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title: Toward a Learning Society
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Colleague, in Carnegie's September Newsletter, learn about the infrastructure it would take to make learning count everywhere.  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­    ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  

| View in Browser \| Join Our Mailing List Dear Friends and Colleagues,    Something important is happening at the margins of American higher education. In Wichita, Kansas, a 16-week program called Spero, built jointly by regional employers, community organizations and Wichita State University, is moving working adults from call centers and second jobs into salaried careers. Community colleges across the country are running employer partnerships that take only weeks to complete, not years. Apprenticeships, long ordinary in Europe, are at last gaining ground in the U.S. And some of the nation’s largest private employers are investing in new paths to opportunity: Walmart Foundation has committed $140 million to skills-based hiring and advancement.   This month, I am writing with my friend and collaborator Mitchell Stevens. In the current issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Mitchell and economist João Souto-Maior of the Burning Glass Institute give this movement a name and a history. They call it a learning society: one that recognizes learning wherever it happens — at work, in the community, in the wisdom of raising a family or starting a business — not only when it is certified by a college diploma.   We believe in this movement. We also believe it could stall. As Mitchell and João document, more than 1.8 million distinct credentials are now available in the United States. They are offered in a marketplace with no regulator, no shared measures of value and no agreed-upon way to compare one credential with another. This kind of abundance does not represent opportunity. A learning society cannot be the sum of a thousand good local programs, operating around a credentialing system that is too narrow, too expensive and poorly timed for how people actually live and work. What a true learning society needs is infrastructure. It needs signals of what people know and can do that are as legible, portable and trusted as a college transcript. It needs standards for verifying those signals and measures that employers and institutions can rely on.   Two essential pieces of that infrastructure are within reach.   The first is precision about durable skills. Judgment, persistence and collaboration appear in nearly every mission statement and portrait of a qualified graduate. Yet these capacities rarely come with a clear plan for developing them or a reliable way of affirming whether they have been developed. Spero’s faculty saw this firsthand. Much of what stood between their students and good jobs was not technical knowledge. Rather, it was the tacit know-how of working inside large organizations.   The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching will soon publish a full set of science-based, field-tested Skills Progressions that define these capacities precisely enough to teach, assess and verify. To be clear, these capacities are not replacements for academic knowledge. We know that both matter and develop together. Over time, we expect these progressions to be built into transcripts, learner records, curricula, learning tools and credentials, so that demonstrated mastery can count toward both academic credentialing and workplace advancement.   The second is a better way of evaluating those who award credentials. For decades, the Carnegie Classifications grouped colleges by the degrees they grant and the research they produce. The reimagined classifications now also identify institutions that measurably improve their students’ economic circumstances. A learning society needs that kind of judgment extended to every provider that asks people to invest their time and money — whether it is a community college, an apprenticeship sponsor, a training program, a corporate academy or a research university.   Shared standards do not mean a national skills registry or a single universal credential. A program training aircraft technicians in Wichita will look different from one preparing software engineers in Austin or sous chefs in San Francisco. A better analogy is accounting. Investors can compare very different companies because they share common rules for reporting value. By creating common standards for credentials, we could do for learning what accounting does for capital: make differences comparable without making everything the same.   The credential society we’ve inherited took most of a century to build. The nation assembled it at moments when it judged the stakes high enough to act: the GI Bill after World War II, the National Defense Education Act after Sputnik, the Higher Education Act and the creation of Pell Grants during the civil rights era. Those investments opened opportunity to millions. They also, unintentionally, produced a country that sorts life chances by whether one holds a four-year degree, and the reality is that only about 40% do.   The present moment carries stakes at least as high. The labor market is being reshaped by AI, and working lives now stretch across more decades and more careers than ever. As Mitchell and João observe, the old map of life, with schooling packed into the front end, fits fewer of us every year. One Spero graduate told them he had lived his life “a little backward.” He hadn’t. Our institutions simply haven’t caught up with him.   We know a great deal about accreditation, assessment and classification. The task now is to reinvent that infrastructure for everyone who learns — wherever and whenever they learn. That is how a learning society moves from a promising idea to a public commitment.     In partnership, Timothy Knowles President, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching   Mitchell Stevens Professor, Graduate School of Education, Stanford University     FEATURED NEWS Skills Change Fast in CTE. Can Teachers Keep Up?    Read more  → FEATURED PROFILE Opportunity Colleges & Universities Series: College of Saint Mary   Read and share  → Higher Education Leaders: Colleges Must Adapt to AI and Changing Student Needs (U.S News & World Report) Why High Schools Are the Linchpin (Democracy Journal) States’ Role in Transforming High School: Evidence, Trends, and the Path Forward (NASBE) Microschools Are Spreading. Some School Districts Have Opened Their Own (EdWeek) Business, Government and Education Leaders Try to Reinvent College from Scratch (Hechinger Report) Connect Your Community to Our Work. Join our mailing list and follow Carnegie on social Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching 51 Vista Lane, Stanford, CA 94305 Unsubscribe |
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