So here is what they admit: they are graduating non-proficient students from high school. Brilliant.
Maine pioneered proficiency-based (aka competency-based) education in 2012, reports Hechinger’s Jill Barshay. It didn’t go well. Legislators pushed back the 2018 date for issuing proficiency-based diplomas, then ended the experiment this summer.
The idea was to replace “seat time” with measures of students’ mastery of skills and content, reports Matt Barnum on Chalkbeat. Students were supposed to show mastery in eight subjects to earn a diploma.
Gray-New Gloucester High School Principal Ted Finn was excited. “The idea of having an identified set of standards and expectations that would be put out there, so that … everybody would know that if you had earned credit in, say, an Algebra I class, you did in fact meet specific identified standards — at first I was thinking, this is great,” said Finn.
A newly published study on the experiment, titled “In theory it’s a good idea”: Understanding implementation of proficiency-based education in Maine, shows what went wrong, writes Barshay.
Rural high schools had trouble making the transition to new ways of teaching. After four years, many students reported little exposure to proficiency-based teaching, the study found.
When students were exposed to proficiency-based learning, they were more engaged and “much more likely to feel that school was worthwhile,” writes Barshay.
However, “teachers were so consumed with establishing new graduation requirements and grading systems that they didn’t have much time or support for changing teaching practices in their classrooms,” researchers found.
Meanwhile, teachers and administrators had to replace conventional 0-100 grading systems with a new 1-4 score that measured how proficient a student was at meeting a standard or learning a new skill. But there was a lot of confusion over exactly what each number meant. The report described how some teachers thought it made sense to give most students 2s on their first report cards in the fall, showing that the students were working toward proficiency, something that might be attained by year end. But a 2 can feel like a mediocre grade on a four-point scale, and be discouraging, even if a student was doing everything right and working hard.
Parents didn’t buy in to the changes. Eventually, parents rallied to repeal the proficiency pilot, reported Pine Tree Watch.
The problems proficiency-based education tries to address are very real: Students pass courses, collect a diploma and discover they don’t have a solid academic foundation on which to build.
Requiring students to demonstrate proficiency is a huge change — and it’s not clear how it can be done.
https://www.joannejacobs.com/2018/11/proficiency-falters-in-maine/