The question arrives in a deposition, or in an OCR data request, or from a parent’s attorney. It is always some version of the same thing.
How do you know this investigator was qualified?
Most institutions can answer that the investigator attended training. Fewer can answer what the training required them to demonstrate, and that is the gap the question is aimed at.
Attendance is a fact about a calendar, not a fact about a person.
What the regulations require, and what they leave open
Institutions are required to train the people who carry these roles, and to make training materials available.34 CFR 106.8(d) The requirement covers subject matter and impartiality. It does not prescribe a syllabus, a duration, or an assessment.
That latitude is appropriate, and it created a market that filled the gap with the cheapest measurable proxy available.
Why the market sells seat time
Attendance is easy to count, easy to certify, and easy to sell. Competence is expensive to assess, uncomfortable to fail people on, and produces a product some buyers do not want.
So the sector optimised for the measurable thing. Hours are recorded, certificates are issued, and everyone can point at something. The something does not establish that any individual can conduct an investigation.
What a certificate should mean
A certificate should assert two things: that the person completed a defined program, and that they demonstrated a defined capability against a standard they could have failed.
Most certificates in this field assert only the first, while being designed to look like they assert the second. That is not fraud. It is a market convention, and it survives because buyers rarely ask.
A certificate that cannot be failed certifies nothing.
Assessment you can fail
The distinguishing feature is simple and awkward: some participants do not pass.
A real assessment in this field looks like a written determination exercise, marked against a published standard, by someone who does this work. It tests whether the person can identify the governing policy, apply the correct standard of proof, address inconsistencies, and write reasoning a reviewer can follow.
Those are the skills the role requires. They are also the skills that a lecture cannot establish and a multiple-choice quiz cannot measure.
The training records problem
Institutions need to produce more than a certificate when asked.
- Who was trained, on what dates, and for how many hours.
- What the training covered, at the level of module rather than title.
- The materials themselves, which may be subject to publication requirements.
- Whether the person was assessed, against what standard, and with what outcome.
- What refresher training has occurred since.
An institution that can produce only the certificate has answered the easy version of the question.
When training itself is challenged
Training materials are increasingly the subject of challenge, on bias grounds and on adequacy grounds. Two consequences follow.
The materials have to be defensible on their face, because they may be read by people who are hostile to them. And the institution has to know what is in them, which is harder than it sounds when the training was bought rather than built.
An institution that cannot describe what its investigators were taught is not in a position to defend what they did.
Eight questions to ask a training provider
- Is there an assessment, and can a participant fail it?
- What is the pass rate, and will you tell me?
- Who marks it, and what are their qualifications?
- What exactly does the certificate assert?
- Will you provide hour-by-hour attendance documentation?
- Are the materials ours to publish if we are required to?
- Who wrote the curriculum, and do they still carry casework?
- What happens when the framework changes?
A provider that answers all eight without hesitation is unusual. The answers to the first two tell you most of what you need to know.
The point is the capability
None of this is an argument that credentials matter for their own sake. A certificate is not a skill.
The argument is that an institution relying on a person to conduct a process that may be reviewed by a federal agency should be able to say, specifically, what that person demonstrated and to whom. The credential is not the point. It is how you show the point.
— Albert Roberson, Fractional Coordinator