Chiropractic Education (CCE)

These controlling groups (minus the ICA) were believed to be part of the Chiropractic Cartel operating within the chiropractic profession and exerting a monopoly upon the accreditation and licensure functions of the profession.

The Chiropractic Cartel was first recognized by the USDOE’s NACIQI Committee.

As a result of the meetings between the ICA, CCE and the "Roundtable", the ICA has agreed to support CCE’s renewal of recognition by the USDOE during the upcoming hearing in December.   

Previous to the ICA joining with the Summit Group to endorse the CCE, the ICA had been part of the DaVinci Group, a coalition of over 70 chiropractic organizations which had joined together to protest the renewed recognition of the CCE and in written submissions to NACIQI had requested a deferral of recognition until remaining concerns had been addressed.

The ICA entered into the “arrangement” with CCE and the Summit Group without conferring with DaVinci which left most members of the DaVinci group shocked at such a betrayal. At this point it is felt that the ICA has undermined a perfect storm of events that might have left CCE with a shorter leash on which to operate and that more could have been done to protect the subluxation centered faction of the profession which has been struggling to remain viable in the face of overwhelming changes to accreditation criteria and governance concerns of the profession’s sole accreditation agency.