Beyond the High School Diploma
Rethinking Academic Reputation in the Digital Age
This Post is an Addendum to the December 5th, 2020 Post: From Standardized Tests to Student-Created Media. Read that first.
I have argued that the New York State high school diploma, as a fair and responsive measure of meaningful learning is of little use. There are three hidden implications of this thesis that warrant some unpacking.
TL:DR: Credits remain meaningful at individual high schools with strong reputations. Many high schools do an excellent job of ensuring value in their credit awards. It follows that academic reputation is a key derivative market of academic capital, measured in endorsements from top universities and trusted third parties such as The College Board or Harvard University.
Educators do their jobs individually, despite the industrial system.
I define an educator as anyone who works in a school building and has contact with students so as to impact the quality of their work products.
If the institution of the state-awarded high school credit is broken, then each individual high school principal is responsible for establishing their school’s reputation. Many schools maintain their reputation thanks to guidance staff and admissions policies designed to attract the most academic families by promising admission to the most elite universities. These schools establish the value of their transcript by swimming upstream of the industrial currents which incentivize lowering the bar year after year for political purposes.
//Long, Necessary Sidebar: The quality of a high school today is most accurately a function of the students that arrive at their door on day one. How we measure schools today only measures their admissions policies. Consider how schools are incentivized to forget kids who are pushed off the register to focus on those who have bought into the standardized industrial model of bubble sheet academics.
Image from Wikipedia
By contrast, schools in high poverty communities are expected to work through Maslaw’s Hierarchy of Needs before even addressing one’s desire to succeed (the top of that pyramid).
My career has been at NYC’s transfer schools where we get kids three years after they should have started high school, their skills are at a third grade level, and we have eighteen months to help them cross the finish line, often with no IEP in place. Our work is best evaluated based on growth prior to academic achievement.
Videos and podcasts can journal a student journey far before they are literate, even. Hand a kid a seat as the host of a podcast, help them prepare a bit, and you will see magic. A student coping with lack of basic needs can find forms of support by broadcasting to an audience. Doing self-reflective work can further support planning for many of the earlier human needs in the pyramid. The odd implication is that work on hs.credit which is not approved for a credit could grow into an ecosystem of pre-academic growth. [End Long Sidebar]
Long, necessary sidebar aside, my point here was simply that most educators from the lunch lady or safety agent to the principal are doing great work with individual students despite the industrial system. Can you imagine their impact if the system they worked for were humanized with a focus on quality project-based learning products?
2. Academic reputation is fundamental to the shift away from standardization and toward normalization. The measure of reputation, however, is not a measure of learning. More specifically, academic reputation is a derivative of the measure of learning, aka the accumulation of academic capital. Derivative markets are wily beasts, abounding in unintended consequences which can be both very good and very bad.
The shift at hand, let us not forget, is toward digital and away from industrial. It is the complexity of a large-scale system of reputation that can generate useful crowd insights in the way a fair and free marketplace is designed to do for prices. And of course, there has never been a free and fair marketplace, in practice. But free-er and fair-er, one hopes with the introduction on anti-biased incentives.
The hs.credit platform is driven by the quality of student work as measured by a committee of three highly paid credit experts. The credit experts are paid $180/hr in funds donated, tax-free, to the platform. This ensures that academic data not be confused for social capital or even academic reputation! While derivative markets are problematic, we cannot stop them from naturally forming lest we deny the fact that the reputation of Harvard has value in defining meaningful learning, as does that of The College Board.
Now add to these players some competition from the Fourth Estate. Media outlets like NPR and PBS or a top podcast who know how to monetize a stream of high quality, hyper local youth news stories, discover a free source of high quality local coverage. The result is a flood of third-party brands who compete to publish the best curricula, generating their stream of quality youth content out of high schools across the nation.
It is important to recognize that advertising on these media outlets, if they have any, are not selling the students’ attention. Instead, they are selling the attention of their listeners/viewers—the students’ potential audience. That protects student academic learning from the pressures of popularity and reputation, “likes,” and so on. Academic media is not the same as social media. It is much more similar to professional hyper-local journalism. The curricula are the source of evaluation and the stream of student work speaks for itself, defining the endorsements acquired by a particular credit.
//Another Sidebar: Standardized testing purports to measure the student with a score. By contrast, normalized evaluation only evaluates the quality of discreet monthly work products, not the student themselves. It’s a subtle but important shift from “I got a 75 in U.S. History last term” to “The 10-minute video I uploaded last month earned a credit.” Exams like the SAT are taken on one afternoon—the culmination of twelve years of study! That’s utter madness. Monthly uploads of 10-minute, revised video or audio allow students to invest sweat equity to define the reputation of a particular credit. [End Another Sidebar]
3. Today there is a breakdown in the availability of high quality and hyper-local media. The key to establishing competition among curriculum authors is to generate the best student coverage of local issues. The time and energy of our 11th and 12th grade youth serve to improve local media markets and the students benefit from an authentic audience. On top of these synergies, we have a near vacuum in local coverage.
Final Sidebar: hs.credit is currently seeking high profile board members to launch a 501(c)3 corporation focused on this model of academic capital as blocks of approved project-based media segments. This is an open source, nonprofit, anti-biased, academically-focused, stream of project based high school media. Interested parties, please email: info@hs.credit. [End Final Sidebar]
