Credentialing For All?

Getting Smart’s Nate McClennen recently authored a report titled “Credentialed Learning For All.” In the report, McClennen writes,

“When a learner completes a program of study, they receive credentials. These credentials validate that the learner has demonstrated proficiency in all the recognized skills. The high school diploma and numerous industry certifications are credentials that often play a gatekeeping role for employment.”

“Credentials are well-established in the Career and Technical Education (CTE) ecosystem of secondary education and within employment sectors requiring specific technical skills. The National Career Clusters Framework describes categories of CTE around which programs focus. Most CTE programs emphasize technical skills rather than core or transferable skills. Although transferable skills (such as communication, collaboration, leadership, and project management) are rarely evaluated, many recognize them as increasingly important for the workplace. Programs continue to evaluate core skills (like mathematics and literacy) through a list of courses and grades, and assess these via standards through national assessments. These measurements of core skills tend to be weak signals for long-term success. While over a million different credentials are available from high school through employment, many are at a grain size that serves only as a proxy for skill assertion, rather than the assertion itself.”

“During the 2019-20 school year, 49% of high school students completed at least one CTE course while 19% were CTE concentrators (completing at least two courses in a single CTE pathway). Often embedded within CTE programs, pathways to credentialing include academy programs, internships, apprenticeship models, and whole-school models that incorporate some element of work-based learning – where students earn high school credit while embedded in the workplace.”

“While there is a high level of interest around work-based learning, participation is low due to the complexity of implementation. Work-based learning is a particularly good way for students to develop a sense of purpose/career direction and authentically build both technical and transferable skills. Since work-based learning falls outside of traditional forms of measurement, it provides an opportunity for credentialing.”

“Additional work-based learning opportunities occur in postsecondary settings with certification programs in the community college system and internships in four-year degree programs. Throughout a career, certifications are available in some sectors for employees to continue learning and growing.”

“Despite the credentialing success of the CTE programs and the availability of credentials, the challenge remains around how to describe valuable (value-creating) capabilities around core, technical, and transferable competencies that are helpful to every learner and meaningful to higher education and the workforce.”

Most of the public school world doesn’t understand the work world. The exception would be Career and Technology Education. For a small percentage of traditional learners these days, they can be evaluated and rewarded in the same fashion employees are evaluated and rewarded in the world of work. For a vast majority of traditional learners inside public schools, they do not have the opportunity to be evaluated and rewarded in similar fashion.

If Getting Smart thinks the traditional public school system will learn credentialing practices from their small piece of the pie called CTE, then I think they have another thing coming.

I just don’t see it happening.

The school world is different from the real world because school world wants it that way. They want to be different in the way they evaluate and reward so that their system is difficult to understand, and therefore difficult to change and possibly improve.

Their insistence on being different and therefore special is the one thing that will probably lead to their demise.

When we were opening a new high school, we decided to put an Outback Steakhouse on our property as part of our career and technology program. At one of the first meetings of the school district career and technology leadership and the Outback entrepreneurs, we were asked to answer this question: “What would it take to build an Outback on the school’s property before school opened in a little over a year?”

The school district leadership answered that question with all the problems we would be facing in order to accomplish such a task. The Outback folks giggled and gave each other high fives recounting other such projects they tackled involving such a time deadline. I looked at both groups and realized the group I was going to spend more time with, in the rest of that meeting and the next year – and it wasn’t my friends at the school district.

The difference between the school world and the real work world is palpable.

The idea that Getting Smart thinks the traditional school system can import credentialing practices across the board from today’s work world is a head scratcher.

Til tomorrow. SVB