The hope of the “Skills for the Future” collaboration is to make it easy for schools to treat so-called “durable” skills such as critical thinking, teamwork and perseverance the same as traditional subjects like math and English. That includes giving students new tests and a new report card that shows how well they have mastered those other skills as they apply to colleges or jobs.

The collaboration between the Educational Testing Service and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching started last year and added five states this spring — Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Wisconsin. The Mastery Transcript Consortium which has already built a mastery-based report card became part of ETS, the company that runs the SAT and GRE college admissions tests, in May.

The partnership comes as some businesses edge toward skills-based hiring, rather than hiring for having a college degree. The partners also want to increase mastery or competency learning, where students progress at their own speed, rather than in lockstep with a class.

“This whole idea that education could be focused on durable and transferable skills is super exciting to me,” said Scott Looney, founder of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, which just added its innovative report card to the partnership this month. “It’ll make school more engaging, interesting for kids, but also make it more meaningful.”

“I think this is going to give us the ability to take this to millions of kids,” he said.

Carnegie President Tim Knowles said this new effort is a full reversal of what his foundation once promoted. In the early 1900s, the foundation popularized the credit hour or Carnegie Unit concept of measuring learning by hours spent on a subject. 

But Knowles said it is clear now that students learn at different speeds and the measure that share’s his foundation’s name doesn’t work anymore. ETS, Carnegie and others in the mastery movement want students to be rated on progress toward each skill, at whatever speed works for them, regardless of when a grading period ends.

Knowles said he hopes to replace the credit hours model “where bells ring between classes, where it’s time, not competency, that is the rule of the day.”

“Our aim is to build a new architecture that would actually enable competency-based learning to move from the edges of the profession where it’s lived for 100 years to the mainstream,” he said.

The end result, said Laura Slover, managing director of the effort, will hopefully be a way to show students’ character traits that many believe are just as important to success in school, jobs and life as academic knowledge.

“We are convinced that there’s a lack of social and economic mobility in the U.S., and that we’ve moved from a knowledge economy to a skills economy,” said Slover. “We want a portable transcripts or wallet, if you will, that shows where students are in their development, skills and abilities that they can use with employers, they can use to open the doors to college, and that are fair and reliable and meaningful for kids.” 

That shift, though, relies on schools to determine which skills to focus on and how to measure them. While there are many tests on subjects like English and math, there are no standard ways of measuring skills like communication, collaboration or digital literacy that carry across teachers, subjects, schools or states.

This spring, the five states that are dipping their toes into mastery joined Skills for The Future to help develop ways of measuring student progress on these durable skills. 

ETS said first steps included looking at the “Portrait of a Graduate” or “Portrait of a Learner” statements that — see Nevada’s or North Carolina’s   — that list the attributes and values they want students to have. The most common traits that will be the first  priority, said Knowles, are communication, collaboration, persistence, and digital literacy, with critical thinking and creative thinking close behind.

ETS, Carnegie and the states met in California in April to brainstorm approaches, with each state now meeting with teachers, students, colleges and businesses to develop ideas to pilot as early as January, 2025. A few early possibilities include interactive testing that adjusts questions – making them harder or easier or zeroing in on certain topics – based on student answers, as some online tests do now.

Some tests could be game-based, instead of just having students answer questions.

The partners are discussing how to use artificial intelligence and portfolios of student work such as papers, artwork, and projects created for multiple classes, as well as extracurricular or out of school activities to show character and interdisciplinary skills.

Portfolios can post a challenge for schools and for one of the long-range goals of the project – that skills can be reliably measured and believable to business or college admissions departments. Mastery schools use portfolios now, but those are dependent on subjective decisions by schools and teachers and are not verifiable to outsiders.

But Nevada state superintendent Jhone Ebert said Skills For The Future could develop guidelines that could be used in schools everywhere to create more consistency. 

Or some rating decisions may be left to teachers, but a third party may be able to offer a seal to be added to the new transcripts to offer some verification.

Ebert said she wanted Nevada schools, some of which have tested mastery concepts after a 2017 state law change, to have a role in creating new assessments.

“What has not gone well in the past is that someone just makes it a determination that this is the magic wand and how we’re going to measure everything,” she said. “Then it comes down and classroom teachers haven’t been involved, state leaders haven’t been involved. It is just this tool that has been made available and we are all going to adopt.”

“This process is much different,” she said. “We are all working together to co-design what it will look like and provide that feedback and input up front.”

The Mastery Transcript Consortium started in 2017 with private schools who wanted to show student progress from “developing” skills to “mastering” them. It built a transcript model that typically shows about 60 skills, as each school determines, instead of just the half dozen courses a student might take each semester. Some schools have used versions of it in college applications since 2019.

It now has 370 private and public schools or districts as members and says 500 colleges agree to accept students using the transcript.

It also has already built an intermediate report on student progress on durable skills that schools can use as a supplement to traditional academic report cards, if they’re not ready to make a full leap yet.

Though it keeps adding members, director Mike Flanagan said it is still a small group without the clout to take its work to a massive scale.

“For us to reach millions of students across the entire country on our own would have taken an infinite amount of time,” he said. “It’s virtually impossible. But ETS is one of the few organizations in the sector that has the scale and capacity to credibly help us reach millions of learners.”

Flanagan added that having ETS, Carnegie and five states joining the work  “lends enormous credibility to our effort.”

Whether this effort is enough to make mastery and measurement of soft skills take hold nationally remains  to be seen. Attempts to use mastery in states like Maine and New Hampshire never fully caught on and are often .

Among the pitfalls, he noted, are federal testing requirements under the Every Student Succeeds Act that don’t allow flexibility when students must learn some academic skills. And schools and parents could balk at a shift, he said, though Skills For the Future might succeed in doing enough advance work that it would be easier for schools and teachers to adopt.

“It’s a real challenge to do it well, but it’s good that somebody with the horsepower that ETS and Carnegie (have) are giving it a shot,” said Scott Marion, executive director of the nonprofit National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment. “Let’s not kid ourselves. If it wasn’t so hard, somebody would have done it.”

Recommendations include ways schools can reduce carbon emissions, utilize infrastructure as a teaching tool, support communities of color disproportionately affected by weather crises and create pathways for students to pursue green jobs.

“Ultimately, there are a lot of technical fixes that we need in addressing climate change. But we will need people to actually advance a sustainable society,” said Laura Schifter, senior fellow with the Aspen Institute and founder of the new initiative, .

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Synthesizing a year of listening tours and research, the connects one of the country’s most sizable public sectors to actionable climate solutions — like warming effects by replacing the nation’s largest diesel fleet with electric school buses and swapping the common asphalt plots that surround schools with green spaces.

Organized by federal, state and local impact, all recommendations detail what partnerships can and do look like with business, philanthropy, media and advocacy organizations across the country.

In comparison with private homes, public safety offices and businesses, , according to the New Buildings Institute, a nonprofit that tracks and helps to redesign commercial spaces’ energy performance. Annually, K-12 schools in the U.S. produce emissions equivalent to or roughly 15 million cars. Energy is the second most costly expense for school districts on average.

The K12 Climate Action of students, teachers, education administrators and environmental leaders includes incoming Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez, researcher and president of the Learning Policy Institute and the presidents of the country’s two largest teachers unions, representing roughly 4 million educators combined. The group is co-led by Republican Christine Todd Whitman, former New Jersey governor and head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush, and Democrat John King, former U.S. secretary of education under President Obama who is now running for Maryland governor.

With the action plan now live, the commission is coalition building with districts and businesses nationwide. Their focus is educating more leaders about how small and large school infrastructure changes or partnerships can support a cleaner environment, so that they’re able to follow through on recommendations.

“All the things that we’re calling for are achievable. There’s someplace somewhere that is doing each of the things we recommend,” King told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

Some suggested changes, like improving air quality for students, are highly anticipated by parents and already underway in efforts to ameliorate pandemic health concerns. Beginning next year, more than 500 schools across New York state will further improve air quality, reduce emissions and add energy career and tech opportunities under Gov. Kathy Hochul’s just-announced $59 million . New York officials are partnering with the New Buildings Institute on the effort.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers who sometimes clashed with King in her role as a labor leader, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ that the union “leaped” at the opportunity to be involved in K12 Climate Action, seeing it as part of the AFT’s broader goal to make schools safe and healthy spaces for learning.

“The way you teach people is by not telling them, but having them see, feel, touch, use whatever senses they have to really envision a future,” she said.

Weingarten and other commission leaders toured Alice West Fleet Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia Sept. 21 to learn how a small school has become a model of sustainability for the affluent, D.C. area county. The school’s geothermal heating system and solar panels save roughly $100,000 in energy costs each year, enough to fund two teachers’ starting salaries, according to the Aspen Institute’s Laura Schifter.

In the center of Alice West Fleet, the red and blue lights of a “solar pole” show students how much energy is being produced and used at any given moment. Any surplus goes to greater Arlington County, and upper grade students use data collected to make comparisons and predictions about how much energy will be produced at different points in the year.

On the first floor is the yet-to-be-named “Power Pole,” showing students the amount of power the school has generated. The blue is from the solar panels, the red is the power being used. Extra power goes back to the county.

— AFT (@AFTunion)

Weingarten, whose enthusiasm was evident during the tour when she slid down a slide that connects Fleet’s third and second floors, added that the AFT recently established a climate task force, including members from states heavily dependent on the fossil fuel industry, like Texas, West Virginia and Alaska. The growing urgency to address climate needs across political parties and geography gives her hope that what unites us is greater than what divides us.

“Just like our responsibility to educate kids, there’s a responsibility to keep a climate that’s going to be there,” Weingarten said.

Commission member Nikki Pitre, executive director for the told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ that there’s also a responsibility to keep Indigenous people and values at the forefront of climate solutions, given that Native peoples have always stewarded the land and acted as environmentalists.

The action plan emphasizes that Indigenous communities’ knowledge systems — their local culture and ecological practices — must be included in climate solutions.

Pitre said she walked away from the tour of Alice Fleet questioning, “What do we need to advocate for in our policies to ensure that these schools are not the exception? That we’re providing equal access across the country — including tribal reservations, including urban spaces?”

School leaders on the commission say that equity considerations play a key part in deciding which sustainable infrastructure improvements are prioritized because solutions cannot be one-size-fit-all. For some districts, climate issues are just as urgent as addressing unfinished learning and mental health concerns related to the pandemic as families face unprecedented flooding in the South and upper Atlantic.

As Los Angeles County’s superintendent of schools, Debra Duardo leads the that constitute the nation’s largest K-12 consolidated school system. She told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ she hesitated when first approached by the commission, given all the urgent challenges facing students during the pandemic.

“I hadn’t really placed as much of an emphasis on my own time and knowledge on understanding the impact that the education sector has on the environment. For me it was like, we’re super busy right now, but one thing this pandemic has taught us is that schools have to be ready to step up — that people look to schools as the hub of support and resources and communities,” Duardo said.

In Los Angeles, where families increasingly face poor air quality from smog and fire smoke, she said, it’s historically been student and environmental activists leading the charge for climate solutions. However busy leaders might be, she said, they cannot ignore the dread young people feel when confronting climate change and the strains it may place on their learning.

“There’s so much evidence and research that tells us that children thrive when they’re in an environment where it’s safe, beautiful and accommodating to meet their needs …Children aren’t going to learn and thrive in an environment if they don’t feel like anybody is listening, or they’re concerned that their futures, their safety are in danger.”

Advocates and teachers say presents a way to confront some eco-anxiety with positive actions and possibilities for future careers in engineering, green infrastructure and clean energy. K12 Climate Action commissioners contend that infrastructure changes are reducing emissions while preparing the next generation of stewards.

Sustainable changes also open the door for deeper civic and family engagement at a time when the pandemic has strained relationships to schools. As a part of a larger research assignment on the Chesapeake Bay, Ashley Snyder’s fourth-grade students at Alice West Fleet started brainstorming ways to share with the community how best to enhance rain gardens and filtration systems to protect the watershed area.

“I definitely see the students bringing home a lot more of what they’re learning to their families,” she said.