{"id":5196,"date":"2018-12-05T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-12-05T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/blog\/cw_post\/competency-based-education-quality-principle-11-establish-mechanisms-to-ensure-consistency-and-reliability\/"},"modified":"2020-02-05T13:06:57","modified_gmt":"2020-02-05T18:06:57","slug":"competency-based-education-quality-principle-11-establish-mechanisms-to-ensure-consistency-and-reliability","status":"publish","type":"cw_post","link":"https:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/cw_post\/competency-based-education-quality-principle-11-establish-mechanisms-to-ensure-consistency-and-reliability\/","title":{"rendered":"Competency-Based Education Quality Principle #11: Establish Mechanisms to Ensure Consistency and Reliability"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"This is the twelfth article in a series based on the book\u00a0<\/em>Quality Principles for Competency-Based Education<\/a><\/em>. You can find the section on Principle #11 Establish Mechanisms to Ensure Consistency and Reliability on page 77.\u00a0<\/em>The links to the other articles can be found at the bottom of this page and will be updated as they are posted.<\/em><\/p>\n

In the midst of writing all the papers for the Summit, a colleague said to me, \u201cPick consistency or reliability but not both.\u201d I thought about it for a bit, but after looking up the definitions, I ended up feeling that both were actually important.<\/p>\n

Let me start with reliability. It is a characteristic that is tragically lacking in the traditional system and has led us on the tumultuous path toward No Child Left Behind, Common Core of State Standards, and state accountability tests that are effective in identifying inequity but have been used to create a culture of shame, blame, and fear in our schools.<\/p>\n

A dictionary definition of reliability includes \u201cthe quality of being trustworthy<\/a>.\u201d The standards movement and the drive toward top-down accountability policies grew out of the fact that our schools simply were not trustworthy. Students graduated from high school only to find they needed remediation courses at college. Parents were told that their A and B students were doing great only to find out later that their children were reading two or three levels below their grade. The mixed messages and false signals of our grading systems and varied expectations leads to low achievement, inequity, and this sense of mistrust that creates tension at the local level and has led to the voucher and charter policies as well as this idea that somehow school can and should be \u201cteacher-proofed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Competency-based education seeks to and requires us to counter this trend toward policies in response to mistrust, instead building cultures and daily practices that create trust. And one of the big steps is to be reliable and, if there is variability, to be honest about it so solutions can be found.<\/p>\n

Reliability is indeed built on the idea of consistency. Consistency is important in the traditional system as well, but on a different set of factors. The traditional system seeks consistency in terms of curriculum, scope and sequence, and pacing guides. At the extreme, every student should be on the same chapter in the same textbook on the same day — regardless of whether they already have mastered the content or have yet to master the prerequisite knowledge needed to be successful. Personalized, competency-based education demands that the learning expectations (competencies<\/em> based on applying knowledge and skills and\u00a0standards<\/em> needed to develop the competencies) be held to a high degree of consistency while creating room for personalized pathways in terms of how students learn, how they demonstrate their learning, and the amount of instructional support and resources (including time) that is needed to be successful.<\/p>\n

In personalized, competency-based education, the idea of reliability means \u201cThe degree to which the result of a measurement, calculation, or specification can be depended on to be accurate<\/a>.\u201d In other words, competency-based schools should be able to consistently determine or certify that students have \u2018mastered\u2019 the content and knowledge. When a competency-based school says that a student has mastered eighth grade math standards, parents and high schools should have complete trust that that is in fact the case. Maybe a student will forget some of it by the time they enter ninth\u00a0grade, but after a refresher, they should be able to demonstrate that they can apply those standards.<\/p>\n

During a site visit, Susan Bell, former superintendent of Windsor Locks School <\/a>District<\/a>, and David Prinstein, principal of Windsor Locks Middle School, highlighted the importance of reliability and consistency: \u201cIn the traditional system, it can mistakenly feel more precise because we use mathematics to determine the grade. In the mastery-based system, we have to make sure we are as objective as possible… We used to have teachers say that they wanted to give students who had worked hard the benefit of the doubt. Why is there any doubt? We need to have a system in which we can be confident of what students know.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are three aspects to building consistent determination or certification of learning:<\/p>\n