Academic Credits as Digital Gates
The idea of systems and structures that are native to digital markets can be contrasted with the more familiar industrial-native analogues. Our school system is native to industrial culture, as are corporations, for example, as well as many government institutions. They depend on standardization, coercion, competition, and top-down control. The digital native equivalents are built on crowdsourcing, strength-based incentives, cooperation, and sharing. While The Industrial Age used Mother Nature (steel, oil) to make plastics and other consumer products, in The Digital Age, human attention is the commodity being repackaged and sold for profit.
So what does this mean, exactly? Digital native academics involve practices like mindfulness to teach students to dig deep into this moment of opportunity, helping them produce meaningful digital content. By contrasts, industrial education asks students to be passive consumers of textbook content. The screenification of everything is NOT what digital native academics will look like. More Zoom meetings are not the answer. The answer looks like high school students attending protests or otherwise collecting primary sources as part of their credit-earning journey in a humanities block. They then do research and edit their content with the support of a teacher who helps craft their questions before a showcase event or supports the research and writing required to produce high quality academic content to be featured online.
Pouring our attention into a screen for others to monetize is a hallmark of an industrial mindset as captured by digital platforms. Only industrial natives who do not understand this dynamic voluntarily give their human resource to an app like Facebook without demanding anything in return. Understanding these dynamics is critical for our young adults if we hope to stop the concentration of capital in the hands of fewer and fewer people who manipulate the attention of their users.
In digital native academic settings students will interact with the world around them, using their smartphones to record primary sources rather than consuming academic content controlled by the major publishers and testing conglomerates. Students learn to invest their attention with intention, building work ethic, frustration tolerance, and maker skills, not to mention gaining an experience of how digital economics allow us to convert sweat equity (focused attention) into an investment in new forms of capital.
All of this is well and good on a conceptual level, but what will it look like in practice?
It looks like an app on mobile phones with some basic functions. The most important tool on this app for us industrial natives to comprehend is the gate.
When I received my degree in physics from Brandeis University I mostly studied electronics. The invention that launched the digital revolution was the transistor. Also commonly referred to as a gate. Electrical signals are noisy and unstable as electro-magnetic interference is everywhere and every wire acts like an antenna picking up these forms of energy, causing “noise.” The transistor acts like a gate to discern good signal from bad: anything below 5 Volts is interpreted as a value of “0” and anything above 5 Volts causes the transistor gate to open, causing an electrical push which can be interpreted as a “1.” The resulting 0’s and 1’s we built a new digital economy. And the same is about to happen in education with the creation of a library of academic gates, each representing a single high school credit.
The academic gate is similar the one made of silicone: it converts the “noise” and variation in student work into 0-credits (below the gate) and 1-credit (above the gate). That’s it. No more A, B, C, D, F, no more 87.5%; just 0 or 1 credit value for each uploaded student video or podcast. (The #AcademicCapital system has specific incentives for students to go above and beyond the protocol, but such detail is beyond the scope of this article).
In essence, a gate is just a place where students can upload their content in exchange for a high school credit on their transcript. Each credit can be clicked or a QR code scanned to view the content that was submitted. Instead of paying The College Board to grade their AP test, that fee is paid to upload work to a gate. The fee pays gatekeepers to evaluate the work and choose if it earned a credit or not.
This system of gates replaces the industrial concept of standards. Standards were top-down and almost never changed. Gates can be created by anyone and organizations like The College Board can select which gates they will approve for AP Credit, for example. That means that an author like Resmaa Menakem can establish a high school credit using the coursework he already has. Such a credit can become the most popular high school credit for students to earn and can quickly “go viral” among high school students. A year later circumstances change and perhaps a credit focused on environmental justice authored by Greta Thunburg catches on as the “must have” high school credit of that year, mobilizing thousands of students to engage their local communities on a particular subject.
Gates allow high school credits to remain current and relevant while providing national organizations that certify credits the ability to approve gates for college credit, when appropriate. The academic value of a particular credit can be evaluated since each credit is linked to the student work product that earned it. Similarly, those seeking to evaluate the work of a particular gatekeeper community can review student work that was not approved for credit alongside the work that cleared the gate for credit. A gate may have an “AP credit” accreditation from The College Board, or may be a “Harvard” stamp of approval for gatekeepers that use their brand of critical thinking.
Students will choose which gates based on their interest and based on where such a credit is honored. This also allows for some very localized credits that have particular value to a local community. As a father, I could even set up a gate for my daughters to earn their allowance. Of course such a gate would not show up in search results of most students unless they are my daughter. A gate, like a transistor, is a simple structure for establishing high fidelity data points based on a published protocol. That’s it.
Unbundling high schools may be as easy as starting with unbundling the high school transcript. This makes me think of what a facebook was before Facebook. It was an awkward publication of faces published for incoming freshmen by universities. Little did anyone expect that to evolve into the largest economic powerhouse of our time when launched as a digital platform. Similarly, the wonky and administrative act of awarding a credit, once represented as a digital platform, can rearrange incentives to a remarkable degree.
Gate Protocols and Incentives
Each gate will provide an online repository of tutorials, templates, activities, and evaluation criteria (the protocol) to make expectations clear and to guide students through the process of creating the type of content accepted by that gate. Gatekeepers who evaluate work for a podcast-based gate are experts in evaluating academic podcasts, specifically, as one example.
Teachers in classroom across the country who allow their students to select gates benefit in two immediate ways:
They no longer have to write unit plans and lesson plans — the gate protocol provides the student-facing resources along with a library of previously approved and denied work for students to browse as exemplars.
If they participate, their students get support from online media coaches allowing academic teachers to focus on research, writing, and other content-specific skills not microphone levels or green screen editing tricks.
If a teacher supports students to upload work to a particular gate, and each time they approve a students’ work the gatekeepers also approve that work for credit (i.e. the teacher’s credit approval rate for that gate protocol) the teacher can threshold that gate to become a gatekeeper themselves, earning money from the gate fees to evaluate incoming work.
This aligns with their values as a teacher — no teacher signed up for the job to teach students how to survive standardized testing. Teachers thrive off of making a difference in the lives of their students.
While classroom teachers no longer have to prepare lessons and units, they become more critical than ever in a digital native academic setting. Students need someone to help them through the frustration of multiple revisions, for example. Instead of using our teachers to teach to a test which they know is not authentic critical thinking, they focus their efforts as coaches on a human level, teaching mindfulness and attention-related skills so that their students can push past failure to create high quality content. Such human-to-human crafting of narrative is a hallmark of digital native education and no online learning system can offer such authentic human learning experiences.
Note that this is not a revolution, but an evolution as storytelling and hard work were central to human development until the industrial age which disfavored diversity and invented the jobs loop where people were used like robots to make money so that they buy stuff so that others can make money to buy stuff. Separating the ancient concept of “doing work” from the modern concept of “having a job” is a key contribution of my book. I’m glad to share a free PDF of the entire book for anyone that subscribes to my mailing list here.
Money is not the only form of incentive in a digital world. Other forms of capital can come into play. For example, public television and public radio already produce resources for teachers to use their content in classrooms. If these local stations create their own gates, they receive a library of student content which they can then use in their broadcasts. If a producer is doing a podcast about the Black Lives Matter protests in their city, they can establish a gate with clear parameters for fact-checking, length and format as well as a deadline to upload work to that gate and, voila, at the specified date they can browse the approved credits to select among pre-vetted youth content to include in their broadcast. Students can attend protests while earning high school credit (assuming they spend some time editing and fact-checking, researching, etc.). The hs.credit gate offers local media outlets a low cost and hyper-local way for stations to cover stories in their geographic region by leveraging the existing network of high schools. These are but a few of the incentives driving the #AcademicCapital system.
Unbundling the High School Credit
Certification of learning in American high schools has come to rely almost exclusively on state-level political institutions serving as trusted certifiers of academic credits. While the system has worked well enough for industrial-era standardization of learning, it increasingly suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model (i.e. trusting a government credit to represent meaningful learning). The cost of centralized academic credit systems is that each credit devolves into test results or seat time (Carnegie Units), or GPA, all flimsy proxies for meaningful learning.
This legacy industrial system is incentivized to continually lower expectations as each new administration wants to show gains in educational outcomes and lowering the standards is an easy way to achieve this. Over time this has rendered public high school credits meaningless.
In response, instead of separating the authority to award credits from the politicians who seek to devalue those credits, a coverup is implemented by blaming teachers for the lowering of expectations. Administrators are trained to be wary of their teachers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need to cover the fact that they must award meaningless credits in the first place. School administrators get tied down in countless unfunded mandates which act as bandages when lawsuits expose the systemic malpractice.
A multipolar trap kicks in where each teacher is pressured to approve credits for students who did not do the requisite work. Those principals who try to maintain high standards lose their jobs because their data lags and when students are held-back they must repeat credits which doubles the cost of their education. Lawyers step in when a school has such lagging credit approval rates; they tell principals how they must educate (to a lowest common denominator), demanding homogeneity and compliance above high standards and critical thinking. This educational fraud is accepted as inevitable as union, legal, district, or government representatives fail to represent students’ educational interests, favoring adult security amid a failing system.
The solution is a purely peer-to-peer version of academic transcripts which allow credits to be certified between a gatekeeper and a class of students without going through a central school district. By taking the power to award credits away from the politicians and locating that authority in decentralized communities of educators (gatekeepers) we shift the focus from political expediency to a laser-focus on the quality of student work. An important byproduct is that we no longer evaluate students the way the tests do: “I got a 1592 on the SAT” or “I’m a B student.” These comments show how student refer to alphanumeric scores as if they are representations of themselves. In a digital context, we only evaluate individual pieces of student work, we don’t pretend to evaluate the human being that created them: “that work did not earn a credit, I need to revise it more to fulfill on the potential credit award.”
The Problem With Education Reform
Public secondary schools were designed to function as factories measuring output with standardized scores for cohorts of students moving through the assembly line according to daily bell schedules and annualized Carnegie Units. The massive investment in charter schools and other education reform efforts (Gates Foundation) have only produced more efficient factories because the industrial model itself remains unchallenged.
If education evolves to exercise students’ use of attention, the resulting #AcademicCapital is as foundational a data point to digital prosperity as stock prices were in the Industrial Era. I dive deep into this in the first part of my book.
The importance of academic capital extends well past economics: human attention is central to choice and freedom from manipulation (sovereignty) and thus is foundational to individual freedom not to mention self-expression and psychological well being. Digitally relevant secondary schools have a massive opportunity to improve our world, by developing critical thinking and mindfulness skills in each new class of graduates.
There is no way for a standardized exam to represent academic capital as described above. And yet, federally subsidized and locally funded public schooling requires concise data to evaluate school quality. Those writing the checks would be irresponsible with tax dollars if they didn’t demand accountability. A new, updated unit of academic value is needed, aligned to the inherent value of human attention.
In secondary schools today, educational capital is represented using the academic transcript. By developing #AcademicCapital, we align the incentives that drive public schools with the skills that can help us leverage our birthright: the value of our attention to become prosperous within quickly expanding digital markets. Instead of timed tests, students learn to navigate production deadlines and all that it takes to publish quality academic content.
Adapted from Listervelt Middleton’s poem On the Origin of Things, as used by Harambee Rites of Passage, Inc. / Kamau Tehuti Ptah and by First World Alliance / The First World Lecture Series
How do we Make this Happen?
The fact that I turned around a failing school and have produced breakthrough student outcomes consistently since 2003 in the poorest congressional districts does not seem to give me the credibility necessary to build the hs.credit platform. This is an ambitious effort and will require funding. Think of the early days of Uber. How did they get their first drivers to sing up? How did they convince the first riders to get into a stranger’s care? The answer is that they had a budget for PR and advertising which were necessary to educate users about the opportunity of downloading their app.
The technology to implement this platform is not complicated: an upload button for students to submit work to a gate; a way for a gate to be set up with educational resources and evaluation criteria. A gate browser for students. These are rather trivial software tasks and we should do everything in our power to have them up and running by September so that we can help out schools facing social distancing and diminished budgets.
I do admit that there is a much more complicated system that requires some R&D before it will launch. This would be a strong anti-bias infrastructure to ensure that all the student content produced does not come from rich white boys. Such a system would use fake internet money to reward students who come together to ensure that all communities voices are heard. Again, this is beyond the scope of this article but important to point out that an anti-fragile economy requires an anti-biased system of education.
Here is what I can imagine would help build awareness and open more eyes as to the opportunity before us:
A celebrity or thought leader gets behind this project.
The College Board or CUNY or SUNY or others who benefit from a gold standard high school credit choose to upgrade for a digital age and get behind this.
Some organizations that want to support anti-bias, solutions-oriented initiatives see that #AcademicCapital would give all students between the ages of 14 and 25 access to a quality unit of credit. After trust in our police, those who follow the prison pipeline will find education next in line. The violence we do in our public schools is unrcontionable. Who really believes that the ‘safety agents’ in our schools are not there to police our young people? Imagine a student who wakes up at 16 and decides to get serious. Today they would be in the wrong high school at that point, having gone to the wrong elementary school, to have access to quality college credits. #AcademicCapital is available for any student to earn at any time, leveling the playing field a little bit.
NOT HAPPENING: I suddenly gain lots of followers on Twitter. I thought I might be able to build my user following to be an influencer on social media, but I’m a high school principal and my skillset does not align with becoming a social media superstar. Also, I’m a white male.
NOT LIKELY (YET): People suddenly donate some bitcoin, funding this work in part or whole.
However you choose to do so (clapping for this article, sharing it), please help give these ideas credibility which will make it easier for someone with a substantial resources (financial, social, human) to consider getting involved.
Let’s disrupt our high schools the way Uber disrupted our taxi industry. Today, more than ever, it is important that we do this.
Thank you for reading,
Principal Z
