Education Week - February 4, 2015 - 10

In a Shifting Field,
Credit Hours Retain
Validity, Study Says
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
making it possible for students to
learn at their own pace, the Carnegie
unit has become obsolete.
About 40 states now have policies
that allow students to replace Carnegie
units with demonstrations of
competency or out-of-school experiences
for academic credit, according
to the Education Commission of the
States, a Denver-based research and
policy organization.
In fact, three states-Maine,
New Hampshire, and Vermont-
have gone even further, requiring
schools to use competency measures
rather than seat time to assign
credit. New Hampshire has
been piloting this practice for more
than a decade, while the Maine
and Vermont requirements go into
effect for the classes of 2017 and
2020, respectively.
However, in its report released
last week, the Stanford, Calif.-based
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement
of Teaching-which spawned
the Carnegie unit in 1906-defended
the unit as a necessary "common currency"
among education institutions.
"The Carnegie unit's value in providing
a minimum instructional standard
for all students shouldn't be underestimated,"
it states. "If the quality of
teaching and learning already differs
dramatically from class to class
(and from online platform to online
platform), the level of learning might
vary even more substantially in the
absence of the Carnegie unit."
Widespread Influence
In conducting the study, which was
supported by the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation, the Carnegie
Foundation spent 18 months doing
archival research, visiting K-12 and
higher education institutions, and interviewing
educators, administrators,
union representatives, policymakers,
and other practitioners.(The Hewlett
foundation also supports coverage of
"deeper learning" in Education Week.)
In K-12 schools, the Carnegie
unit affects everything from daily
schedules and course sequences to
staffing decisions and instructional
strategies. In higher education, it's
also a factor in determining billions
of dollars in eligibility for federal financial
aid, the report states.
"The system continues to rely on it
because, in large part, the Carnegie
unit is the system," Noelle Ellerson,
the associate executive director for
policy and advocacy for the Alexandria,
Va.-based aasa, the School Superintendents
Association said in an
interview. She was not involved in the
report.
On a media call, one of the report's
authors, Elena Silva, emphasized
that the Carnegie unit "is a
strong administrative tool for the
system. It continues to be that. It's
also a minimum standard for instruction
that ensures all students
get at the very least a minimum
amount of time learning."
What the Carnegie doesn't do,
though, is give a sense of how much
students have learned.
'Are Kids Learning?'
"It's a huge shift to turn from minutes
to, 'Are kids learning?' " said
Susan Patrick, the president and
chief executive officer of the International
Association for K-12 Online
Learning, who is not associated with
the report. Moving students along in
school based on the amount of time
they put in, rather than content
mastery, "essentially ensures they
have these Swiss cheese holes in
their learning," she argued.
The Carnegie unit was never intended
to be a measure of learning,
Ms. Silva, a senior associate at the
Carnegie Foundation, said on the
media call. "It's just a time-based
measure of exposure," she said. "It's
one of the few guarantees, if not the
only one we have in American edu"
It's
one of the few
guarantees ... we
have in American
education that all
students have the
most basic resource:
time to learn."
ELENA SILVA
Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching
cation, that all students have the
most basic resource: time to learn."
The unit is also not as much of a
hindrance to new methods of instructional
delivery as critics have
suggested, according to the report.
"There is more opportunity to innovate
than some suggest and there's
a lot more innovation going on than
one might think," Thomas Toch, another
of the report's authors, said.
"It's going on despite the presence of
the Carnegie unit."
According to the report, many
states "are modifying their laws and
regulations to permit staggered staff
schedules, online learning, Saturday
schooling, and a host of other variations
in how the school day and year
are organized." And some states are
doing so "under existing statutory
and regulatory flexibility," it says.
The report walks a fine line
throughout, lauding efforts toward
making learning more transparent
and flexible, admitting the Carn10
| EDUCATION WEEK | February 4, 2015| www.edweek.org
Seeking a Substitute
Mark F. Smith, a senior policy
analyst for the Washington-based
National Education Association,
which was influential in the development
of the Carnegie unit a century
ago as well, said the credit hour still
has value, but only because the field
hasn't identified a better replacement.
"It provides some basis of
comparison, some agreed-upon stanNatalie
Driver works on a project
at Lewis Central Middle School
in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The
state allows students to replace
Carnegie units with other
measures for academic credit.
egie unit can be a barrier-though
not an insurmountable one, and
ultimately maintaining the need for
the time-based credit assignment.
For instance, the group says it's
in favor of efforts that take student
learning into account. But the report
also states that competency-based
approaches could increase educational
disparities by "speed[ing] the
progress of more accomplished and
affluent students (who tend to have
many out-of-school learning experiences
and are often tutored over
academic hurdles), while their peers
are left to struggle and possibly fall
further behind."
The report also says there's little
evidence that education would improve
under a competency-based approach.
"These innovations hold great
promise, but we need to be careful not
to think more innovation equals more
learning," said Mr. Toch, a senior
partner at the Carnegie Foundation.
"We talked to consultants working
with New Hampshire, and one said
looking at districts across the state
you could find the good, the bad, and
the ugly when it comes to competencies
and measures of them."
The authors point to the commoncore-aligned
assessments, which
debut this spring in most states, as
promising methods for measuring
student learning on a common yardstick.
However, the report also notes
that these tests have been costly, and
that expanding such a testing system
with performance-based measures
(such as essays and projects) would
pose logistical difficulties.
WHAT IS A CARNEGIE UNIT?
Developed in 1906 and named for industrialist Andrew
Carnegie, who established the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching, the Carnegie unit is a measure of
the amount of time a student has studied a subject.
Per its original definition:
1 hour of instruction x 5 days a week x 24 weeks = 120 hours
of contact time with an instructor = 1 standard Carnegie unit
Most public high schools use this 120-hour
standard to award course credit.
(Today, high school classes
tend to last less than an
hour and be held over
a 36-week period.)
A typical high school
student earns six
to seven credits per
year over four years.
Most states require
a minimum number
of Carnegie units for
graduation.
SOURCE: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
dard, but given all the differing approaches
that are out there now, it's
not enough," he said. "I think we're
all struggling with how to replace it."
For Ms. Patrick of inacol, the answer
is simple. Keep the Carnegie
unit, but redefine it in terms of
student learning. The purely timebased
measure, she said, "has outlived
its utility."
The Carnegie Foundation's
vision is that even if a new agreedupon
student-learning measure is
developed, the Carnegie unit would
continue "to serve as a common administrative
currency."
As Carri Schneider, the director
of policy and research for Getting
Smart, a consulting and advocacy
group for K-12 digital learning, sees
it, a diploma would be worth more
if it indicated more than just how
much time a student spent in class.
But schools have a long way to go
before they can get rid of the Carnegie
unit. "So much of the system
right now is still built around time,"
she said. "I don't think we can just
close the door on time immediately."
That said, Ms. Schneider believes
it will eventually be phased out.
"I think it's really the only way,"
she said. "If the Carnegie unit was
serving everyone well and everyone
was coming out with a high school
degree and was ready for college
and careers, I don't think we'd be
having this discussion. But the system's
failing a lot of kids."
Coverage of more and better learning
time is supported by a grant from the
Ford Foundation at www.fordfoundation.
org. Education Week retains sole editorial
control over the content of this coverage.
Scan this tag with your
smartphone for a link
to "The Carnegie Unit:
A Century-Old Standard
in a Changing Education Landscape."
www.edweek.org/links
The CURRICULUM MATTERS blog
tracks news and trends on this issue.
www.edweek.org/go/curriculummatters
iStockphoto
Joe Shearee/The Daily Nonpareil/AP-File
http://www.fordfoundation.org http://www.fordfoundation.org http://www.edweek.org/links http://www.edweek.org/go/curriculummatters http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - February 4, 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - February 4, 2015
