Are you a good communicator? Can you effectively lead a team of your peers? Can you think critically about issues, ask questions, and find solutions to complex problems? If so, we’re looking for you. Apply now if you can show evidence of teamwork, creativity, and a strong work ethic. We don’t need “good test-takers” or the highest GPA. No experience? No problem. We will train you. We want employees who know how to learn, think, and lead. We want employees with the skills to help our company succeed both now and in the future. Are you up for the challenge? 

Sincerely,

Every Industry in America

Today’s education system fails to adequately prepare many students for college and the workforce. One found less than a quarter of high school graduates believe their schooling prepared them for life after graduation. Meanwhile, employers want candidates with “21^st Century Skills,” but are coming up short.

In recent years, however, there has been a promising shift as many states re-evaluate how to prepare students for the world. and hundreds of districts have created “Portraits of a Graduate” outlining the skills students should have by graduation such as communication, problem-solving, critical thinking and collaboration. 

Meanwhile, the landscape of K-12 assessments is also shifting. Last year when New York to eliminate the requirement that students pass the Regents Exam in order to graduate, it a of states that have ended reliance solely on exit exams as a condition of graduation. Instead, states are increasingly embracing measures such as which measure both what students know and whether they can apply that knowledge. These students demonstrate their skills through completing a project or performing a certain activity, which can include. essays, portfolios or research papers.

With the right support, these changes can effectively prepare students for the workforce of tomorrow. We have seen this happen in schools that have taken a project-based learning approach to instruction and assessment.

For instance, the rural Adair County School District in Kentucky launched an initiative to help students build skills outlined in the state’s portrait of a graduate and create a “culture of inquiry.” In one project, high school English and business classes, led by teachers Amy South and JR Thompson, worked together to research local industries and community businesses, interview business owners, analyze marketing strategies and develop comprehensive plans for promoting the community and its local businesses to outsiders.

As part of the process, students were introduced to the concept of a “strong hook” to capture interest and then divided into two teams. Each team worked collaboratively to propose a value proposition and refine their marketing strategies. They were then required to pitch their ideas and plans, ultimately narrowing down their focus to two distinct community projects. They presented their final pitches live to a jury, which selected one — a Marketing Day Vendor Fair — to be implemented in the community. The project culminated in students hosting an event at the high school showcasing local businesses

The Thomas Edison CTE High School in Queens, New York, is currently a for the New York State Department of Education, training other schools to develop performance-based assessments. It uses a project-based learning model in which students engage in real-world and personally meaningful projects. It developed a framework and “essential skills” rubric that assesses both how well students know the content and whether they can demonstrate essential skills of communication, collaboration, feedback and reflection, design thinking and professionalism. 

These are just two examples of schools that are leading the way in making sure students are prepared for the world by the time they graduate. We need more stories like this. Instead of focusing on cuts to education, we need to continue the momentum happening in New York and elsewhere by supporting and growing these innovative programs.

We call on parents, caregivers, students, schools, districts, boards of education, policy makers and government agencies to focus on these key areas to ensure the momentum continues and the changes last

• Professional development and capacity building: Institutions must ensure all teachers have ample time for professional development around performance-based curriculum and assessments as well as ongoing professional support. Buy-in at all levels is required in order to strengthen the system and build the capacity needed to make the shift toward building and measuring real-world skills.
  
• Funding: Re-defining student success — and how to assess it — will require investment. State leaders must ensure that there is funding to provide the staffing, training, curriculum and resources to support implementing performance-based assessments.
  
• Stakeholder alignment: K-12 schools, local industries and higher education institutions must be aligned on which skills are important for career and college readiness. 
  
• Communications: Some students may resist performance-based assessments because they have learned how to navigate the current system and do well on tests. Communicating effectively to students and families will help to shift mindsets and make the process smoother.  

Change is slow, but worth it. It will take persistence. There must be a willingness from all involved to hold the line and know it might take 10 years for this new way of assessing student learning to fully take hold.

We are experiencing a rare opportunity to change education and improve student success. This work must be intentional, evidence-based, and supported at all levels. We implore education leaders, policy makers, schools, districts and communities to lay the groundwork now to ensure students have a successful future and can respond to the “letter to high school and college graduates” with a resounding “Yes.”  

On this episode Timothy Knowles, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, joins Diane and Michael to discuss how this historic foundation looks to drive the future of American education. On K–12, they discuss why Carnegie has partnered with the Educational Testing Service and why they are seeking to assess a broader array of skills — not just focus on the standards that are already assessed. They also dive into Carnegie’s push to undo the Carnegie Unit and move toward a competency-based system. Knowles also shares details on the Foundation’s efforts to prioritize social and economic mobility in higher education by changing how they classify colleges and universities.  

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey Michael.

Michael Horn: Hey Diane.

Diane Tavenner: Well, we are fully in the holiday season at this point, and I’m super curious. A couple of clips away from the big part of COVID, are you noticing or experiencing anything different this year?

Michael Horn: Oh, yes, we are. We are hosting constantly, it seems. We have had one of my kids’ entire class and all their friends over. We’ve had parties galore, and it seems like it’s never going to stop. We’re going to do it apparently straight through New Year’s. So that feels like a big difference. As you know, we’ve been renovating our house. That’s basically done. COVID basically done. Knock on wood that there’s nothing else coming. And so there we are. And here we are in this, our fifth season, still working through some of the sticky issues in K-12  education, all the way into how it impacts higher education and lifelong learning, frankly, and trying to give people a different vantage point on how to think about these intractable — historically — issues. And I guess the last thing to say is, as listeners know, this year we’re doing a lot more guests, a little less of Diane, Michael, a little bit more of people out there doing some really interesting work. And today you have invited a guest, Diane, who is doing a lot of interesting work. 

Diane Tavenner: That could not be more true, Michael. It is my great pleasure to have invited Tim Knowles here today to be with us. He’s the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning. And as you know, I am really privileged to sit on the board of that foundation. And so I have a really front row seat to the ambitious agenda that the foundation is undertaking. So much of what Tim and the team are seeking to tackle relates to the topics that you and I have been talking about on all of these seasons here, on Class Disrupted. And so I just thought it would be really fun to go back and dig into some of those, like, seat time, competency-based learning, assessment, accountability, but through the lens of a really historic foundation that has a really ambitious, modern agenda and has had really profound impacts on our schools that I don’t think most people realize or understand. And so I’m super excited for this conversation. Tim, welcome.

Timothy Knowles: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Michael Horn: Yeah, well, we’re incredibly excited. I was really thrilled when Diane told me she was going to extend the invite. And before we dive into the work that you’re doing now that Diane just alluded to, I know that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning has a long and pretty storied history. Can you tell us a little bit about the organization and why it has mattered to K-12 education in this country?

Timothy Knowles: Sure. So, Carnegie Foundation is 120 years old and it’s been instrumental to a wide range of educational things. The first thing it did, literally the first thing it did was create TIA, now TIA CREF, the largest retirement fund for teachers, professors, and people working across the social sector. It then created the pesky Carnegie Unit, or the Course Credit, the bedrock currency of our educational economy, which I expect we might get into a little bit further. And it’s done other important things through its history. It created Pell Grants, it created standards for engineering, law, medicine and schools of education. And more recently, it introduced improvement science, known colloquially as continuous improvement, to the education sector. But big picture, it’s an institution which has, or I like to think of it as an institution which has, looking around the corner in its DNA. It’s identifying levers to press, to improve both the quality of K-12 and the post-secondary sector, to incubate things, and to bring them to life at a scale that’s persuasive. And today our stake is firmly in the ground for first-generation underrepresented and low-income young people nationwide.

Diane Tavenner: Well, and that is one of the many reasons that I really appreciate being able to be on the board and be a small part of what Tim and the team are working on. The only thing that I would add is I was really surprised to learn when I joined the board that it’s the first nonprofit in America. It was enacted by Congress and became the first nonprofit in America. So, many of us who work in education, I think, take nonprofit entities and organizations for granted. And here’s the founding member of that team. So just a really fascinating, long, long history.

Timothy Knowles: I look really good for 120, don’t I?

Michael Horn: Better every day.

Diane Tavenner: Interestingly, for how old it is…Are you president number eleven?

Timothy Knowles: Ten. 

Diane Tavenner: I mean, not a lot of presidents.

Michael Horn: That’s impressive.

Diane Tavenner: Tim, you just alluded to it. For the last stretch of time under the previous president, because you’ve been here at the Foundation for a couple of years now, the Foundation was really focused on improvement science. And one of the interesting elements of this Foundation is that the current president really gets to define, has the full latitude to define the agenda. And so under Tony Bryk, that’s when I joined and when a whole vibrant improvement science community really formed. You’re continuing that. You believe deeply in improvement science and have a long history of it as a method for how we do our work, but then have layered this really ambitious agenda on top. I want to start with one of those meta outcomes. There’s a few of them that you’re driving to, and that is to accelerate social and economic mobility and achieve equity across the educational sector. And you just alluded to this. Earlier in this season, we had Todd Rose on the podcast and he shared a number of findings that suggest that a majority of Americans are really starting to question the ROI of four-year college and even our K-12 education system. And that they have this perception that education has become the end goal versus sort of a means to achieving a good life, economic security, freedom, however you want to say that. And this big outcome that you’re talking about seems to be in tune with the sentiments of the American public, if you will. So will you talk to us about why this big meta outcome is important to the foundation and honestly, what you think can be done about it?

Timothy Knowles: So I’m going to start with a sort of personal reflection about that. My first job as a teacher was teaching Southern African history in Botswana, and it was before apartheid fell. And so by day I taught a fundamentally emancipatory history curriculum, and by evening and by weekend, I was involved more directly in what was then known simply as the Struggle. I had the opportunity about 25 years later to visit South Africa, which I hadn’t traveled to, when it was free. And I met with artists and activists and clergy like Desmond Tutu involved on the ground in the Struggle. And to a person, literally to a person, they said it was teachers, students, and professors who broke the back of apartheid. From a personal perspective, if educators were responsible for that, our work here to accelerate economic and social mobility and achieve equity seems eminently doable. I guess I would also say personally that I want to live in a nation and I want young people to live in a nation. Whether you grew up on Navajo Nation or in rural Appalachia or in the South Side of Chicago, you have the opportunity, legitimate opportunity, to lead a healthy and dignified life. I’m much less interested in arguments about the particular kind of school you attend public, private, charter, home school, or the time it takes to finish high school or a postsecondary degree. I care much more about how to build systems that enable millions more young people to possess the knowledge and skills that they need to lead purposeful lives. I know for your listeners, there are some out there who are going to be persuaded more by data about why social and economic mobility matter. There was a study, just to cite one study, there was a study by the Federal Reserve in Boston and economists from Duke and the New School. It was called the color of money. And they looked at the net worth of families living across a range of American cities by race. And the average white family’s net worth was $247,000. The average Puerto Rican family’s net worth was $3,020. And the average non-immigrant black family’s net worth is $8. To be clear, I’m not suggesting education is not a powerful engine of economic mobility. We know it is. What I am suggesting, and where Carnegie is putting our stake, is that it could be a much, much more powerful one.

Michael Horn: Just, I mean your own personal story and how you come to this is inspiring. Tim, the few times we’ve gotten to connect at different conferences and so forth, hearing you speak about it always touches a chord, I think, for those listening. And obviously you just alluded to how you all now want to make sure that the system evolves and really creates a lot more opportunity for a lot of individuals. And I think that relates to a big partnership that has been in the news quite a bit lately, which is this partnership with ETS, the Educational Testing Service. Can you tell us about what you’re trying to do and why?

Timothy Knowles: First of all, I don’t think assessment is a singular answer to serving young people better. Young people need to love school. They need to be engaged. They need to feel challenged and pressed. They need to learn hard things and relevant things. They need to experience learning, not just enact learning. So I don’t think we’re going to assess our way to a better place. However, there are a set of skills that we know matter, that we know predict success in life, in the workplace and in the schoolhouse, and yet we haven’t paid them as much attention as we might. And their skills affective behavioral, cognitive skills like persistence, communication, critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration. We think they deserve more attention, not at the expense of reading or algebra or history. Disciplinary knowledge really matters, and you can’t think critically without something to think about. But we think these skills in particular need to be elevated. We also know that these skills are developed in all kinds of contexts, both in the schoolhouse and outside, that many young people who demonstrate them, they’re too often invisible or illegible to postsecondary institutions, and to employers, and even to students and parents themselves. So just by way of an example of what I’m talking about, if I’m growing up in rural Indiana and I work for 2 hours every morning on my family farm, and then I get to high school at 7:30, every day on time. I have a 98% attendance rate. I do my homework on time, I get B’s or better, and then I have a job after school or on the weekends. Taken together, those skills, in my view, would represent persistence and they should be made visible to students themselves, certainly to educators and to postsecondary education institutions and employers. So if I was to state Michael, really simply, what we’re trying to do with ETS, we’re trying to build a set of tools that will provide insight into key predictive skills that the education sector has neglected. I don’t think teachers have neglected these skills, and I could say more about that. I think they know that these skills matter. But we want to build tools that will capture evidence of learning also wherever it takes place. And to make those insights visible and legible to students and parents, actionable for teachers, and useful for postsecondary institutions and employers. That’s at the heart of this.

Michael Horn: That’s super helpful. Diane may jump in as well because she’s been working in these domains for a long time. FoR1, I guess I’m curious when I hear you say that, from my perspective, critical thinking, creativity, things like that, there are a set of skills that can be applied in different domains, but being a good critical thinker is in a domain, right? It doesn’t necessarily cross unless you have domain knowledge. So I’m sort of curious how you square that circle with something like the example you used, perseverance, which I would put, in Diane’s language, the habits of success, different from skills, which might be a set of artifacts across lots of different domains to show those habits. And so I’m sort of curious, are you thinking of them all as the same set of assessments that will capture these? Or how do you distinguish some skills that sit within academic standards perhaps, or academic domains, let me say, versus those that maybe are a collective evidence across lots of bodies of work?

Timothy Knowles: That’s a great question. And frankly, is the work that we are doing right now is to figure this out in terms of which skills are we really going to draw on disciplinary knowledge? Which skills are we going to draw on extant data that may exist like the kid in Indiana I just described? And which skills actually do we need to build tools for from the ground up that we may not have a nuanced enough set of tools to measure, for example, collaboration or working with others? So do you need to build game-based or scenario-based tools that would help you, give you visibility in terms of how someone is developing on that arc? But it’s a very good question and clearly, whether it’s critical thinking or even persistence, you don’t want to divorce that from content and from subject matter. You learn a great deal about young people in terms of their persistence based on their approach to complicated problems and hard problems and how they go about solving them. So this isn’t divorced from disciplinary knowledge in that sense by any means. I think in terms of assessments, first of all, I should say the aim was not to take on the American assessment industry and all the politics that go with it and try to introduce an incrementally better set of disciplinary assessments that feels like that would be sort of a Common Core redux. And I think we saw that play out pretty clearly and we saw where dividends were paid and where they weren’t. So, I think really the intention here is to identify competencies that we know matter that predict success that are developed in all kinds of contexts and create a set of tools that won’t look or feel like traditional assessments and push the educational sector to attend to a richer array of outcomes. Another important thing that I think is worth pointing out, which actually makes me optimistic about this, perhaps more optimistic than I should be. There’s something, as you both know, but maybe not all your listeners know, that is sweeping the nation in the form of these things called portraits of a graduate, or portraits of learner. States and school systems and schools have been developing them, engaging lots of stakeholders, basically asking, who do we want our young people to be? What do we want them to be able to do? So colleagues from ETS analyzed as many as they could find. This is one of the wonderful things about being partnered with ETS. I feel like I have 3000 new employees I can ask to do things. But they analyzed all of these portraits, and there were about eight to ten core skills that Americans say they want young people to possess upon completion of K-12. It’s almost as though – and this resonates, Diane, with some of your work – but it’s almost as though there’s an invisible consensus about the core purpose of schooling. Kind of a river running through our nation, whether in red places or blue places, in cities, in rural areas, about what we want our young people, who we want our young people to be. That’s hopeful to me. So if we can help the other thing that people say about the portraits, if you speak to them candidly, is A) They haven’t changed anything, like we haven’t actually changed what’s going on on the ground, even though we put a lot of energy into it, and B) We have no way of measuring these things. That, to me, represents an opportunity in the US, right now, that I think is worth plumbing.

Michael Horn: I’ve just learned a tremendous amount from you, and I had a takeaway that I think I haven’t had from the press stories on this, which is, in essence, you’re not trying to do what we recommend you never do in disruptive innovation, which is to try to leapfrog the incumbents with a better assessment or a better this widget whatever, but instead go to the areas of non-consumption where the alternative is nothing. And you’re right. I see the same thing in the portraits of graduate, which is there’s no teeth. There’s no way to measure or represent or have an asset based framing around these things because there’s nothing to measure them. So you’re going there. I think maybe the second question is less mine and more what I think a lot of people are wondering, which is why partner with ETS on this? Because they have a reputation in different quarters and different ways, as you know. 

Timothy Knowles: That is a completely fair question, Michael. And I know you both know as well as I do that most assessment companies across the world are grappling with what their future will look like and are seeing, quote, market share evaporate really quickly. Standalone assessments that bring schools to a screeching halt for two weeks in May and are not predictive of very much, I hope are not going to be part of the equation for the long term. And yet those very assessment companies, including ETS, have made an incredible business based on that design. ETS is clear-eyed about that, in my view. They hired a new CEO, Amit Sivak, who is exceptionally clear-eyed about. And one of the magnetic forces, from my perspective, was they have the capacity to build for scale. I don’t, Carnegie doesn’t. We’re a small organization. When I introduced to the board the idea of focusing on the future of learning, which is really the aim here, is to get at learning. One of our board members, who is a very well regarded scholar of assessment, said, well, what about the future of assessment? And at the time I thought, we really don’t have the capacity to build credible, reliable, valid tools to do some of this work. Then, Amit, who I’d known prior to ETS, joined ETS, and I thought there was an opportunity that led to a year’s worth of conversations about whether they are willing to really try to innovate and in essence create a separate entity within ETS, but with its own walls and autonomy to build a new set of tools that would attend to these skills, that would think about assessment in very different ways and that would be focused on the insights that were generated, not focused on the test as it were. So that’s why ETS. Now, to be fair, again, I think the test for us is can we build something different? Is it going to be useful to young people? Is it going to be useful to parents, to teachers? I think we can, but I know we won’t know unless we try. That sounds slightly glib, but I think it’s true. Like we have to take a shot at broadening the picture of what we say is important for young people. It bears probably saying that we met recently as part of this work with the 50 teachers of the year from across the country, from each state, and introduced the work to them. And literally there were some teachers in the room in tears and I was like, “Why?” But they were saying, bring it. This is the work we want to do. This is in essence the work that parents know we should do. And this is why we started to teach in the first place. That’s my short answer to “Why ETS?” We have enough elegant examples that live around the edges of our profession. Everybody in this sector can point to elegant examples of competency-based learning that haven’t scaled. So we need to think about – if we’re serious about tipping or using this tipping moment – we have to figure out how to enact at a broader scale than we have tried to historically. 

Diane Tavenner: I will just add here because I hear the critiques, just like you, and the questions. And I will just add from a personal experience, I think you might know this, Michael, and Tim, you certainly do, that several years ago, Summit actually partnered with a startup assessment company that was doing these exact types of assessments. So I know they’re possible, I know that they can be done. And then, of course, as a startup company, they got acquired and employers valued and wanted these types of assessments and they couldn’t stay in K-12 where the market was so competitive and unreliable, etc. And that was such a disappointment to me because I saw such the possibility of those types of assessments and how they could be used and that they really were possible. And so it feels like this is where the sort of solidness and the expansiveness of ETS, perhaps, enables us to move forward. And I would just add a fun fact, which is I don’t think relevant, but ETS is yet another entity that the Carnegie Foundation created and then spun out.

Timothy Knowles: We did — 75 years ago 

Diane Tavenner: Tim, you have started alluding to this already because these things are all connected and linked, but you said assessment is just a small part of it. And when you first started, it wasn’t even a thing that you were thinking that we needed to do, because what you’re really setting out to do is sort of build this architecture that produces what you call reliably engaging, equitable, experiential and effective learning experiences for all young people, every single one of them. And I think that those words, those concepts describe the type of learning that Michael and I are talking about all the time, that we are advocating for, that we believe in. So beyond assessment, what does that architecture look like? What else is happening to try to bring this to life?

Timothy Knowles: Here, we need to move away from models of schooling singularly dependent on the Carnegie Unit or the credit hour. It was established in 1906 to standardize an utterly unstandardized educational sector. So it was a great plan in 1906. But since 1906, we’ve learned a great deal from learning scientists and cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists about what knowledge is and how it’s acquired. So we need learning modalities that are truly competency or mastery based, whatever the language you want to use, that allow young people to solve real problems, that support experiential education, that enable them to work with mentors and experts and peers. The problem is not that we don’t know what this looks like. We do. Again, we can all point at examples of it. The problem is we haven’t figured out how to bring it to life at a scale that’s persuasive. Thing one for me is building, in essence, existence proofs and networks of existence proofs and amplifying and elevating them because this work is happening in ways that will generate momentum and attention. And I think we’re in an interesting moment where I’ve talked to 18 or 20 states in the last four months. State leaders, state chiefs, governors, they’re interested in how do we move to competency-based systems. There’s are opportunity windows open at the school system and state level, I think, post-pandemic that we have to leverage. And part of it is about cracking the Carnegie unit. Second thing I’d say is, and you may laugh me out of the podcast, which might be a first to be laughed out, but we need to think hard about learning experiences or curricula. And I know people feel like they’ve been down the curricular road before, but the tools and supports for teachers and students have to be taken into more careful consideration. The problem with the wave after wave of standards and accountability efforts over the last 40 years, and this is completely oversimplified, is that we thought if we cranked up the standards and tested for them on the back end, that somehow magically in the middle, the work that students and teachers would do every day would change. And I think the sort of governance reforms that led to charter schools were not that dissimilar. The theory being if we provided schools with flexibility and autonomy over hiring and money and use of time and governance, somehow the stuff that kids did every day would shift and we didn’t see that really occur. Part of the architecture demands building learning experiences for young people across disciplines, which are course-based, which are unit-based, which can come in different sizes to use that language, are much more engaging, much more experiential equitable and effective. So first thing is the Carnegie unit. Second thing is actually what gets taught. And the third thing is policy. The Carnegie unit has infiltrated much of our state-level policy, and I think we just assume that perhaps the states provide waivers so people can do what they want. Well they don’t. Seat time is the rule. That is the rule. Mastery or competency is not the rule. 990 hours of instructional time per annum, or some variation on 990 is the requirement for the vast majority of states. I’m a fan of guardrails, so I understand the argument that, “Well, you want to be careful about removing the guardrails.” But I’m not a fan of guardrails that don’t acknowledge what we’ve actually learned about learning over the last hundred years. And that’s the peril with this singular devotion to the conflation of time and learning. In my view, there’s a set of policy opportunities, if I was going to frame it in a more asset-based way, that I see. And there’s an appetite. And again, red states, blue states, both are interested. This is oversimplified, but I think the majority of the more conservative states that I talk to are interested in employment and access to jobs for young people who may otherwise leave their state. In the blue states, the interest is more about access and opportunity. But I think both are the same in this case, they’re fundamentally the same. Access and opportunity is really about employment, is really about social and economic mobility. I think there’s some more common ground, despite the kind of thrum of our national political discourse.

Michael Horn: I think you’re right. And I get super excited when you start talking about replacing this time-based unit – from the foundation that put it in place – with something much more meaningful and meaty. And it’s not surprising to me when I hear you – I want to use the word preaching – about this wisdom that you had to go and that you have. 

Timothy Knowles: Ouch

Michael Horn: Well, I want to yell “Preach!” But when I hear you say, “We ended up having to go to assessment,” that makes sense to me, because you have to replace the unit of time with something that is measuring progress in a different way. And so that makes sense. Now to switch gears completely, though, another part of the work — you’ve got your tentacles in a lot – another part of the work that you all do, and something that Diane and I have been talking a lot about on the show, is higher education, of course. And you all have a profound impact about how we think of the categorization of colleges and universities in this country. And you’ve made some big moves to change that. For our listeners that are less steeped in higher ed, can you tell us what the Carnegie classifications are in the first place, why they matter, why they have mattered, perhaps in the way that was not intended, and what you’re doing now with them to change those incentives?

Timothy Knowles: One of the things we do is we classify every postsecondary institution in the nation, almost all of them. There’s some that don’t submit data to the federal government, and so we don’t classify those, but something like 4500 institutions, we classify. Many of your listeners or some of your listeners may have heard of one of these classifications “research one” or “R1” classifications that comes from us. That spawned an arms race in terms of higher ed institutions aspiring to be R1 institutions and designated R1. Not just because of the One, but because the federal government follows it up with vast tranches of capital, of public capital. So there are real incentives to become an R1 that led to this arms race. So when I arrived at the foundation, the classifications had basically been spun off and had gone through very modest changes for 50 years. So since I got there, we’ve brought the classification…I’ve invented a new term, it’s called spinning on. We spun it back on and we brought them in house. Now with our partner, the American Council on Education, we’re trying to reimagine them from the ground up. So in 2025, all postsecondary institutions in the country will be classified in new ways. There’s lots of vectors of the work here, but one thing that I’m particularly excited about, and I hope will resonate with the kind of work we’re interested in on the K-12 side is developing a classification focused on the extent to which postsecondary institutions are engines of social and economic mobility. So every higher ed institution in the country will receive an economic mobility classification. So classification is distinct from a ranking. We’re not of the view that you can distinguish in credible ways between an institute number 599 and 600 on a list. Classifications are groups of institutions. So like institutions, in that sense, we’re less interested in naming names and creating another rank order. The primary aim here is to learn what institutions are doing to effectively accelerate social and economic mobility, to develop public policy that supports it. And just as R1s have been the recipients of large tranches of public capital, to drive public capital to those institutions that are accelerating economic mobility. So that’s that body of work. It’s fascinating because the big world doesn’t know much about it, but the higher ed world pays extraordinarily close attention to it. So two weeks ago I had a conference call with 1500 higher education leaders. That’s a third of them, or something close, which suggests how closely they’re paying attention. So we want to draw attention to one of the things that I think makes America and higher education great, which is the extent to which they’re actually making improvements in terms of young people from low-income backgrounds, first-generation young people, and underrepresented young people in particular.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, it’s really fascinating. It’s so interesting that a tool like that is visible to everyone. I mean, so many of the national rankings are based in part, like, if you look at their formulas, the beginning of the formula is this classification. So we all see it, but we don’t understand where it comes from. Super hopeful about the potential impact there. Okay, I have to squeeze one more thing in here before. This is like the speed round. But when I was in grad school, I learned about the Committee of Ten and the profound impact that they had. I’ve talked on this show about this before — Michael and I have talked about this — about how they really defined what the order and sequence of high school curricula was and put the sciences in order, alphabetically biology. So we did it that way for a really long time. You have launched something called the Carnegie Postsecondary Commission. So people should not be surprised to know there was a relationship with the foundation and that old committee. So you’ve launched a new commission. Tell us about it quickly.

Timothy Knowles: So sure. The Committee of Ten was founded in 1892. It was chaired by a guy called Charles Elliott, who was the president of Harvard at the time. Interestingly, and I didn’t actually know this until recently, Charles Elliott was charged by Andrew Carnegie to establish the foundation that I’m responsible for. So the congressional order that says we better create a nonprofit for this thing, the first signature on that congressional order is Charles Elliot. So it’s a very tangled web that we live and weave. So the postsecondary commission is a group of not ten, but seventeen K-12 and postsecondary leaders. My hope is that they become the Committee of Ten for this century that will be thinking hard again about the question of mobility and how we create not just K-12 and post secondary systems, but systems that might even become much more blurred. So K-16, K-to-work systems that are going to not try to reach consensus as a group, and they all signed up with this agreement. The aim is not consensus. The aim is to develop action papers that will provoke both thinking and policy, certainly, but then to help shape the work of the foundation, particularly on the post secondary side for the next decade for what I hope is my tenure. It’s a commission with institutional engine underneath it. It’s an extraordinary group of people. I won’t name them, but I would urge anybody who’s interested to go and look at our website and meet them because they are almost, to a person, first generation leaders who are doing exceptional things ranging from running large public systems to small colleges to K-12 systems serving young people who depend on the quality of school the most. It’s an extraordinary group. We just convened earlier last month, and the world should get ready.

Michael Horn: Well, with that tease, why don’t we leave the conversation there from a work perspective, but before people tune out, Tim, you’re joining us. Diane and I have this end of show segment where we talk about things we’re reading or watching, and we try to make them not about our work. We don’t always succeed, but we try. So can we ask you what’s on your watching, reading, listening list?

Diane Tavenner: Sure.

Timothy Knowles: I have a weird tradition. I read poetry from December 1 to the New Year because it makes me think differently. So, I’m right now, who am I reading? Haki Maributi, South Side of Chicago poet. Gwendolyn Brooks and W.H. Auden, not a South Side poet, so a mixture. But I find it takes me out of my day job and makes me think about the world and people and what I’m here for in different ways.

Michael Horn: I love this because poetry is one of those things I always wish there was time for. I never know how to fit it in. You may have just given an idea for not just me. So, Diane, what’s on your list?

Diane Tavenner: I’m going to go a little bit different this week. Coming off a time period where we had lots of family and fun friends around, I did a jigsaw puzzle this past weekend. Some special guests dropped in and helped put a few pieces in. It was so much fun. Makes your brain think differently. Very social. So that’s my, whatever, enjoyment of choice this week. How about you, Michael?
Michael Horn: I love that. That feels very COVID, I will tell you that, but I love it. Mine, I will go, I just finished the first season of The Morning Show with Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston and have moved into season two and really enjoying it. It’s a complicated set of storylines that follow a little too closely, like real life in 2019–20 and so forth. And we’re getting into the COVID period right now, but it makes you think, it makes you laugh, it makes you cry, and it’s enjoyable. So that’s where I’ve been. And we’ll wrap it there. Tim, huge thank you for joining us, talking through all the initiatives that you all are doing at Carnegie. And for all of us, we will stay tuned. And for all of those listening, we’ll see you next time on Class Disrupted.

A revolution is in the making at California’s community colleges: No more grades, no more sitting through lectures or seminars, no more deadlines. In a pilot program taking shape across eight of the state’s community colleges, the only requirement for some associate degrees will be “competency.” 

Students who can prove that they have the relevant skills can earn that degree. 

In theory, this model, known as “competency-based education,” could provide students with more flexibility and the potential to attain degrees faster in key job sectors. The pilot is geared toward working adults, many of whom  during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

As the state’s population of K-12 students continues to shrink, leaving colleges with fewer students right out of high school, the pilot aims to attract adults who are already in the workforce by “valuing their lived and work experience,” said Madera Community College President Ángel Reyna.

If successful, these community colleges will set themselves apart from every other two-year institution in the country. The pilot, which launched in 2021, provides  with up to $515,000 over the course of four years to each design a single associate degree program using this new model. 

The goal is for students to be able to enroll at some point in the 2024-25 academic year, said Aisha Lowe, an executive vice chancellor at the California Community College Chancellor’s Office. In practice, colleges must overcome bureaucratic and logistical hurdles to make the new system work. At least one community college says it is struggling to hit the state’s deadline.

The challenge is to create something that works “but isn’t so different that colleges can still wrap their heads around it and engage,” Lowe said. “It’s definitely unprecedented.”

A new way to measure learning 

The new model restructures the requirements of a degree to reflect what students have learned, rather than the amount of time they spend in class. 

Currently, all college degrees require a certain number of hours spent in a classroom, either in-person or virtually. An associate degree, which California’s community colleges offer, requires roughly 3,000 hours spent in a classroom or on homework in a traditional academic year. That’s why some refer to it as a “two-year degree.” 

Teachers get paid in part based on the number of hours they teach. Because of the high number of part-time students, the state funds colleges and universities based largely on the number of hours that a student spends in class, not the number of students themselves. 

In this current system, students may be required to sit through classes to get college credit even if they can demonstrate they already have some of the requisite skills. Students who may have less time for school because of work or family obligations lose out too, said Charla Long, the president of the Competency-Based Education Network, a consultant for California’s pilot program. 

“We’ve created an inequitable system because it’s so time bound,” she said.

In the new system, students seeking an associate degree in early childhood education at Shasta College in Redding will take 60 different exams, each one testing a specific skill, said Buffy Tanner, the college’s director of innovation and special projects. Students in the program will have materials to teach themselves, teachers will be available to answer questions and counselors will be able to provide wraparound support.

Currently, a student is required to take 20 semester-long classes for that same degree. Students in the new program will be able to take an exam up to three times and can move as quickly or as slowly as they want, Tanner said. In-state students in the new program who do not qualify for financial aid will pay the same total tuition, just shy of $2,800 for an associate degree, not including the cost of books, classroom supplies, or other miscellaneous fees. Shasta College, like the other colleges in the pilot, is still trying to figure out how much to pay faculty in the new system.

Not every student can succeed in this self-paced format. Tanner said the plan is to vet students for the program through questions about their lives and study habits: “Do you need external deadlines? What kind of self-discipline do you have?”

“We have to make sure students fully understand what they’re getting into,” she said.

A growing phenomenon

Such  have existed for decades. Since the 1970s, some colleges and universities have experimented with new models of teaching and learning that offer more flexibility and try to evaluate students based on what they know, not on how much time they spent in class, Long said.

In 1997, a group of 19 governors from Western states agreed to develop a private, nonprofit institution, known as , to provide “competency-based” education. With roughly 150,000 students today, it’s the . Though headquartered in Utah, the university is entirely online and boasts students from all 50 states. 

Other large for-profit and non-profit university systems have experimented with the same model, including Capella University, an online college, and Southern New Hampshire University. California followed. In 2018, , the state created a new community college, known as Calbright, which is free, entirely online, and exclusively “competency-based.”

“This is radically different, and an incredibly powerful way to support our students,” Calbright’s  says about its model.

A  of nearly 500 colleges and universities across the country found that 13% were already offering at least one degree or certificate through competency-based education and roughly half of those surveyed were in the process of adopting one, though the report noted that there’s “considerable variation” about how they define the model. 

Homework after 10 p.m. makes progress slow

For Calbright student Jeremy Cox, the appeal was less about the instructional method and more about the convenience of online education. He started taking online classes in 2016 through for-profit companies such as Udemy and Coursera.

“To be able to just pull out a phone and bust out a couple of lessons from Udemy or Coursera, that’s very helpful,” he said.

One day while at a park near Long Beach with his children, Cox ran into a woman who told him about Calbright College. While Udemy and Coursera do not focus on a particular instructional method, Cox said his experience at Calbright College has been pretty similar, with two key differences. Unlike Udemy or Coursera, he said, Calbright provides teachers who are more available and respond quickly to questions via Slack, a messaging app. The other difference is social interaction. He has become involved in building community among his classmates and serves as the college’s first student body president.

Calbright has had consistent enrollment growth each academic year since it began, despite  from the state auditor’s office. State legislators have repeatedly tried to defund the school, pointing to poor academic outcomes.

Even though the college advertises that students can finish certificate programs in less than a year, CalMatters found that . The data only runs through the spring of 2022, and Calbright was unable to provide updated figures.

Cox said he had intended to complete an IT certification at Calbright in three to six months with a goal of one day getting a job that involves user design, artificial intelligence or blockchain. Now, he expects it to take about a year and a half. 

“My study time is when the kids go to bed. I only have after 10 p.m.,” he said. “And then with student body responsibilities, my time is split between the two. Half of it is with the student body and half is my studies.”

Creating an ‘unprecedented’ new system

With this new pilot, these eight community colleges in California aim to go one step further than Calbright College, using a similar concept but creating new curricula and setting up new systems to provide even more flexibility for students. Calbright is not in the pilot, but Lowe said the college has provided advice, such as strategies to support students outside the classroom. 

By the 2024-25 school year, these eight colleges plan to change part of their state funding formula, faculty pay, and financial aid regulations. They’re also adapting the licenses that allow them to operate, a process known as accreditation. These are changes that take years of work and include getting approval from district boards, state officials and federal agencies. Adapting financial aid policies is particularly cumbersome, but Long, president of the Competency-Based Education Network, said if the eight colleges can succeed, they’ll be the first two-year institutions in the country to do it.

If the state’s community colleges can’t adapt to the competency-model of no lectures or grades, other schools will beat them to it, said Lowe, an executive vice chancellor with the community college system. She pointed to “for-profits” as the primary competitor.

At Shasta College, Tanner said the pilot program offered an opportunity to train students as the state ramps up its plans to offer free transitional kindergarten, which is a year of school offered to any 4-year old before kindergarten. California will need  by 2025-26 to teach transitional kindergarten.

State law sets requirements for transitional kindergarten teachers, such as taking 24 units of early education college classes or having comparable professional experience. For those who already have some background in early childhood education, but not enough to meet the requirements, the new course model could allow them to “quickly demonstrate that they know their stuff,” Tanner said. 

Unions, faculty leaders voice concern

The success of the pilot depends on the support of the faculty.

“Take a look at teacher load, teacher contracts — that’s all connected to time in the classroom, lecture hours. This whole framework is going to have to break or change and nobody really knows how to go about doing that,” said Elizabeth Waterbury, a music instructor and the faculty association president at Shasta College. 

While she supports the idea, she’s concerned about what the new system could do to faculty pay. 

“I’m afraid we may be the ones who could make it more difficult for California to transition to competency-based education,” she said.

Tanner and her colleagues haven’t yet tried to sell the faculty union on the pilot. Instead, they plan to ask faculty involved in the pilot program to track their time so that the college first understands the workload.

Last fall, faculty leaders from the Madera Community College Academic Senate expressed concerns about the ways this new model might impact their pay and intellectual property, college president Reyna said. The development of the new program has been on “pause” ever since, he said. 

On Aug. 25, the Madera Community College Academic Senate issued saying it was “deeply concerned” about the direction of the pilot program and asked the college to “reconsider” participating. However, the former president of the academic senate, Brad Millar,  on March 7, 2021, when the college submitted its application to join the pilot. 

But in its resolution, the academic senate said anyone who signed the application on behalf of the group never sought approval from its members. When the members of the academic senate did discuss the program on Nov. 18, 2022, it “failed to garner support,” according to the resolution.

“In concept, there are many benefits,” Bill Turini, president of the Madera Community College Academic Senate, told CalMatters. One potential concern is that the model could lead to less qualified teachers in some instances, he said. He said the program is “still an abstraction” but pointed to other, simpler changes that he said yield similar results, such as more online instruction and flexible start dates.

Madera Community College is the newest community college in the state, officially recognized in 2020. It is part of a large district that includes Fresno City College, Clovis Community College, and Reedley College. None of the other schools in the district are participating in the pilot. 

“Any policy that we want to change at Madera Community College to accommodate competency-based education, it impacts the three other colleges,” Reyna said. 

East Los Angeles College is the only college participating in the pilot among a nine-college district. It’s the largest community college district in the nation. It’s been slow to implement some of the changes required by the pilot program, but success there could make it easier for other colleges in the district to follow.

“When you talk to faculty who’ve been here longer than 10 years and their picture of an East Los Angeles College student, they envision a 20-year-old student taking 15 units (full-time) at the Monterey Park campus. We’ve now grown to an older student population,” said Leticia Barajas, a faculty member and president of the college’s academic senate. “This is about institutional transformative change.”

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association’s Reporting Fellowship program. Adam Echelman covers California’s community colleges in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education.

A network of 20 Missouri school districts is asking the state to implement a more responsive assessment system in order to personalize student learning.

The state Board of Education is considering the districts’ proposal to change testing at its Aug. 15 meeting. If approved, it would be the inception of a shift in Missouri’s education system that will “resurrect student engagement,” district leaders say.

The group of schools, part of the , want to move away from the state’s annual standardized testing to assessments that would be administered multiple times a year. The coalition consists of public school districts and one St. Louis charter school, and includes a mix of rural and urban campuses with a wide range of student performance scores and poverty rates, according to state demographic and . 

During a June state board meeting, district leaders argued that doesn’t provide results in time to be effectively used in the classroom. 

The schools want to instead take advantage of a new pilot waiver program created last year that offers exemptions for districts to bypass specific education laws for up to three years. These “innovation waivers” are intended to boost student performance and benefit educators by giving schools the room to implement unique strategies, said Lisa Sireno, assistant commissioner with the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. 

“The state legislature enacted a statute that allowed the school innovation waivers in 2022 and so we’ve been working on what that process might look like,” Sireno told The 74. “The group with our very first innovation waiver request — the Success-Ready Students Network — kind of grew out of a (state) work group that was looking at competency-based education.”

While 20 school districts in the Success-Ready Students Network have agreed to launch new assessments if approved, other schools will join in the future, said Mike Fulton, one of the network’s facilitators. The plan is for a new cohort of districts to use the innovation waivers each school year until the entire state is involved.

If approved, districts will be able to administer multiple interim tests, but will still have to give the normal annual standardized test until a federal waiver is approved to get rid of it. Fulton said the Success-Ready Students Network will be working on a federal waiver later this year.

Fulton said the state’s innovation waivers are key to, which allows students to move through education at their own pace as they demonstrate a full understanding of the material.

“The whole proposal is designed to support the participating districts in using personalized, competency-based approaches in their learning design,” Fulton told The 74. “The assessment system was designed to provide feedback to both students, teachers, parents and every stakeholder, on how individual students are progressing, how classrooms and schools are doing and how districts are doing as a whole.”

Jenny Ulrich, superintendent of the Lonedell School District, part of the Success-Ready Students Network, said her teachers are always asking for feedback on what they are doing in the classroom, but assessment results are returned too late to make an effective change for individual students.

“We are alone out there trying to figure out how we get real-world learning to our kids,” Ulrich told the state board in June. “This work supports educators. It gives them a platform, an opportunity and the data they need to make good instructional design and decisions for their kids.”

Besides lagging results, around the U.S. for sucking up too much time, being culturally biased and doing little to improve students’ academic outcomes.

Ulrich said instead of the one-time tests, schools will administer tests several times a year and keep results updated online on a district dashboard for teachers to use in real time. The dashboards, which will go live in November, will show a student’s progress in becoming “high school ready” or “college, career and workforce ready.”

“By the end of the 2025-26 school year, it is our aim — our lofty goal — that 100% of our graduates would have an individualized plan,” Ulrich said. “As we reach these goals, all students will be able to declare, ‘I am truly college, career and workplace ready.’”

Fulton said districts will be transitioning to competency-based learning even if the state innovation waivers aren’t approved. Students will progress on evidence of mastery of skills based on state standards, meaning they might move through the K-12 education system faster or slower than their peers.

“That scares people a bit and I understand that,” Fulton said. “That’s a big shift.”

Sireno, the assistant state education commissioner, said the desire to switch Missouri schools to competency-based learning emerged from the learning loss caused by the pandemic. Earlier this year, more than a 100 Missouri districts experienced a drop in their student assessment scores to levels that would typically threaten their state accreditation.

“This will allow students to move at the appropriate pace. So, if some students finish mastery of the content a little bit quicker, if some students take a little bit longer, that’s OK,” Sireno said. “It’s a heavy lift, but it’s important work, and (districts) realize that it can have a real positive impact on student learning.”

Other schools around the nation have been tackling competency-based education as a way to help students recover ground in learning. Idaho, South Carolina, Kansas and Utah are among those that have successfully created competency-based learning systems, according to a .

Some states haven’t done as well implementing competency-based education. In 2018, Maine’s Department of Education had to model several years after it went into effect. The system lacked specifics in things like proficiency and grading, which also sparked parent backlash.

This is a common failure in putting the approach into practice, according to the Missouri education department’s  

“Researchers attribute negative outcomes to schools that implemented (competency-based learning) without clear definitions and expectations, as well as uneven implementation,” the report says. 

When Missouri’s innovation waiver plan was unveiled in June, the entire State Board of Education voiced support for it.

“It is a gift to the students, the parents and families in Missouri, and I would say nationwide,” said Charles Shields, board president. “Others will learn from us nationwide.”

Vice President Carol Hallquist said she believed it will “change the face of education” in Missouri.

Fulton, of the Success-Ready Students Network, said he hasn’t heard from any stakeholders warning against the use of innovation waivers or the switch to competency-based learning, but there is some wariness from the state department about using a model that hasn’t been tested. 

“I think we’re all going at this cautiously. Research is going to sit at the core of this,” he said. “But you have to be willing to be entrepreneurial and innovative and that’s what I think these districts are being asked to do. We need more of that in public education.”

The new tests, to be created by the Educational Testing Service and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, are meant to usher in competency-based forms of schooling that would allow students to proceed through academic material at their own pace. Leaders of both organizations hope they will also capture a broader array of non-cognitive qualities, like teamwork and relatability, that are highly prized in the modern workforce but undetectable through conventional academic metrics like grade point average or school attendance. 

The adoption of more personalized instruction and assessment has faced a key obstacle in the form of , the namesake foundation’s strict definition of annual credit hours that students must accrue to demonstrate their grasp of material. (The calculation essentially breaks down to one hour of seat time per day, per subject, for 24 weeks.) Though largely unknown outside the education world, many high schools and universities have based their academic requirements on the Carnegie Unit . 

But Timothy Knowles, the foundation’s president, said that while the Carnegie Unit had served a useful purpose at one point, new discoveries in neuroscience and cognitive psychology have proven that pupils learn different subjects at highly variable rates. What’s more, he added, the capacity now exists to test for valuable qualities that were previously invisible to admissions officers and employers.  

“We’re in a position to do something that we hadn’t before,” Knowles said. “Unlike 20 years ago, we can actually reliably measure the skills that we know are predictive of success in postsecondary education and work.”

Competency-based learning and assessment has long been theorized as a preferable alternative to existing educational models, which critics describe as too standardized to deliver instruction to individual students with vastly divergent levels of academic preparation. Instead, they allege, the status quo came to reflect the production processes of 20th-century industry, with students replacing widgets as the product. In , Knowles himself telegraphed his desire to phase out the Carnegie Unit, calling time a “crude” metric to determine educational attainment.

With a range of philanthropic and education-focused advocates backing the movement, has promoted some version of competency-based policies. Those efforts hit in Maine, where high school graduation requirements were refigured over the last decade to emphasize proficiency on subject material. But disputes over the definition of proficiency and teachers’ differing grading standards led many to question the new approach, with legislators later backing away from the competency-based model.

Similarly rocky transitions were seen in and , which attempted similar shifts. The central puzzle facing critics of the current model (i.e., calendar-centered requirements and standardized assessment) is what will come to supplant it. 

Scott Marion, president of the , said that the challenge in executing the hoped-for switch to competency-based learning lay in designing realistic measures of achievement to replace existing tests. To deliver on advocates’ promises, he observed, such measures would need to be both tailored to individual students and academically credible.

“Competency-based assessment is not for the faint of heart,” Marion said. “It’s being done quite poorly in a lot of places. So if ETS and Carnegie can bring a little more rigor to it, it might be good.”

With interest in competency-based approaches growing, more players have leapt into the field, with the best-known among them that developed a “mastery transcript.” The project has gained adherence among high schools over the last year.  

The ETS-Carnegie proposal is also emerging at a time when traditional high school admissions exams, such as the SAT and ACT, have lost significant market share. Both the aftereffects of the pandemic and concerns about inequitable outcomes from standardized testing to go test-optional in the last few school years. With those leading indicators of secondary achievement potentially passing from the scene, demand is expected to rise for measures that could take their place.  

ETS, which administers the widely used GRE, PRAXIS, and TOEIC tests, during and after the pandemic.

Perhaps the biggest question hanging over the newly announced partnership is the proposed measurement of not just cognitive and behavioral skills — including everything from comprehension of math content to teamwork and leadership — but so-called “affective” skills as well. As described by ETS head Amit Sevak at the educational technology conference ASU-GSV, such skills could include something like emotional intelligence, or the ability to successfully convey sincerity and empathy to others. Just how those kinds of competencies can be conveyed to students, let alone measured by third parties, is debatable even to backers of competency-based instruction.

Michael Horn, a cofounder of Harvard’s Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Education, said he would be watching the development of such measures carefully.

“This part, from my reading of the literature on assessment, is both unproven and underdeveloped. So the how is going to be very important,” Horn said. “I’m going to be very curious to see what the investments look like as they go forward, and I hope they don’t overpromise.”

While no concrete timeline has been released for the conception of the new suite of assessments, Carnegie and ETS to conduct a multi-state pilot that could begin as early as next year. In an interview, Sevak said he envisioned students being able to access a digital “transcript” detailing their ongoing growth in areas like collaboration and creativity. Real-time data could build their awareness of their comparative strengths and weaknesses, he added.

“That more holistic approach is in contrast to much of the assessments in K–12 and higher education, which are really cognitive-driven and tied to logic and reason,” Sevak said. We’re looking at a more holistic approach that is more tied to the future of work.”