{"id":728786,"date":"2024-07-09T14:01:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-09T18:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/?post_type=article&p=728786"},"modified":"2024-08-14T10:11:01","modified_gmt":"2024-08-14T14:11:01","slug":"reinventing-report-cards-reading-writing-collaboration-and-other-work-skills","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/article\/reinventing-report-cards-reading-writing-collaboration-and-other-work-skills\/","title":{"rendered":"Reinventing Report Cards: Reading, Writing, Collaboration and Other Work Skills"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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 powerful players joining forces to advance it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hope of the \u201cSkills for the Future\u201d collaboration is to make it easy for schools to treat so-called \u201cdurable\u201d skills such as critical thinking, teamwork and perseverance the same as 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The collaboration between the Educational Testing Service and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching started last year and added<\/a> five states this spring \u2014 Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Wisconsin. The Mastery Transcript Consortium which has already built a mastery-based report card became part of ETS, the company that runs the SAT and GRE college admissions tests, in May.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


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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 own speed, rather than in lockstep with a class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis whole idea that education could be focused on durable and transferable skills is super exciting to me,\u201d said Scott Looney, founder of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, which just added its innovative report card to the partnership this month. \u201cIt’ll make school more engaging, interesting for kids, but also make it more meaningful.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think this is going to give us the ability to take this to millions of kids,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carnegie President Tim Knowles said this new effort is a full reversal of what his foundation once promoted. In the early 1900s, the foundation popularized the credit hour or Carnegie Unit concept of measuring learning by hours spent on a subject. <\/p>\n\n\n