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Competency-based learning, which allows students to progress at their own pace after they’ve shown mastery of a subject, rather than by their age, is quickly gaining momentum. Already, a few states like New Hampshire, Maine, and Oregon are moving towards implementing competency-based learning models throughout the entire state. What’s more, 40 states have at least district experimenting with the model. But despite this growth, its proponents say federal policies for accountability and assessment are holding the movement back.

KnowledgeWorks, an organization that supports three education-focused initiatives — New Tech Network, EDWorks and Strive — recently released a report highlighting the pain points between federal policy and a competency-based system. The report, Competency Education Series: Policy Brief One [PDF], points out that, although the federal government has supported some aspects of competency-based learning, implementing the new model can be difficult because of federal restrictions.

“The greatest conflict stems from disconnect with the work on the ground and federal accountability and assessment systems,” the report states. “Implementers faced with this disconnect have no choice but to juggle two systems: one required by federal law and one developed by the educators, students, parents, and community leaders committed to successful implementation of competency education.”

CLASHES OVER TIME

Time is the biggest point of contention between the two systems. The federal government measures school accountability as well as student achievement through time-based modules. Seat time and annual test results are the primary ways that the government keeps schools accountable, categorizes them, and targets them for intervention. And required end-of-year tests focus school instruction timelines in specific ways that do not allow students to move at their own pace, a key element of a competency-based system.

With the competency models, students take summative assessments at various times throughout the year. They demonstrate what they’ve learned as they’re learning — not just during one or two big testing seasons, as most schools do.

WHAT’S WORTH TESTING?

Another big difference between the two systems is what gets tested. Competency-based learning focuses not just on content, but also on “soft skills” like communication, collaboration, and other higher-order thinking skills. In contrast, the federal assessments focus on the subjects of math and English Language Arts aligned with academic achievement standards, but not necessarily with core competencies. In other words, everything is based on a number score, not on whether the student can demonstrate that he can do each individual task determined to be a core competency.

Federal accountability standards track student achievement, not growth. Many competency-based models are tracking progression in career and college readiness as well as core competencies, and those can’t be reported to the federal government under the current rubrics.

COST

The report also identifies limited resources as a roadblock to improve assessments, which they agree are essential, in order to complement the competency-based system. States already spend a significant amount of money on required federal assessments, so there’s no additional money to invest in assessments that would allow for demonstration of mastery or to evaluate throughout a year and not just at the end.

NEXT STEPS

The KnowledgeWorks report doesn’t give a smoking-gun solution for the various problems it raises. Instead, the group intends to continue investigating how federal policies could encourage competency-based learning by studying the effects of the few programs the government has decided to fund in this area. The organization also plans to pull together best practices from states moving ahead despite the challenges and to figure out how competency-based education could be assessed in a more comparative way.

What will the future of education look like? KnowledgeWorks Foundation has just released the third edition of its education forecast, called Forecast 3.0, Recombinant Education: Regenerating the Learning Ecosystem, that outlines the deconstruction of the current education model, a change in educators’ roles based on their strengths, changing career pathways, and the role of technology in this realm

CUSTOMIZABLE VALUE WEBS 

While the digital explosion has long been creating an expanding ecosystem of new services, applications, and tools, innovative business models will find new ways of harnessing these opportunities into flexible value webs that deliver highly customer-centric experiences.

Across industries, new intermediaries, novel customer value propositions, and creative ways of facilitating open digital platforms and networks are already transforming customer experiences.  For example, new intermediaries in the music industry have integrated platforms such as iTunes, Google+, and Facebook with artist information, concert databases, and mobile apps to transform passive listeners into active music participants who share, create, remix, and produce music.

In education, new intermediaries will facilitate a similar integration of networks and systems that bring learners, resources, services, data, and learning agents together in novel value webs. Schools will no longer be singular, enclosed organizations.

Instead, they will serve students by harnessing and brokering resources and talent across the global community. Customer-centric value propositions will guide the creation of learning experiences that leverage rich value webs to serve distinct populations. What began as a “bring-your-own-device” (BYOD) movement may very well turn into a “create-your-own-school” movement as new intermediaries, learning agents, parents, and learners collaborate to weave vibrant value webs.

This increasing customization of learning will involve recombining learning experiences, assets, and tools to help each learner find the specific value proposition(s) that best meet her or his needs.

Collective Invention

Adil Tahawai: future learner

What will a typical school day in the year 2020 (or beyond) look like? How and where will kids learn? What will be the role of the teacher, the parent, the education community?

Over the coming weeks, I’ll post responses from respected authorities on the field byway of articles, video interviews, and innovative projects.

We’ll launch the series with a collaborative project by Knowledgeworks and Collective Invention for Grantmakers for Education that shows what learning will look like in the year 2025. The group created scenarios of the future from the perspective of learners and educators in order to help grantmakers understand what kind of innovations would make the biggest impact on learners.

From Learning 2025: Forging Pathways to the Future.

The heart of formal learning is the relationship between a learner and a mentor, teacher or technical master. That relationship is supported by family and community. Traditionally we’ve built schools at the center of our communities to enable such relationships for larger numbers of children. In today’s world, the mentor-learner relationship is now managed by various entities, from school districts to charter school networks to home-school networks to—increasingly–online communities.

And in the future, we can expect that technology’s role will increase as new distance learning models enable innovation at the very heart of the teaching and learning relationship. In a 24/7, Internet-enabled world of learning, the nature of that relationship will undoubtedly evolve. What happens when kids are engaged in geographically-distributed learning cohorts with other students who happen to share their interests, learning styles and/or challenges?

The Ideal Scenario: Learners Create Rich Opportunities

• Amid a culture of flexible innovation, learners shape their own learning experiences, drawing upon a rich learning geography to identify resources that meet their needs.

• Personalization of learning experiences are the norm, so the K-12 system of 2010 no longer dominates learning. Those schools and districts that remain have become part of a complex and vibrant set of options that together form a loose learning ecosystem. Learning is available 24/7 and year round across many learning platforms and beyond geographic limits.

• Smart networks of resource providers form lightweight, modular learning grids to offer  flexible learning experiences as demand dictates. Gone are the days when the adults involved in learning primarily served as teachers, administrators, and tutors. Now a whole host of learning agents support learning, with some specializing in particular content and others focusing on pedagogy or assessment design. Networked collaboration is the norm.

To get a sense of the experiences of a wide range of learners from the future — a 15-year-old Muslim immigrant being home-schooled in Minnesota by her mother, a 17-year-old “climate refugee” encamped in Richmond, Calif. with tribal elders, a 17-year-old African American in New Orleans, go to “Meet the Learners.”

And below, meet a future “learning agent” (known in 2010 as educator). He’s addressing two of the learners described above and guiding them on joint projects. (You’ll also see two other videos, all of them portrayed by Jamais Cascio.)

So all this said, what’s needed to get us there?

• Resources geared toward the learner
• Risk-taking and prototyping
• Social and peer-based learning
• New forms of governance
• Personalized learning and community
• Public will for change

Read more about the Learning 2025 project.

Lenny Gonzalez

Some might say it’s all well and good to teach responsibility and accountability and self-sufficiency, but what about test scores?

At Napa New Tech, the numbers speak for themselves. The school’s 2009 API scores was 818. (Napa New Tech is the first school in the New Tech Network, and was opened in 1996.) The average score of all the 62 schools in the New Tech Network for 2008 was 691, and the growth in the score between 2007 and 2008 was 10.75.

“In general, our students do better across the country in humanities, language arts, social studies, and science,” said Chris Walsh, director of innovation and design at New Tech Network. “Math is still at average. But in terms of engagement, college attendance, and graduation rates, we’re off the charts.”

He’s right. From the KnowledgeWorks Foundation (which New Tech is a subsidiary of):

Also according to Knowledgeworks:

- 26 of 28 New Tech schools with available data (or 93%) had attendance rates between 90-100% in 2008-09. Almost two-thirds of the New Tech schools had a 0% drop out rate across grades in 2008-09.

- 98% of Napa New Tech graduates surveyed advanced to post-secondary education.

- 40% are in Science, Technology, Engineering or Math (STEM) career tracks compared with 7% of high school graduates nationwide.

More numbers to take into account, showing that the New Tech model could work in any setting.

- 1/3 of New Tech schools are in rural areas; 1/3 are in suburban; and 1/3 are in urban neighborhoods.

- Half of the students in the network have free and/or reduced lunch.

But even with such promising scores, the whole assessment issue can stand some serious review, Walsh said.

“We’re trying to redefine what the definition of a great school is. Not just good test scores or great football teams,” he said. “If we had a national assessment around critical thinking, which we unfortunately don’t, you would change the whole dialogue.”

Lenny Gonzalez

What does the high school of the future look like? It’s one that emphasizes useful, relevant skills that can be applied to college and the work world beyond. One that encourages students to be critical thinkers, responsible for their own actions. One that trains them to work collaboratively and push themselves to outside their comfort zones. And one that uses the benefits of technology to reach those goals.

If these are the tenets, then the folks at Napa New Technology High School in Napa, Calif., believe theirs is the model.

One of 62 schools in the New Tech Network, Napa New Tech High has turned the traditional high school model on its ear. Its objective is to deliver responsible citizens who are ready to work or go to college, and learn the skills to be prepared for the world outside the confines of school.

I visited the campus recently and came away with a clear understanding of the school’s vision. There’s a lot to cover, but in essence, I’ve boiled it down to these five ways I consider New Tech a school of the future.

1) Breeding a culture of accountability.

Aligning with the growing movement of teaching 21st century skills, one of the recurring mantras at New Tech High is the pervasive culture of respect, trust, and responsibility that goes both ways between educators and students. For instance, you’ll hear no bells signaling the end of class periods. Students are trusted to keep track of their own time, just as they would as grownups in the outside world, and to show up where they need to at the appropriate times. They can organize independent study projects with teachers and work on their own or in groups in the school’s airy atrium/cyber café.

“How students work here is different from traditional schools,” said Paul Curtis, assistant director of school design at Napa New Tech. “It’s much less about control. Our kids are basically treated as much as possible like an employee in a company. With respect and trust.”

Lenny Gonzalez

When, for example, it came time to nail down a policy about video games – whether non-educational games should be allowed on school computers or only on personal computers, whether headphones should be required, whether some games should be barred completely at school – administrators included students in the decision-making process.

“Rather than come up with rules to control behavior, we give them as much freedom as possible, but give them norms and behaviors for work we want everyone to do. It’s the idea of ownership of community,” Curtis said.

2) Project-based curriculum.

Put simply, project-based curriculum emphasizes learning through doing classroom projects that address a specific issue or challenge. Students typically carry out the projects in groups, and teachers guide them along.

At Napa New Tech, you’ll hear very little lecturing and see few teacher-led activities. For this school, the decision to use project-based curriculum was based not only on what topics students should learn, but also what skills they should acquire in school.

Lenny Gonzalez

“It came from a fundamental belief that we have a set of skills we want to teach kids,” Curtis said. “Critical thinking, collaboration, and communication. There are two approaches you can take: create electives that teach these skills, or embed them into every single class. If you do the latter, it leads to project-based learning.”

And in this era of high accountability, the New Tech team recognizes that the curriculum must be tied to standards. (More on the school’s assessment scores in an upcoming article.)

“We have to train teachers to look at standards that states derive, where there’s meaningful application of that knowledge,” Curtis said. “So now we start with standards and build curriculum around them. And at the same time, we provide deeper a learning experience that also teaches 21st century skills.”

3) Smart use of technology.

You can’t escape computers at Napa New Tech High. They’re everywhere. Students sit grouped together at round or long conference tables, working in teams, each one armed with a computer. The point, though, is not that they have these computers, but how it helps them become self-sufficient learners.

“Kids are finding the path to knowledge their own way,” Curtis said. “They become empowered and no longer have to raise their hand to ask a question unless they’re really stuck. This pushes them to become lifelong learners. It happens every time as long as you have access to information and technology.”

To that end, every student has access to a computer, whether it’s brought from home or provided by the school, whether it’s a Netbook or a desktop. For those families who can’t provide laptops for students, the school offers desktops. But according to Curtis, 93% of students bring their own laptops, though 33% are on free or reduced lunch.

4) Test scores based on more than knowing just facts.

In most schools, if a student turns in a project or paper late, her entire grade is typically lowered. And as a result, that one grade doesn’t accurately indicate other important factors, such as quality of work or amount of effort. With New Tech’s “gradebook” system, a student is graded on four different criteria: content, written communication (even in subjects like math), critical thinking, and work ethic.

And sometimes to surprising results.

Lenny Gonzalez

“Some kids who struggle the most are bright kids who’ve always gotten A’s but now are not necessarily getting the grades they’ve gotten,” said Howard Mahoney, principal of Napa New Tech High School. “When it comes to things like collaboration, critical thinking, pushing above and beyond, they don’t know what to do when they’re graded on those things and sometimes they get a D on an assignment. Other kids who’ve never been successful are doing great.”

Every student has access to how they scored in the rubric, and can easily identify what part of their project can be improved.

5) Providing a framework for other schools to scale.

You’ll find pockets of innovation all across the country, examples of progressive schools or programs that could be replicated, but often are not for a long list of reasons. But New Tech Network is scaling its program all over the country.

Napa New Tech High is the first of a proliferating network of schools that follow the same ideals and mission. As of now, 62 schools across the country are replicating the New Tech model (and that number grows).

What does it take to become a New Tech school? First and foremost, it’s the willingness to embrace absolute change in school culture.

“If you don’t have this atmosphere, it’s hard to think about academic achievement. Even in urban schools, we focus on culture as the primary piece, because until that gets established it’s hard to do anything else,” said Chris Walsh, director of innovation and design at New Tech Network, which is a subsidiary of KnowledgeWorks Foundation.

Also, it takes many months of planning, about $450,000 to $500,000, a lot of intense teacher re-training, an entire project-based curriculum, and possibly the biggest challenge — an understanding that the model has to be embraced in its entirety.

“It doesn’t help to try to piecemeal your way to change,” Walsh said. “Each of those small changes are seen by the rest of the system as cancer. The whole system fights against that change.”

And they’re pushing for even further growth. To really get traction and for communities to benefit from all the advantages of New Tech schools, the network’s goal is to create entire districts with their model.

“We’ve figured out the school part,” Walsh said. “But the big challenge for us is to create a district that supports the infrastructure like this.”