Is your school accreditted?

I was looking at school accreditation, and I realized that many public schools aren't accreditted. While all the politicians talk about all sorts of non-sense for public schools, I think accreditation is the traditional process for ensring quality schools.

The idea is that the schools should have a set of values, and goals. They then should have periodic evaluations, and get feedback from students, teachers, parents, etc. on how to meet their goals. Do research into the problems, and find solutions. The peer review process involves having different schools evaluate each other.

There is a directory of accreditated secondary and elementry schools at www.accreditedschools.org... One of the largest accreditation agencies is at www.ncacasi.org... The process sounds pretty reasonable, and looks like it could get schools to actually act reasonable. The accreditation bodies aren't run by the government, but are indepedent organizations.

So my first question would be who are these "independent organizations" and what are their agendas?