Giving Compass' Take: 

• Getting Smart explores the connections Competency-Based Education has to Career and Technical Education, using the Putnam County School System in Tennessee as a success story.

• Can integrating these two education disciplines result in better workforce preparation? Should funders pay attention to overlooked programs that apply the principles described in this piece?

• Here's how we can scale Competency-Based Education with equity in mind. 

Competency-Based Education — a flexible approach that allows students to pursue personalized learning pathways and demonstrate mastery in authentic contexts — has been fundamental to Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs for years, but it is still a relatively new and challenging practice in the context of general education that has yet to take hold in any large-scale way. Competency-Based Education (CBE) can sometimes also meet resistance from those who prefer to see traditional measures of progress such as grades and test score, and district and state accountability systems as well as college entrance requirements often need to be updated to allow for this model of learning and assessment to thrive.

Despite these challenges, many in the field view it as the best way to move toward a system that better prepares all students for the future of work, and the Putnam County School System in Tennessee has set out to discover how Competency-Based Education can benefit students in the context of our district’s new personalized learning program, currently in its second year of district-wide implementation.

Read the full article about how career and technical education can inform competency-based learning by Sam Brooks and Jeffrey Slagle at Getting Smart.