The end of the Carnegie Unit

The recent news that the Carnegie Foundation, the brain power behind “The Carnegie Unit”, which has largely governed the way most credit granting educational institutions from secondary to university have assigned credit, would be shifting from seat time to skills and that Educational Testing Services (ETS), who are the gatekeepers to teacher licensure and graduate school, will collaborate to create new tools designed to assess what students are able to do is fantastic news.

Those of us who have been working for years to redefine assessment and instructional practices to be learning focused have many times run into this obstacle of “seat time” and “required credits” when attempting to impose rational minded reform on an out-of-date educational structure. The removal of “seat time” as the governing decision of when a student has completed a course or has sufficient credits to graduate changes the entire dynamic and puts mastery and learning at the center.

Imagine as a student:

1. Your school day doesn't start at a specific time or end at a specific time
2. You don't need "courses" or "subjects" or "credits"; you need proof of proficiencies
3. You could complete high school in 2 years, 4 years, 6 years..."high school" could become a series of competencies that may extend into internships, externships, apprenticeships...your formal education is undefined

Timothy Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation said in an interview with EdSurge that “emphasizing educational outcomes more than processes would allow schools and colleges to embrace nuances about learning…..Like the reality that it takes different students different amounts of time to acquire skills. And the fact that students learn valuable lessons in the many hours they spend outside of the classroom, too, before school, after school, on the weekends and in the summer.”

This shift to measuring mastery of skills has broader implications beyond just opening up our school days and envisioning wall-less learning. The European Union has declared 2023 the European Year of Skills and under the 1st half year Council Presidency of Sweden they are putting out a specific call for skills that are needed in times of climate crisis.

A recent article in Getting Smart highlighted the need for “the ability to apply entrepreneurial skills towards challenges, and more importantly towards creating value for society.. “ as a way to innovate our way out of the climate change crisis.

Those types of skills are difficult to authentically teach in a rigid structured system based on seat time as the arbiter of success.

This shift is not without some challenges, however. Defining what counts as a "skill" is not a straightforward task, and there is a need for assessments that can measure students' acquisition of skills in an applied and hypothetical setting. There are also practical challenges related to the existing infrastructure and policies designed around the traditional time-based approach to education. There is also the issue of how to credential learning that doesn’t have a class or mark assigned to it. Three recent studies show that employers, universities, and students are not comfortable with the explosion of micro-credential options and how to ensure they are actually accrediting the skills they say they are.

However, there are opportunities in the face of these challenges. Standards Based Grading and Assessment reform advocates have long acknowledged that that reform is just part of the larger iceberg. Transcript reform groups like Mastery Transcript Consortium and The Coalition to Honour All Learning, as well as attempts to unify all of the individual US states’ Seals of Biliteracy into a Global Seal of Biliteracy are a way to impose some order on the chaos and keep educational institutions’ hands on the tiller. There have been school based initiatives to model larger plans on as well; the International School of Geneva has launched its Universal Learner Passport, Sanborn Regional High School in New Hampshire is a model school for competency based learning, and the Aurora Institute offers guidance to schools and legislative bodies on how to make these reforms permanent.

 

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