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, according to The 74.
In place of A-F grades, the aim is 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.
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.
Portfolios can post a challenge for schools and for demonstrating skills that 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.
But future guidelines could be used in schools everywhere to create more consistency.
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.
The Mastery Transcript Consortium started in 2017 with private schools that wanted to show student progress from “developing” skills to “mastering” 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.
It now has 370 private and public schools or districts as members and says 500 colleges agree to accept students using the transcript.
It also has already built an intermediate report on student progress on durable skills that schools can use as a supplement to traditional academic report cards, if they’re not ready to make a full leap yet.
Though it keeps adding members, director Mike Flanagan says it is still a small group without the clout to take its work to a massive scale.
“For us to reach millions of students across the entire country on our own would have taken an infinite amount of time,” he says. “It’s virtually impossible. But having the Educational Testing Service (ETS), Carnegie and five states joining the work “lends enormous credibility to our effort.”
The 74
