{"id":728786,"date":"2024-07-09T14:01:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-09T18:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/?post_type=article&#038;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<p>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<p>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<p>The collaboration between the Educational Testing Service and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching <a href=\"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/article\/carnegie-ets-team-up-to-develop-competency-based-assessments\/\">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<span class=\"cta_snippet\"><hr><p><em>Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. <\/em><a class=\"arrow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/about\/newsletters\/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=top&utm_id=newsletter\"><strong>Sign up for The 74 Newsletter<\/strong><\/a><\/p><hr><\/span>\n\n\n\n<p>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<p>\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&#8217;ll make school more engaging, interesting for kids, but also make it more meaningful.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\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<p>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.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n<aside class=\"inline_story shortcode simple\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/article\/carnegie-ets-team-up-to-develop-competency-based-assessments\/\"><figure style=\"background-image: url(https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/erasing-tests.jpg);\"><\/figure><div><span class=\"sans related_tag\">Related<\/span><h4 class=\"sans\">Carnegie, ETS Team Up to Develop Competency-Based Assessments<\/h4><\/div><\/a><\/aside>\n\n\n\n<p>But Knowles said it is clear now that students learn at different speeds and the measure that share\u2019s his foundation\u2019s name doesn\u2019t work anymore. ETS, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Knowles said he hopes to replace the credit hours model \u201cwhere bells ring between classes, where it&#8217;s time, not competency, that is the rule of the day.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cOur aim is to build a new architecture that would actually enable competency-based learning to move from the edges of the profession where it&#8217;s lived for 100 years to the mainstream,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The end result, said Laura Slover, managing director of the effort, will hopefully be a way to show students\u2019 character traits that many believe are just as important to success in school, jobs and life as academic knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe are convinced that there&#8217;s a lack of social and economic mobility in the U.S., and that we&#8217;ve moved from a knowledge economy to a skills economy,\u201d said Slover. \u201cWe want a portable transcripts 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 are fair and reliable and meaningful for kids.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This spring, the five states that are dipping their toes into mastery joined Skills for ذكذكتسئµ Future to help develop ways of measuring student progress on these durable skills.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>ETS said first steps included looking at the \u201cPortrait of a Graduate\u201d or \u201cPortrait of a Learner\u201d statements that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.edweek.org\/policy-politics\/the-steps-some-states-are-taking-to-redefine-student-success\/2023\/08\">states have passed<\/a> \u2014 see Nevada\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nvfutureoflearning.org\/process\">here <\/a>or North Carolina\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dpi.nc.gov\/districts-schools\/operation-polaris\/portrait-graduate\">here<\/a>&nbsp; \u2014 that list the attributes and values they want students to have. The most common traits that will be the first&nbsp; priority, said Knowles, are communication, collaboration, persistence, and digital literacy, with critical thinking and creative thinking close behind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>ETS, Carnegie and the states met in California in April to brainstorm approaches, with each state 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 &#8211; making them harder or easier or zeroing in on certain topics &#8211; based on student answers, as some online tests do now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Some <a href=\"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/article\/drawing-on-video-games-educators-land-on-unlikely-idea-playful-assessment\/\">tests could be game-based<\/a>, instead of just having students answer questions.<\/p>\n\n\n<aside class=\"inline_story shortcode simple\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/article\/drawing-on-video-games-educators-land-on-unlikely-idea-playful-assessment\/\"><figure style=\"background-image: url(https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/playful-assesment-1.jpg);\"><\/figure><div><span class=\"sans related_tag\">Related<\/span><h4 class=\"sans\">Drawing on Video Games, Educators Land on Unlikely Idea: &#8216;Playful Assessment&#8217;<\/h4><\/div><\/a><\/aside>\n\n\n\n<p>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 show character and interdisciplinary skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Portfolios can post a challenge for schools and for one of the long-range goals of the project &#8211; that skills can be reliably measured and believable to business or college admissions departments. Mastery schools use portfolios now, but those are dependent on subjective decisions by schools and teachers and are not verifiable to outsiders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But Nevada state superintendent Jhone Ebert said Skills For ذكذكتسئµ Future could develop guidelines that could be used in schools everywhere to create more consistency.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Or some rating decisions may be left to teachers, but a third party may be able to offer a seal to be added to the new transcripts to offer some verification.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ebert said she wanted Nevada schools, some of which have tested mastery concepts after a 2017 state law change, to have a role in creating new assessments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWhat has not gone well in the past is that someone just makes it a determination that this is the magic wand and how we&#8217;re going to measure everything,\u201d she said. \u201cThen it comes down and classroom teachers haven&#8217;t been involved, state leaders haven&#8217;t been involved. It is just this tool that has been made available and we are all going to adopt.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThis process is much different,\u201d she said. \u201cWe are all working together to co-design what it will look like and provide that feedback and input up front.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Mastery Transcript Consortium started in 2017 with private schools who wanted to show student progress from \u201cdeveloping\u201d skills to \u201cmastering\u201d them. It built a transcript model that typically shows about 60 skills, as each school determines, instead of just the half dozen courses a student might take each semester. Some schools have used versions of it in college applications since 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It now has 370 private and public schools or districts as members and says 500 colleges agree to accept students using the transcript.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It also has already built an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/article\/as-schools-embrace-mastery-learning-and-confront-challenges-of-gpas-and-college-admissions-consortium-creates-new-bridge-transcript\/\">intermediate report on student progress on durable skills<\/a> that schools can use as a supplement to traditional academic report cards, if they\u2019re not ready to make a full leap yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Though it keeps adding members, director Mike Flanagan said it is still a small group without the clout to take its work to a massive scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cFor us to reach millions of students across the entire country on our own would have taken an infinite amount of time,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s virtually impossible. But ETS is one of the few organizations in the sector that has the scale and capacity to credibly help us reach millions of learners.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Flanagan added that having ETS, Carnegie and five states joining the work&nbsp; \u201clends enormous credibility to our effort.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Whether this effort is enough to make mastery and measurement of soft skills take hold nationally remains&nbsp; to be seen. Attempts to use mastery in states like Maine and New Hampshire never fully caught on and are often <a href=\"https:\/\/hechingerreport.org\/inside-maines-disastrous-roll-out-of-proficiency-based-learning\/\">viewed as failures<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Among the pitfalls, he noted, are federal testing requirements under the Every Student Succeeds Act that don\u2019t allow flexibility&nbsp;when students must learn some academic skills. And schools and parents could balk at a shift, he said, though Skills For the Future might succeed in doing enough advance work that it would be easier for schools and teachers to adopt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt&#8217;s a real challenge to do it well, but it&#8217;s good that somebody with the horsepower that ETS and Carnegie (have) are giving it a shot,\u201d said Scott Marion, executive director of the nonprofit National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment. \u201cLet&#8217;s not kid ourselves. If it wasn&#8217;t so hard, somebody would have done it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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. The hope of the \u201cSkills for the Future\u201d collaboration is to make it easy for schools to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":729550,"menu_order":0,"template":"","categories":[190],"tags":[5934,1103,5799,2026,6345,7294,7419],"series":[5583],"class_list":["post-728786","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-carnegie-unit","tag-education","tag-future-of-high-school","tag-k12","tag-report-cards","tag-skills","tag-skills-for-the-future","series-future-of-high-school"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/728786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/728786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":731285,"href":"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/728786\/revisions\/731285"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/729550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=728786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=728786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=728786"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the74million.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=728786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}