In history, we see evidence of Competency Based Assessment in apprenticeships. Over the course of years, apprentices studied and learned under a master craftsman until they were ready to go out on their own. Their learning was deep and based on the mastery of smaller skills that together allowed a blacksmith to, well, be a blacksmith.
The assessment came in the form of teacher observation, student's self reflection and of course the products produced along the way. The master blacksmith was constantly assessing, the student constantly self-assessing.
Of course it wasn't called competency based education, nevertheless, that's what it was. Other modern terms that mean the same thing: Proficiency Based Learning, Mastery Based, Standards Based and Performance Based. Students develop a smaller set of skills that when used together are able to create complex products, processes and solutions.
Many learning institutions do this without calling it anything specific at all. It's just good teaching and learning. Which is why it's important to interrogate the attacks on competency based assessment by some people in some school districts. For most of human history, before modern bubble tests, the industrial revolution and the mass production of graduates with caps and gowns, society advanced under competency based learning and assessment. We cannot outright ignore this truth.
The three Rs
A lot of folks who are rejecting competency based education want us to return to a simpler time when we just focused on the three Rs, reading, writing and (a)rithmatic. That's it. Can students read? Can they write? Can they do basic math?
A side note on writing. This year's new law requiring cursive writing is most absurd. We reduced writing to calligraphy with some lawmakers and policymakers relying on nostalgia and bad logic to make their case. My favorite terrible argument is that the next generation won't be able to read founding documents like the constitution. Well, the early colonists didn't either. The constitution was printed and mass produced on the printing press that used print, not cursive.
Another reason often touted is that cursive is good for neural networks and folks with dyslexia. And while that's true, all handwriting is good for neural networks and not all kids have dyslexia. I also wonder what cursive style are we teaching. The Palmer Method? D'Nealian? Or are we going back to 1776, when English Round Handed Script was all the rage?
And this side note, which has quickly turned into a rabbit hole helps make a point about the value of competency based education.
We want kids to know how to write, but to what end? If we focus on the physical mechanics of writing, we're limiting students, and we're distracting from what writing actually is, the ability to communicate information, story and ideas.
The same goes for reading and math skills. We want kids to read but why? The ability to read and understand words, sentences and paragraphs is meaningless if folks can't make sense of it in a bigger context and think critically about what they're reading.
We want kids to be able to know basic math skills, but to what end? To build, create, deconstruct, explain. Competency Based Assessment which puts discrete skills under larger umbrellas helps us connect learning across content areas and helps define a meaningful why.
Labeling "competency based education" as some "liberal" code word that signals progressive change is a bad move for all kids. Traditional education, before the standardized test movement, was competency based and we should be celebrating and lifting up this meaningful and evidence based way of teaching and learning.