What It Does
Gives every district clear and explicit flexibility to award credit for learning, not seat time, without constraint or limitation.
Why It Matters
For too long, schools have been shackled to an industrial-era system that ties credit toward graduation to time spent in the classroom. But sitting in a high school classroom for four years is not indicative of mastery.
It’s time to free students from the outdated constraints of seat time by tying credit to mastery.
This is a critical step toward unlocking high school transformation. All 50 states provide some form of flexibility from seat time requirements (ExcelinEd, 2018). Yet in many cases, that comes with conditions: a district must apply for a waiver from the state, or flexibility is granted as an accommodation to individual students (e.g., related to medical absence or dropout recovery). Many of these policies are too limited to catalyze real change.
In order to meet the criteria for this policy action, the policy must:
Apply equally and automatically to all public schools (i.e., districts do not need to apply for a waiver);
Apply across an entire district or school, not on an individual student-by-student basis; and
Be clear and explicit
Download our frontier guide to see what the gold standard looks like for this policy action.
