The Move to Mastery Transcripts

Novel measures that capture evidence of what’s most important for students’ success in high school and beyond

Many times, when school district leaders kick off strategic planning or professional development sessions, we ask big picture “What if?” questions to inspire generative thinking.

What could we do together to create new learning environments that are consistently engaging, relevant and useful? Where would our team focus its energies if we didn’t have to rank and sort students? How might our teaching and assessment practices evolve if our only priority was authentic development and application of essential skills?

The challenge is that these inspiring hypotheticals too often crash headlong into practical constraints. Do you want to capture and credential learning that happens both in and out of school? It’s hard to do that when state requirements only recognize “seat time.” Do you aspire to have each learner’s unique strengths and abilities made visible to the world? That’s difficult when traditional high school transcripts have no place to track or display these.

Better Metrics

Since 2017, a nationwide coalition of schools and districts has been working to systematically address and eliminate some of these blocking issues by working in concert as the Mastery Transcript Consortium, or MTC. The consortium’s big idea is a simple one: Too many of the metrics once created to describe school — credit hours, course titles and grade point average — increasingly have begun to define school and now are throttling innovation in the service of compliance.

Our solution is simple by design. We’ve created a set of digital learning records that replace credit hours and GPA with competencies and examples of student work, and we’ve invested thousands of hours helping our partners in higher education admissions understand and use these new records. Our tools empower school districts to award credit based on mastery rather than seat time, and to create and credential personalized learning paths that aren’t limited to fixed doses of English, math, science, history and world language. By doing so, they allow college admissions staff to find talented applicants who might go unseen through the lens of standardized tests alone.

What does a school district need to use these new credentials successfully and to ensure a warm reception on the part of higher education? Our most successful district partnerships share several essential building blocks.

Defined Portraits

Helping students build interdisciplinary skills isn’t new. Even as we’ve taught essential academic skills and content, district leaders always have seen our students as the leaders and creators of tomorrow.

What is new is our field’s emerging and growing commitment to explicitly defining and teaching key interdisciplinary skills rather than trusting that such skills will grow organically during academic work or co-curricular experiences. To put it more directly, whereas leadership and creativity might have once been seen as ineffable attributes with a performance standard of “we’ll know it when we see it,” there is now a fast-growing network of national ecosystem partners working to define these skills as sets of observable behaviors and repeatable practices that can be mastered through deliberate practice and coaching.

One such partner is America Succeeds, which used statistical analysis of over 80 million job descriptions to identify and prioritize the skills most prized by employers. Their resulting framework of durable skills includes a combination of how you use what you know — skills such as critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity — as well as character skills of fortitude, growth mindset and leadership.

More than a dozen states have worked in parallel to create their own statewide Graduate Profile or Portraits of a Graduate. These are concrete maps of durable skills organized by domain and typically paired with clearly articulated, asset-based descriptions of progression in each skill.

One such example is the Utah State Board of Education’s Portrait of a Graduate, which includes not just academic mastery, but also critical thinking, collaboration and teamwork, and creativity and innovation. Nathan Auck, the Utah agency’s STEM coordinator and personalized competency-based learning specialist, believes traditional education models “don’t explicitly empower students to grow these skills,” so centering them “inspires local communities to innovate and evolve their approaches.”

What this means for schools and districts using mastery transcripts is that most now either have access to portraits or are building their own. They use these as a framework for assessment, and our systems visualize each school’s portrait in the interactive “competency wheel” that is the core of every mastery transcript.

Fort Wayne’s Project

Even the best competency model and articulation of skill progressions won’t drive much growth if learners aren’t being given the time, space and agency to tackle complex real-world problems. Within the consortium, we refer to these innovative learning environments with the umbrella term of “mastery learning.” If you’re comfortable with academic jargon, you could describe it as personalized, competency-based education combined with real-world learning and authentic performance assessment. In more concrete terms, it means you’ll see MTC schools teaching problem solving through iterative, project-based learning.

Take, for example, Amp Lab at Electric Works in Fort Wayne, Ind. This is a community-centered project space that draws 11th and 12th graders from five high schools across the Fort Wayne Community Schools, where the students engage in half-day programs focused on real-world problem-based learning.

Riley Johnson, director of Amp Lab, says the program’s goal is to “flip the equation in terms of the role 16- to 18-year-olds play in our community. When students launch their own businesses or help businesses and organizations in the community solve real problems, the students get a voice and seat at the table.”

Within the Mastery Transcript Consortium’s network, Amp Lab is a leader but not an outlier. School districts increasingly are building formal programs and curriculum around design thinking, entrepreneurship or app development. This isn’t trend-seeking. Our educators embrace these models because they teach cyclical frameworks for problem solving.

Whether coding an app or planning a business venture, learners need to identify problems, hypothesize solutions, prototype and test, and then reflect, iterate and refine based on feedback. These are “fail first, fail fast” models that help students learn through experience that risk and failure are natural parts of the learning process. They also learn to consider what does and doesn’t work for them when solving problems. What approaches work best for them when grappling with ambiguous scenarios? Where are they most prone to flawed assumptions or errors in reasoning? And how do they respond and adapt when one right answer doesn’t exist?

Small Starts

When we see districts struggling with the move toward competencies and personalization, the pitfalls usually result from moving too fast. Parents will push back against changes to assessment and reporting if they aren’t given time to understand or co-create them. Our school schedules and the systems that track them have been built for decades around an architecture of academic courses dispensed in 40- to 50-minute increments. Changes in expectations and practices take time and patience.

In the Mendon-Upton Regional School District of Mendon, Mass., Nipmuc High School created a successful rollout of mastery-based learning through a phased approach. Beginning in 2018-19, co-principals John Clements and Mary Ann Moran designed and rolled out the Portrait of a Learner in a series of community conversations, including workshops and programs with outside speakers and a small pilot with 32 Portrait of a Learner students. They then worked to incorporate elements of the portrait into classroom practice.

The high school piloted the MTC Learning Record with small groups of learners the past three years and now uses the learning record as part of a semester-long freshman seminar. The class allows new learners to start their high school journey in the context of their portrait and functions as a tool for seniors applying to college.

Describing their work at Nipmuc, which enrolls 600 students, Moran said, “We believe students are more than their numbers.” Clements added that the mastery learning and portrait initiatives empower learners with “a powerful personal narrative connected to skills that sets them up to be capable, confident and happy in the world beyond school.”

Postsecondary Links

Ultimately, the measure of any academic record is whether and how it’s valued by receivers — the end users who use it to make informed decisions about our students. By that measure, our project is working. Since our first record was published in late 2019, learners from MTC districts and schools have been admitted to more than 590 colleges and universities, using credentials that feature skills rather than scores.

This fast-growing adoption is fueled in part by changes to higher education admissions more broadly. The National Association of College Admissions Counseling in recent research has made the case for new types of assessment models, noting in its “Report on Standardized Testing” in 2020 that “many students thrive demonstrating knowledge in hands-on classroom environments, yet falter in pressured standardized testing scenarios disconnected from daily learning.” NACAC made the case that “more comprehensive academic records are needed to fully convey students’ excellence in the classroom,” in its “2023 State of College Admission Report.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June 2023 that race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful upended the “holistic admissions” application-reading practices at many highly selective institutions and left their leaders eager for new data points for identifying talent in their vast applicant pools.

Exciting Signs

We expect rapid growth and expansion in the use of mastery transcripts. In May, the Mastery Transcript Consortium became part of the Educational Testing Service, and in this new role will support the Skills for the Future initiative, a joint endeavor of ETS and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Skills for the Future seeks to transform education from a time-based to a competency-based system undergirded by novel measures that capture evidence of what’s most important for success in high school, postsecondary education, jobs today and jobs of the future.

Through SFF, we aim to provide districts with new assessments and insight engines that will improve the validity and usability of our skill transcripts.

We are genuinely excited about the early successes our graduates experience when they arrive on college campuses or in the workplace, which we attribute to the innovative competency and mastery learning models that underpin mastery transcripts. Whether applying to a selective college or vying for a competitive internship, we have clear signals that young adults who are unique and authentic have an easier time standing out in a crowded field, which is why we need to challenge them and coach them to think, write and speak in ways that develop their individual strengths and empower them to tell their unique stories. 

Michael Flanagan is CEO of the Mastery Transcript Consortium in Winchester, Mass. Susan Bell is the consortium’s chief program officer.