Carnegie unit

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The Carnegie unit is the standard time-based metric of student progress in American education, which, while still used in most states, is being replaced by more flexible, competency-based models of learning. It refers to a system that bases academic credit on how much time (seat-time) students spend in a classroom with a teacher. "The standard Carnegie unit is defined as 120 hours of contact time with an instructor—i.e., one hour of instruction a day, five days a week, for 24 weeks, or 7,200 minutes of instructional time over the course of an academic year."

Background

Carnegie Units were proposed in 1906 as a basis for measuring school work and are still the most widely used credit system in U.S. secondary education. Since one unit represents a single subject taught for one classroom period of typically 50-55 minutes for five days a week, it is said that Carnegie units refer to "seat-time" and are not a true measure of actual learning or mastery of a subject. Recent technological advances, as well as alternative forms of organized learning, have led many critics to call for more proficiency-based models of learning. Past Carnegie President Ernest Boyer called the Carnegie Unit “obsolete” in 1993 and said the time had come to “bury” it once and for all. In 2013, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching announced that it was revisiting the idea of the Carnegie unit because communication technologies have radically changed how and when information can be delivered. Instructional materials, teaching tools, assessments, online courses demonstrate how education is fast becoming more personalized, accessible, portable, and asynchronous, so that measuring student learning by “seat time” seems obsolete.

Usage

Still today, however, 4,000-plus higher education institutions rely on the credit hour to calculate student financial aid, determine faculty work load and compensation, grant student credentials, and more, so that replacing the Carnegie unit is difficult. Likewise, in K-12 education the unit affects the very way that knowledge is organized for instructional purposes: it affects school calendars, instructional planning, testing schedules, and teacher work contracts of the nation’s roughly 100,000 public schools.

Accountability

One of the reasons the Carnegie unit has survived is the demand for accountability that can be measured. Taxpayers want accountability assurances and colleges want some way to compare applicants and to assess their preparedness. David Tyack and Larry Cuban, in Tinkering toward Utopia, (p. 107) cite "interlocking reasons" that defenders of the status quo gave for regarding the Carnegie unit as part of a system that cannot be changed. "This system--the time devoted to each class and each course, the departmental organization, the lecture method of teaching--were likened to the building blocks supporting an entire structure. Remove one, they said, and the stability of the others, and of the high school itself, was imperiled."

See also

• Public education in the United States
• Education policy in the United States

External links

• The Glossary of Education Reform
• Carnegie Units - Time, School, Learning, and Schools - StateUniversity.com