The Past and the Promise: Today’s Competency Education Movement

 “In this paper, [the authors] explore several essential questions about today’s competency education reforms. [Their] intent is to lay a foundation for assessing the potential of competency-based approaches, as they currently exist and as they could eventually evolve. [The authors] believe that a reorganization of schooling is long overdue and that the reforms explores in this paper may have the potential to help narrow achievement gaps and better prepare all young people for life after graduation.

This paper attempts to answer several key questions about the emerging field of competency education:

• What is driving the interest and investment in competency-based education models and policy today?
• Given that education reforms focused on learning outcomes are not new, what historical efforts are current competency-based practitioners building upon and what lessons can we draw from them?
• What can we infer from research and theory on effective student-centered learning about implications for personalized competency-based education programs?
• What opportunities and challenges does the current competency education movement face?” (p.2).

Abstractor: Author

“Competency education is currently one of the hot ‘innovation spaces’ in education reform. In an attempt to ensure that these efforts are more lasting and widespread than previous rounds of mastery-oriented reforms, [the authors] have highlighted potential lessons from the factors that historically limited the growth and sustainability of such innovations and suggested how the work of building competency-based systems can be infused with new research and tools for learning, motivation, peer interactions, assessments, and more” (p.20). “Efforts to expand competency education must navigate: the ongoing implementation of the Common Core and related assessments; federal and state decisions about accountability measures; the scarcity of funding for and solid research on innovation; and the time typically required for innovations to grow, be evaluated, improve, and reach maturity” (p.20). • Implementation of competency-based approaches raises significant challenges, which include: “training teachers in new approaches, maintaining a supportive school culture, galvanizing community buy-in, and maximizing the advantages and minimizing the disadvantages of technology” (p. 22). “Answering many of the questions raised in this paper requires careful analysis. Clear data on outcomes are just beginning to emerge. Several studies are currently underway, thanks to efforts of the Regional Education Labs (especially the REL Northeast College and Career Readiness Research Alliance, REL Midwest, and REL Central and the Marzano Research Laboratory), the American Institutes for Research (funded by the Nellie Mae Education Foundation), and RAND (funded by the Gates Foundation). Yet even these ambitious efforts are struggling to provide the field the answers it needs, due to the vast diversity in implementation and definition across the many models that claim to be competency based” (p.26). Scaling “personalized competency education from a few promising examples to a transformation of the nation’s high schools,” is a start and “much more must be known about the issues highlighted,” in the report. Fortunately, the growing number of competency-based schools and programs are beginning to yield some answers and insights” (p.26). Abstractor: Author and Website staff

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2014
• Author(s): Le, Cecilia; Wolfe, Rebecca E., and Steinberg, Adria
• Organizational Author(s): Jobs for the Future
• Funding Source: Nellie Mae Education Foundation
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Long Dang
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies