Education Next – Julia Freeland
“Earlier this year, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released a report titled “The Carnegie Unit: A Century-Old Standard in a Changing Education Landscape.” Chris Sturgis of CompetencyWorks reacted quickly by authoring two fantastic blogs that analyze and criticize the report’s defensive and reactionary take on the Carnegie unit. Sturgis’s remarks are on point. Given that it’s been a month since the report appeared, I didn’t want to rehash her thorough criticisms, but instead add the below points to the conversation, particularly as they relate to competency-based approaches in K–12 education. The result of a two-year study, the report examines the history of the century-old Carnegie Unit and its impact on education reform in K–12 and higher education. Although the authors acknowledge that time is not necessarily the best metric for learning, the report grasps continuously at the virtues of the credit hour. As Sturgis aptly pointed out, the paper seems to ignore that the Carnegie unit is—like Carnegie’s very own steel mills and library buildings—manmade. Instead, it treats this artifact as something of an inevitability in a functioning education system. Indeed, the authors are correct that entire systems for funding, tracking, and measuring attendance are tied to the Carnegie Unit. Yet this does not mean that, as is alluded to throughout, the credit hour ought to maintain a life of its own. The researchers also take pains to insist that the Carnegie Unit grounds certain normative values—particularly equity—that are central to American values. Yet, they rarely pause to consider that the credit hour has only been a background condition as those norms have evolved: it is not necessarily the lever making equity possible, but instead a firmly fixed feature of a system that has begun to care deeply about equity only in recent decades.”(more)