skills – ��Ӱ��

Live Event: AI & The Changing Skills Landscape for Learners and Workers

��Ӱ�� — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 14:30:00 +0000

What does the rise of artificial intelligence mean for students preparing to enter a shifting workforce?

Join ��Ӱ�� and the Progressive Policy Institute at 1 p.m. ET Thursday for a webinar about the “skills landscape” and how education and AI could help unlock new avenues for equity, mobility and opportunity.

PPI’s Bruno Manno will first lead a conversation with Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute, about the potential for AI to accelerate the pace of change and what this means for students and workers.

Kerry McKittrick, co-director of the Harvard Project on the Workforce, will then moderate a panel with Judy Goldstein, senior vice president of American Student Assistance, and Carlo Salerno of the Burning Glass Institute.

More AI coverage from ��Ӱ��:

AI Education Is the New Space Race. Here’s How America Must Respond

OpenAI’s Education Leader on AI’s ‘Massive Productivity Boost’ for Schools, Teachers

AI-Fueled Testing, From the Mouths of Babes

Artificial Intelligence and Schools: When Tech Makers and Educators Collaborate, AI Doesn’t Have to be Scary

Leanlab Founder Says Ed Tech Should Root Itself in Community Voice, Co-Design

New Jersey Officials Defend Law Dropping Test Requirement for Would-Be Teachers

Sophie Nieto-Munoz — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 13:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

The new year brought changes to requirements for New Jersey teachers, including a new law eliminating a basic skills test that lawmakers overwhelmingly advanced in both houses.

Gov. Phil Murphy signed the eliminating the Praxis basic skills test for people seeking teaching certifications in June, and it went into effect Jan. 1. Lawmakers said the legislation aimed to address a l and remove duplicative, costly tests that create barriers to pursuing a career in education.

At the time, it faced little controversy. Just three Republicans voted against it.

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But recent comments from tech mogul Elon Musk have shined a spotlight on the new law. Musk, who owns social media platform X, this week of an article about the change and questioned if teachers in New Jersey need to “know how to read.” The post has been viewed nearly 20 million times.

Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia (R-Sussex), who supported the bill, said the change to teacher certification requirements has been taken entirely out of context and does not lower the bar for would-be teachers.

“My largest concern was it was an extra expense for teachers just starting out, and for taking a test, actually, that is much easier than the current tests you already have to take,” said Fantasia, who obtained her teaching certificate in 2008 and now works as an administrator at a charter school.

She explained that for teachers to receive certification in New Jersey, they must first graduate from an accredited teacher preparation program with at least a 3.0 grade point average, complete months of student teaching, and pass several exams, depending on the grade level and subject matter being taught.

Those tests can easily amount to hundreds of dollars, and by the time a potential teacher takes the Praxis exam, they’ve already proved their capabilities, she said.

States across the country have removed similar exams in an effort to ease shortages plaguing schools, according to the . Oklahoma enacted a law in 2022 removing the requirement for a general education exam, and Arizona implemented a law allowing educators to begin teaching before graduating from college.

Fantasia did not fault Musk for his confusion about the law and placed some blame on the media — fringe and mainstream — for irresponsible headlines and missing context. The knee-jerk reaction from the public is to be “completely expected,” she said.

And while she noted she’s the loudest Republican voice supporting the legislation, she slammed Democrats for remaining “radio silent” on a bill they supported. The bill sponsors did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

“The teachers of New Jersey are made to look across this country like the village idiots because the Democrat Party who sponsored this bill and the governor who signed it don’t feel it necessary to defend them when the headlines are extraordinarily misleading,” Fantasia said.

Murphy’s office defended the law in a statement to the New Jersey Monitor.

“The Praxis Core requirement was redundant to New Jersey’s other requirements for teacher certification that remain in place, and its removal was a recommendation of our public school staff shortage task force, a group of experts who know more about New Jersey’s education needs than Elon Musk,” said Natalie Hamilton, a Murphy spokeswoman. “The bipartisan legislation that the Governor signed passed by overwhelming margins and we are disappointed by out-of-state agitators that want more red tape.”

Steven Baker, spokesman for teachers union the New Jersey Education Association, said “right-wing blog sites trying to push this story don’t understand the law and definitely do not understand New Jersey’s very rigorous teacher certification standards.”

He stressed that the additional requirement to pass the Praxis following years of other coursework did nothing to elevate the standards and “amounted to a corporate money grab” from college students.

Sen. Joe Pennacchio (R-Morris), who voted against the bill, said he thinks it has indeed lowered standards.

“I think these are the days of dumbing down, and somebody’s got to put their foot down and say, ‘Absolutely not,’” he said. “We should expect more from these kids, not less, and we certainly should expect no less from the teachers that are teaching them.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence T. McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com.

Reinventing Report Cards: Reading, Writing, Collaboration and Other Work Skills

Patrick O’Donnell — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 18:01:00 +0000

A movement to throw out traditional A-F grades in favor of tracking high school students as they gain mastery of academic and life skills is gaining momentum, with five states and powerful players joining forces to advance it.

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.

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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.”

Future of High School: How California Growers Are Training Teens the Trade

��Ӱ�� — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 17:30:00 +0000

Updated June 28

This summer, Lodi, California, high schoolers will again head to local wineries to learn the business through a combination of hands-on internships and college classes. The first-of-its-kind initiative is the result of a growing partnership among the district, Delta College, the Lodi Winegrape Commission and the nonprofit San Joaquin A+.

��Ӱ�� recently partnered with the Progressive Policy Institute for an inside look at the “Growing Futures” Initiative and how it aims to promote a more inclusive agriculture industry.

In the replay below, you’ll hear from experts Stuart Spencer, Executive Director of the Lodi Winegrape Commission, Kai Kung, CEO of San Joaquin A+, Kathy Stonum, Winemaker at Stonum Vineyards and Francesca Stonum, Operations Manager at Stonum Vineyards.

Some of our recent coverage of trends in career preparation:

How a California Wine Region Is ‘Growing Futures’ By Turning Vineyards Into State-of-the-Art Classrooms

Why Wait to Graduate? Georgia Apprentices Start Training as Sophomores

How Rhode Island Is Tapping Career & Technical Ed to Help Every Student Succeed

LISTEN — Beyond ‘College or Bust’: Apprenticeship as a Path to Opportunity

Who You Know: Social Capital is Key for First-Gen Students’ Career Success

Watch: How Apprenticeships Can Help High School Students Earn While They Learn

��Ӱ�� — Wed, 08 May 2024 14:30:00 +0000

Updated May 8

Apprenticeships are booming as high schools and private industry recognize the need for training students for roles in the workforce of the future and for offering career pathways that don’t necessarily rely on a bachelor’s degree.

��Ӱ�� recently partnered with the Progressive Policy Institute on a new installment of the “New Skills for a New Economy” webinar series, which focused on solutions needed to ensure the U.S. education and workforce systems adapt to meet current workforce needs.

In the replay below, you’ll hear from experts, you’ll hear from experts Vanessa Bennett of Jobs for the Future; Lateefah Durant of CityWorks D.C.; Jess Kostelnik, senior policy adviser to Colorado Gov. Jared Polis; and Seth Lentz, executive director of the Workforce Development Board of South Central Wisconsin. Watch the full conversation: