NCDPI receives $4 million grant to implement durable skills in education

On Oct. 30, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction announced they received a $4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education for the Skills for the Future project.

The project intends to shift the focus of education in North Carolina to an evaluation of durable skills, which include communication, collaboration, critical thinking, adaptability and personal responsibility, instead of relying solely on standardized tests to measure academic progress, providing a more holistic view of a student's capabilities. 

Paula Wilkins, chief academic officer at Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, said the project will change how students are preparing for their future careers. 

“A lot of what we have done in our current assessment era has been about knowing information as factual, but not a lot about application and being able to look at additional skills that you need for the future, or what we might call durable skills,” she said. 

Wilkins said the goal of the project is to create a learning environment where students engage critically with information while developing skills that extend beyond the classroom. 

“We're trying to reimagine what matters in a high school and to create a learning environment that is more individualized and also more experiential,” Kristie VanAuken, special advisor to the superintendent at NCDPI, said. 

Deputy State Superintendent Andrew Smith said the grant will support about 6,000 students over the next three years. Selected school districts, which are Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, Iredell-Statesville Schools and Mooresville Graded School District, will pilot the initiative by refining the implementation and providing feedback to the NCDPI and its partners, VanAuken said.

She said working with school districts will create high-quality tools that help classrooms, teachers and students make progress in the cultivation of durable skills.

“We were looking for unique leaders — superintendents, specifically — who had already kind of dove into this work, who were familiar and who were innovative in the way they were thinking about the work of their high schools,” Smith said. “We also wanted to make sure that these schools were already using the durable skills and the portrait of a graduate in their schools. That was really important to us, because these are really the trailblazers.” 

The Skills for the Future project is meant to be a response to changing job markets, according to the NCPDI's press release, and prepare students for college. 

Additionally, the project will establish a tool for measuring the progress of durable skills within students, allowing the skills to be incorporated into educational accountability models including official report cards.

“We are at an inflection point in education, across our country, across the world, and really the inflection point is here because of AI,” Smith said. “And what's happening is we know that it is going to be really easy to just access content, and mastery of content is no longer going to be king.”

As the project is implemented within the chosen districts, Smith said he hopes its successes can be scaled across other school districts throughout the state. 

“Students are really highly engaged in things like art, music [and] all the extracurriculars,” Wilkins said. “Why is that? Because they get to use skills that are novel. They get to think about creativity and working in groups. And, sometimes, our regular core classes don't always give them that opportunity.”

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