Reinventing Crediting for Competency-Based Education

The Mastery Transcript Consortium Model and Beyond

Jonathan E. Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429881077
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Many argue that the conventional high school transcript has become irrelevant to today's best practices in teaching, learning, and assessment. With more and more school leaders turning to alternate, competency-based approaches for learning, crediting and transcripts can follow suit by drawing on badging, micro-crediting, digital portfolios of student work, and other emerging tools. Reinventing Crediting for Competency-Based Education explores the need for this transformation while detailing the implementation of promising models, particularly the Mastery Transcript Consortium. Written by an experienced consultant and former school leader, this book will assist school and district administrators in making a forward-thinking crediting and transcript system work for their students' futures.

1

Introduction

Consider how few inventions from the late nineteenth century we continue to use, and how few we will be using for much longer. We’re fast phasing out the use of coal-powered electrical generation, the internal combustion engine, the landline telephone, and the incandescent light bulb.

It’s time, too, to look at phasing out the traditional high school transcript, the one-page piece of paper listing courses completed and letter grades earned, the one utilizing Carnegie Units. It’s time—long past time—to award students credits for demonstrated proficiency, not for time spent sitting in chairs. Learning should become the constant, time the variable.

This transition is the natural order of things. Products follow a predictable pattern of introduction, growth, and then a long, stable maturity—before they begin their inevitable decline. This time is coming for the traditional transcript and the Carnegie or “standard unit.” It probably can’t last much longer, what with its intrinsic limitations and more importantly the rising tide of innovations coming to challenge it with new aspirations and new technologies. But rather than simply awaiting its inevitable demise, today many educators are joining together to ideate, innovate, and implement successor systems to the conventional transcript and crediting for secondary school learning.

This alternative model is what we call crediting for competencies earned through demonstrated proficiency or mastery, rather than crediting for courses completed by “time in seats.” Seeing it as an extension of competency-based education (CBE), we’ll call this alternative form of transcript and crediting “competency-based crediting” (CBC), while acknowledging that the terminology is still slippery, and some call this mastery learning or mastery-based or proficiency-based crediting. One prominent example of this new model is the “Mastery Transcript” as defined by the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC); the MTC calls this a “mastery credit” system.

Here in Chapter 1, we’ll look at why and why now this change is coming, what it entails, and what it looks like.

Why Competency-Based Crediting, and Why Now?

Concerns and critiques about the conventional high school transcript and the standardized course crediting are hardly new. They have regularly appeared in the 120-odd years since its adoption around the turn of the twentieth century. More than sixty years ago, in 1954, the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s Office of Education published a monograph entitled The Carnegie Unit: its Origin, Status, and Trends. Contemporary readers of this monograph will quickly recognize the timelessness of many of our current concerns about the conventional high school crediting system and transcript:

1. It encourages a rigid schedule of classes and subjects, which makes needed innovations in the high school program difficult.

2. It gives undue emphasis to the time served, to subjects and to textbooks, without appropriate emphasis on [the] amount learned in subjects.

3. It fosters the assumption that all pupils can acquire the same minimum amount of learning or subject mastery in a given period of time, thus encouraging well endowed pupils to loaf and requiring those less well endowed to attempt to achieve the impossible and thus suffer possible failure.

4. It provides no uniform means for measuring such qualitative learnings as social adjustment, moral and ethical development, leadership, attitudes, work experience, civic competence, and a variety of other essential and valuable human objectives.

(Tomkins & Gaumnitz, 1954)

Today, though, we are seeing a great increase in attention to the limitations of the standard credit and transcript, and many are declaring it is time for a new approach.

Why now?

1. Things are broken that need fixing; the status quo is increasingly untenable.

2. Aspirations are rising for better aligning student credits and records for the values we have in twenty-first-century learning.

3. New models and technologies are making the shift easier to imagine, design, implement, and manage.

Problems and Limitations of the Status Quo

The greatest driver of change may be the rising dissatisfaction of educators, parents, colleges, employers, and students themselves. The limitations and deficiencies of the contemporary high school transcript are passing the tipping point. Though these limitations are many, some stand out.

Grade inflation has been increasing annually since the sixties, just as our currency has seen inflation. Average grades have risen dramatically, and letter grades no longer allow colleges or employers to meaningfully discriminate among the top third, roughly, of the graduating classes at many high schools. Inside Higher Ed reports on a recent College Board study finding that looking at cohorts of high school graduates who finished from 1998 to 2016, the average high school GPA went up from 3.27 to 3.38: “The data come both from the Education Department and from surveys the College Board conducts of students who take the SAT” (Jaschik, 2017).

And the problem is especially true at certain types of schools; the rate has been “more than twice that at private, nonreligious schools. The percentage of seniors claiming to have an A average has also risen, from 39 percent to 47 percent” (Murphy, 2017).

But this is only half the problem. When grades are inflated in systems that reinforce grading as the primary driver of certifying preparation, students feel forced to compete and stress over the littlest things, beseeching teachers for extra points, disputing every demerit, striving to be credited for compliance, not for the real work of mastering challenging material. Stanford Professor of Education Denise Pope’s Doing School is an acutely observed narrative of a high-achieving, highly competitive public high school. The book:

follows five highly regarded students through a school year and discovers that these young people believe getting ahead requires manipulating the system, scheming, lying, and cheating. They feel that in order to get ahead they must compromise their values. In short, they “do school”—that is, they are not really engaged with learning nor can they commit to such values as integrity and community.

(Pope, 2003)

It should be said that Pope doesn’t blame students for their choices, nor do we in this book: students act in these ways because their options are so limited, and the system is structured so that this is what is defined for them as success, and other pathways toward more authentic and ultimately more sustained and meaningful learning simply aren’t available to them.

Pope wrote that more than a decade ago; she reiterated these concerns when being quoted in a recent magazine article:

[Students] realize that they are caught in a system where achievement depends more on “doing”—going through the correct motions—than on learning and engaging with the curriculum. Instead of thinking deeply about the content of their courses and delving into projects and assignments, the students focus on managing the workload and honing strategies that will help them to achieve high grades.

(Looney, 2017)

Meanwhile, in other schools, particularly where resources are poorer, many students are passed along for cooperation and good citizenship, while their grades lack any connection to actual mastery of material. As educational writer Rose Colby notes in her book Competency-Based Education:

Our colleges and business have no way to tell from current school transcripts if students have met performance criteria for graduation. In addition, the course content from one high school to another can vary greatly, and the lack of performance criteria in granting credit for courses has eroded the value and meaning of the high school diploma. . . . Schools need to rethink the notion that credit accrual alone translates into competence and college and career readiness.

(Colby, 2017)

What letter grades really mean—what they are pegged to beyond any individual teacher’s opinion—has been a longstanding problem. Grant Wiggins, renowned late author of Understanding by Design and one of our most thoughtful education writers, observed this back in 1989. “An ‘A’ in English means only that some adult thought the student’s work was excellent. Compared to what or whom? As determined by what criteria? In reference to what specific subject matter?” (Wiggins, 1989).

New Aspirations

Across many sectors, our nation has embraced so-called twenty-first-century skills such as critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. Not new to the world, they are far more important for a far greater proportion of the workforce than ever before. Even the most elite professionals must now work together to solve problems, interpret data, and offer value beyond what can be provided by the performance of intelligent machines. Our schools must not only integrate these essential skills but develop a system of accountability for their mastery. Today, these skills tend to buried under the “content” of the curriculum of, for instance, US History or Biology, and recognition of them in assessment is diluted by an emphasis on testing and factual recall. Educators need to ensure that students have the opportunity to learn these skills, and learn them deeply and lastingly, for transfer and application, not just for short-term performance.

Fortunately, there is rising interest in allowing and empowering students to showcase these crucial skills—critical thinking and communication, for instance, and also global competency, meta-cognition, and creative problem-solving—and the breadth of the things they’ve accomplished, the skills they’ve mastered, on their transcripts. If this critical document and record is to be a key ticket to the future, a passport to post-secondary learning and professional opportunities, shouldn’t it report more than just the courses taken and grades awarded? In a 2018 piece on Education Week, educational innovation observer Tom Vander Ark writes about the potential value in transcripts that “help students share personal bests, unique accomplishments and capabilities, and evidence of growth on career readiness indicators” (Vander Ark, 2018). He also writes that, in the conventional form:

Narrow focus on course and credit requirements limits emphasis on the importance of out-of-school learning (for example work, service, and civic-based learning). There are few if any opportunities to gain credit for out-of-school or informal learning (learning fractions on Khan Academy, taking calculus on a MOOC [Massive Open Online Course], starting one’s on business or cause).

(Vander Ark, 2018)

There is also a growing embrace of what is called “performance assessment.” In order to attain a driver’s license, one must first pass a multiple-choice test, but that is not all that is required: the real test comes on the road, in real-world circumstances, while actually performing the task the test is certifying. The same should be true for schooling at every level. Doctorate students produce some kind of thesis to demonstrate their capacity to do the work of the field in which they are earning degrees. Road driving tests, dissertations: these are examples of performance assessments, and, increasingly, we are seeing them called for in secondary education. In New York state, schools can opt out of the state Regents exam and have their aspiring graduates demonstrate their skill sets with a performance task project culminating in an exhibition. Innovative charter and public school programs such as High Tech High, New Tech Network, and Science Leadership Academy require students to prepare and present portfolios of completed work in independent projects that demand careful preparation and thorough mastery of the knowledge and skills involved. Stanford’s SCALE—Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity—is both a cause of and a response to this rising demand for performance assessments, and its comprehensive website is complete with design guidance and example performance tasks in every subject area.

Performance assessment can and should be utilized in conventional high school courses. But it can be far richer when it asks students to go beyond the confines of a single subject, when it asks and demands of them the integration of skills and knowledge from multiple disciplines. Most higher academic performances—and most professional performances—entail synthesizing skills of literacy and numeracy, of drawing upon historical knowledge and technical understanding, and the ability to apply these multiple strands to a novel challenge. Life isn’t lived inside narrow subject area disciplines, and truly challenging problems are rarely situated exclusively within the abstractions of a single class or course. Students too often find learning artificial, airless, and narrow as they race down crowded hallways every 45 minutes to shift gears from quadratic equations to the origins of World War II to the use of the present participle to the periodic table, all of it in a vacuum separate from the dynamic demands of the world just outside the school doors. High-quality performance assessment will better enable teachers to provide and demand of students this type of more extended, applied, and multidisciplinary learning.

Performance assessment cannot be rendered especially effectively into letter grades and traditional course crediting; there is always a loss of information and substance when one tries to squeeze and shape the complexity and richness of performance assessment and interdisciplinary learning into a Carnegie unit format—into simple, single-course credits. As we shall see, a primary motivation for the launch of the Mastery Transcript Consortium came from challenges that one school’s leadership confronted after creating an entrepreneurship studies program, entailing powerful learning in real-world settings that included economics study and internships. In the eyes of students and teachers, as was recounted by MTC founder Looney, this course “counted” for a lot, far more than most traditional courses, but it couldn’t easily be counted on a transcript in Carnegie units (Looney, 2017).

One more aspirational “pull” is a fast-growing appreciation for the extraordinary diversity of learners in our schools. The Carnegie unit, which awards three credits for the completion of a year-long course in about 120 hours, is designed to recognize the learning of “average” students. Author Todd Rose recently explained that there is no such thing as an average student; his book proclaims in its title that we are ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Kevin Mattingly
• Meet the Author
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Competency-Based Crediting Models from Higher Ed and Abroad
• 3 The Mastery Transcript Consortium
• 4 Elements of the New Model
• 5 Downstream Effects on Schools and Systems, Curriculum, and Instruction
• 6 Learning from Experience: Case Studies of Competency-Based Learning Transformation
• 7 Planning the Shift: A Game Plan
• 8 Perspectives from Higher Education
• 9 Conclusion