The Carnegie Unit Has To Go

I’ve written about the Carnegie Unit before.

“In the early 1900’s, the nation’s civic leaders launched a full court press to make secondary education – previously offered to an elite few – available to the many. They compelled communities to build high schools and sought to convince the populace that a diploma was their ticket out of a life of hard labor, as well as society’s change at unprecedented economic expansion. But how to assess the validity of what was being taught?”

“Simultaneously philanthropist Andrew Carnegie hoped to kick-start the expansion of higher education by donating $10 million to bankroll pensions for college professors. This posed a parallel dilemma: How to decide whether a scholar had put in enough time to earn the annuity?”

“Thus was born the wonky educational anachronism known as the Carnegie Unit., brainchild of the trustees of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. A certain number of hours spent in a high school classroom added up to a credit, the trustees decided in 1906. A set number of credits earned a diploma. So quantified, the diploma could be used as the entrance ticket to a college or university, where Carnegie Units would add up to a degree – or the right to retire.”

“Carnegie Units went on to become the central currency of a dizzying number of aspects of education, ranging from what subjects students are exposed to to how states allocate school funds. But it was quickly understood that while units were good for, say, establishing whether a public school had delivered its pupils enough hours of teaching to earn its taxpayer dollars, it was not particularly helpful at signaling what a student had learned during those hours in class – now, 117 years later, better known as seat time.”

(Thanks to Beth Hawkins, a reporter for The 74 online, for the above Carnegie Unit primer.)

Recently, The 74 online interviewed Tim Knowles, the current Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s president, about the Carnegie Unit’s future:

The 74: Tell us about the Carnegie Unit, what it is, how it wove itself into education’s very DNA and why it’s time to step away from it.

TK: “In 1906, when the Carnegie Foundation created the Carnegie Unit, it suggested that a college degree should be 120 credits. Today, it’s 120 credits. It’s become the bedrock currency of the educational economy. It’s infiltrated everything. It’s how we think about assessment, it’s instrumental to accreditation, to who get financial aid and who doesn’t. It defines the daily work of teachers and professors. It is the system.”

“What it is fundamentally, is the conflation of time and learning. It’s the suggestion that X number of minutes equals learning. The problem is, that it basically ignores everything we’ve learned in the last 100 years about what knowledge is and how it’s acquired. We’ve had neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists and psychologists and learning scientists come along and say, ‘People learn through solving real problems, they learn from peers, they learn from mentors, they learn in apprenticeship, they learn from experience.”

“In its time, the Carnegie Unit was an incredibly important reform because it standardized an utterly nonstandardized educational sector. But it crept into the core DNA of educational practice and didn’t evolve or adapt in the face of a significant amount of empirical knowledge about how human beings actually learn. That’s problem No. 1.”

“No. 2 is that it inhibits educational innovation. Competency- or mastery-based education has existed, arguably, since Dewey and Montessori. But it’s existed at the edges. It’s never been central. We can all point to schools that are breaking the boundaries of what learning should look like, how it’s organized, how it’s structured. While those examples exist, they’re often led by extraordinary teachers and school leaders. We haven’t figured out how to take it from the margins to the mainstream. That’s a problem.”

“The third thing is perhaps more existential, and that is the absence of social and economic mobility in our nation. That is not to suggest that education isn’t an essential solution to addressing social and economic mobility, it’s just that it’s not nearly powerful enough an engine for doing so. The Carnegie Unit is, in my view, partly responsible for that. In the 1950’s, over 90% of young people would [end up] better off than their parents. That number is basically cut in half now. We’re going in precisely the opposite direction, and underlying that are some really fundamental inequities, which are exacerbated by race and by class.”

“If we want to radically increase economic and social mobility, we need to reimagine what learning is, and really take into consideration what we know about the context in which people learn. Young people need to be engaged in much more experiential, hands-on solving of real problems and applied work.”

If you’ve read my columns, then you know I’m not hopeful about the future of this current system of public education. And the Carnegie Unit is a big reason for why I’m skeptical, even cynical. Whenever a system promotes a learner to another grade based upon that young person sitting in a seat inside a classroom during 6 weeks of summer, that’s a big problem. And it’s a big problem that, if not changed, will ruin the current system of public education and demand a new system of learning.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. SVB