A bill approved Tuesday by the House Education Committee would shield North Carolina public school districts from what critics of outside school-accreditation groups call unnecessary interference and even political punishment.

Filed mainly to resolve a school-board scuffle in Burke County, the bill could elicit more uproar for how it would impact a debate over diversity in the Wake County Public School System. The private accreditation organization AdvancED, based in Alpharetta, Ga., has told Wake to fix several issues, some of which relate to the tussle over diversity in assignments, or risk losing its accredited status.

House Bill 342, High School Accreditation, would allow the State Board of Education rather than an outside entity such as AdvancED to accredit schools. State-sponsored accreditation wouldn’t be required, only available, and school districts would have to pick up the tab for it.

In addition, H.B. 342 would prohibit North Carolina colleges and universities from using the accreditation status of a student’s school in admissions decisions unless the school is accredited by the state.

State accreditation isn’t new in the Tar Heel State — the Board of Education has done it in the past. Republican sponsors hope the measure would take the political bite out of the decision-making process.

As it stands, kids are being penalized not because their schools are bad, but because AdvancED takes issue with how school boards make decisions, said the bill’s primary sponsor, Rep. Hugh Blackwell, R-Burke.

“This doesn’t choose one side or the other,” Blackwell said during the House committee hearing Tuesday. “It just says to parents and students, ‘If you’ve got a good high school and it performs well, you don’t have to worry that somebody’s going to cause you to not go to the school you want because of issues that have to do with governance.’”

Foes of H.B. 342 counter that national nonprofit accrediting groups, such as AdvancED, bring credibility and political independence to the table, in a way that state accreditation wouldn’t.

“We need to have our high schools live up to national standards, because our kids are competing with kids from all over the country and all over the world to get into the fine institutions,” said Rep. Deborah Ross, D-Wake.

Another concern: putting too much strain on the Department of Public Instruction.

“We’re concerned that DPI might not be able to handle this responsibility because it doesn’t have the infrastructure with the budgets cuts that everybody is talking about doing to the department,” said Linda Gunter, a lobbyist with the N.C. Association of Educators.

Despite that, backers of the measure say it’s an idea whose time has come.

“A couple years ago, the 40 traditional public schools that were the most low-performing in the state of North Carolina, [AdvancED] accredited every single one of them,” said House Minority Leader Paul “Skip” Stam, R-Wake. “They have lost their way, and we don’t have to be subject to their bullying.”

H.B. 342 passed the House Education Committee by voice vote and now goes to the Appropriations Committee.

David N. Bass is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.