Rethinking the High School Transcript: ETS and MTC Chart a New Path for Student Success

Welcome to the future of education. And now here's your host, Michael Horn. Welcome to the future of education. I'm Michael Horn, and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to building a world where all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And to help us think through that today, I'm I'm really excited. It's my longtime friend, Mike Flanagan. He's the town, over for me here in Massachusetts, but we've known each other since I was on the board of the National Association of Independent Schools, and he was running one of the very cool business lines, for NAS as well as, frankly, like, all things technology, for the organization. But then he became the CEO of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, which was acquired recently by ETS, just that organization focused on testing across the country and, internationally as well. And we're gonna talk about all of that today. Mike, so good to see you. We're not in person, but it's it's great to be with you on camera. I am so excited. Yeah. Neighbors first, but, like, this is, what a great opportunity. I'm really, really appreciate the invite. Yeah. I should have added your CrossFit CrossFit certified coach as well. So, you know, we've got, like I I'm not that, but, you know, we we have certain other things in common as well. So, Yeah. I got I always I have to put that an asterisk on that. I was former former coach. I unfortunately, my certification lapsed when my job changed, and I found I wound up spending ninety percent of my time on planes. You know, CrossFit's a great way to be healthy and stay in shape. But if you wanna get injured, a really good thing to do is do CrossFit once a month. Fair enough. Fair enough. Don't do that. Get some regular rhythm. But, hopefully, not afflicting you, but it's good to see you. Let let's let's dive in. You and I have had a long set of conversations around what the Mastery Transcript Consortium pre ETS acquisition is. We might call it MTC. Who knows? That's the acronym. But let's just talk about what Mastery Transcript Consortium was at the outset through its history before the acquisition itself. Yeah. I mean, I will say just a a preview. It's what and still is. You know, the the changes of the result of our new home with ETS, which we'll talk about in a bit, are, much more about expansion and and kinda continuation of what we're doing versus, like, a radical kind of rethinking of it. But, but to go back to the start, you know, the way we talk about MTC to educators out there is to start start with a pretty simple premise, which is that we think there are better ways of doing school. Right? That the schooling models we have today for a lot of kids, they don't feel very relevant. They don't feel very useful. They don't feel very engaging. And yet at the same time, there's all these counterexamples of amazing schools. You talk to them all the time. Right? School leaders who are innovators. Yeah. They're doing project based learning. They're doing interdisciplinary work. They're getting kids out of classrooms into the world of work. They're putting kids in teams and solving real world problems, and they're really focused on skill building. And the challenge we had or the the thing that kinda kept pushing us was, like, these these models are awesome. Like, why aren't they everywhere? Like, why isn't and why doesn't every neighborhood have a school like this? And what we realized, talking to a lot of the same people you talk to, school leaders and innovators, is that what we kinda have is an infrastructure problem. We basically know how to produce this amazing innovative learning, But all the systems we have to, frankly, keep score, to credit and credential that learning are completely yoked, completely invested to old ways, credit hours, academic courses, and GPAs. Mhmm. And so the the question is, like, what do you do if you're a school leader and the model you have, like, doesn't map to any of that? Like and and the answer to the question for us was a grassroots effort, a consortium in MTC, the Mastery Transcript Consortium. And what we've built with our schools is, simply put, an alternative credential. It's one that's completely based on competencies and skills and also centers artifacts of student learning, like actual work product, and then combines the two. So you have the best attributes of what we think is a competency based transcript and a portfolio system. And that's it. That's MTC in a nutshell. We've built this system so that kids that are doing innovative learning don't have to translate or water down that learning to have it make sense to colleges and to workforce, But they can actually have a credential and exit ticket that is fully consistent both in terms of, like, philosophy and design with, like, all the hard work that the people that started their school are probably doing. Very cool. And and and I think what I've learned and appreciated over time is I thought about it, Mike, is is two things. One, in in by by focusing on those folks that either have an innovative model or want to to your point, you're creating the infrastructure for them to grow, for them to validate what they're doing to be accepted by colleges or trade schools or employers or whatever else, sort of giving them a consistent infrastructure across the schools. So it's not just, oh, here's another one off here. Here's another one off there. And then number two, what I think I've come to learn is you're not necessarily in the weeds of, you know, my big thing, right, of, like, competency based or mastery based learning of, like, we're throwing over seat time and, like, you get to move at your own pace. What you are more is on the like, yes. That would be great. But, like, you're more on the end of that saying, okay. Whatever the system is, let us, like, represent what you have mastered in some way that I can then click in and see the artifact of learning that proves you've, in fact, mastered that domain, skill, knowledge, whatever it is. And so it's really the way I kinda think of it is it's like an asset based report card at the end of the day. These are the sets of things I can do. And, yeah, it may be jagged, but, like, that's a reflection of then who I am as an individual, and I don't have to lie about it. Right? I don't have to puff up these other areas. How do you think about that? Exactly. I mean, jagged jagged and asset together. Right? And I think if there's one thing that we spend I mean, MTC is a nonprofit by design, because if we were for profit, we wouldn't be able to invest so heavily in advocacy and outreach to higher education. And if there's one place where I think we've had to work very hard to move the needle and change the mindset is folder reading in universities and colleges today is largely done through a deficit mindset. It's how many APs did school x offer? Did applicant y take all the ten APs? And if not, why not? And it's a very weird way of thinking about how the high school journey. It has this weird pernicious effect where the most high achieving kids actually have the most narrowed options in terms of what they study and how they study because they are basically ex engaged in a full time exercise of compliance. Like, how do I how do I put the best, you know, portrait forward? You know, no deviations allowed. Whereas, like, all the best real learning like, all all I mean, eighty percent of the great stories you tell when you're talking to somebody who's innovated or built something new, all the Clayton Christensen work is like, oh, what what's what comes from failure? What comes from looking at things through totally unexpected ways of, like, bucking systems? And so if you build feedback loops and measurement loops for high schoolers that say, oh, no. We want you to be creative. We want you to take risks. But, also, we need you to be perfect at everything all the time. No no variance allowed. They're they're smart kids. They know what the actual assignment is. They know what the game is. Yeah. Yeah. So No. And, I mean, I think, look, this should be a huge thing for colleges as well as, you know, I famously earned famously sitting there watching the closures, and and and mergers of colleges. My argument is lean into what makes you as a college distinct. Look for the students who match that profile, and guess what? We don't all have to try to look the exact same, which is the current system. Right? One of the things that I and when you're starting new things, it can be very hard to find signal in all the noise. Right? And so I think one of the things that we've learned both in in this role and in some of my previous jobs is, generally, you know you're onto something when you see that users on both ends of, like, a performance curve like what you're doing or see some value in what you're doing. Right? So for higher education, if I'm in charge first of all, I wanna stipulate that we as a society overly obsess about twenty colleges and their very, very low selectivity rates, and that's how our kids actually go to school. You know that better than anybody who read books about it. But, but since we do, if you're in one of those twenty colleges, you are still you still have the mandate to yield a diverse representative class, and the Supreme Court just tied your hands. Right? So they now are saying, oh, you have new metrics. You have different ways of visualizing student capacity and capability in a in a systematic way. That's interesting to us. We wanna have that conversation. So that's not anything MTC did. That's the kind of market shifting to this kind of wind up where we already were. No. That's for sure. And then to your story earlier, the vast majority of enrollment managers at these institutions are actually just trying to find kids. Right? So and right now, the the signals we give those same kids when they're wayfinding, trying to find the right, you know, destination, they're very blunt tools. It's like, okay. You have this set of SAT or ACT scores. That means you if you theoretically rat you know, stack, stack rank all these schools, how high up are you allowed to aim? But there's no lateral dispersion. There's no way of saying, but but what about fit? Like, what about what am I actually gonna do if I get into one of these schools? Right? Yep. And that level of fit, real skill profile, that's where the jagged becomes a feature, not a bug. Yeah. That second one, I confess. That's where I'd love to spend the energy of that. Not so interested in the former, but the, but let's let's jump in then to the ETS question, because they made the choice. We're now this is September, so I guess it was June or something like that. Yeah. We went we announced it in the middle of May, the signed the paperwork in early May. Okay. So May. We're now a few months in. They acquired MTC. Why was this interesting for them? How does this fit into ETS' strategic plans? Folks who follow the industry know they have a relatively still new CEO. There have been a lot of changes at ETS as well. Wrap it in. Tell us the story. So first, what I will say is just for in case you have any, professors of law out there, it's not technically an acquisition because we are a nonprofit and they are a nonprofit. Fair. So it's still a control. Right. They will know that what we did was called a a sole member substitution. But let's just say in plain English, we are now a wholly owned subsidiary of ETS. We are one of the ETS family of companies. So we still operate independently. MTC is still its own five zero one c three, but we are absolutely now in this kind of family that has much vaster resources and, I dare say, like, grander aspirations. So ETS has been very busy. The ETS that you and I grew up with, Educational Testing Service, has rebranded. It's just ETS now. And if you look at their tagline, they're talking more about education and talent solutions. Amit Sivak, who you just kinda name checked earlier or referred to, is definitely leading the organization in a new direction. I have heard him get on stage and talk to an audience of ETS customers and thought leaders and say, hey. Standardized testing isn't gonna cut it anymore. I mean, that's a very bold statement for him in that role of that organization to to make. I think the strategy is that skills are the future, interdisciplinary skills. If we really wanna give targeted supports and take advantage of emerging technologies to, you know, give actionable insights to young people when they're in school, to young adults as they traverse high school to college or work. The more and better information we can give them about their skill profiles, the better job they can do of self advocacy and wayfinding. And what I think we all kinda stipulate is a very complex and fast changing world. Right? The classic compact that you and I had together, which is study hard, sharpen your number two pencil, get to a good college, get a good job. Like, I mean, good luck with that. I mean, that is a that that whole, call it a treadmill, if you want to call it call it a value proposition, has been very deeply upended. In some ways, we're better. Right? I think there are there are equity, stories to tell in finding talent through new and different lenses. But that's sort of the big picture direction of ETS. They're going in a new direction. They're focusing on skills. And most specifically, in the area of k twelve schooling, they have an initiative, a partnership with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, which is led by Tim Knowles. And I know you've spoken with Tim yourself. Tim's vision for education is to upend k twelve educational architecture. He, like we believe, architecture and infrastructure drive practice. And so if you can move beyond seat time, as he has said many times more eloquently than me, the Carnegie Foundation created the Carnegie unit as we know it, and they're sorry. They're they're trying to, you know, kind of disrupt that. If we can move beyond seat time and we can widen the aperture of what counts as skill development and what we, you know, assess and credential inside of schools, we open up more pathways, for young people to be successful. So I never thought I would say this, but we have been working at MTC now for seven plus years, kind of at a grassroots level, trying to be like, seat time. Move beyond it. Right? Like, hey. Think expand your aperture. Think about skills. So suddenly, you have those two organizations be like, no. This is right. This is where we should be going. That was a huge kind of, I guess, wind in our sails, and it also let us you know, it was pretty short discussion when we realized just how aligned the senior leaders were of those organizations and our admittedly much smaller team and our senior leaders and board for what we were hoping the change we wanted to see in the world. So quick question, and then I have a longer one. But the quick one first is when you say the word skills, so many ways to think about what that word means. Right? Some people it's critical thinking, problem solving. Some people think, you know, it's it's the ability to do a task in a certain domain, you know, and maybe think, you know, show critical thing. Like, lots of different ways to show that. Sometimes it's just applied knowledge. How are you all like, what does that word mean in MTC land? Yeah. We are borrowing very explicitly and with a lot of gratitude, the phrase durable skills from our friends at America Succeeds. Okay. And so for the listeners out there, please check out America Succeeds Google Durable Skills. What you'll see is a wonderful research project where they did a meta analysis and, like, a data extraction of eighty million different job postings online. And what you see when you look at those is that there's a tremendous consensus about what employers are looking for. Technical jobs require certain technical skills. And I don't mean, like, STEM jobs, coding jobs, although those certainly do. Right? If you want a job in a bakery, there are technical skills you need to have, like, you know, understanding how dough's proof and how to laminate dough's, like, you wanna make croissants and things like that. Mhmm. But there's also soft skills or which they have rebranded as durable skills. You have to be able to communicate and partner well and, you know, you know, make this problem solve on the fly. So whether you're in the bakery or whether you're working at Facebook, those durable skills are, you know, transferable across those in ways the technical skills are not. And more importantly, employers are very comfortable, we think, skilling up entry level hires and technical skills that are specific to their tasks. Right? I see. So if they have the durable skills, they'll take the chance on them on the Tire bar for their expectation for what we, as education leaders, give them as product. And so in terms of there being a mismatch between what k twelve is doing and what employers might want, we think it's the the opportunity to add more value is in the explicit creation of durable skills. And I and I I hit that word really hard. Right? Because I am a former English teacher. That was my first job out of college. I was a liberal arts major. I majored in English. I'm a huge believer in a liberal arts education. I know my communication and critical thinking and, I guess, in some ways, my negotiation skills were built around the seminar table. I had no doubt about that. The difference is those were implicit. Right? The the compact was go to a school of, you know, certain profile, major in certain subjects, and we can trust as an employer that you'll have that toolkit. It'll just kinda happen. Like, it'll it'll it'll the secret sauce will just kinda out itself. We're actually saying no. These are explicit skills. You can see clear progressions. The progressions are backed by learning science. Teams with the capacity of, say, ETS or Carnegie can surface those very explicitly. And when they do that, it's to the whole betterment of the sector for us to be able to use those as yardsticks as we coach and mentor young people through the skill development. So just as an aside, you know, as you know, I I've spent now the past seven years talking to a lot of very skeptical admissions offices. Right? I'm saying, hey. We wanna give you something you've never seen before, but it's gonna do a better job. Trust us. One of the best conversations I have is with the admissions team at West Point. Because I showed up there and they're like, okay. Look. We've read your website. We get it. But, honestly, we're kinda into this ranking and sorting thing. Like, we we think that's a feature. And what I said, yes. And we probably also agree that leadership can be taught. Like, it's not just, like, things some people have, some people don't. You can it's a process. And they're kinda like, okay. We we we found common ground on that one. So if they believe that leadership can be taught explicitly, that there's ways to do it developmentally, at scale, That's sort of the big idea that we're trying to lean into with durable skills and scales for the future at MTC. Stay stay with me on this because I I think we'll lead into why the ETS partnership probably makes triple sense. But I guess the push I wanna have is durable skills, like, critical thinking, does it really or problem solving, does it really transfer that much from domain to domain? Because in a bakery, it looks very different from a coding job, looks very different from me behind my desk podcasting. Like, how do you think about or or is it no. We've codified it. And therefore, like, whatever domain you're working in, yes, you gotta build up the knowledge base. But as you progress beyond novice, we expect to see this sort of set of behaviors. I guess I so the the easy thing, because it's the right thing, is to just agree with you and say it's more of a matrix than a ladder. Okay. Right? Like, so yeah. There's not a unified model of critical thinking that is domain independent. Okay. But there but there are versions of that ladder that are optimized for critical thinking, say, in the humanities or critical thinking in the STEM fields. And Okay. I don't know how fine grained we can or even should be as we parse those, and I use the we there very loosely. Like, I am not a psychometrician who's gonna be making that deliverable for the sector. I I'm very lucky that ETS employs, I think, seventy five percent of the psychometricians in America. So the we've got the the the capacity to do that now. Smarter people than me will be figuring that out. And and also working across the sector, you know, bringing in domain experts, you know, so we can have their voices as we build out the skill progressions. No. That makes sense. I mean, I know at Minerva University, the way and I'm on the board there. The way that they have thought about it is what you just said, which is we create a clear framework for these different they have different names for them, but these different habits or skills. And then whatever you're learning, like, we expect to see the progression over time that you've mastered, and so it becomes a habit that does transfer to your point as I move domain to domain. I guess the question there or the perhaps may maybe I'm jumping to something, but it seems like ETS, the partnership, rather than just resources, the other thing now it does for you is we can actually create validated measures to say, like, yeah, what you just represented in the MTC transcript, that artifact of work, like, this is how we, assess it, validate it, and so that's sort of scalable, if you will, across the platform. Maybe there's even a third party way to do that that gets out of the, oh, my teacher liked me and therefore said this project was good. That's exactly right. I mean, I think of the I think of, like, the our moonshot is if you think about why APs have gotten such traction, right, and why they're it's that there there is value in having a a national verified psychometrically sort of stamped, you know, exam, that certifies on a scale of one through five that, you know, student is at this level of capacity in area x. The the huge value in that as, like, as a premise. Mhmm. The downsides are one time a year, very high stakes, you know, very significant upstream effects on what the curriculum is. And what if you didn't have to compromise? What if you could have a student doing an independent study, a portfolio defense, capstone project, completely of their own choosing? All the right adjectives you would want, self directed, personalized feedback, you know, from, you know, defending into experts in the community. But you could take the deliverables that came from that and run them through we'll call it an engine. Right? Mhmm. And get valid feedback about their communication skills or evidence of their critical thinking. And you could do it, in theory, ad infinitum. You could run it through that engine as many times as you want. You could take a single high stakes exercise into a formative exercise, and you could take one of the biggest gating factors to the adoption of these exciting models, which is teacher workload. Right. And you could turn some of these technologies into copilots. We're not taking humans out of the loop. Like, education is a relation relational human centered exercise. But if you could have that kinda heads up display, right, those metrics on the side that assisted educators, took a little bit of the burden off them, but also improved the validity and accuracy of the feedback they were giving to the students. I just think it could be transformational for the adoption of these practices in actual classrooms. And, yes, they result in credential, whether it's a mastery transcript or a learning record. The biggest area of pushback we still get with just justification is, well, these are really just collections of local assertions by the schools, which, by the way, is what grades are. So, you know, the the current state is that we're that we're kind of solving against is grades. But, yes, there the a competency based transcript currently generated by MTC school is ultimately what the school says so. You know, and we work very closely to make sure their competency models are as, you know, as strong as they can be. We have to advocate implicitly and explicitly, you know, on behalf of those models with higher eds, we have a, we have skin in the game and making sure they're high quality, but that's not the same thing at all as all as being able to say, oh, because we've run this portfolio of work through a process, we can now certify or stamp or put a badge on those things. I hesitate to use the word badge. Let's let's scratch that. But you can certify or stamp those to say, no. This you can take this to the bank. This this means something. Third party. Very cool. I I have to ask, is AI a central component of being able to build that scaled infrastructure in some way? I mean, as I said, it's not even a yes or no question. It's sort of in what ways. Right? The areas I'm most excited about are thinking about certain kind like, if you think about what a mastery transcript is today, you pull it apart from a technology perspective. What it really is is an assemblage, a collection of varied artifacts, student, you know, work files, metatagged with a lot of data about skill and skill development and scales and other things by humans. That is a really interesting kinda corpus of data and text to put into a large language model. Like, I'm really excited to see what happens when we have a lot of these flowing into trained models and to see what we learn by doing that. The other thing too is that there are problems that we face now as a consortium. Right? So, you know, last count, we had about four hundred schools and districts that were working within the MTC environment. Right? That probably means we got about four hundred bespoke competency models that are in play. Each of them is kind of built with good intentions and backwards design and community buy in, but that's a lot of different ways of defining communication. Mhmm. So there's two ways you solve for that problem. One is by fiat. Somebody comes in top down and says, no. This is how we do it, which is terrible for change management and terrible from a product and customer perspective. The other is you say, hey. We've looked at all of these in a very analytical, thoughtful way. We've run them through different large language assist models. And what we can tell you is that in all these different models, it looks like there's actually two meaningful variants. If you have communication, you're probably doing it either this way or that way. And we'd encourage you to maybe, like, choose one of those and try and move towards that. That kind of, like, AI assisted harmonization, I think, is gonna solve a lot of our problems in the coming years. Very cool. Very cool. I as as you were saying that, I was laughing to myself at your earlier assertion again, which is like, hey. Grades in English, suffer from a lot of the same problems, but we sort of accept it because we've accepted the Carnegie Union. We think we have an understanding of what goes on in an English class even though I would argue the signal of grades has been increasingly breaking down, over the last, several years in particular. Always flawed in my mind, but really breaking down in the last few years. COVID pressure tested our kinda national and local assessment practices and, not surprisingly, found them wanting. And a lot of them wanted as you've as you've documented probably better than better than anybody. No. But, I mean, you know, for those of, you know, listeners out there who are less familiar with mastery learning, I could see some of them saying, well, isn't this kind of just standards based grading? Mhmm. And it's the the answer to that is not a no. It's a yes and. Like Mhmm. Standards based grading is awesome. It's criterion referenced. It's very objective. You can look at you have scales. The difference is you can still do standards based grading and not tinker all that much with the fundamental architecture of school. Right? You can still have everything in, like, seat time. You can still have everything based in, like, academic subjects. Not a lot of not a lot of, you know, moving the needle on sort of what school feels like and is a lived experience for kids. Still better than status quo grading, and that's my point on that. But we think it that's a good start. And what we wanna do is take the same essential principles, really clear criteria and reference scales, but expand them so we can use them to measure new and hopefully more relevant things. And create the room for that jagged asset based. Okay. So last question then for me is you all are a separate nonprofit still. Legally, that's how it works, but there's obviously a great deal of integration. What what does this look like down the road as you, you know, play the story forward with ETS and MTC, and the work together? And, you know, what what's what's the hope for what this looks like in five years? Well, I think the you you can almost work backwards. And and, you know, when we talk about this now as a team, we sort of have two big goals. One is to use sort of, all the amazing support and the brand equity and the relationships with, of our new parent, to grow the footprint of what we're doing. Like, we, more or less, without spending any resources on sales and marketing, just kinda grassroots, have managed to build really good sustaining relationships with, like, these four hundred schools and districts. There's no reason we can't double that in the coming year, and who knows? Be it be I I would love us to be and say, be available to half of school districts, right, as MTC by twenty thirty. Wow. I mean, I think and we're we're now in in an organization where, like, you talk about having a couple hundred thousand kids, and they're like, yeah. It's a good start. So so I think that's that's one thing. The other is is anything you know, when we think about product and we think about innovation, it's just contributing as much as possible to the success and product development of the Skills for the Future initiative. I wanna be very clear. Skills for the Future is it is owned by Carnegie and ETS. Those are the organizations that that's their jam. But anything we are bringing to the table that can be used or leveraged, you know, in terms of thinking about how you build skills based credentials, skills passport, or skills transcripts as Amit sometimes likes to refer to them. And also the fact that we do have, you know, as we work with these five states, the first skills for the future that Carnegie and ETS have recruited as codesign partners, we also can use the portfolio of MTC schools, to get feedback and, you know, kind of testing, new innovations and assessment and insights. So all that I think fits together from a product perspective and a growth perspective. So Very cool. Mike, thanks so much for the work. Thanks so much for joining me and walking us through where you've been and where you are now and where you're going. Really appreciate it. Thank you for thanks again for the invite. Love the conversation. No. I'm I've been thrilled to watch from afar and sometimes close, and it's great to see. And for all you tuning in, we'll be back with more stories like this next time on the future of education.