We have the highest accreditation possible: the continuing, voluntary financial support of a very particular parent body. In addition, we meet all our state and local regulations regarding schooling, and we transfer credits and student to and from all our local public and private schools. We are also registered with the College Entry Examination Board. Our diploma is acceptable to all local and regional colleges and many of our students have gone on to four-year institutes of higher learning and distinguished themselves. Indeed, all of our students meet not only the usual requirements of high school, but also our additional requirements of self-discipline and motivation. A professor of education at a nearby university reviewed our students’ performance; her letter to us said,
	“We live in an age in which grade inflation, also known as “dumbing down the curriculum,” is commonplace. Parents considering your high school will wonder whether grades earned here represent actual learning. I have examined the records of students at this school who, over the last several years, have taken the ACT test. A Scatter Plot of the relationship between their Grade Point Average and their ACT scores showed a definite linear trend and a clear, positive relation. The Pearson Product Moment Correlation between these two measures was 0.61, which is an unusually large correlation. High grades here not only represent a lot of work, they greatly advance a student’s preparation for college.”
Besides performance and reputation, there are several other kinds of accreditation, the most common being the approval of a state government or one of the seven regional bodies that have been doing this since accreditation became popular in the early 20th century. There was a time, perhaps a generation or so ago, when accreditation was the only way colleges had of making sure that a student did not come from a "diploma mill." It comes as a surprise to most people, but accreditation agencies have never had the job of assessing the quality of an educational institution, only its organizational structure and longevity. In the 1930s and '40s, diploma mills would pop up and take money, then disappear overnight. This kind of school is rare today. Our program was regionally accredited in our early years, but like most private schools we abandoned it since it was an expensive nuisance and conferred almost zero benefits. The important thing to remember about traditional accreditation is this: every public high school is accredited by its state and its regional association, yet many of them are terrible. The colleges are quite aware of this, and when they want to know how well prepared a student is for the demands of college, they look at standardized scores, such as SAT and ACT (often called "college entrance" exams). As is well known, colleges welcome home schooled and other nontraditional students because they tend to do better than regular students, despite their getting an education from non-accredited sources.