Since 1906, the Carnegie Unit has been the go-to for quantifying student engagement in terms of time spent learning a subject. But after 120 years, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is reconsidering its stance on “seat time”. Instead of tracking credit hours, they are shifting to a new currency based on building meaningful skills and competency.
While undoing a century-long framework will be an enormous undertaking, it’s not the biggest challenge facing educators. The deeper challenge is overcoming what I call the Preparation Paradox.
The Preparation Paradox is the belief that every stage of school is meant to prepare students for the next one, rather than designing the best possible experience for the moment. Schools often assume their role is to give students a preview of what is to come, even when that “what” is impersonal, rigid, or uninspiring.
Think about when your students or even your own kids started kindergarten and how excited they were. The colors, the songs, the sense of belonging — it all feels magical. But over time, that magic fades. What starts as curiosity and joy slowly gives way to compliance and endurance.
That disengagement is not just a feeling; it shows up in the data. Nearly three-quarters of fifth-graders say they are engaged in school, but that number drops to about half in middle school, and by high school, only one in three reports feeling engaged. This decline is often referred to as the “school engagement cliff,” and too often, districts guide students right to the edge by centering education around the Preparation Paradox:
- Upper elementary schools claim they are preparing children for middle school, so they gradually erode the close relationships children had before by introducing multiple teachers and reducing personal attention.
- Middle schools claim to be preparing students for high school, so they make grades more rigid and emphasize that everything now “counts.”
- High schools say they are preparing kids for college. Since many college experiences involve large lecture halls, professors who may not know your name, and an impersonal system, high schools often mimic those conditions.
Over time, the joy of kindergarten becomes a distant memory, and learning becomes a duty. Educators have the best of intentions, ensuring their students are prepped for the next step, but it comes at a cost of meaningful and engaging learning. Their enthusiasm is erased.
Instead of modeling high school around the frustrating parts of college, what if we made it the pinnacle of a young person’s learning journey? What if elementary and middle schools did not prepare students for drudgery but instead sparked excitement about the inspiring, engaging, deeply human experience awaiting them at the next grade level?
Across the country, 24 schools and districts in the Carnegie Foundation’s Future of High School Network, including Eastern Hancock Schools in Indiana, are taking the bold step to redesign the learning experience by tearing down the time-based education system. In undoing the confines of the Carnegie Unit, they’re also unraveling the frustrations of the Preparation Paradox.
This collective effort centers on creating proficiency-based credits, so students move forward when they have demonstrated mastery, not just when time has passed. It includes designing authentic learning experiences, such as designing and building solutions for real community problems, engaging in paid or credit-bearing work experiences aligned to student interests, or presenting learning through public exhibitions, performances, or defenses for authentic audiences that give older students the chance to apply knowledge to real-world applications – and get younger kids excited about the opportunities awaiting them in higher grades. It focuses on recognizing and giving credit for powerful learning that happens outside of the classroom, whether through work, service, or other experiences that shape young people’s growth.
That is the vision the Carnegie Foundation’s network is pushing us toward. And it is the vision worth fighting for. Because in the end, this is about more than undoing the Carnegie Unit. It is about undoing the Preparation Paradox itself, and building schools where the path forward gets better, not worse, at every step.
As Shawn Achor, author of “The Happiness Advantage,” reminds us, “happiness is the joy we feel striving after our potential.” Our job as educators is not to point students to some distant destination where they will finally find happiness. Our job is to help them see that the journey of learning itself can be fun, rewarding, and full of joy.