Education Week - October 20, 2021 - 20

The Overdue Case for
Competency-Based Education
I
n schools across our country, time is the
constant, and the quality of learning is the
variable. To get a high school diploma, students
must attend school for roughly six hours, 180
days of the year, for 12 to 13 years. Some students
graduate ready for the Ivy League, and others are
barely able to read.
We are an alliance of urban superintendents with a
combined enrollment of more than 1 million students.
We know there needs to be a dramatic change to public
education.
What if we flipped the current model of public education
on its head and made the standard of learning the constant
and time the variable? What if the
goal of education was to get all
children truly " life ready " no matter
what the obstacle?
Reimagining our education
system might seem daunting,
but, in February 2020, no one
would have imagined that we
could completely overhaul our
schools to go entirely virtual in a
matter of weeks. But we did. We
did it because we had to. And it is
now just as important to leave the
prepandemic " normal " behind. The
students we serve cannot afford to
have an empty-promise diploma.
All students deserve to graduate
with a credential that has real value
in the changing economy, no matter
their plans after high school.
We are calling for a competencybased
system of education that
looks nothing like our current
model. It would be centered on
ensuring all students meet a
life-ready standard. The current
education system is designed to
give a fraction of our children
the highest quality education.
It is designed for inequity. The
pandemic showed us just how
much.
Achieving real equity in education
does not mean all kids learn the
same things at the same pace, but,
at a minimum, equity dictates all
kids get the support they need to
be educated for success in life after
high school. We need to redesign
our schools and systems to make
that happen.
A good place to start is with local
conversations about what children should know and be
able to do before they graduate. These conversations could
establish shared goals and an understanding of the kind
of change our schools must undertake. While challenging,
change is possible with the right engagement-as we're
seeing in our own systems.
In districts both large and small, a life-ready standard
would mean students are competent in reading and math
but also able to demonstrate critical-thinking skills, mental
and physical health, creativity, collaboration, leadership,
and effective communication. It would mean students
have engaged with a rich curriculum that asked them to
think deeply, make connections across disciplines, with
assessments that encourage them to explain their reasoning
and show what they know.
Rather than courses being a semester or a year long,
courses would be as long as necessary for each student to
gain the competency needed to take the next course in the
20 | EDUCATION WEEK | October 20, 2021 | www.edweek.org/opinion
By Morcease Beasley,
Alberto Carvalho, William Hite,
Jesus Jara, Monica Goldson,
& Jerry Almendarez
BEASLEY, CARVALHO, HITE, JARA, GOLDSON,
and ALMENDAREZ are the superintendents
of the school districts of Clayton County,
Ga.; Miami-Dade County, Fla.; Philadelphia;
Clark County, Nev.; Prince George's County,
Md.; and Santa Ana, Calif., respectively.
They are the founding members of the
Superintendents Alliance at the National
Center on Education and the Economy.
sequence. That will require rethinking the master schedule,
how we group students, and how we assign teachers.
Instead of all students taking an algebra course in the
same grade but at different levels of rigor, all students
would learn the same algebra, but some might do so earlier
than others. Because every student would need to reach
proficiency in reading and math to graduate, we would no
longer tolerate students falling multiple grades behind. We
would intervene early and often, so interventions would be
common and lose their stigma.
There would be no need for " honors " courses; some
students would just progress at a faster rate than others.
Students who need more time to reach the life-ready
standard would receive more resources, more focused
academic interventions, or increased mental- and physicalhealth
services.
Some students would reach the life-ready standard
years before the 12th grade. Those students could earn
college credits, associate degrees, or industry-recognized
certificates, or they could participate in meaningful jobshadowing
opportunities before they graduated. Such a
system would breed both excellence and equity.
To support this new system, the work of teachers would
be transformed for the better. Educators would get more
time in their workday to collaborate with their colleagues,
work individually with struggling students, and engage
with families. Here again, the
constraints of a " normal " school
schedule can be stifling. We will
need to provide teachers with
time away from formal teaching
to accomplish this. We will need
to also rethink how we deploy our
talented educators.
Rather than being assigned to
honors classrooms, our best teachers
would work with students furthest
behind. In this reimagined public
school system, teachers would be
treated like the professionals that
they are, with greater autonomy
and more specialized professional
support-a powerful combination
for improving not just teaching and
learning but also addressing COVID19-induced
teacher shortages.
This is not a leap into the great
abyss. A report from the Council
of the Great City Schools in June,
" Mirrors or Windows: How Well
Do Large City Public Schools
Overcome the Effects of Poverty
and Other Barriers?, " shows
that certain districts are taking
significant strides in making their
schools more equitable. But it
is challenging work made more
complex by the pandemic.
As superintendents, we are
facing unprecedented challenges
from the pandemic, as are the
educators and families who make
up our school communities.
We have been focused on the
foundational challenges of opening
and operating schools safely and
providing quality learning despite
difficult circumstances. At the same
time, we have an enormous amount of new resources from
the federal government and an openness to new approaches
to education from our families.
We cannot, however, simply tinker within the current
broken system. We need to completely reimagine what is
possible in education by designing and building a system
that is centered on the needs of students. The influx of
federal education funding gives us just three school years
and three summers to thoughtfully do it. If we simply
reinvest the federal stimulus windfall in the current system,
we will produce nothing more than inequity that is more
expensive and an educational divide that is deeper. We
need to redesign our education system for the 21st century
and beyond and leave behind the outdated 20th-century
system we currently have.
Let's make time the variable and learning the constant.
And let's ensure that every one of our students graduates
from high school truly life-ready. n
Vanessa Solis/Education Week and iStock
http://www.edweek.org/opinion
Education Week - October 20, 2021

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