{"id":3276,"date":"2015-02-11T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-11T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/blog\/cw_post\/beyond-the-carnegie-unit\/"},"modified":"2020-02-05T12:54:27","modified_gmt":"2020-02-05T17:54:27","slug":"beyond-the-carnegie-unit","status":"publish","type":"cw_post","link":"https:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/cw_post\/beyond-the-carnegie-unit\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond the Carnegie Unit"},"content":{"rendered":"
\u201cThe person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u2013 Chinese Proverb<\/em><\/p>\n It\u2019s striking, isn\u2019t it \u2013 the juxtaposition of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching’s recommendation<\/a> that we keep using the Carnegie Unit (CU) because we don\u2019t really have anything better, and Scott Marion\u2019s incredible post <\/a>describing a new, interlocking system that better defines student learning goals and targets, teacher goals and outcomes, and assessments that promise a more meaningful measure of learning.\u00a0The contrasts could not be clearer: one is a system to engage students deeply in learning in a competency-based environment where schools claim responsibility for ensuring that students learn, compared to the less than meaningful Carnegie Unit, in which we only promise exposure to a topic, thereby leaving students to sit through one more lecture in a traditional classroom setting.<\/p>\n Across our country, educators are coming to the conclusion that we can\u2019t wait for think tanks or federal policymakers to lead the way to a personalized system. Instead they are creating a new personalized system of education piece by piece. (You can read all about leading states, districts, and schools here at \u00a0CompetencyWorks.)<\/p>\n No one expects any one organization to come up with all the answers, but certainly the Center for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) could have offered something more in their report than telling us what we already know \u2013 that the CU is rarely a barrier, with the exception of financial aid and getting the full benefit from online learning, but neither is it a valuable unit of learning. Thus, it allows the standardized system to continue to operate with lower quality than our students deserve and contributing to the inequity that plagues the standardized education system. The report by CFAT was a major disappointment at a time when our country needs leadership and creativity about how we can proceed in re-engineering the standardized system into a personalized one in which students are at the core.<\/p>\n There are three major problems with the paper in regard to the K12 public education system.<\/p>\n Below is a deeper discussion on each of these concerns.<\/p>\n Consider the Student<\/b><\/p>\n What is in the best interest of kids?<\/i> That\u2019s the mantra found in the most highly developed competency-based schools. It\u2019s all about making decisions that are student-centered first and foremost, and then figuring out how to manage the adult issues that arise. In defining the issues using a student-centered analysis, educators are currently challenging the traditions, practices, and policies of the standardized system.<\/p>\n However, the report by CFAT was firmly focused on the adults in the systems, with limited attention to whether the CU and how it is used in the current system is beneficial for students in their pursuit of an education. CFAT outlines all the issues the dysfunctional combination of the CU and A-F and the 0-100 grading scale has created. Such dysfunction has allowed schools to indicate to parents and students that their children have learned more than they actually have. CFAT returns to a defensive stance that it isn\u2019t the fault of the CU because it was never designed to be about learning. This is hard to swallow when millions of parents have watched their children graduate after accruing all the necessary credits only to feel terribly betrayed when they discover their children don\u2019t have the skills to go to college without remediation. This is hard to swallow when it is children and parents who have to pay the financial cost of a low quality system.<\/p>\n Furthermore, the authors seem to suggest that online and blended learning is a reform that can be stopped rather than a broad societal change as we integrate technology into our lives, and that the policy goal to ensure that all students are successful in school is a reform rather than a social expectation that has taken root across the country. They encourage us to be cautious \u2013 indicating these reforms might not work \u2013 rather than asking the questions: What will make them work? What type of research is needed? And what type of system needs to be in place to make it so?<\/p>\n CFAT is very focused on the efficiency of the system, but there\u2019s no use for an efficient system that is not delivering what students need. In fact, one can partially blame the emptiness of the CU credit as a measure of exposure to instruction as one of the major disconnects between high schools and college. It certainly helped to expand the education system, but has little value to ensuring a quality system that works for students. It has contributed to the loss of millions of dollars in precious educational funds when schools are forced to offer full course credit recovery. Rather than directing resources to the specific areas where students need help, failure to gain the needed CU puts the \u201cfailed\u201d student right back in for another 120 hours, subject to the same thing in the same way. Is it any wonder that many students disengage and become part of the large dropout population in our nation\u2019s schools?<\/p>\n Just think of the cost to students who have had to bear the brunt of the disconnect over the past century \u2013 and how this has slowed down our effort to create an equitable system, as year after year after year, students were awarded credits that only indicated they had been exposed to the subject matter.<\/p>\n Regarding Equity, that Horse is Out of the Gate<\/b><\/p>\n\n