Your child's school has just been accredited and the staff is basking in the glow. Is the feeling of accomplishment well deserved? Has the school passed some objective measure of excellence? Conversely, if your school is not accredited, does it mean that it's a bad school?

Contrary to common lore, accreditation is not synonymous with educational excellence. It has more to do with a school's administrative processes and deployment of resources than with educational outcomes for students,. High schools at which more that 90 percent of the students test at barely functional in reading, writing, and mathematics manage to stay accredited.

Most local educators view accreditation by one of the nation's six regional accrediting bodies as a status symbol. Certainly most of the public schools in the country are more than willing to fork over the money for membership in the regional accrediting body and submit to the lengthy and costly evaluation required for accreditation.

About 19,000 - or about 95 percent - of the nation's public high schools, and one-sixth of the elementary and middle schools, are accredited by the regional associations such as the New England Association of Schools and Colleges or the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools. Private and religious schools also often seek accreditation from a regional body as a means of obtaining licensure from states.

With so many schools accredited, clearly the pressure is on all schools to fall in line. Fear plays some role in their decision. One of the arguments the accrediting agencies make for their stamp of approval is that without it schools jeopardize their graduates' college prospects. Or do they?

A high school's accreditation "or lack of it" is a "non-issue" when it comes to evaluating student applications at Middlebury College, a highly selective school in Vermont, according to a university spokesman. Schools that haven't belonged to a regional accrediting association for decades continue to see top graduates accepted at such esteeemed institutions as the University of Pennsylvania, the College of William and Mary and Duke University.

Over the years, as the accrediting associations have expanded their reach, they have focused less on the quality of teaching and learning, and more on facilities, equipment and policies of the schools seeking accreditation. A visiting team of inspectors is more likely to comment on the condition of fire extinguishers or how cleaning supplies are stored than on whether a school has a coherent math curriculum.

As a result, the influence of accrediting associations among national education reformers and state policymakers has waned, especially after the states began to establish more rigorous standards and assessments and, more recently, to do their own school evaluations, issuing school report cards based in large part upon how students performed on statewide test.

Typically, the accreditation process for a school begins with an exhaustive self-study by numerous committees drawn from school staff with some parental input. It culminates with a visit from an evaluation team that can last from several days to a week.

Many educators find the self-study a valuable process. "It was intensive, and we learned a great deal about our strengths," said an education counselor in the Home Instruction Department at the nationally-recognized, private Calvert School in Baltimore. "We examined every department, our curriculum, our communications with parents. The self-examination was a positive and worthwhile process." Calvert's courses are approved by the Maryland State Department of Education, the Commission on Elementary Schools division of the Middle States Association, and its home schooling curriculum has become the first to receive accreditation from the Commission on International and Transregional Accreditation.

A local school board member in Pennsylvania also makes the case that Middle States accreditation is both important and useful because it gives the school board an outside analysis of the district's financial and policy handling of its schools.

But he recognizes that the accreditation does not address issues of educational quality. "It's an administrative monitoring system and it has nothing to do with the educational quality of the school," said the West York Area School District board member. "It has nothing to do with the teachers' performance in the classroom. Our main mission is to educate children and the Middle States evaluation has nothing to do with that."

Further illustrating the gap between accreditation and educational quality, two inner-city high schools in Philadelphia accredited by the Middle States Association were deemed so bad a couple of years ago that they were "reconstituted" with a whole new staff. Both Audenreid and Olney High Schools continue to struggle. As recently as 1998, more than 90 percent of students at both schools tested below the basic (lowest) level in all subjects on the SAT-9 (Stanford Achievement Test-Ninth Version).

Prodded by all the activity in the states around standards, assessments and school report cards, the regional accrediting bodies have recognized that to justify their continued existence they must reinvent themselves and target academic issues instead of concentrating primarily on facilities and administrative procedures.

Meanwhile, among the best ways for parents to evaluate education at a school is to examine the school report card issued by the states. The report cards show how well students performed on standardized tests and how they compare with other schools in the district and state. Report cards also display demographic data that can offer insights into educational outcomes. They are not always use-friendly, but can often tell you more about whether your child's school is performing than a stamp of "accreditation."