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You knew it was coming. If the dog eats the report card, give him something interesting.
A movement to throw out traditional A-F grades in favor of tracking high school students as they gain mastery of academic and life skills is gaining momentum, with five states and influential players joining forces to advance it.
DOING IT THE RGHT
The hope of the “Skills for the Future” collaboration is to make it easy for schools to treat so-called “durable” skills such as critical thinking, teamwork, and perseverance like traditional subjects like math and English. That includes giving students new tests and a new report card that shows how well they have mastered those other skills as they apply to colleges or jobs.
The Educational Testing Service and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching collaborated in spring; they added five states: Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin. In May, the Mastery Transcript Consortium, which has already built a mastery-based report card, became part of ETS, which runs the SAT and GRE college admissions tests.
The partnership comes as some businesses edge toward skills-based hiring rather than hiring for having a college degree. The partners also want to increase mastery or competency learning, where students progress at their speed rather than in lockstep with a class.
MAKING IT MATTER
“This whole idea that education could be focused on durable and transferable skills is super exciting to me,” said Scott Looney, founder of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, which just added its innovative report card to the partnership this month. “It’ll make school more engaging, interesting for kids, and meaningful.”
Carnegie and others in the mastery movement want students to be rated on progress toward each skill at whatever speed works for them, regardless of when a grading period ends. Timothy Knowles said he hopes to replace the credit hours model “where bells ring between classes, where it’s time, not competency, that is the rule of the day.”
Timothy Knowles is the 10th president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
“We aim to build a new architecture that would enable competency-based learning to move from the edges of the profession where it’s lived for 100 years to the mainstream,” Knowles said.
CHARACTER TRAITS MEAN MORE
Laura Slover, managing director of the effort, hopes the result will be a way to show students’ character traits, which many believe are just as crucial to success in school, jobs, and life as academic knowledge.
“We are convinced that there’s a lack of social and economic mobility in the U.S. and that we’ve moved from a knowledge economy to a skills economy,” said Slover. “We want a portable transcript or wallet, if you will, that shows where students are in their development, skills, and abilities that they can use with employers, they can use to open the doors to college, and that is fair, reliable, and meaningful for kids.”
That shift, though, relies on schools to determine which skills to focus on and how to measure them. While there are many tests on subjects like English and math, there are no standard ways of measuring skills like communication, collaboration, or digital literacy that carry across teachers, subjects, schools, or states.
This spring, the five states dipping their toes into mastery joined Skills for The Future to help develop ways of measuring student progress on these durable skills.
THIS IS WHAT THEY WANT
ETS said the first steps included looking at the “Portrait of a Graduate” or “Portrait of a Learner” statements that states have passed in places like Nevada and North Carolina, which list the attributes and values they want students to have. The most common traits that will be Knowles’s priority are communication, collaboration, persistence, and digital literacy, with critical and creative thinking close behind.
ETS, Carnegie, and the states met in California in April to brainstorm approaches. Each state is now meeting with teachers, students, colleges, and businesses to develop ideas to pilot as early as January 2025. A few early possibilities include interactive testing that adjusts questions—making them harder or easier or zeroing in on specific topics—based on student answers, as some online tests do now.
MAKE IT FUN
Some tests could be game-based instead of just having students answer questions.
The partners are discussing how to use artificial intelligence and portfolios of student work, such as papers, artwork, and projects created for multiple classes, as well as extracurricular or out-of-school activities, to demonstrate character and interdisciplinary skills.
Portfolios can be challenging for schools, and one of the project’s long-range goals is to ensure that skills can be reliably measured and believable to business or college admissions departments. Mastery schools use portfolios now, but those depend on subjective decisions by schools and teachers and are not verifiable to outsiders.
Who knows if it will catch on, but at least you’ll get an “A” for effort.
This column is by Ritchie Lucas, Founder/CEO of the non-profit The Student Success Project. He can be reached by email at ritchie@studentsuccessproject.org and on Facebook as The Student Success Project.
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