{"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":"

\"Chinese\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