Hopes and Dreams Behind ETS's Acquisition of Mastery Transcript Consortium

Welcome to the Future of Education. And now here's your host, Michael Horne.

Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horne. And you are joining the show where we are dedicated to building a world where all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And to help us think through that today, I'm really excited. It's my longtime friend Mike Flanagan. He's the town over for me here in Massachusetts. But we've known each other since I was on the board of the national association of Independent Schools, and he was running one of the very cool business lines for nas, as well as, frankly, like, all things technology for the organization. But then he became the CEO of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, which was acquired recently by ets. Just that organization focused on testing across the country and internationally as well. And we're going to talk about all of that today. Mike. So good, good to see you. We're not in person, but it's, it's great to be with you on camera.

I am so excited. Yeah, neighbors first. But like, this is what a great opportunity. I really, really appreciate the invite.

Yeah, I should have added you're a CrossFit. CrossFit certified coach as well. So, you know, we've got like, I'm not that, but, you know, we, we have certain other things in common as well. So.

Yeah, I always, I have to put that in asterisk on that. I was former, former coach. I unfortunately, my certification lapsed when my job changed and I found wound up spending 90% of my time. You know, CrossFit is a great way to be healthy and stay in shape. But if you want to get injured, a really good thing to do is do CrossFit once a month.

Fair enough. Fair enough. Don't do that. Get some regular rhythm, but hopefully not afflicting you. But it's good to see you. Let's dive in. You and I have had a long set of conversations around what the Mastery Transcript Consortium pre ETS acquisition is. We might call it mtc. Who knows that's the acronym. But let's just talk about what Mastery Transcript Consortium was at the outset, through its history, before the acquisition itself.

Yeah, I mean, I will say, just a preview, it's what and still is, you know, the, the changes as a result of our new home with ets, which we'll talk about in a bit, are much more about expansion and kind of continuation of what we're doing versus, like a radical kind of rethinking of it. But to go back to the start, you Know, the way we talk about MTC to educators out there is to start with a pretty simple premise, which is that we think there are better ways of doing school right. That the schooling models we have today for a lot of kids, they don't feel very relevant, they don't feel very useful, they don't feel very engaging. And yet at the same time, there's all these counter examples of amazing schools. You talk to them all the time, right? School leaders who are innovators, they're doing project based learning, they're doing interdisciplinary work, they're getting kids out of classrooms into the world of work, they're putting kids in teams and solving real world problems. And they're really focused on skill building. And the challenge we had or the thing that kind of kept pushing us was like, these models are awesome. Why aren't they everywhere? Why doesn't every neighborhood have a school like this? And what we realized talking to a lot of the same people you talk to, school leaders and innovators, is that what we kind of have is an infrastructure problem. We basically know how to produce this amazing innovative learning. But all the systems we have to frankly keep score to credit and credential that learning are completely yoked, completely invested to old ways, credit hours, academic courses and GPAs. And so the question is like, what do you do if you're a school leader and the model you have doesn't map to any of that? And the answer to the question for us was a grassroots effort. The consortium and mtc, the Mastery Transcript Consortium. And what we've built, built with our schools is simply put, an alternative credential. It's one that's completely based on competencies and skills and also centers artifacts of student learning like actual work product, and then combines the two. So you have the best attributes of what we think is a competency based transcript and a portfolio system. And that's it. That's MTC in a nutshell. We've built this system so that kids that are doing innovative learning don't have to translate or water down that learning to have it make sense to colleges and to workforce, but they can actually have a credential and exit ticket that is fully consistent both in terms of like philosophy and design, with like all the hard work that the people that started their school are probably doing.

Very cool. And I think what I've learned and appreciated over time, as I thought about it, Mike, is, is two things. One, in by, by focusing on those folks that either have an innovative model or want to. To your point, you're creating the infrastructure for them to grow, for them to validate what they're doing, to be accepted by colleges, schools or employers or whatever else, sort of giving them a consistent infrastructure across the schools. So it's not just, oh, here's another one off here, here's another one off there. And then number two, what I think I've come to learn is you're not necessarily in the weeds of, you know, my big thing, right? Of like competency based or mastery based learning. Of like we're throwing over seat time and like you get to move at your own pace. What you are more is on the like, yes, that would be great, but like you're more on the end of that saying, okay, whatever the system is, let us represent what you have mastered in some way that I can then click in and see the artifact of learning that proves you've in fact mastered that domain, skill, knowledge, whatever it is. And so it's really the way I kind of think of it is it's like an asset based report card. At the end of the day, these are the sets of things I can do. And yeah, it may be jagged, but like that's a reflection of then who I am as an individual. And I don't have to lie about it, right? I don't have to puff up these other areas. How do you think about that exactly?

I mean jagged and asset together, right? And I think if there's one thing that we spend, I mean MTC is a nonprofit by design because if we were for profit, we wouldn't be able to invest so heavily in advocacy and outreach to higher education. And if there's one place where I think we've had to work very hard to make move the needle and change. The mindset is folder reading in universities and colleges today is largely done through a deficit mindset. It's how many APs did school X offer? Did applicant Y take all the 10 APs? And if not, why not? And it's a very weird way of thinking about the high school journey. It has this weird pernicious effect where the most high achieving kids actually have the most narrowed options in terms of what they study and how they study. Because they are basically engaged in a full time exercise, exercise of compliance. How do I put the best portrait forward? No deviations allowed, Whereas all the best real learning, 80% of the great stories you tell when you're talking to somebody who's innovated or built something new. All the Clayton Christensen work is like, oh, what comes from failure? What Comes from looking at things through totally unexpected ways of bucking systems. If you build feedback loops and measurement loops for high schoolers that say, oh, no, we want you to be creative, we want you to take risks, but also we need you to be perfect at every everything all the time. No variants allowed. They're smart kids. They know what the actual assignment is.

They know what the game is. Yeah, yeah, no, and I mean, I think, look, this should be a huge thing for colleges as well as, you know, I famously or infamously sitting there watching the closures and mergers of colleges, my argument is lean into what makes you as a college distinct. Look for the students who match that profile. And guess what? We don't all have to try to look the exact same, which is the current system. Right.

One of the things that I. When you're starting new things, it can be very hard to find signal in all the noise. I think one of the things that we've learned both in this role and in some of my previous jobs is generally, you know, you're onto something when you see that users on both ends of like a performance curve, like what you're doing, or see some value in what you're doing. Right. So for higher education, if I'm in charge, first of all, I want to stipulate that we as a society overly obsess about 20 colleges, and they're very, very low selectivity rates. And that's not where kids actually go to school. You know that better than anybody who's written books about it. But since we do, if you are in one of those 20 colleges, you still have the mandate to yield a diverse representative class. And the Supreme Court just tied your hands. So they now are saying, oh, you have new metrics, you have different ways of visualizing student capacity and capability in a systematic way. That's interesting to us. We want to have that conversation. So that's not anything MTC did. That's the kind of market shifting to kind of wind up where we already were. That's interesting. And then to your story earlier, the vast majority of enrollment managers at these institutions are actually just trying to find kids. And right now, the signals we give those same kids when they're wayfinding trying to find the right destination, they're very blunt tools. It's like, okay, you have this set of SAT or ACT scores. That means you, if you theoretically rat, you know, stack rank all these schools, how high up are you allowed to aim? But there's no lateral dispersion. There's no way of saying, but but what about fit? Like, what about what am I actually going to do if I get into one of these schools? Right.

Yep.

And that level of fit, real skill profile, that's where the jagged becomes a feature, not a bug.

Yeah. That second one, I confess that's where I'd love to spend the energy. That. Not so interested in the former. But the. But let's, let's jump in then to the ETS question because they made the choice. We're now, this is September, so I guess it was June or something like that.

Yeah, we went, we announced it in the middle of May. The sign the paperwork in early May.

Okay. So May. We're now a few months in. They acquired mtc. Why was this interesting for them? How does this fit into ETS's strategic plans? Folks who follow the industry know they have a relatively still new CEO. There have been a lot of changes at ETS as well. Wrap it in, tell us the story.

So first, what I will say is just for in case you have any professors of law out there, it's not technically an acquisition because we are a non profit and they are a nonprofit. Fair.

So it's still a control. Right.

They will know that what we did was called a sole member substitution. But let's just say in plain English, we are now a wholly owned subsidiary of ets. We are one of the ETS family of companies, so we still operate independently. MTC is still its own 501C3, but we are absolutely now in this kind of family that has much vaster resources and I dare say grander aspirations. ETS has been very busy. The ETS that you and I grew up with, Educational Testing Service, has rebranded. It's just ETS now. And if you look at their tagline, they're talking more about education and talent solutions. Amit Savak, who you just kind of name checked earlier or referred to, is definitely leading the organization in a new direction. I have heard him get on stage and talk to an audience of ETS customers and thought leaders and say, hey, standardized testing isn't going to cut it anymore. I mean, that's a very bold statement for him and that role of that organization to make. I think the strategy is that skills are the future, interdisciplinary skills. If we really want to give targeted supports and take advantage of emerging technologies to give actionable insights to young people when they're in school, to young adults as they traverse high school to college or work, the more and better information we can give them about their skill profiles, the better job they can do of Self advocacy and wayfinding in what I think we all kind of stipulate is a very complex and fast changing world. The classic compact that you and I had together, which is study hard, sharpen your number two pencil, get to a good college, get a good job, Good luck with that. I mean, that whole call it a treadmill if you want quality value proposition has been very deeply upended in some ways for better. Right. I think there are, there are equity stories to tell in finding talent through new and different lenses, but that's sort of the big picture direction of ets. They're going in a new direction. They're focusing on skills and most specifically in the area of K12 schooling, they have an initiative, a partnership with the Carnegie foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, which is led by Tim Knowles. And I know you've spoken with Tim yourself. Tim's vision for education is to upend K12 educational architecture. He like, we believe architecture and infrastructure drive practice. And so if you can move beyond seat time, as he has said many times more eloquently than me, the Carnegie foundation created the Carnegie Unit as we know it. And they're sorry, they're trying to kind of disrupt that if we can move beyond seat time and we can widen the aperture of what counts as skill development and what we, you know, assess and credential inside of schools, we open up more pathways for young people to be successful. So I never thought I would say this, but we have been working at MTC now for seven plus years, kind of at a grassroots level, trying to be like, seat time, move beyond it, right? Like, hey, expand your aperture, think about skills. So suddenly you have those two organizations be like, no, this is right, this is where we should be going. That was a huge kind of, I guess, wind in our sails. And also let us, you know, it was pretty short discussion when we realized just how aligned the senior leaders were of those organizations and our admittedly much smaller team and our senior leaders and board for what we were hoping the change we wanted to see in the world.

So quick question and then I have a longer one, but the quick one first is when you say the word skills. So many ways to think about what that word means, right? Some people it's critical thinking, problem solving. Some people think, you know, it's. It's the ability to do a task in a certain domain, you know, and maybe think, you know, show critical, think like lots of different ways to show that sometimes it's just applied knowledge. How are you all like, what does that word Mean in MTC land.

Yeah. We are borrowing very explicitly and with a lot of gratitude, the phrase durable skills from our friends at America Succeeds. Okay. And so for your listeners out there, please check out America Succeeds. Google durable skills. What you'll see is a wonderful research project where they did a meta analysis and like a data extraction of 80 million different job postings online. And what you see when you look at those is that there's a tremendous consensus about what employers are looking for. Technical jobs require certain technical skills. And I don't mean like STEM jobs, coding jobs, although those certainly do. Right. You want a job in a bakery, there are technical skills you need to have, like, you know, understanding how dose proof and how to laminate doughs if you want to make croissants and things like that. But there's also soft skills or which they have rebranded as durable skills. You have to be able to communicate and partner well and, you know, you know, make this problem solve on the fly. So whether you're in the bakery or whether you're working at Facebook, those durable skills are, you know, transferable across those in ways the technical skills are not. And more importantly, employers are very comfortable. We think skilling up entry level hires in technical skills that are specific to their tasks.

Right, I see. So if they have the durable skills, they'll take the chance on them on.

The entire bar for their expectation for what we as education leaders give them as product. And so in terms of there being a mismatch between what K12 is doing and what employers might want, we think it's the, the opportunity to add more value is in the explicit creation of durable skills. And I hit that word really hard, right, Because I am a former English teacher. That was my first job out of college. I was a liberal arts major. I majored in English. I'm a huge believer in a liberal arts education. I know my communication and critical thinking. And I guess in some ways my negotiation skills were built around the seminar table. I had no doubt about that. The difference is those were implicit. The compact was go to a school of certain profile, major in certain subjects, and we can trust as an employer that you'll have that toolkit. It'll just kind of happen. Like it'll, it'll. The secret sauce will just kind of out itself. We're actually saying no. These are explicit skills. You can see clear progressions. The progressions are backed by learning. Science Teams with the capacity of, say, ETS or Carnegie can surface those very explicitly. And when they do that, it's to the Whole betterment of the sector for us to be able to use those as yardsticks as we coach and mentor young people through the skill development. So just as an aside, you know, as you know, I spent now the past seven years talking to a lot of very skeptical admissions offices. Right. I'm saying, hey, we want to give you something you've never seen before, but it's going to do a better job, trust us. One of the best conversations I had was with the admissions team at West Point, because I showed up there and they're like, okay, look, we've read your website, we get it. But honestly, we're kind of into this ranking and sorting thing. Like, we think that's a feature. And what I said, yes. And we probably also agree that leadership can be taught. Like, it's not just like, things some people have, some people don't. You can. It's a process. And they were kind of like, okay, we found common ground on that one. So if they believe that leadership can be taught explicitly, that there's ways to do it developmentally at scale, that's sort of the big idea that we're trying to lean into with durable skills and skills for the future at mtc.

Stay with me on this because I think we'll lead into why the ETS partnership probably makes triple sense. But I guess the push I want to have is durable skills like critical thinking. Does it really. Or problem solving, does it really transfer that much from domain to domain? Because in a bakery, it looks very different from a coding job. Looks very different from me behind my desk podcasting. Like, how do you think about. Or is it. No, we've codified it. And therefore whatever domain you're working in, yes, you got to build up the knowledge base. But as you progress beyond novice, we expect to see this sort of set of behaviors, I guess.

So the easy thing, because it's the right thing, is to just agree with you and say it's more of a matrix than a ladder.

Okay.

Right. So, yeah, there's not a unified model of critical thinking that is domain independent, but there are versions of that ladder that are optimized for critical thinking, say, in the humanities or critical thinking in the STEM fields. And I don't know how fine grained we can or even should be as we parse those. And I use the we there very loosely. Like, I am not a psychometrician who's going to be making that deliverable for the sector. I'm very lucky that ETS employs, I think 75% of the psychometricians in America. So we've got the capacity to do that now. Smarter people than me will be figuring that out. And also working across the sector, you know, bringing in domain experts so we can have their voices as we build out the skill progressions.

No, that makes sense. I mean, I know at Minerva University the way, and I'm on the board there, the way that they have thought about it is what you just said, which is we create a clear framework for these different, they have different names for them, but these different habits or skills and then whatever you're learning, like we expect to see the progression over time that you mastered. And so it becomes a habit that does transfer to your point as I move domain to domain, I guess the question there or the perhaps maybe I'm jumping to something, but it seems like ets the partnership rather than just resources. The other thing now it does for you is we can actually create validated measures to say like, yeah, what you just represented in the MTC transcript.

That.

Artifact of work like this is how we assess it validated. And so that's sort of scalable, if you will, across the platform. Maybe there's even a third party way to do that that gets out of the oh, my teacher liked me and therefore said this project was good.

That's exactly right. I mean, I think of the. Our moonshot is. If you think about why APs have gotten such traction, right? And why they. It's that there is value in having a national verified, psychometrically sort of stamped, you know, exam that certifies on a scale of 1 through 5 that, you know, student is at this level of capacity in area X. The huge value in that as a premise. The downsides are one time a year, very high stakes, very significant upstream effects on what the curriculum is. And what if you didn't have to compromise? What if you could have a student doing an independent study, a portfolio defense capstone project completely of their own, choosing all the right adjectives. You would want self directed, personalized feedback from defending into experts in the community. But you could take the deliverables that came from that and run them through, we'll call it an engine, right? And get valid feedback about their communication skills or evidence of their critical thinking. And you could do it in theory ad infinitum. You could run it through that engine as many times as you want. You could take a single high stakes exercise into a formative exercise and you could take one of the biggest gating factors to the adoption of these exciting models, which is teacher workload and you could turn some of these technologies into copilots. Not taking humans out of the loop like education is a relational, human centered exercise. But if you could have that kind of heads up display, right. Those metrics on the side that assisted educators took a little bit of the burden off them, but also improved the validity and accuracy of the feedback they were giving to the students. I just think it could be transformational for the adoption of these practices in actual classrooms. And yes, they result in credential. Whether it's a mastery transcript or a learning record. The biggest area of pushback we still get with just justification is well, these are really just collections of local assertions by the schools which by the way is what grades are. So that's the current state is that we're. That we're kind of solving against his grades. But yes, the. A competency based transcript currently generated by an MTC school is ultimately what the school says. So, you know, and we work very closely to make sure their competency models are as, you know, as strong as they can be. We have to advocate implicitly and explicitly on behalf of those models. With higher eds we have skin in the game and making sure they're high quality. But that's not the same thing as all as being able to say, oh, because we've run this portfolio of work through a process, we can now certify or stamp or put a badge on those things. I hesitate to use the word badge. Let's scratch that. But we can certify or stamp those to say, you can take this to the bank. This, it means something third party.

Very cool. I have to ask, is AI a central component of being able to build that scaled infrastructure in some way?

I mean, that's it. It's not even a yes or no question. It's sort of in what ways? Right. The areas I'm most excited about are thinking about certain kind. Like if you think about what a mastery transcript is today, you pull it apart from a technology perspective. What it really is is an assemblage, a collection of varied artifacts, student, you know, work files meta tagged with a lot of data about skill and skill development and scales and other things by humans. That is a really interesting kind of corpus of data and text to put into a large language model. Like I'm really excited to see what happens when we have a lot of these flowing into trained models and to see what we learn. But the other thing too is that there are problems that we face now as a consortium. Right. So, you know, last count we had about 400 schools and districts that were working within the MTC environment. Right. That probably means We've got about 400 bespoke competency models that are in play. Each of them is kind of built with good intentions and backwards design and community buy in. But that's a lot of different ways of defining communication. So there's two ways you solve for that problem. One is by fiat. Somebody comes in top down and says, no, this is how we do it. Which is terrible for change management and terrible for most product and customer perspective. The other is you say, hey, we've looked at all of these in a very analytical, thoughtful way. We've run them through different large language assist models. And what we can tell you is that in all these different models, it looks like there's actually two meaningful variants. If you have communication, you're probably doing it either this way or that way. And we'd encourage you to maybe like choose one of those and try and move towards that. That kind of like AI assisted harmonization, I think is going to solve a lot of our problems in the coming years.

Very cool, very cool. As you were saying that, I was laughing to myself at your earlier assertion again, which is like, hey, grades in English suffer from a lot of the same problems, but we sort of accept it because we've accepted the Carnegie Union. We think we have an understanding of what goes on in an English class. Even though I would argue the signal of grades has been increasingly breaking down over the last several years. In particular, always flawed in my mind, but really breaking down. In the last few years, Covid pressure.

Tested our kind of national and local assessment practices and not surprisingly found them wanting. As you, as you've documented, probably better than better than anybody. But I mean, you know, for those listeners out there who are less familiar with mastery learning, I could see some of them saying, well, isn't this kind of just standards based grading? And it's that the answer to that is not a no, it's a yes. And like standards based grading is awesome. It's criterion referenced, it's very objective. You can look at, you have scales. The difference is you can still do standards based grading and not tinker all that much with the fundamental architecture of school. Right? You can still have everything in like seat time. You still have everything based in like academic subjects. Not a lot of, not a lot of, you know, moving the needle on sort of what school feels like and is a lived experience for kids. Still better than status quo grading. And that's my point on that. But we think That's a good start. And what we want to do is take the same essential principles, really clear criterion reference scales, but expand them so we can use them to measure new and hopefully more relevant things and create.

The room for that jagged acid based. Okay, so last question then for me is you all are a separate nonprofit still legally. That's how it works. But there's obviously a great deal of integration. What does this look like down the road as you play the story forward with ETS and MTC in the work together and what's the hope for what this looks like in five years?

I think you can almost work backwards. And when we talk about this now as a team, we have two big goals. One is to use all the amazing support and the brand equity and the relationships of our new parent to grow the footprint of what we're doing. We more or less without spending any resources on sales and marketing, just kind of grassroots, have managed to build really good sustaining relationships with like these 400 schools and districts. There's no reason we can't double that in the coming year. And who knows, I would love us to be and say be available to half of school districts right as MTC by 2030. Wow. I think. And we're now in an organization where like you talk about having a couple hundred thousand kids and they're like, yeah, it's a good start. So I think that's, that's one thing. The other is anything, you know, when we think about product and we think about innovation, it's just contributing as much as possible to the success and product development of the Skills for the Future initiative. I want to be very clear. Skills for the Future is, it is owned by Carnegie and ets. Those are the organizations that, that's their jam. But anything we are bringing to the table that can be used or leveraged in terms of thinking about how you build skills based credentials, skills passports or skills transcripts as Amit sometimes likes to refer to them. And also the fact that, that we do have, as we work with these five states for skills for the future that Carnegie and ETS have recruited as co design partners. We also can use the portfolio of MTC schools to get feedback and kind of testing new innovations and assessment and insights. So all of it I think fits together from a product perspective and a growth perspective.

Very cool. Mike, thanks so much for the work. Thanks so much for joining me and walking us through where you've been and where you are now and where you're going. Really appreciate it.

Thank you for. Thanks again for the invite. Love the conversation.

No, I've been thrilled to watch from afar and sometimes close. And it's great to see. And for all you tuning in, we'll be back with more stories like this. Next time on the Future of Education.