Accreditation and Liberty

Every argument for freedom eventually runs into the same practical objection. If anyone can start a school, a land trust, a clinic, or a cooperative, how is anyone supposed to know which ones are any good? A parent choosing a school for a five-year-old can't sit in on a year of classes first. A family placing a conservation easement on its ranch is trusting an organization to enforce it for longer than anyone alive. A donor giving to a housing trust has no way to inspect its books. Freedom produces variety, and variety makes it harder to know what you're getting.

The usual answer is licensing. The state decides who may operate, sets the standards, and inspects. That does create trust of a kind, but at a cost this collection of essays keeps returning to. A license is permission, and whoever grants permission also decides what the thing is allowed to be. Government Schooling Is Unacceptable followed how this works with school vouchers: a private school that takes public money accepts, sooner or later, the state's standards, tests, and reporting, and becomes a branch of the system it was meant to be an alternative to.

There's another way to build trust, older than most licensing regimes and more compatible with liberty: private accreditation. An independent body of peers sets public standards. Institutions apply voluntarily, are examined, and earn a mark others can rely on. They can also lose it. This essay argues that accreditation is a critical part of any social liberty structure, maybe the most overlooked one, and that what matters most is getting its characteristics right.

Three claims about trust

The problem fits the three-claim form this collection uses for hard questions.

A free society produces variety. If people can found schools, trusts, and associations without permission, they'll found very different ones, with different missions, methods, and quality.

People need to know whom to trust. Parents, landowners, donors, and members have to make decisions about institutions they can't fully inspect, often with a great deal at stake.

The state shouldn't be the one deciding. Permission from the state comes with the state's idea of what the institution should be, and it tends to flatten the variety the first claim promised.

The first two seem to require giving up the third. If people need trust and freedom makes trust hard, the state looks like the natural guarantor.

Accreditation resolves this. Trust doesn't have to come from permission. It can come from a reputation, granted by people who know the work, sought voluntarily, and backed by an examination anyone can understand. The institution is still free to exist without the mark. It just has to explain to the people it serves why it doesn't have one.

Land trusts: a field that holds itself to account

The clearest working example is the one in Held in Trust. Land trusts hold millions of acres and easements meant to last forever, on behalf of landowners and the public. That's a great deal of trust to place in private nonprofits, and the field knew it. In the early 2000s, abuses of conservation-easement tax deductions drew scrutiny from Congress and the IRS. The land trust community's answer wasn't to ask for a regulator. It built one of its own kind: the Land Trust Accreditation Commission, an independent body that grants a seal to land trusts meeting the field's published Standards and Practices.

The commission's process shows what accreditation can look like when it's done seriously. A land trust applies voluntarily and documents its governance, finances, land and easement transactions, and stewardship: how it monitors its easements, how it would defend them, and whether it has the money set aside to do so permanently. The public is invited to comment. Accreditation isn't permanent. It's renewed every five years, extending to seven after the third renewal, with a fresh review each time. There are now 480 accredited land trusts in 46 states and territories, and they hold about 81 percent of the land and easements held by all land trusts. Landowners, donors, and public partners have learned to look for the seal, so it has real value, and nobody is forced to seek it.

The point isn't that the commission is perfect. It's that a voluntary field, facing a real problem of trust, solved it with a body of peers and a public standard instead of a permit.

Schools: accrediting the practice, not the subjects

Private schools already have accreditors. In California, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges accredits about 5,500 schools, public, independent, religious, and charter alike, through self-study and visits by teams of educators. That's a voluntary, peer-based system, and it's better than a state license. But over time most school accreditation has drifted toward measuring every school against the government school's idea of a school: the standard subjects, the standard sequence, the standard outcomes. A school that wants to be different gets judged by how closely it resembles the one it's an alternative to.

A social liberty accreditation would ask a different question: does this school practice what it promotes?

Every school promises something. A Montessori school promises that children will choose their own work and learn at their own pace. A democratic school promises that students will help govern the school. A classical school promises that students will read the great books, not summaries of them. A religious school promises a community that lives its faith. A school that advertises critical thinking promises that its students may question the school itself. A forest school promises that children will spend their days outdoors. These are very different promises, and a free society should have room for all of them.

The accreditor's job isn't to decide which promise is best. It's to check whether each school keeps its own. Do the Montessori children actually choose their work, or are they assigned it with Montessori furniture in the room? Does the democratic school's student meeting decide anything that matters? Does the classical school read the books? When a student at the critical-thinking school questions a school rule, what happens? An accreditor can answer those questions with a site visit, interviews, and a look at how the school's days are really spent. The answers say far more to a parent than a test score.

This matters because, as Ivan Illich argued, a school's most powerful lessons are the ones it teaches by how it operates, not by what it says. A school that promotes independence while running on obedience teaches obedience. A school that promotes community while sorting children against each other teaches competition. Accrediting the practice keeps the hidden curriculum honest with the visible one. And it lets real variety survive, because each school is measured against its own mission, not against the state's.

Assessment: accrediting the people who value land

The third case is less obvious, and it may matter most to a Georgist. A land value tax is only as good as its assessment. Three Blind Assessors argued that the fairness of a property tax is decided less by its rate than by how the land gets valued, and that assessment failures are quiet. In Cook County and across much of the country, owners of cheap homes have been assessed at a higher share of their value than owners of expensive ones, and no one voted for it. A community that collects the rent of land has to trust the number the rent is charged on.

That number has always come from the state: a county assessor, elected or appointed, answering to the same government that spends the revenue. But the profession already grades itself without the state's help. The International Association of Assessing Officers, a professional association, publishes standards for how close assessments should come to actual sale prices, and for whether cheap and expensive homes are assessed at the same fraction of their value. Those tests, the ratio studies, can be run by anyone with the sales data. They're an accreditation standard waiting to be used as one.

A social liberty arrangement would separate the assessor from the treasury. The community collects the land rent, but the valuation is done, or at least checked, by assessors accredited by an independent body. Their accreditation depends on passing the ratio studies in public, every year, with the models and data open for anyone to rerun. An assessor whose values drift, or who quietly overcharges modest homes, loses the seal, and the community can hire another. The owner gets something no county assessor's office now offers: an independent, published judgment of whether the number on the bill is fair.

Accreditation is itself an assessment, and it faces the same problem the blind assessors did. Each way of judging an institution touches one part of it. A self-study shows what the school or trust says about itself. A site visit shows a few days of practice. Outcome numbers show results without the reasons. Testimony from parents, landowners, or members shows what it's like to depend on the place. Each is partial, and each, taken alone, can be gamed or misread. A good accreditor does what a good assessor does: it reconciles several methods into one judgment, says how it reached it, and lets the institution argue back. It also watches for its own version of regressivity. An accreditation process expensive enough that only large, well-funded schools and trusts can afford it charges the small ones more for the same seal. That's the Cook County mistake made by a private body, and it's just as quiet.

Social liberty is a style of living

That's why accreditation matters more to social liberty than to most political philosophies. Social liberty isn't only a platform of policies to be enacted. It's a style of living: people forming voluntary associations, governing the things close to them, caring for land and each other, and leaving one another free to do it differently. It lives in schools, trusts, cooperatives, congregations, mutual-aid groups, and neighborhood associations far more than in statutes.

A style of living can't be legislated, and it can't be verified by a license. It can only be practiced, and someone who wants to join or rely on an institution needs a way to tell whether the practice is real. A school can call itself free, a trust can call itself a steward, and a cooperative can call itself democratic. Accreditation is how a community of practice says to outsiders: we've looked, and this one really does what it says.

So the question for social liberty isn't only whether accreditation exists, but what kind. The characteristics matter more than the seal.

What good accreditation looks like

These are the characteristics that make accreditation a support for liberty instead of a substitute for licensing.

Voluntary. No institution should be required to seek it. The mark earns its value from the people who choose to look for it, and an unaccredited school or trust is free to make its case some other way.

Mission-relative. The standard is the institution's own stated purpose, judged by whether it practices it. Common requirements should be limited to what every institution of the type owes the people who depend on it: honest finances, sound governance, safety, and keeping its promises.

Peer-based. The reviewers are practitioners who know the work: teachers judging schools, land stewards judging land trusts. They understand what good practice looks like from the inside in a way an inspector applying a checklist can't.

Public. The standards are published, the process is known, the public can comment, and the result is visible. Trust built in secret isn't trust.

Renewed and revocable. A seal earned once and held forever stops meaning anything. Periodic review, and the real possibility of losing accreditation, keep it tied to current practice.

About practice, not paperwork. Visits, interviews, and observation matter more than documents. The question is what actually happens on a Tuesday afternoon, not what the policy binder says.

Affordable to the small. The process should cost a one-room school or a volunteer land trust no more, relative to its size, than it costs a large one. Otherwise the seal measures budgets, not practice.

Plural. More than one accreditor should be able to operate in a field, so a single body can't impose one idea of a good school or a good trust on everyone. Competing accreditors can specialize, and their reputations are on the line too.

Independent of the state and the money. This is the one most easily lost. American higher education shows how. Beginning with veterans' benefits after the Korean War, federal aid became tied to approval by federally recognized accreditors. Over the decades, accreditors became gatekeepers for billions in federal money, and with that came federal pressure on what they require. An accreditor that controls access to government funds stops being a reputation and becomes a license again. Social liberty accreditation should keep its distance from both the state and any single funder, or it will end up serving them.

Seals worth seeking

Freedom doesn't have to mean that nobody knows whom to trust, and it doesn't have to mean asking the state for permission. Between those, people have long built their own ways of vouching for one another: guilds, peer review, independent testing labs, religious certification, and in our own time, the accreditation of land trusts. These work because they're earned, voluntary, and public, and because the people granting them know the work.

Social liberty depends on that kind of trust more than most philosophies, because it lives in so many small, different, voluntary institutions. If those institutions are going to be trusted without being licensed, they need accreditation that asks the right question. The question isn't whether a school looks like every other school, or whether a trust does what an agency would do. It's whether each one practices what it promotes.

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A note on how this piece was written: the subject, the questions it asks, and the positions it takes are mine. Much of the research, the examples, and the sentences were drafted by an AI model working from that direction, and then edited by hand. I'd rather say that plainly than have a reader guess at it.