Resources to Power Transformation

Moderated by Stephen Bowen, then-deputy director for state leadership at the Council of Chief State School Officers, this recording of a Hoover Institution Success Initiative session features an expert panel discussion about moving from seat time to mastery.

Russlynn Ali and Timothy F.C. Knowles explain why the Carnegie Unit—and the “seat time” system it spawned—must be dismantled, describing steps that state leaders can take to replace it with a more empowering, engaging architecture for high school learning.

This three-minute video explains the origin of the Carnegie Unit and seat time policies.

Visit this website from America Succeeds to learn more about durable competencies, including research on how many job postings require them nationally and in select states and what the states are doing to activate them in their education systems.

Battelle for Kids offers a gallery featuring dozens of locally-developed portraits, sortable by state name.

GettingSmart’s gallery includes examples from national organizations, states, districts, schools, and educational networks, calling out a distinctive element of each example.

This short publication from NASBE describes how four states—South Carolina, Utah, Virginia, and Washington—developed Portraits of a Graduate and the lessons they learned along the way.

The XQ Competency Navigator offers practical tools and resources for putting durable competencies into practice in any subject area or learning environment.

The five XQ Learner Outcomes and more detailed XQ Competencies provide rigorous, scientifically-based benchmarks that describe what students must know and be able to do to truly thrive in today’s complex and rapidly changing world.

Developed and fine-tuned over 15 years, XQ’s Educational Outcomes Audit and Analysis (EOAA) provides an in-depth portrait of the academic progress of a school’s entire graduating class over all four years of high school, uncovering eye-opening patterns in access to college- and career-ready experiences by gathering evidence across multiple analytical tools to produce a comprehensive report.

This one-page graphic offers a birds-eye view of the community-driven journey to reimagine high school in the nation’s capital.

The XQ Design Principles can guide any school community that’s ready to rethink high school. These research-backed principles are foundational to the XQ school design process, which has been used by teams across the country to redesign their existing schools or design new ones so all students achieve the XQ Learner Outcomes.

The Youth Voice Toolkit is a comprehensive resource designed to support high school students to drive change within their high school communities.

This guide shows how dual enrollment can serve as an “on ramp” to postsecondary education for students who are otherwise unlikely to attend college, highlighting successful statewide dual enrollment efforts and offering a step-by-step plan for policymakers to create successful programs and review their current approaches.

This deep-dive resource covers all of the critical issues and decision points state leaders must consider to build a comprehensive policy for developing high-quality WBL programs, including how to overcome persistent roadblocks to implementation and expansion.

Excel in Ed broadens the lens on workforce preparation in this comprehensive website intended to help policymakers create a continuum of flexible yet coordinated pathways that maximize benefits for learners as they progress from school to postsecondary success in education, training, and work.

This short publication provides essential background on modern youth apprenticeships and includes a description of PAYA’s influential “Principles for High-Quality Youth Apprenticeship.”

The National Governors Association identifies three core elements of sustained systems change necessary to embed work-based learning in education systems, based on a collaborative effort to scale WBL in 19 states.

This state-by-state analysis of work-based learning policies identifies six key themes that point to several key levers for strengthening work-based learning.

This page of the XQ Competencies Navigator offers dozens of classroom activities that educators can use to bring durable competencies into their classrooms right away, in any content area or discipline.

Developed by XQ in partnership with Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, this 15-page brief describes the six “must-have” characteristics of a meaningful, engaging learning experience, based on what we know about the needs of young people and the science of adolescent learning.

A self-guided series of nine professional learning modules—six modules on the XQ Design Principles and three in-depth modules on inquiry-driven, project-based learning—to support aspiring and current educators in rethinking their approach to secondary education. Each module leverages video clips from the documentary film The First Class and includes extension activities and prompts designed to drive individual, small-group, and team-based reflection. Learners receive a certificate of completion from ASU upon successful completion of each module.

This preliminary report from the “Skills for the Future” initiative analyzes common frameworks for describing durable competencies and discusses technical considerations for next-generation assessments that could measure such skills.

ETS’s in-depth research report offers a window into the challenges of building next-generation assessments, promising solutions already being developed, and technological advances that hold promise for making such assessments a reality.

Visit this website to learn about a groundbreaking project to develop next-generation assessments that can measure durable competencies and capture evidence of learning in new ways.

XQ has convened a network of experts in math pedagogy, assessment, policy, and instruction to build a new approach aimed at meeting the needs of individual students: the XQ Math Badging System. This system comprises 23 individual badges, each representing a set of core mathematical concepts and practices. Bigger than a standard but smaller than a course, math badges provide administrators, educators, and students with building blocks to create more flexible math pathways that better connect student learning to interests and career opportunities.

The Aurora Institute offers case studies of efforts to redesign student transcripts in the U.S. and abroad, highlighting three states—North Dakota, Utah, and Vermont—that are changing policies and practices to move toward next-generation transcripts.

Read this blog post from CompetencyWorks for an introduction to the Mastery Transcript Consortium and its work to build a movement to reinvent the high school transcript in the U.S. The post is part four in a series of posts intended to help state policymakers understand what they can do to facilitate the move towards meaningful next-generation credentials and features a six-minute video tour of a sample Mastery Transcript.

Visit this website to learn more about how educators in three pilot states are using an innovative new badging system to teach, assess, and give students credit for mastering key math concepts and skills in subjects like Algebra I.

This tutorial from the Data Quality Campaign offers policymakers a concise crash course in the fundamentals of longitudinal data systems and considerations for publicly reporting data on student success in postsecondary education and the workforce.

Find out how states are incorporating postsecondary and workforce success metrics in their public reporting, accountability, and funding systems. This invaluable resource offers a 50-state table along with “deep dive” analyses that include detailed examples from leading states.

Informed by ECS’s 50-state comparison of state longitudinal data systems, this essential policy guide describes emerging best practices against which policymakers can benchmark their state’s own approach to building and managing a state-of-the-art data system.

Visit ECS’s “Data Systems” web page for a host of additional resources and reports related to state data systems, including an interactive 50-state table on key features and governance policies.