Like instruments used in afterschool programs to assess children's social and emotional growth or to evaluate staff members' performance, instruments used to evaluate program quality should be free from bias. Practitioners and researchers alike want to know that assessment instruments, whatever their type or intent, treat all people fairly and do…

This paper examines whether the peer-review process of the North Central Association (NCA) is reliable and valid. Reliance on peer judgments has been a part of NCA accreditation, but confidence in the use of peer decisions to certify a school's readiness to implement the improvement plan--Outcomes Accreditation (OA)--was weak. The study focused on…