As first reported by POLITICO at approximately 8:15 yesterday evening, the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia determined that “The Obama Education Department ‘procedurally erred by failing to consider various categories of relevant evidence’ about the ACICS (petition for re-recognition), U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton ruled.”
Based upon this ruling, and the successful efforts by ACICS and their counsel, the decision remands the Obama Administration decision back to the Trump Administration and Secretary DeVos who will be responsible for reviewing evidence the Court and Judge Walton asserts was not given its proper consideration during the previous review process and therefore led to a potentially inaccurate determination that ACICS would be unable to develop and implement revisions to their processes, polices, and procedures required to comply within one year. Judge Walton concluded,
“The Court concludes that the Secretary (former Secretary of Education John B. King, Jr.)violated the APA (Administrative Procedures Act) by failing to consider the Accrediting Council’s Part II submission and evidence of its placement verification and data integrity programs and procedures, and finds that the proper remedy for these violations is to remand this case to the Secretary (current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos) for consideration of this evidence.”
At this time CSPEN, as well as the rest of the community, are in the process of attempting to review the 66-page ruling, are discussing the significant implications of the most recent FAVORABLE turn of events in the wake of final decisions made by House and Senate leadership* not to include an extension for former ACICS-accredited institutions and the accrediting agencies they seek to align themselves with going forward to complete the accreditation process by June 12, 2018, and will be providing additional information once we have had time to circle back with our contacts on Capitol Hill, within the Department of Education, and our community.
While nothing is yet certain at this point, we believe that Judge Walton’s ruling, at a minimum, could require the Department and Secretary DeVos to:
- Immediately place the original December 12, 2016 notice to institutions on hold, stopping the clock on the pending June 12, 2018 deadline for institutions and their accrediting agencies to complete the process of converting to another accrediting agency;
- Evaluate the Accrediting Council’s Part II submission and evidence provided of its placement verification and data entry programs and procedures to determine if ACICS should have received, or possibly will now be granted, a year to show their ability to take the corrective actions required to achieve full compliance; and/or
- Determine how the Court’s ruling impacts the pending petition and the upcoming May 22-24 National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) Meeting.
More to come…but this is most certainly welcome news for our community!
* Note: In this week’s earlier update we stated, inaccurately, that the Omnibus bill contained no riders. Words matter, and that was how the outcome was characterized to us by key House and Senate staff. What we CSPEN, and I (Tom Netting), failed to understand, was that the staff were attempting to indicate that ALL OF THE CONTROVERSIAL RIDERS that were being considered along with DACA and the southern boarder wall were stripped in order to obtain a compromise. There are, in fact, a number of riders contained within the Omnibus. My apologies for the confusion and the inaccurate reporting. All of us here at CSPEN do our best to be as timely and accurate as possible, but we are not perfect – as our typos will surely attest – but we do our best and when we make a mistake we own it.
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