The Center for PPP shares quotes from pioneers of education to transform the experience of school for students. Ask students to describe school and they will use the word "boring." Roger Schank, Dennis Littky, Larry Rosenstock, High Tech High, Big Picture Learning, Elliot Washor, John Spencer, Ken Robinson, George Couros, Abraham Fischler and John Dewey are some of the pioneers that we support and we ask you to click on their social media.
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By James Vaznis
GLOBE STAFF JULY 09, 2017
For years, students have been stacking their high school transcripts with as many advanced courses and A’s as possible in an effort to get into the best colleges. But under a radical redesign of the document — being led by dozens of private schools nationwide — the practice of listing courses and grades could come to an end.
Instead, the new transcripts would detail a student’s mastery of specific skills, such as the ability to collaborate, think creatively and analytically, take initiative, assess risk, solve problems, or write coherently.
And what about that hard-earned A in calculus? Most schools would stop itemizing courses, credits, and grades on the transcripts. Not even grade point averages would appear.
The idea is to show colleges what students can do, rather than how good they are at memorizing information or taking tests. Supporters say the change should do a better job of predicting which students will thrive in higher education and ultimately in the workplace.
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“I think we overvalue content knowledge,” said Scott Looney, head of the Hawken School in Ohio, who is the founder and chairman of the Mastery Transcript Consortium , a group of schools that was created to spearhead the revisions and that includes several Massachusetts schools. “If you really think about what makes kids successful in college, it is the ability to think deeply, reason, write well, lead a team.”
But a move away from a standardized measurement could create a nightmare for college admission offices, as they grapple with a surge in applications generated by the ease at which students can apply online to multiple colleges at once.
William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard College, said high school transcripts and standardized test scores play an important role in the admissions process and “provide a common measure that allows some comparison among applicants from very different backgrounds and academic institutions.”
“Secondary school grading systems and transcripts give colleges an estimate of how much a student has achieved day-to-day in the classroom and a way to measure a student’s readiness for college-level academic work,” Fitzsimmons said in a statement. “We hope that the proposed proficiency-based transcripts will provide such information as well.”
The redesign could be the biggest change to the high school transcript since the documents came into vogue more than a century ago, when colleges began setting admission standards for the number of hours students needed to study certain subjects.
Behind the effort locally are some big-name private schools: Phillips Academy, Milton Academy, Noble and Greenough, Newton Country Day School, Brooks School, Gann Academy, and Northfield Mount Hermon. The dean of studies at Phillips is taking a leave of absence to lead the group.
Several experts say that if these schools pull off the change, then public schools — some of which have already been experimenting with alternative transcripts — will follow. Most notably, the New England Secondary School Consortium, which includes education commissioners and public school educators from all New England states except Massachusetts, has been pushing for proficiency-based transcripts for the last few years.
For many of the private schools, the move is about more than just changing the content of a transcript.
They want to shift the mindset of students who have become so obsessed with grades that they are whizzing through their studies without realizing what they have actually learned, and they are unwilling to take the kinds of risks necessary to succeed in an innovation economy because they fear failure.
“Students can’t think beyond that transcript and see the entire life ahead of them,” said Sarah Pelmas, head of school at the Winsor School in Boston. “The pressure has become so intense.”
And the course grades on the transcripts reveal little about the kind of work students put into their class and what skills they learned, they say.
‘If you really think about what makes kids successful in college, it is the ability to think deeply, reason, write well, lead a team.’
Scott Looney, leading a push to overhaul transcripts without grades
Under the redesigned high school transcript, however, college admission officers would be able to see specific examples of student work in just a couple of clicks.
Although the exact design is still being hashed out, supporters envision the transcript would be online and contain three layers of information.
The first layer would summarize a student’s mastery of specific skills. Then the admission officer could click on a skill to see how that student’s school defined mastery. With one more click, the admission officer could see the various examples of student work that a school used to judge mastery.
“We will run some pilots over the next couple of years,” said Patricia Russell of Phillips Academy and interim executive director of the Mastery Transcript Consortium. “Once we think the transcript is working well, we will make it available to any school.”
Eliminating courses and grades from the transcripts could create a host of problems, especially for applicants to colleges that require students to have passed certain classes, admission experts said.
For instance, the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education requires applicants to the University of Massachusetts and the state universities to have taken four years of English and math, three years of science, and two years of foreign languages, as well as other courses.
Beyond the requirements, judging an applicant’s performance in high school courses — especially those related to the major the applicant hopes to pursue — is useful in determining if the applicant can handle the rigor of a college-level program, said James Roche, associate provost for enrollment management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
He questioned the need to drastically overhaul transcripts.
Many of the skills the consortium hopes to detail in the transcripts are typically conveyed in letters of recommendation the colleges receive, Roche said.
“I’m not sure the world understands how thorough college applications are now,” Roche said. “I’m always impressed with the amount of work and energy that goes into the applications and the letters of recommendation.”
James Vaznis can be reached at james.vaznis@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeVaznis.
A consortium of more than 100 of America's best preparatory schools think a competency-based transcript can relieve the pressure on students. And education reformers say the clout of this group could be strong enough to bring about this change nationwide.
—Imagine a transcript that doesn't say anything about the courses a student took or the grades earned. Instead, there is a description of the qualitative skills and character traits that student mastered, along with examples in the form of essays, labs, and videos.
This is the vision of Scott Looney, head of Hawken School, outside of Cleveland, and the founder and board chair of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, a group of more than 100 of the most prestigious preparatory schools in the United States. The coalition is developing a digital transcript that tracks the whole progress of students, not just performance on tests and class assignments. It's a change that reformers say could free high school education from the century-long limitations of A-to-F grading.
“The problem with a grade is it doesn’t feel like coaching and guidance to kids – it feels like a judgment,” Mr. Looney tells The Christian Science Monitor in a phone interview. “Kids are not focusing ... on what they need to learn. They are just worrying about what the teacher wants from them.”
Many US schools have turned from A-to-F grades to more descriptive assessments of student mastery of skills.But only a handful of states and major cities have made competency-based assessments available at every grade level. Most schools have confined the movement to lower grades. On the high-school level, schools and parents alike worry that not granting A-to-F grades to students could hurt their college admissions chances.
But that could change if the Mastery Transcript Consortium, which includes some of the most highly regarded private schools in the US, succeeds. With members like Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, the Dalton School in New York, and the Cranbrook Schools in Michigan, the group's clout could force a broader acceptance of the new transcript.
The consortium has worked out a first pass of a new digital transcript. The document would be standard across schools but each school would determine for itself the competency areas and mastery credits it wants students to focus on. And letter grades would play no part in the assessment process.
“If we figure out how to make this work, this could be a really major change in education,” says Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. “I’m extremely excited and optimistic.”
When the Carnegie Unit – the 120 hours students are expected to sit in class each year – and A-to-F grades became the standard for American high schools more than a century ago, they were viewed as revolutionary, too. No longer were students put through subjective oral or written examinations to gain entrance to college. Over the years, however, educators say the traditional transcript has turned high-school learning into a college-admissions game. Students strive to "win" by earning the highest grades in the hardest classes – but don't necessarily retain knowledge or skills.
The Hawken School has discussed experimenting with a pilot program with volunteer students, Looney tells the Monitor. Under the pilot, a teacher may, for example, attach a strong student essay to a transcript. Then a panel of faculty members would review the essay and either let it stand, or remove it and tell the student how to improve it.
“We know that if you want kids to get better at theater, at acting, or at basketball, you don’t give them a letter grade at the end of practice,” Looney says. “You just say, ‘Hey, you did a good job.... But at the next practice I really want you to work on this.’”
The Edward E. Ford Foundation announced last week that it will award the consortium $2 million, which members have pledged to match. Ultimately, the consortium says, it hopes to win over both public and parochial schools as well as the college admissions world.
Good or bad?
But the consortium could end up hurting the very public schools it says it wants to help, says Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell.
“Admissions at top colleges is a zero-sum game, after all,” she wrote last week. “If signal-jamming by the [elite schools] of the world sufficiently confuses college admissions officers into accepting more of their students, fewer spots will be available for other schools. Additionally, less digestible transcripts might lead colleges to place more weight on something that’s more easily comparable across students: standardized test scores.”
Some other education professionals express a mix of caution and optimism.
“I think it’s a promising development,” says Michael Reilly, executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “The concern that I would raise is if that’s the only document that is going to be produced by the school and handed to the student for colleges and universities, that could negatively impact students who are trying to go to schools that have not transitioned to be able to evaluate those and be able to make admissions decisions.”
But Randall Bass, the vice provost for education at Georgetown University, says a transcript like the consortium’s could offer value.
“In many ways the admissions process now is a game of trying to read in between the lines of transcripts to look for certain qualities that are not actually represented by high scores and good grades,” he says. “It could strengthen the process if they are successful in finding ways to represent, in a more explicit way, the qualities we’re continually trying to infer.”
It could also alleviate the pressure on high-school students, says Mark Hatch, vice president for enrollment management at Colorado College.
“We’re seeing an average 18-year-old that matriculates at our institutions a little bit more frazzled and a little bit less focused right now,” he says. “There is a growing concern among faculty at institutions that they are inheriting students who are very good at punching buttons and very good at collecting a 5 on AP scores and great grades, but are lacking the passion, curiosity, and freshness for learning that we’d like to have.”
Has it worked before?
Though competency-based transcripts are more often used in elementary schools in the US, some independent and public schools have expanded it to secondary school.
Wildwood School, an independent progressive school in Los Angeles, evaluates all of its K-12 students on academic and life skills. It also provides them with narrative assessments of their performance and standards-based evaluations. Most or all of their 65 or so graduating seniors go on to college the next year, with several attending the best institutions in the country.
Public schools in Windsor Locks, Conn. use standards-based evaluations for all students in ninth grade or younger, and will expand to the whole school system in the next three years.
Parent Ann Marie Charette says she has learned more about her sixth-grade daughter's progress at school than she ever gleaned from the traditional grades and transcripts of her two older sons.
“Do I care sh
“Do I care if she has an A? Or do I care she knows what a right angle is?” says Ms. Charette, who is a human resources specialist in the district. “I’m more concerned about what she knows and is mastering versus the grade that is coming afterward.” LINK
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How did Scott Looney explain the Mastery Transcript to his students and teachers?
Here is a memo
Dear Hawken Community,
I am writing to share with you information about a project my Hawken colleagues and I have been working on for several years, one that has come to be known as the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC). The MTC grew out of my concerns about the broken state of education today – a topic I addressed at some length in the Hawken Review from the summer of 2014 in a feature entitled “The Future for Education: Why Hawken Has to Lead.”
The Mastery Transcript Consortium focuses on one aspect of education that contributes to this brokenness - namely, the traditional high school transcript. For some time, we have known that the transcript is a powerful force in shaping the high school experience, one that is increasingly out of step with educational research and the authentic needs of students. This is particularly true for a school like Hawken, which is moving toward a more authentic, competency-based education. But we were also aware that re-imagining our current transcript needed to be a collective and long-term effort – first on the part of schools, both public and private, and ultimately on the part of colleges and universities. I began gauging interest in this concept of a Mastery Transcript several years ago by contacting heads of other well-established independent schools and found overwhelming support for my proposal among some of the most established, including Choate, Exeter, Andover, Punahou, Latin School of Chicago, and many others.
As I wrote in a blog published last fall, “The MTC is working to invent a tool that will make each student’s humanity and abilities visible and understood to colleges and to the students themselves." By changing the high school transcript, we hope, in the words of our vision statement, ‘to change the relationship between preparation for college and college admissions for the betterment of students. It is worth noting that in a recent article on edutopia.org, the dean of admission at Harvard University wrote, “we are not concerned that students presenting alternative transcripts will be disadvantaged because of format.” This is a significant step forward for our effort.
The MTC’s goal is broader than avoiding a “disadvantage,” though. As I wrote in that same blog, “The Mastery Transcript isn’t just about helping with the college process. It’s about clearing ground for schools to teach in ways that match our era and to honor how students learn best.”
Drawing on the collective wisdom of MTC members (over 160 schools and growing), the Mastery Transcript Consortium will oversee the design and development of a mastery transcript over the next several years, partnering with schools to support and train faculty and staff with the skills they need. It will likely take more than five years for us to adopt a fully functional model to be used by schools. In the meantime, Hawken and other member schools will maintain their current transcript model. Once the new model is fully developed, Hawken students will be able to choose their preferred method of assessment – the traditional model or the MTC model. In other words, students and families can opt in or out of the mastery transcript alternative. This will be an option, not an imposition.
Because the rollout of this new transcript is still years away, it is premature to share more detailed information at this time. However, if you are interested in learning more about the background, member schools, and response to the MTC, please feel free to visit mastery.org. Be assured that when the time comes to introduce the actual transcript to the Hawken community in its completed form, you will be equipped with the information needed to determine their preferred method of assessment.
