Sheela Clary

A Berkshire County resident of the Gilded Age has his name attached to the systems under which students today, at most American public and private high schools, as well as most public or private colleges the world over, mark the time they spend in school. His system determines the length of the standard class (50 minutes = one credit hour), the length of a full-credit course (120) and the traditional four-year (as opposed to three- or five-year) high school and college experience.

The Carnegie Foundation was founded by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who passed away in 1919 at Shadowbrook, his estate that stood on the site of what’s now the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. The foundation created the “Carnegie Unit.” You know all about the Carnegie Unit, even if you don’t know the name. It’s the time-based measurement system of allocating credits based on the number of hours a student spends in a seat and a teacher spends teaching. The foundation created the unit as a precondition for establishing retirement pensions for university professors. This was in 1906, and within just four years Carnegie had set in stone the academic laws of the land in not only higher education, but secondary schools, as well.

Carnegie Units mark time. They dictate that students take English 9, so that they can then take English 10, English 11, and English 12. Teachers are incentivized to pass students from class to class regardless of whether they’ve proven proficiency in any particular learning standard, because no one wants to hold a kid back. This is how we get to the phenomenon of functionally illiterate high school graduates.

Carnegie Units were born, and still exist, not to meet the developmental and instructional needs of students, but to meet the bureaucratic needs of the adults working in the system. As the foundation itself acknowledged in a report released just six years ago, they play a “vital administrative function in education.”But when the focus of a high school experience is on moving as quickly as possible through a series of credit requirements, all we can claim to have given students at the end of four years is way to spend four years, not a way to prepare for the college or career that will follow high school.

Amy Rex, who served as Monument’s principal for the 2017-2018 school year, helped spotlight the problem of inequitable educational access at the school, which was leaving a sizable percentage of each graduating class, year after year, ill-equipped for life after high school. She identified a mastery-based learning system — where students progress only once they’ve demonstrated proficiency, or mastery, in the content — as one that meets the needs of all students and would bring the district into the 21st educational century.

She said in an interview at the time, “When I ask people, ‘What do we want students to be able to do when they graduate?’ They will say, ‘Four years of English.’ We need to shift that, to thinking in terms of skills. If we are saying that passing the 10th grade MCAS tests is the graduation requirement, then why don’t we let them graduate in the 10th grade? Independent studies and internships are excellent avenues for students to access, but if we’re just giving them credit for participation we don’t know if they have developed any knowledge or skills.”

Elementary schools, if they’re doing their job, must necessarily be mastery-based. If a child can’t read, he can’t do anything further in school. Long-time Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews asked in a 2017 story, “Why can’t we adopt the same attitude toward learning high school math, science, history, and English that we do toward young students learning to read? Most elementary schools have specialists to get every child over that hurdle, while we shove students who struggle in high school courses off to the next grade with just a concerned look and a low mark.”

It’s a good question, one that educators at Monument Mountain have been trying to answer. Over the past few years, a cohort of Monument teachers, guidance counselors, and administrators, through the support of a Mass IDEAS planning and implementation grant aimed at reimagining high school, have been studying up on how and why we got to where we are today, stuck with the hardened systems we have in place. Said Principal Kristi Farina, “When you start digging into this stuff, you start getting a sense of how arbitrary it really is.”

Our long familiarity with the old systems may be one of the reasons for the skepticism with which some parents and teachers have met Monument Mountain Regional High School’s new Equity, Access, and High Expectations for All plan. The plan signals a gradual move away from the time-based sacred cows enshrined in the Carnegie Unit model, and toward mastery. Equity, Access, and High Expectations for All will be inaugurated this fall with several small shifts and at least one significant, immediate move: the open enrollment of incoming 9th graders. Freshmen will not select to take College Prep or Honors Math or English classes, but will be assigned to a heterogeneous ability grouping. The thinking behind this “de-leveling” is to ensure that every student of every background is inspired not to slip onto a pre-determined track, but to see themselves, and their school, as full of potential, and possibility.

As part of their work, the Mass IDEAS-supported team also visited mastery-based schools around the country. Perhaps the school most demographically and structurally similar to ours was Sanborn High School in Kingston, New Hampshire, whose principal Brian Stack is the author of the 2017 book “Breaking with Tradition,” about how to shift from the Carnegie Unit way of thinking toward a focus on competency. Among the key takeaways from these visits, said Farina, is the need to promote “student voice.” Changes cannot be imposed from the top down. Students need to be empowered, as they are in the small-group advisory classes established in recent years, to express themselves, to identify and pursue their own vocational and/or academic paths, and to take ownership over their high school experiences.

In their recent presentations to the school committee and public, Berkshire Hills Regional School District administrators have listed some of the country’s most prominent private schools that have shifted to a Mastery Transcript Model, and have pointed citizens toward its website for a complete list of the now nearly 400 schools in the consortium.

The Khan Lab School, in Mountainview, California, adopted a fully-implemented mastery model upon its creation. It’s a small private school of just under 200 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, operating on a year-round schedule, without taking the traditional 10-week summer break. It was created by Salman Khan of Khan Academy in 2014 and will be graduating its first class of nine high school seniors this spring.

Rachel Skiffer, the head of school, explained to me what a report card system looks like for her high school students. Students do not receive letter grades. Teachers do not convert anything into a Grade Point Average (GPA). Transcripts contain live links to work the students curate themselves, “where they can share the things they’re passionate about.” They include the names of the courses they have taken, a start and an end date for each course, and evidence of mastery, as depicted by color-coded circles. Foundational mastery is the equivalent of 90 percent, the level that must be reached in order to consider the course completed. “Kids get to keep taking bites of the apple,” she said, until they reach 90 percent.

Above 90% is called Advanced Mastery. When she talked about the distinctions in mastery levels, Skiffer sounded very much like Monument Principal Farina discussing how to think about the Honors Distinction that incoming 9th graders can earn. “What we’ve been, kind of, banging into the teachers’ heads is: advanced mastery is not extra credit. It is, ‘Can you take what you’ve learned, and apply it to a novel problem?’”

What if one kid takes a semester to reach 90 percent and another takes three years? This doesn’t happen. They’ve found, per the research of Benjamin Bloom that Sal Khan references in his book “One World Schoolhouse,” that a combination of mastery-based instruction, plus one-to-one tutoring, provides the necessary interventions to get every student to the 90% mark. “ALL of them,” Skiffer emphasized. “I always ask, ‘Are we sorting kids, or are we teaching kids?’ What we’re always pushing is: content is the tool to teach skills.”

But the Mastery Transcript Consortium effort was initiated by elite private schools like Khan Lab. To what extent can that schools’ successes be attributed to their privileged student body, and to the broad flexibility those schools enjoy? How can Monument, a small-town public high school with a 50-plus-year history of doing things a particular way, and not in a financial position to hire a slew of tutors, possibly hope to shake up much of what we’ve come to know and understand about high school?

Farina is practical and clear-eyed about what it will take to implement wide-ranging reforms. She is not expecting overnight transformation and considers Equity and Access, and High Expectations for All to be a “five-year initiative.” Credit allocation and report cards will not look any different next year, for instance, though she does expect to see several gradual shifts in the mastery direction. For one, she’d like “more teachers using more formative assessments.” A formative assessment offers feedback to the student about how they’re doing without attaching points or a grade.

She’d also like to move toward less punitive scoring, with more emphasis placed on the “what,” and less on the “when.” “I hope to see bigger shifts with teachers pulling ‘habits of work’ out of their assessments. If a student turns in a paper late, they should get feedback in a separate fashion that does not impact their grade on the paper. The paper assesses different skills.”

More broadly, how does a mastery model fit into the school’s existing time-based systems of moving kids through the grades? “It does not fit in well, and it’s a challenge all these schools have. One thing is what kinds of supports do you put in place to help students recover when they are behind. We are talking about skills rather than credits, so if they had a 58 in Algebra the first time, what does that mean? What should that student be working on to recover their credit? Maybe it’s understanding functions, so you help the student develop there. Credit recovery is not a student doing 50 worksheets, and then you check off a sheet and say they’ve recovered.”

The same approach would be applied toward dismantling the current obsessions with letter and number grades. “Whether they are in CP or Honors, the conversation often becomes like, ‘Why did you take a point off here? I should get this point back.’ It’s about points and not learning. We do want students to be motivated to get the Honors distinction, but to make it about growth and learning. Right now, the problem is Honors is not necessarily earned, it’s sometimes just a parent’s advocacy, or a social grouping.”

Perhaps the most powerful benefit of what Skiffer and her team offer at the Khan Lab School is the relief from competitive pressure, and what that relief opens up in terms of their relationships with one another. She stressed how much her high school students like to work together collaboratively, how proud they are of one another’s accomplishments, how quick to point out one another’s work, and how readily they teach one another.

Horace Mann, born in Franklin, Massachusetts 20 years after this country’s founding, was one of the earliest and strongest proponents of a universal, non-sectarian, free public education system. He warned eloquently against the drive to see schooling as a zero-sum competition, as opposed to something of intrinsic value to an individual student.

“…if the pupil rejoices not because he has acquired so much knowledge, but because, in acquiring so much he has excelled another … if he indulges in a feeling of exultation, not because he has shone, but because he has out-shone a rival, if he yields to the temptation of disparaging a competitor whom he would not have disparaged but for the competition … I suppose it will be admitted by everyone, that the law of Christian, and even heathen, morality is violated.”

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