In our education system, we have institutional accreditors (evaluating schools as a whole) and programmatic accreditors (evaluating specific occupational training programs). How well they do those jobs is often questionable, but what is beyond question is that many of these groups have been taken over by progressives who never miss an opportunity to advance their beliefs. The Trump administration has tried to stop this.
In today’s Martin Center article, Isabella Romboldi focuses on the trouble with programmatic accreditors, which have power due to state licensing laws.
She begins:
On May 13, 2026 Do No Harm, a healthcare education advocacy group, sent an open letter to the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), the national accrediting agency for social work education programs, demanding the removal of all DEI requirements from its accreditation standards. The letter, which cited specific DEI mandates imposed by CSWE, argued these requirements are ideologically divisive, and pointed to President Trump’s April 2025 executive order on accreditation reform, along with federal anti-discrimination law, as grounds for compliance.
As you’d probably guess, CSWE refused. Indoctrinating future social workers with DEI is crucial! And besides, Trump’s order supposedly doesn’t apply to CSWE because it’s a programmatic accreditor.
Romboldi points out that state licensing laws are at the root of this problem:
States compound the problem by writing these ‘sole programmatic accreditors,’ or SPAs, directly into licensing law: aspiring professionals must graduate from an SPA-approved program, or they cannot gain licensure. Texas alone has more than a dozen SPAs embedded in licensure statutes/regulations, most of which maintain standards that appear to directly conflict with the state’s own DEI restrictions. The result is a private monopoly with the power to disregard state law.
Whether licensing laws actually serve the public interest is highly debatable, but as long as states have them, they should prevent accreditors from demanding that schools embrace their ideology.