New graduation requirements could bring radical change to DC high schools

The DC State Board of Education will soon propose new graduation requirements that would spell out two basic diploma types, a standard one and another signifying greater accomplishment. They would also introduce a potentially radical new way of assessing students based on competency rather than the number of hours spent in class.

For the past two years the Board has been working on a revision of minimum graduation requirements that would apply to both DCPS and charter schools. Now almost finalized, the proposals would relax the upper-level math requirement, specify that students take all foreign language courses in the same language, and require a senior thesis or project only for a “Diploma of Distinction.”

More radically, they also move away from measuring achievement in terms of the number of hours students spend in class and towards a competency-based approach, which allows students to move at their own pace and requires them to demonstrate mastery of material before moving on to the next level.

Currently DCPS has a plethora of diploma types—as many as 27, according to the Board’s executive director, Jesse Rauch. Some high schools, particularly the selective ones, have added their own requirements to the minimum specified by the DC government and DCPS.

Charter schools often have their own requirements too, and some have even challenged the idea that the Board’s minimum graduation requirements apply to them, according to Rauch. The differing frameworks can lead to problems when students transfer from one school to another, as often happens in DC.

The Board has been working since 2012 to streamline and modernize the requirements. Its staff has consulted with school leaders from both DCPS and charter sectors as well as parents, students, and education nonprofits, and the topic has been up for discussion at public meetings.

On Wednesday, July 9, the Board is sponsoring another public meeting on the proposed requirements and the concept of competency-based learning. The Board hopes to approve new requirements later that month after a period of public comment, although they wouldn’t go into effect until the class of 2020 enters 9th grade in 2015.

Senior thesis requirement

A previous proposal caused consternation in the middle of the 2012-13 school year for, among other things, highlighting a requirement that students complete a thesis or culminating project during junior or senior year. That requirement had been on the books for some time but had neither been communicated well nor enforced. As a result, last year’s seniors were suddenly confronted with the prospect of failing to graduate.

DC’s graduation rate is already among the lowest in the nation, with only 64% of students graduating within 4 years of starting 9th grade.

The Board removed the senior thesis requirement before it could affect the class of 2013. It is now proposing to add back a requirement for a “senior project or capstone,” but only for the Diploma of Distinction, not the Standard Diploma.

That project could be a traditional thesis-type paper or it could be something more innovative, like a documentary film, Rauch said. In any event, he said, it would need to demonstrate “high-level thinking and deep learning.”

The Board is also proposing a separate diploma for special education students with severe cognitive disabilities. And a proposed Career and Technical Education Credential would be a supplement to the Standard Diploma and signify achievement in a particular career pathway.

Competency-based learning

Current DCPS graduation requirements are phrased in terms of credits, with 24 credits being required for graduation. The proposed Standard Diploma would maintain that number, 24, with the Diploma of Distinction requiring 26. But instead of “credits,” the Board’s proposal uses the word “units.”

That reflects a fundamental shift in the concept of how learning should be measured. For the past 100 years or so, schools have relied on what is known as the Carnegie unit to calculate credits. Each credit represents one Carnegie unit, which is equivalent to 5 hours of instruction every week over the course of the school year.

Critics say that approach leads to promoting students who have managed to get a passing grade in a course but haven’t truly mastered its content. Those students are left with gaps in their learning that get compounded over time.

Some school districts have given schools the option of using a system that promotes students only when they demonstrate competency. Students move at their own pace and can accrue the necessary learning through traditional classroom methods, online, or through “extended learning opportunities”—internships or other experiences outside the classroom.

That is the system the Board is now proposing for DC. So far, only one state, New Hampshire, has adopted competency-based learning for the state as a whole. Each school district in the state is free to develop its own descriptions of the skills and knowledge needed to earn a high school diploma and devise ways to measure whether students have acquired them.

A slow and complicated process

While measuring competency rather than “seat time” makes sense, recent reports from New Hampshire indicate that switching to a competency-based system can be a slow and complicated process.

In the most radical application of the approach, traditional age-based grade levels fall by the wayside. Although New Hampshire adopted the new standards almost 10 years ago, few if any schools have gone that far.

Many schools, in fact, don’t look much different than they did before, because their districts have decided to move all students along at the same pace and measure competencies the old-fashioned way, through performance on end-of-term exams. But state education officials are trying to encourage them to move to systems that allow for flexible pacing.

It hasn’t been easy to come up with definitions of competency and new ways to assess it, and state education officials have discovered that schools need help. They’re now beginning to provide support in the form of professional development and a bank of assessments that can measure learning in terms of mastery.

And the former chair of the state board of education has launched an initiative to recruit thousands of local mentors who can guide New Hampshire students through extended learning opportunities. If he’s successful, the role of the teacher could fundamentally change.

Schools free to devise their own approaches

It’s not clear at this point how radical a change the DC Board’s proposals would effect. They would still require that students take certain subjects and earn a specified number of units in each of them, but schools would be free to devise their own methods of teaching content and assessing competency.

The Board will ensure that schools “have a clear plan” for awarding credits for mastery, Rauch says. “But,” he adds, “there could be 3 different schools doing it 3 different ways, or even 16 different ways.”

That may strike some as an odd result, given that part of the impetus for revising graduation requirements was the need for more standardization. Rauch says the Board’s hope is that schools that want to add requirements to the minimum will adopt the Diploma with Distinction rather than coming up with their own diploma types. But even if they do, the adoption of a competency-based approach opens the door to a huge amount of variation.

It’s possible that the Board’s proposed requirements will produce a more flexible and meaningful system of graduation requirements for DC. But it’s not clear that we’ll end up with any more consistency when kids transfer from one school to another. And until we have a better understanding of how schools will define and assess competency, it’s hard to know whether students will actually end up acquiring any more knowledge than they do now.