OUR OPINION: Cognia due for a review of its own

If you’re a student or teacher or parent or fan of the Cobb County School District, you should be overjoyed … and outraged at the same time.

Mixed emotions are justified after the announcement Monday by Cobb Schools’ accrediting agency that oops, we screwed up. That report issued a few months back pointing out problems in your school system? Pay no heed. We’re taking it all back – everything we said.

The joy comes from what we expected all along – confirmation that the Cobb County School District is among the best, our students among the most well educated and the district among the most well run.

The outrage comes from the incompetence of an organization that made us sweat through its "special review" process, questioned our schools’ reputation, leveled its hammer and now admits its work was flawed.

That organization is Cognia, a private enterprise that wields the power to decide if your child’s school is up to snuff by bestowing accreditation upon those it deems worthy and decimating those it does not. It boasts of being the world’s largest accrediting organization, serving 36,000 schools in 85 countries.

For Georgia schools, accreditation is not just desirable. It’s necessary. The cost to students if their school loses Cognia’s blessing can include a crippling loss of HOPE scholarships and the jeopardizing of students’ college admissions.

For the school district, it can lead to reduced funding.

For the surrounding community, it can cause property values to plummet.

Simply put, the stakes are high.

You’d think that with the power it wields, Cognia would get it right. But they didn’t. CEO Mark Elgart, tail between legs, stood before the Cobb school board early Monday afternoon and issued the mother of all mea culpas: We flubbed it. Sorry!

Specifically, Cognia announced it was necessary to invalidate the findings of its 2021 investigation into the district and a scheduled follow-up review is no longer necessary.

One might give the organization some credit for owning up to its mistake, but CEO Elgart notches no points in offering this excuse: The volunteers did it.

What? Volunteers? The company takes our school district’s tax revenue to fund its work and then places our schools’ futures in the hands of volunteers? A quote from Elgart’s apology letter to Cobb Schools Superintendent Chris Ragsdale: “Cognia’s special review teams are primarily constituted by volunteers and, while Cognia provides guidance and support, Cognia does not substantively revisit the factual findings of the teams …..”

In all, it took Elgart four pages to issue the apology and try to explain it all away. Meanwhile, school administrators lost hundreds of hours preparing hundreds of pages of rebuttals to Cognia’s original special review report, which now is null and void. Imagine those resources spent in further educating our students, rather than mounting a defense to phantom claims.

Here is the cold, harsh reality: For several reasons that go beyond this most recent gaffe, Georgia’s school accreditation process is broken and beyond repair.

What we have is a private company that over the years has amassed so much authority, so much power, so much control that it answers to no one, all the while feasting on the taxpayer’s teat. Company officials claim immunity from the state’s Open Records Act despite using taxpayer dollars to fund its work. Cognia holds our schools and students hostage and Georgia taxpayers cough up the ransom. That, on its face, is wrong. Add the fact they erred and Cognia’s arrogance turns to audacity.

Count state Sen. Lindsey Tippins, R-west Cobb, among those who recognize the injustices in Georgia’s way of school accreditation. He has filed legislation that would change much about how Cognia goes about its business. We hope his fellow legislators and Gov. Brian Kemp share the senator’s wisdom and enact the bill into law.

Cognia can come clean and apologize all it wants, but it will never remedy the uncertainty, the concern and the trauma caused by announcing and issuing its special review. The company and its CEO are deserving of a trip to the woodshed to learn some lessons of their own. It's time for Cognia to undergo its own accreditation review.