The Office for Catholic Schools in the Archdiocese of Chicago has always believed that its institutions offer excellent educational opportunities to their students. Now they are going to have to prove it, said Dominican Sister Mary Paul McCaughey, superintendent of Catholic schools. The office announced in August that it is starting a two-year process to become accredited by AdvancED, the world’s largest educational accrediting agency. Such accreditation is a new step for most of the Catholic elementary schools in the archdiocese, which generally have been accredited through an internal process. All the elementary schools are currently recognized by the State of Illinois and will continue to participate in that separate process. “I think what we’re going to get back out of this is a validation, and also we should probably get some very clear data of things we need to improve on,” Sister Mary Paul said. “Maybe we’ll get a surprise when we put out these questionnaires to our boards and our parents and our kids and our teachers. Maybe we’ll find something we discover we have to do.” The accreditation standards for Catholic schools also will take into account the recently published National Standards and Benchmarks for Effective Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools, Sister Mary Paul said. “The beauty of it is that it is an online program that measures the same areas we had been measuring,” Sister Mary Paul said. “It measures Catholicity, academics, governance, leadership and kind of a stability or finance area. “There will be deep dive analysis of test scores and curriculum, a deep dive analysis of the quality and satisfaction that people have, so there will be a stakeholder survey that has to go out.” Participating in an externally vetted system- wide accreditation process is part of the Strategic Plan for Catholic Schools (2013-2016). While all schools will participate and submit data, a team of auditors from outside the area will visit randomly selected schools as well as the Office for Catholic Schools, she said. “It works well because everybody’s driven at the same time to look at the same things, so the school profile, the data analysis of the kids’ test scores, how well are we meeting the metrics that we put out there for ourselves and those kind of things,” Sister Mary Paul said. “It’s something we can say to grantors and to stakeholders, we meet this national accreditation that’s also aligned with Catholic standards. It’s quite a massive project.” The archdiocese-wide accreditation does not mean that the archdiocese is trying to homogenize or take over local schools, she said. “We are not a school system, we are a system of schools,” Sister Mary Paul said. “There are best practices that should drive each site, even though each site is unique in its value proposition, in its community, in a lot of things that surround it. There’s just a feel for a place. There’s vanilla and chocolate and strawberry and mint chip in the Archdiocese of Chicago schools. You can get a variety of angles and gifts and value propositions. On the other hand, all of these things we just mentioned for AdvancED are basic to every school, so they may express it differently, but there are best practices and they should be adopted.”