The day Superintendent LaTonya Goffney received Aldine ISD’s baseline 2021 test scores was one of the worst days of her career.

She remembers asking herself how they were ever going to recover academically from the pandemic, while Aldine ISD students, families and staff were still in the throes of its economic and social impacts. 

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North Carolina is stepping up its game in education by rolling out the Skills for the Future initiative, geared towards giving students a leg up with durable skills that will last them a lifetime. This endeavor, launched earlier this month, is putting four school districts in the limelight, helping to lead the charge on a national scale for a revamped learning approach that goes beyond the dated memorize-and-regurgitate model of the past.

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The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) has been awarded a nearly $4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to pilot the Skills for the Future (SFF) project in North Carolina.

RALEIGH, NC—The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) has been awarded a nearly $4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to pilot the Skills for the Future (SFF) project in North Carolina. This initiative is part of a national effort to measure and incorporate durable skills into education systems, equipping students with the competencies needed for success in college, careers and life.

This Skills for the Future pilot will utilize the North Carolina Portrait of a Graduate (Portrait) durable skills to anchor the assessment tools. The Portrait identifies the skills and mindsets North Carolina’s students need for success after high school, including:   adaptability, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, empathy, learner’s mindset and personal responsibility. 

“Data shows that durable skills, like those outlined in the North Carolina Portrait of a Graduate, are highly valued by employers and benefit students across all paths — whether they choose college, a career or the military,” said North Carolina State Superintendent Catherine Truitt. “This grant is such an important step forward in ensuring our students are prepared for success in the workforce and prepared for the jobs of the future.”

This summer, NCDPI and the North Carolina Department of Commerce’s Labor Economic Analysis Division (LEAD) presented data demonstrating that NC’s Portrait of a Graduate skills are essential to every occupation in the state. The data highlighted the need to continue integrating durable skills into everyday learning across North Carolina classrooms.

North Carolina joins four other states — Indiana, Wisconsin, Nevada and Rhode Island —partnering with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and ETS  in transforming traditional education models. These states are collectively pioneering the integration of durable skills assessments, creating a comprehensive, portable skills transcript that will provide students, educators and employers with real-time insights into students’ skill development.

“We’re honored that NCDPI has entrusted us with this opportunity to support learners across the state,” said Laura Slover, managing director of Skills for the Future at ETS. “By effectively measuring these critical durable skills, we aim to instill a mindset of continuous learning and development and believe we will set students on the path to being better prepared for the future of work.”

Over the next three years, NCDPI will partner with ETS, Carnegie Foundation and Battelle for Kids (BFK) to create a tool that utilizes performance skills that are demonstrated through problem-based learning in the classroom, scoring and personalized skills transcripts to provide a more holistic view of students, their abilities, and the skills they can contribute to the workforce.

“In order to truly quantify the value of the Portrait of a Graduate’s durable skills, we must have a tool that can measure students’ mastery. The Skills for the Future project does precisely that,” Truitt said. “With this tool in hand, we will be able to better evaluate our students and prepare them for whatever their future holds.”

The goal of the SFF project is to improve career and college readiness by producing and implementing a suite of customizable assessment tools for durable skills. By the end of the grant period, the project aims to produce skills transcripts for 6,000 students and engage 400 educators in professional learning across the state. North Carolina will join a multi-state professional learning community, where they can collaborate, troubleshoot and share experiences with other states engaged in similar work.

“North Carolina is a leader in the work to transform the American high school. They are building systems to create much more powerful pathways to postsecondary school and career and improve economic opportunity for students statewide. This is precisely the kind of innovation that will have an enduring impact on the lives of young people across North Carolina and signals to the nation what the future of high school can be,” said Timothy F.C. Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

In addition to enhancing the way students are prepared for their futures, this pilot will establish a valid and reliable way to measure durable skills, paving the way for these skills to be incorporated into school accountability models, such as North Carolina’s School Performance Grades.

“School performance grades are supposed to tell us about the quality of a school, but they don’t provide a complete picture of that right now. By incorporating additional metrics, factors and indicators that make North Carolina schools excellent – such as the North Carolina Portrait of a Graduate – we will be able to tell a more holistic picture of the health of our schools,” Truitt said.

The pilot will kick off in the spring of 2025 with high-intensity educator professional development in six North Carolina high schools in three school districts (Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, Iredell-Statesville Schools and the Mooresville Graded School District). The skills suite pilot will begin directly after the professional development phase.

About Battelle for Kids

Battelle for Kids (BFK) is a national, not-for-profit organization helping to empower educators so that every student has hope, resilience, and the knowledge and skills to be future-ready. BFK has helped hundreds of school districts and state agencies design, launch, and bring their shared community visions—the Portrait of a Graduate—to life, impacting the learning experiences of millions of students nationwide.

About the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

The mission of the Carnegie Foundation is to catalyze transformational change in education so that every student has the opportunity to live a healthy, dignified, and fulfilling life. Enacted by an act of Congress in 1906, the Foundation has a rich history of driving transformational change in the education sector, including the establishment of TIAA-CREF and the creation of the Education Testing Service, the GRE, Pell Grants, and the Carnegie Classifications for Higher Education.

About ETS

ETS is a global education and talent solutions organization enabling lifelong learners to be future-ready. We advance the science of measurement to build the benchmarks for fair and valid skill assessment. We are committed to powering human progress by promoting skill proficiency, empowering upward mobility and unlocking more opportunities for everyone, everywhere. Our assessment products—including the TOEFL, TOEIC, GRE and Praxis assessments—along with our innovative solutions and subsidiaries, help 50 million people each year to clarify their strengths and find opportunities for growth in education, work and beyond. We continue to operate worldwide, with offices in 25 locations and operations in 200 countries and territories.

Companies have long evaluated new employees by college degrees and their years of experience in a field. In school, learning has long been measured by “credit hour”—the time spent in a classroom—since 1906.

But as companies like Google, IBM and Accenture drop degree requirements and put more emphasis on skills when hiring, leaders from established education organizations want to overturn that approach.

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The glitzy ASU+GSV gathering this week was titled “Brave New World.” But Tim Knowles wanted to talk about 1906.

That was when the organization Knowles leads, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, created the credit-hour standard. The time has arrived, argue Knowles and Amit Sevak, CEO of ETS, to move away from the Carnegie Unit and toward a new currency of education based on meaningful skills and accomplishments, demonstrated through assessment.

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Assessment giant ETS is considering major changes to its widely-used teacher licensing exam, a shift the organization contends could play a part in addressing nationwide teacher shortages.

The Praxis — which has 160 different versions — is the dominant test used in most states for teacher candidates seeking to earn their credentials.

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The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and assessment provider ETS are partnering to develop a suite of tools designed to “radically transform education assessment across the United States.”

According to the groups: “In collaboration with practitioners and policymakers nationwide, the partnership aims to create a robust, scalable suite of assessment and analytic tools that captures the full range of skills required for American students to succeed in K–12, post-secondary education, and beyond.”

Read more on Technical Horizons in Education…

For more than 100 years, high schools and colleges have relied on the same stalwart tool to measure teaching and learning: the clock. That’s because earning credit toward a diploma or degree typically requires students to spend a minimum number of hours receiving instruction in the classroom.

Now, the institution that developed the time-based standard more than a century ago that is used throughout education is calling for the creation of a different way to quantify academic progress. This week, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching — the folks who brought us the Carnegie Unit, the basic segment of time measurement in many degree programs, in 1906 — announced its intentions to change that currency of learning from “seat time” to “skills.”

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Should students be graded a new way — a system that aims to address a full range of skills to ensure they are ready for the future rather than relying on a system that was created in 1906?

The highly regarded Educational Testing Service and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching feel that way. On Monday, they announced that they have formed a partnership designed to radically transform education assessment across the U.S.

In collaboration with practitioners and policy-makers nationwide, the partnership aims to create a robust, scalable suite of assessment and analytic tools that captures the full range of skills required for American students to succeed in K-12, post-secondary education and beyond, the groups said.

Read more on ROI NJ…