For more than a century, the American high school has been shaped by the Carnegie unit. Well, Tim Knowles, the 10th president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, is intent on dethroning the measure of learning his organization made ubiquitous. Last April, Carnegie and the Educational Testing Service announced an effort to replace the Carnegie unit with a “new currency of education” that would substitute demonstrated “skills and accomplishments” for hours of study. Can they really do this? What would it mean in practice? Jal Mehta and I discussed this last fall in “Straight Talk,” but, now that the initiative’s a year old, I thought it worth checking in with Knowles himself. Before taking over Carnegie, Knowles’ roles included founding the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute, serving as deputy superintendent in Boston and as founding director of Teach For America in New York, and teaching African history in Botswana. Here’s Part 1 of our conversation, the second of which is scheduled to publish on Thursday.
—Rick
