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

Mike Flanagan, CEO of the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC), joined me to talk about the organization's recent “acquisition” by ETS, as well as its broader work in changing how we measure student learning and represent that to colleges and employers. Could the broader adoption of MTC change the game for how students choose college—and allow colleges to be more diverse, rather than “one-size-fits-all” as many are today? This was a fun conversation where I pushed Mike on a few ideas around skills—and then learned a lot from his nuanced answers. Look forward to your thoughts in the comments.

Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn, 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. I'm really excited. It's my longtime friend, Mike Flanagan. He's from the town over from 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 NAIS, as well as, frankly, all things technology for the organization. But then he became the CEO of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, which was acquired recently by ETS, an organization focused on testing across the country and internationally as well. And we're gonna talk about all of that today. Mike, so good to see you. We're not in person, but it's great to be with you on camera.

Michael Flanagan:

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

Michael Horn:

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

Michael Flanagan:

Yeah, I always have to put that in asterisk on that. I was former. Former coach. Unfortunately, my certification lapsed when my job changed, and I found wound up spending 90% of my time on planes. You know, Crossfit's 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.

The History of Mastery Transcript Consortium 

Michael Horn:

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, so you know 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.

Michael Flanagan:

Yeah, I mean, I will say just a preview. It's what and still is, 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, 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 counterexamples of amazing schools. You talk to them all the time, right? School leaders who are innovators. They're doing project based learning, 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, like, 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 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 philosophy and design, with all the hard work that the people that started their school are probably doing.

Michael Horn:

Very cool. I think what I've learned and appreciated over time, as I thought about it, Mike, is, is two things. One, 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 or trade schools or employers or whatever else, sort of giving them a consistent infrastructure across the school. 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 my big thing of competency-based or mastery-based learning of we're throwing over seat time, and you get to move at your own pace. What you are more is on the, yes, that would be great. But 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. 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?

Michael Flanagan:

I mean, jagged. 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 a 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 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 ten 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 of compliance. Like, how do I put the best portrait forward, no deviations allowed, whereas all the best real learning. I mean, 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. And so 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 everything all the time. No variants allowed. They're smart kids. They know what the actual assignment is.

Michael Horn:

They know what the game is. Yeah.

Michael Flanagan:

Yeah. 

Michael Horn:

No, and I mean, I think, look, this should be a huge thing for colleges as well as, you know, I famously earned, famously 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. 

Michael Flanagan:

One of the things that I, when you're starting new things, it can be very hard to find signal in all the noise. Right. And so 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, written books about it. But since we do, if you are in one of those 20 colleges, you are still, 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. And then to your story earlier, the vast majority of enrollment managers at these institutions are actually just trying to find kids, right? So. And right now that the signals we give those same kids when they're wayfinding, trying to find the right, you know, destination, they're very blunt tools. It's like, okay, you have this set of SAT or ACT scores. That means if you theoretically 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 what about fit? What am I actually going to do if I get into one of these schools. And that level of fit, real skill profile, that's where the jagged becomes a feature, not a bug.

Joining Forces with ETS 

Michael Horn:

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.

Michael Flanagan:

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

Michael Horn:

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 strategic plans? Folks who follow the industry know they have a relatively new CEO. There have been a lot of changes at ETS as well. Wrap it in. Tell us the story.

Michael Flanagan:

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 nonprofit and they are a nonprofit. Legal junkies out there 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 501(c)3 but we are absolutely now in this kind of family that has much vaster resources and I daresay, like, grander aspirations. So 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 in 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. Like, I mean, good luck with that. I mean, that is a, that whole, call it a treadmill, if you want to call it quality, value proposition, has been very deeply upended in some ways for better. I think 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 K-12 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 K-12 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 to suddenly 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 on board for what we were hoping, the change we wanted to see in the world.

Defining and Codifying Skills 

Michael Horn:

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 things, 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?

Michael Flanagan:

Yeah, we are borrowing very explicitly and with a lot of gratitude, the phrase durable skills from our friends at America Succeeds. 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. One job in a bakery, there are technical skills you need to have, like understanding how doughs proof and how to laminate doughs if you want to make croissants and things like that. But there's also soft skills, which they have rebranded as durable skills. You have to be able to communicate and partner well and 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 transferable across those in ways that 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.

Michael Horn:

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

Michael Flanagan:

They have a much higher 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 K-12 is doing and what employers might want, we think it's the opportunity to add more value is in the explicit creation of durable skills. And I hit that word really hard, right? Cause 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 the secret sauce will just 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 this, like, thing 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. 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.

Michael Horn:

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 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, like, 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.

Michael Flanagan:

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.

Michael Horn:

Okay.

Michael Flanagan:

There's not a unified model of critical thinking that is domain independent. Okay. 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 that 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 into domain experts. So we can have their voices as we build out the skill progressions.

Michael Horn:

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, validate it. 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.

Michael Flanagan:

That's exactly right. I mean, I think of the....Our moonshot is if you think about why AP's 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 one through five that, you know, student is at this level of capacity in Area X. Huge value in that as like, as a premise. The downsides are one time a year, very high stakes, you know, 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, you know, from, you know, 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, 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. We're 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 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 that we're kind of solving against is grades. But yes, a competency based transcript currently generated by MTC school is ultimately what the school says. So. And we work very closely to make sure their competency models are as. 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 you can certify or stamp those. To say, no, you can take this to the bank. Means something third party.

The Role of AI in MTC’s Work 

Michael Horn:

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

Michael Flanagan:

I mean, 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 kinds. 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 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. 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 by doing. The other thing, too, is that there are problems that we face now as a consortium. So last count, we had about 400 schools and districts that were working within the MTC environment, right? That probably means we 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 from a 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.

Michael Horn:

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 unit and 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.

Michael Flanagan:

Covid pressure tested our kind of national and local assessment practices and not surprisingly, found them wanting in areas, as you've, as you've documented, probably better than, better than anybody. No, but I mean, you know, for those of, you know, 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 end. Like standards based grading is awesome. It's criteria and 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.

MTC’s Plans for the Future

Michael Horn:

The room for that jagged asset base. 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 this story forward with ETS and MTC in the work together? And what's the hope for what this looks like in five years?

Michael Flanagan:

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 with of our new parent to grow the footprint of what we're doing. Like 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. 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 one thing. The other is anything. 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. It is owned by Carnegie and ETS. Those are the organizations. 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 passport or skills transcripts as Amit sometimes likes to refer to them. And also the fact that we do have, you know, as we work with these five states, that first 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.

Michael Horn:

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.

Michael Flanagan:

Thank you for, thanks again for the invite. Love the conversation.

Michael Horn:

No, I'm, 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.

Michael Flanagan:

And you can find us at mastery.org.

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