We are now five years into Vermont’s experiment in proficiency based learning (PBL), and I think it’s an important time to pause and take stock of it. When thinking about PBL, I sometimes feel like the proverbial blind man with the elephant. PBL is such a large, amorphous concept, and it’s practiced in so many radically different ways across Vermont that it’s hard to imagine anyone who’s able to comment on it with anything more than just a kind of provincial understanding.
With that caveat, here are some reflections from my experience as a Vermont educator teaching — juniors and seniors under the first few years of PBL.
It’s amazing it has lasted this long. The politics of this reform have been fascinating to me. It’s been an interesting alliance between conservative reformers (much of the advocacy for PBL and Flexible Pathways-style learning comes from the relatively conservative notion of college and especially career readiness) and progressive reformers (the use of grades as holistic measurements rather than competition, the de-emphasis on standardized testing inherent in the movement). And all of this has been run, of course, through the Vermont tradition of local control, sending it in a hundred different directions.
I think a lot of educators are surprised that Vermont has not scrapped PBL yet — or at least made a very clear public declaration that PBL is entirely optional, as Maine did. What surprised me most was that there was never a moment when it seemed as though the Vermont public had had enough. Yes, there were certainly examples of districts where it went over poorly, but it never reached a state-wide tipping point.
Why does this surprise me? PBL runs counter to a variety of cultural expectations that Americans hold for their schools. Surely by now the cultural expectation of raising an “A student,” for example — thwarted by many current incarnations of PBL, which use 1-4 grading systems — would have spurred greater backlash.
The deeper issue at play is that PBL is designed to encourage growth and understanding rather than competition, yet Americans look to schools as meritocratic sorting mechanisms, pitting students in a kind of inherent competition for the finite resources of college placements, scholarship money, and, in a broader sense, economic and political influence. PBL doesn’t do that, at least not in its purer forms.
Another reason I’m surprised it has lasted this long is the sheer indecipherability of the report card: just a maze of standards and substandards trailing on for pages. Reading a student’s grades under PBL sometimes feels like trying to read the fine print on your Verizon bill.
So why the lack of open rebellion?
First, some of the wealthier school districts (where meritocratic concerns might have been most vocal) made smart compromises in their scoring and reporting in order to make PBL look more like the traditional system. Second, teachers and administrators have made Herculean efforts — both to translate the new grades into plain English, and — frankly — to sell the positive aspects of PBL. Perhaps the PBL era even encouraged, through its inherent complexity and newness, a new level of communication between teachers and families, which hadn’t existed during the era of online gradebook transparency, during which it was taken as a given that parents didn’t need an in-depth email explaining that Johnny was failing (because it was right there in the online gradebook).
Third — and I think this is what a lot teachers of seniors would tell you — the global pandemic blunted the effect of the first senior class graduating under PBL last spring; any thorny questions about students not graduating because of increased standards under the new metric were largely waved away by the exigencies of life-under-COVID. Fourth, it’s simple politics: Vermont has a more progressive bent than most other states, including Maine, and I think the population here is simply more tolerant of progressive educational experimentation, especially coming in the wake of the conservative No Child Left Behind-era, which included standardized testing and high-stakes accountability — policies that have never gone over well in our liberal state. PBL couldn’t be further from those policies, and its progressive, holistic feel probably worked even more in its favor during the Trump era (particularly alongside other liberal ed reforms sweeping Vermont, like Restorative Practice, Act 77, and the various incarnations of education-for-social-justice.
What really stood out to me as an on-the-ground educator during the PBL revolution in Vermont was the extent to which:
1) It didn’t really seem like anyone knew what PBL was supposed to look like. There was no mention of its connection to similar prior experiments, such Mastery Based Learning, or Outcome-Based Education, which was interesting. And it was never clear which if any other states had actually attempted to implement such a system. There were always these mythical schools that had done it — Chugach School District in Alaska, Casco Bay in Maine — and I found myself often wishing I could take a pilgrimage to one of these places, just to observe what this magical system looked like.
2) The question of whether this system had ever been shown to work was never particularly discussed, at least not to the rank and file like me. Again, it was interesting that no one ever wanted to make the connection to previous efforts with Mastery Learning or Outcome-Based Education, which was especially strange where I work given that several older teachers had been using Mastery Learning quite successfully for years. Other teachers remembered that we’d actually had a form of “competency-based learning” — in the form of minimum competency subject tests — back in the late 1970s. Nobody seemed to want to discuss these prior efforts, their connection to the current reforms, and the extent of their effectiveness. It was as though, because they’d fallen out of favor, their association would compromise the beautiful new movement of PBL.
3) It was really the best — and the worst — of Vermont’s local control. It never seemed like anyone was at the helm, as though anyone in Vermont really knew what we were supposed to be doing. This was a problem, of course, given that we’ve seen districts take such wildly different approaches. There are always so many rumors floating around about other schools’ better, smarter approaches (five years ago I began covering my ears whenever I heard the phrase, “At CVU what they do is . . .”). The notion that we’re all wasting a lot of effort and missing good ideas simply because we’re not collaborating across districts has haunted us through this whole process.
On the other hand, I’ve appreciated the fact that we’ve had to think this all through for ourselves, that the state didn’t just come in and tell us what to do. I actually think that this led to two benefits. First, there was surely a lot of wasted effort on the part of lone actors repeating the mistakes of other districts, but there was also surely a great deal of innovation achieved in the process as these lone districts were also free to pursue local solutions in their own way.
Second, I also think that the fact that we all had to think everything through for ourselves actually led all of us to think through many of our fundamental assumptions about teaching and learning (for example — what should constitute graduation-level work?). This process has been tremendously healthy for educators, I think.
I’ll be surprised if PBL survives in the long run. A few months ago, I got an email from the Great Schools Partnership, a non-profit organization in Maine that for many years seemed to be the driving force behind implementing PBL in New England. The email I received was advertising trendy new materials and workshops based almost entirely on social justice and racial equity. What a mark of the times — PBL is no longer the cutting edge trend; even the Great Schools Partnership, the bulwark of PBL, has moved on. From what I can tell, most of the early adopter-types, the cutting edge progressive educators who carried PBL have also moved on to issues of social justice and equity. The proposals of the Rowland Fellowships here in Vermont are always a great barometer of what’s hot. In 2017, many of the fellows were pursuing matters of PBL; by 2018, none were. By now PBL is, in some sense, part of the landscape. If we never had the widespread backlash against it that many of us thought we would, I don’t get the sense that it’s something most educators feel passionately in favor of. And ask students their opinion — something I do myself from time to time — and most of them will tell you that they’d rather return to the traditional system. I am not saying this is the right thing to do, only reporting what I mostly hear. I see the structural requirements of PBL quietly slipping away, just like Mastery Learning and Outcome Based Education did, the earth gradually reclaiming it until 1-4 scoring recedes back toward the 0-100 or traditional alpha grading scale.
But the theories and the practices of PBL — some positive and some negative — will have informed an entire generation of educators and students. And that’s an important legacy that will continue to be felt for a long, long time in Vermont education.
Or who knows? Perhaps PBL will last? I hope I have made it clear here that we in education have certainly seen far, far worse in just the last twenty years.
My only hope is that the next time — thirty years from now, perhaps — that the ideas of PBL swing back into favor, we’ll take some time to learn a thing or two from the history of these similar reforms. We are wise to base on new “innovations” on what we learn from the past — both strengths and weaknesses — rather than charging ahead in a glow of excitement and passion. After all, as PBL teaches us, the best learning is always iterative.
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In the next post, I’ll go into some of the specific pros and cons of PBL as a system, with an eye toward understanding what’s positive and what’s negative about the system itself.