By Thomas Ultican 12/9/2023
Current president of Carnegie Foundation, Tim Knowles, from the University of Chicago and founding director of Teach for America, is vigorously trying to upend the Carnegie Unit. Joining in this crusade are CEO of Education Testing Services (ETS), Amit Savak, and billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs’ XQ Institute.
What is it and Where Did it Come From?
Andrew Carnegie became the wealthiest man in the world when he sold Carnegie Steele to J. P. Morgan in 1901. With the sale, he surpassed John D. Rockefeller’s riches. Carnegie, the penniless Scotsman who came to America and became wealthy, is also known as the man who gave it all away. In 1905, he put up $10 million to create retirement benefits for college professors. In today’s dollars that grant would be worth about $350 million.
The problem became developing a standard for identifying legitimate professors.
A 2015 paper from the Carnegie Foundation reported that in 1906:
“The Carnegie trustees concluded that college entrance requirements should be ‘designated in terms of units, a unit being a course of five periods weekly throughout an academic year of the preparatory school.’ Fourteen such units constituted ‘the minimum amount of preparation’ for students heading for college. And colleges that required fourteen units for admission would, if they met the Foundation’s other requirements, qualify for the pension fund.” (Page 8)
The Carnegie Unit, which developed from this decision, measures student progress. For example, a student attending class meetings one hour a day 3 times a week, for 40 weeks, plus passing the course work and testing involved earns one “unit” of high school credit, for the 120 hours in class. The “unit” is a minimum requirement creating a nationwide agreed-upon structure. It does not control pedagogy nor assessments but insures a minimum amount of time on task.
The 2015 Carnegie paper also stated:
“It provides a common currency that makes possible innumerable exchanges and interconnections among institutions. And it continues to provide a valuable opportunity-to-learn standard for students in both higher education and K-12 education, where inequitable resources and variable quality are more the rule than the exception.” (Page 5)
The Carnegie Unit is a method for insuring a minimum amount of time is spent in class to earn a credit. Curriculum choices, assignments and testing are the province of classroom teachers and their schools. The number of credits required to graduate from a high school are set by state education departments and local school districts.
Changes Knowles and Others Want
Billionaire-financed propaganda rag, The 74, interviewed Tim Knowles in September. The sub-head stated, “From credits to seat time to school finance to student engagement, century-old unit of measurement is stifling real education reform and innovation.” Knowles’ first answer, explaining the Carnegie Unit is a lie:
“What it is, fundamentally, is the conflation of time and learning. It’s the suggestion that X number of minutes equals learning.”
It has never conflated time and learning.
Knowles, Savak and Jobs see the Carnegie Unit as a roadblock for their vision of a competency-based education (CBE) system, replacing units with proof of skills. Savak’s ETS promises to develop reliable mastery testing methods for providing a designation of competency, such as grades or badges. Jobs’ Amplify Education already has virtual courses that students can complete at their own speed. These fit nicely with Bill Gates’ old employee, Tom Vander Ark’s new Mastery Transcript Consortium.
In September, The 74 obligingly published “Credit Hours Are a Relic of the Past. How States Must Disrupt High School – Now.” The article is written by Russlynn Ali director of Laurene Powell Jobs’ XQ Institute and Timothy Knowles, blaming the Carnegie Unit for only half of high school graduates being ready for college, decline in economic mobility and NAEP scores falling after the pandemic. Ali and Knowles promise they “are intent on building a new educational architecture that shifts the sector to a truly competency-based system and away from time-bound conceptions of what knowledge is and how it is acquired.”
Not everyone is sanguine about their new “educational architecture.” Jal Mehta, professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said in a published dialog:
“I’ve found myself increasingly wary each time another educational leader tells me how enthusiastic they are about this venture. For one thing, this year marked the 40th anniversary of ‘A Nation at Risk,’ which famously urged states to boost the number of Carnegie Units required for graduation. Given that many of those excited about ditching Carnegie sit in the same offices as those who, a generation ago, led the push to act on that report’s recommendation, it’s worth asking why savvy leaders once deemed mandating more math, science, English, and world-language requirements a promising path forward. The answer, of course, is that they thought it a crude but workable way to put a floor beneath student learning. In a time of sky-high graduation rates, rampant grade inflation, and plummeting student achievement, this is something that we shouldn’t lightly dismiss.”
“The case against changing the Carnegie Unit is essentially twofold. First, that it was never intended as a way of measuring learning, which is properly left to individual teachers, professors, departments, and schools. It offers a very rough view of what is a “course” – defined by time – and then leaves all the assessment questions to local actors. Yes, there is tremendous variability in how these actors define ‘quality learning.’ But it preserves their autonomy to do so, while at the same time creating some basic measures that allow some equity and comparability across institutions. The second case against changing it is that anything replacing it would be worse. As the author of The Allure of Order, I can certainly make a case that efforts to build massive systems of measurement and impose them across different contexts of learning have often gone poorly!”
Education writer, Derek Newton’s article for Forbes, opposed ending the Carnegie unit for a host of reasons but the major one is cheating:
“Cheating, academic misconduct as the insiders know it, is so pervasive and so easy that it makes a complete mockery of any effort to build an entire education system around testing.”
“The sellers use software to take remote control of a test-taker’s computer and have a ringer take the exam for them.”
“But because of the credit hour system, which is designed to measure classroom instruction time, it’s still relatively hard to cheat your way to a full college degree.”
Doomed to Bad Pedagogy
ETS and Carnegie Foundation partnered to create assessments for CBE, making the Orwellian-named “personalized-learning” viable for issuing digitally-earned certifications. This is one required ingredient for their plan to shift American education to a “competency-based system,” with a 50-year history of failure.
The 1970’s “mastery learning” was very unpopular and renamed “outcome-based education” in the 1990s, now it’s called “competency-based education.” CBE is a move to use “mastery leaning” techniques to create individualized certification paths. However it is still the same mind-numbing approach that the 1970s teachers began calling “seats and sheets.” This behaviorist approach to education leaves almost no room for students to construct knowledge and ignores the social component of education.
In A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire explain, “Because learning is deeply rooted in relationships, it can’t be farmed out to robots or time-saving devices.”
Final Observations
The American education system has become more and more centrally controlled since 1983’s “Nation at Risk.” This has made it more vulnerable to hare-brained schemes that would upend it, like Tim Knowles new “educational architecture.”
Billions of dollars have been spent to convince people that public schools are failing. This is not true. We have the premier education system in the world. If most people are satisfied with their schools, corporations will be denied easy access to the $100’s of billions from annual education budgets. They want Tim Knowles’ new “educational architecture,” not that it is better but it is more profitable.
Knowles, Savak and leaders at Jobs’ XQ Institute have been all over the country this year, at corporate-sponsored education events, trying to convince people to get rid of the Carnegie Unit. They want to replace it with CBE, a failed-education approach accompanied by an unproven testing system.
This approach to education has the potential to end American democracy because the public education system is its pillar. It also ignores the important social component of education.
Upending public schools this way is folly.
tultican 
Little Timmy Knowles showed up in Boston as a central office administrator. He was certain he knew so much more than those of us who been in the trenches for years, thus earning him his sobriquet. Also, Lassie.
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