A New Infrastructure for Learning Credentials

America’s education system was a groundbreaking effort to help a growing nation thrive in the 19th century. Now, 200 years later, the world has changed; the horizon looks drastically different. Collectively, we need to redesign our education system to enable all of our children — and, by extension, our nation — to thrive today and tomorrow. “Horizon Three” or “H3” names the future-ready system we need, one that is grounded in equity serving learners’ individual strengths and needs as well as the common good. This series provides a glimpse of where H3 is already being designed and built. It also includes provocations about how we might fundamentally reimagine learning for the future ahead. You can learn more about the horizons framing here.

By: Mike Flanagan

When you think about college admissions, you think about a treadmill of grades, GPAs, and anxiety that starts well before senior year. What if we told you that wasn’t necessary? Today, learners from Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC) schools have used our transcripts and records to gain acceptance to 592 different colleges and universities – without grades, credit hours, or GPA, and by building learning experiences that allow young people to learn and grow their competence in deeply meaningful ways. 

If you’re a regular reader of this H3 series, the problem we’re trying to solve should sound familiar. We’re measuring the potential and capacity of young adults in the wrong ways. The tools we use for that measurement are out of date, prone to bias, and too narrow in their scope.  There are other skills and abilities that matter just as much, if not more, than test scores and GPA—we need to capture those and restore them to equal footing. The fundamental design of school needs to change. 

But college admissions is always the choke point. Schools say they want to do things differently, but they can’t because colleges and universities want learning communicated through a traditional transcript that can be read by admissions officers in three minutes or less. 

At the Mastery Transcript Consortium, we’ve been working since 2017 to build a growing national collective of schools and districts that are embracing H3 change and building a path to a different communications system between high school and higher education.

From day one, our big idea was simple: Metrics once created to describe school—credit hours, course titles, and GPA—had begun to define school and were now throttling innovation in the service of compliance.  Our solution—the Mastery Transcript—replaces credit hours and GPA with competencies and examples of student work. It allows educators to award credit based on mastery, rather than seat time, and to create individualized learning paths not bounded by fixed doses of English, math, science, history, and foreign language.

The case we’re making is also starting to resonate outside education circles alone. David Brooks’ recent cover story in the December issue of The Atlantic, “How the Ivy League Broke America” beautifully argues that we need to “humanize and improve” the meritocracy by widening the aperture of what “counts” when it comes to assessing progress and growth in high school. We’re helping to lead this change.

We’re also realists. We accept a key part of his premise: that like it or not, college admissions still gets a vote in how we do things. If our new H3 measures are to be relevant for learners, they need to result in credentials that are useful to them and help them make progress toward their goals. That means they need to be legible and meaningful to higher education and workforce alike.

New Infrastructures

So how do we actually do this? How do we change “what counts” when it comes to HS learning and growth? As other contributors to the series have noted, part of the work is new policies and also new classroom practices. The other, more invisible part is new infrastructure, or more correctly, infrastructures: technical, semantic, and heuristic. 

Imagine a deep, community-embedded learning ecosystem experience: a group of students doing a year-long project on wetland restoration that cuts across science, math, English, and social studies, as well as the scientific method (investigating pollutants) and creative processes (a five-minute video on the restoration work). The project grows students’ competence in critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, communication, and citizenship. It is accomplished in partnership with a local non-profit, partly during non-school hours, with the students also running a campaign on the non-profit’s social media. How do we communicate what students have learned to colleges, universities, and employers beyond a simple letter grade of ‘A’? 

Technical Infrastructure

The technical infrastructure consists of the tools and protocols to collect, capture, and share new and more useful kinds of data about learners’ skills and abilities.  Surprisingly, this piece of the infrastructure is the furthest along.  Thanks to the hard work of organizations like 1EdTech, Digital Promise, and Learning Economy Foundation, we now have tools and protocols such as Open Badges, Learner Employment Records (LERs), and Comprehensive Learner Records (CLRs). For our students working on wetland restoration, this means the progress they’ve made in critical thinking and collaboration can move with them as they progress through middle school, high school, higher ed, and beyond. 

Expanding Access, Value and Experiences Through Credentialing

Getting Smart’s recent credentialing publication helps expand upon this new infrastructure, taking a landscape view of where credentialing is now and where it might get to. This analysis provides key insights and practical frameworks to help educational institutions and organizations implement equitable and transparent credentialing systems.

View Publication

Semantic Infrastructure

Semantic infrastructure is harder.  Technical infrastructure will help new types of data move across different platforms and settings, but this won’t matter if the information being relayed is meaningless to readers or doesn’t add value to their decision-making. We experienced some of this about a decade ago when digital badging was all the rage. Organizations would issue badges to indicate that the learner had completed an arc of learning, and that badge could be displayed in digital ‘wallets’ or on LinkedIn. The technology to issue and share badges worked just fine, but the badges didn’t mean anything. Anyone could issue a badge for anything, so everyone did, and precious little of it had any value or signal on the destination end. 

Let’s say we help our local non-profit issue a digital badge to recognize our learners’ restoration work–how will others outside the community know what we mean by communication or collaboration? How will a college or a potential employer know the quality of the work?  For these new measures to be useful, we must do the deep work of defining what these new essential skills are, what they look like in practice and how they are assessed. America Succeeds’ Durable Skills, the XQ Competencies, and the recently launched Skills for the Future initiative are all good examples of what this needs to look like. (Full disclosure–MTC is now part of the ETS family of companies and is working directly to support and build out Skills for the Future.)

Heuristic

Heuristic may be the hardest of all. Heuristics are the mental frameworks or “shortcuts” we use to make decisions quickly and without overtaxing our brains. At worst, they can result in stereotypes and bias, but at their best, they allow us to drive cars while listening to podcasts—the complex work of steering thousands of pounds of metal at high speeds is effectively reduced to “background routines.” The same goes for surgeons in the OR, or judges reviewing legal filings—they all have subroutines they use to chunk complex tasks into simpler steps, and relegate the routine steps to “autopilot”, allowing them to focus attention on the truly hard/difficult/novel. This is a universal type of cognitive infrastructure, and educators and admissions officers have it too—we have decades of “wiring” from training and experience that we use to recognize “good” v. “not good”; “admissible” v. “not admissible”; or even “smart” v. “not smart.” 

H3 thinking requires us to push on these definitions. When members of our wetland restoration team are applying for scholarships or internships, we want their evaluators to be attuned to not look solely at coursework and grades, but also consider evidence of skills, and to ask different types of questions. What does “good” work look like in the age of AI? What does it actually mean to “be smart” anyway? Full implementation and acceptance of new education models requires an explicit and collective rewrite of this mental infrastructure. This work is being done nationally and locally by a myriad of organizations, many of whom have contributed to this series.

What’s Next? 

Like any H3 effort worthy of the name, this is hard work but our seven years have exceeded our wildest expectations. We know from talking to higher education admissions leaders that “our kids” weren’t admitted because of MTC records per se. Rather, they’re doing well because they’ve benefited from mastery learning. Whether applying to a selective college or vying for a competitive internship or job, young adults who are unique and authentic have an easier time standing out in a crowded field.

In addition, we’re excited about what’s next. Working with our partners at ETS and the Carnegie Foundation, the Skills for the Future initiative aims to capture learning wherever it takes place–in school, in extracurricular activities like sports or theater, in internships and apprenticeships, and on the job or while taking care of family members. SFF tools will provide insights throughout the learning process, giving students, families, and educators actionable information to help them continue to build skills over time. Finally, we’ll integrate these tools and insights into new records of skill development that can open doors beyond high school. Doing so will help build the infrastructure we need to fundamentally rethink education, challenging and coaching learners to think, write, and speak in ways that develop their individual strengths and empower them to tell their unique stories.

Mike Flanagan is the CEO of the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC).

This blog series is sponsored by LearnerStudio, a non-profit organization accelerating progress towards a future of learning where young people are inspired and prepared to thrive in the Age of AI – as individuals, in careers, in their communities and our democracy. Curation of this series is led by Sujata Bhatt, founder of Incubate Learning, which is focused on reconnecting humans to their love of learning and creating.