This commencement season, let’s debate A Portrait of a Graduate

Is the proliferating “portrait of a graduate” movement just the latest way to downplay rigorous academic expectations?

Today we talk about our hopes for high school graduates, featuring takes by Dan Buck and Chad Gestson; dig into the sobering Education Scorecard results with Nat Malkus and Marc Porter Magee; bemoan AI in the classroom with Andy Smarick and Greg Ashman; and round up other views from Catrin Wigfall, Chad Aldeman, Anne Blankenhorn, Jocelyn Pickford and Josh Parrish.

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Getty Images / PeopleImages

It’s commencement season, including for my firstborn son, who graduates high school in less than two weeks. So it’s a good time to check in on the “portrait of a graduate” movement.

If that term is unfamiliar to you, CASEL defines it as:

A holistic look at the skills and competencies students need to master to thrive in work, postsecondary educational opportunities, community, and their personal lives.

Here’s how Education Week’s Libby Stanford put it a few years ago:

Rather than deciding that a student is a successful graduate based on the amount of time they’ve spent in the classroom, the portrait presents a more well-rounded view of what success looks like.

She also offered some examples:

In Kentucky, a successful student is an engaged citizen, critical thinker, effective communicator, empowered learner, creative contributor, and productive collaborator, according to the state’s portrait of a learner.

In South Carolina, successful students should be able to read critically, express ideas, investigate through inquiry, reason quantitatively, use sources, design solutions, learn independently, navigate conflict, lead teams, build networks, sustain wellness, and engage as a citizen, according to the state’s portrait of a graduate competencies.

And in New York, the proposed portrait, which the state’s Board of Regents will vote on in an upcoming meeting, describes a successful graduate as someone who is a critical thinker, innovative problem solver, literate across content areas, culturally competent, social-emotionally competent, an effective communicator, and a global citizen.

These “portraits” are being adopted at both the state and district levels—and surely by individual schools, too.

My question is: Should we applaud this?

On the one hand, these statements affirm what everybody already knows: School is about more than just academic learning, and success in life depends on skills that can’t be easily measured by standardized tests. Indeed, whenever parents are asked about what they want their kids to learn, “life skills” or something similar almost always rises to the top. Call it pragmatism or anti-intellectualism, but this reflects a longstanding strand of American thought and culture, and also common sense.

So perhaps these are harmless exercises just re-stating the obvious.

On the other hand, at a time when grade inflation is rampant, AI is making cheating easier than ever, and student achievement is in the cellar, do we really need another effort to downplay the importance of academic achievement? Even if these portraits take care to communicate “both/and”—as in, both traditional academics and other skills and competencies are important—should we worry that the academic piece will be overlooked?

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But it’s not just the potential crowding out of academics that makes me nervous—especially if states, districts, and schools take these “portraits” seriously. That’s the intention in Arizona, for example, as Chad Gestson wrote in The 74 back in January:

Childcare providers weaving the profile into kindergarten readiness. PK–12 systems embedding it into curriculum, instruction, advising, and accountability. Out-of-school programs reinforcing mindsets, habits, and skills beyond the classroom. Higher education and industry evolving credentials, internships and work-based learning around the same vision. Government agencies and philanthropy aligning policies and investments to this shared north star.

If “portraits of a graduate” aren’t just feel-good visioning exercises, then we’d better pay attention to what they are promoting. Also writing in January, Dan Buck took to Education Next to explain what’s at stake:

These frameworks extend the scope of traditional standards from academic content and skills to personality traits, fundamental beliefs, and patterns of thought. Portraits of a Graduate change the question facing policymakers from “What should we teach our children?” to “What kind of people do we want to create?” In so doing, they extend the goals of schooling from traditional academics to values and character traits. That represents a seismic shift.

In my view, Dan does a masterful job explaining the many reasons why such a shift is problematic. I encourage you to read his entire essay. Among them:

• Some of the qualities these portraits address are not malleable, like inborn personality traits.

• The danger of political indoctrination often lurks beneath the surface, such as with New York’s intention to create “global citizens.”

• Sometimes the portraits step into mental health terrain, an area where schools have little expertise and sometimes do harm.

• While a focus on developing strong character goes back at least to Plato, concerns about not offending anyone lead these portraits to aim for the lowest common denominator.

I share those concerns. But I also understand the impulse at work behind this movement. So here’s where I see room for compromise:

We should embrace “portraits of a graduate” for schools of choice but not for states or districts or traditional public schools.

That’s not because I’m pro-school choice (though of course I am), but because schools of choice are intentional communities that parents and educators opt into, unlike traditional neighborhood schools, districts, or states. (Indeed, my son is graduating from a traditional public high school in the D.C. suburbs, and any “portrait” it would develop would either be pablum or would offend some families and their politics, religion, and/or cultural heritage.) As intentional communities, schools of choice can and should make it clear what they value. Which is the only way these portraits will do any good.

Indeed, the best private schools have always been clear about their intention to develop more than just students’ minds. Great charter schools, including what we used to call the “no excuses” ones, also have a clear point of view on the type of people they are working to develop. And that means they aren’t for everyone.

And in that context, a statement like a “portrait of a graduate,” if taken seriously, may in fact do some good. If a school says it wants graduates who “strive for excellence,” for example, then it should regularly celebrate excellence—lauding students who produce academically excellent work, as well as those who demonstrate excellence on the playing field or in the orchestra pit. If “honesty” and “integrity” are core values, then it better be sure that its code of conduct aligns with those aspirations.

But states and school districts, as governmental entities charged with serving everyone, should steer clear of these exercises. State standards can and should identify important skills that students should learn that aren’t explicitly academic, such as in the domains of financial literacy, personal health and fitness, and civic responsibility. (This is, of course, nothing new.)

But only schools of choice should paint portraits of a graduate—at least if we want those portraits to be clear and bright and not just a bunch of watery pastels.

That’s my view. What’s yours? Weigh in by responding to this newsletter, in the comments, or by emailing me at SCHOOLED@fordhaminstitute.org.

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The big news last week was the annual release of the Education Scorecard from Tom Kane and Sean Reardon at Harvard and Stanford, respectively. Now the policy wonk crowd is starting to make sense of the sobering results. Let’s start with Nat Malkus, who has examined the pre-pandemic achievement slump as rigorously as anyone. Nat writes:

A primary goal of the report is to push Americans to think beyond pandemic learning loss. To put a finer point on it, the researchers renamed this year’s report: Previous versions were called the Education Recovery Scorecard, but the authors removed the word “Recovery” from the title to emphasize the “learning recession” that began well before the pandemic.

Good point. Furthermore, Nat reports:

This learning slump is most glaring in reading comprehension. Between 2017 and 2019, reading scores declined at the same rate as they did during the pandemic years. That is worth restating: Reading declines in the two years before the pandemic were comparable to those during the pandemic itself.

That’s pretty crazy! Nat continues:

Worse, between 2022 and 2024, reading continued to decline at roughly the same rate. This year’s scorecard shows the beginnings of reading recovery between 2024 and 2025, but that’s where the good news ends: From 2015 to 2025, 83 percent of districts lost ground on reading, and one in three districts fell behind by a whole grade level. That is indeed the stuff of a learning recession.

The pattern in math was different. The pandemic was a much bigger driver of losses in math, and recovery in math was evident immediately after the pandemic. Even still, about 70 percent of districts scored lower in 2025 than in 2015.

Those patterns are worth pondering. Math achievement is thought to be more closely related to schooling, so it’s not surprising that sending kids home for over a year had the worst impact on their math skills. Reading, though, is also connected to what happens outside of school, and the fact that it declined pre-pandemic makes me (and of course others) wonder if it was the screens. Nat relays the Scorecard’s analysis showing that states with science of reading laws may have outperformed those without in recent years, which is encouraging. Here’s hoping SoR bends the curve. But maybe recent efforts to get kids to put down their phones—inside but especially outside of school—are helping, too.

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Marc Porter Magee is also trying to understand the Education Scorecard results, and turns to his 50CAN colleagues in Louisiana and Tennessee—two of the only states showing gains over the past decade—for insights. He starts with TennesseeCAN Executive Director Chelsea Crawford:

The Tennessee Literacy Success Act really paid off in reading gains, and without a lot of fanfare, we worked with the Department of Education to apply those same lessons to math, with ongoing teacher training and resources at the center of the support. I think further gains are on the horizon, especially after this session where we required every school in the state to offer advanced math.

He also asked Kelli Bottger, Executive Director of Louisiana Kids Matter, for her take on the Pelican State’s success:

For people looking to implement a similar playbook, here’s what we did over the past several years: high dosage tutoring, teacher training in the science of reading and numeracy, K–3 literacy and numeracy screeners and leaders at every level insisting on instructional excellence with accountability for results. This wasn’t the work of one year or one leader, but took a long-term collective effort.

Sounds a lot like how Rachel Canter explains the Mississippi Marathon.

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Next, let’s check in on the Education Freedom Tax Credit, the subject of last week’s debate here at SCHOOLED. Catrin Wigfall argues that “Minnesota Democrats [including Governor Tim Walz] recycle tired myths to block scholarships for kids.” For example:

Claim: “This would direct public dollars toward private education, which ultimately means fewer resources for our public education system.”

This objection gets repeated constantly, but it misunderstands how tax-credit scholarships actually work.

Tax-credit scholarships are funded by private donations, not appropriations. When a taxpayer donates to a Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO), that donor receives a federal tax credit. The scholarship money comes entirely from those private contributions. Not from the state general fund, not from the education budget, and not from school district money.

It is also worth noting that because roughly 90 percent of Minnesota students attend public schools, most students eligible for scholarships would likely come from the public school system, giving them access to more education resources, not less.

Yup. Plus, as I wrote a few weeks ago, it’s unlikely that the lost revenue to the Treasury that stems from these private donations is going to lead to any federal cuts in education or anything else. If past behavior is any indication, Congress will just put it on the credit card, like pretty much everything else.

The “free money” argument is also the focus of a recent Washington Post editorial:

Many Democrats are now refusing to allow potentially billions of dollars to flow into charities in their states because of pressure from special interests. That’s why it’s a huge deal that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul recently became the second Democrat to welcome the money.

The Post is hopeful that others will follow suit:

Five of the [thirteen] holdout states are led by potential 2028 presidential candidates: California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. This is an opportunity for a potential presidential candidate to show independence from self-interested union leaders.

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Chad Aldeman, meanwhile, suggests that blue, red, and purple states could all tap the EFTC to offer transition scholarships to kids in low-performing or closing schools. Inspired by the announcement that Jeff and Janine Yass will fund private school scholarships for 500 students displaced by school closures in Philadelphia, Chad writes:

This is a clever idea…. School closures are disruptive and kids can easily get off track socially and academically as they get separated from familiar friends and teachers. It’s a smart move all-around on the Yass’ part.

But what if those kids want to go to a public school instead? Chad explains:

A new scholarship granting organization could eventually do this for public schools. Thanks to the federal tax credit scholarship program that opens up next year, nonprofits could raise money for “transition scholarships” for students affected by school closures...to pay for navigators or counselors to help them find new (public) schools, get tutoring, or attend summer or after school programs to make it a smooth transition and meet new people.

I would take this idea even further: Why not raise money to pay the tuition that districts charge for students who live outside their boundaries? (In the states that don’t have mandatory inter-district choice, of course.) In the case of Philadelphia, someone could pay for displaced students to attend schools in, say, Abington, where Governor Shapiro’s private residence is located. Please, please, pretty please?

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In other news, over at National Review, Andy Smarick doesn’t hold back on AI in the classroom, calling it “our most senseless education experiment yet.” Among his arguments:

Learning is seldom about swiftly generating a final product. It’s about the slow, arduous work necessary for getting to a final product. From a great teacher’s perspective, what a student wrote in her final paper is less important than the weeks of researching relevant sources, assembling evidence, and outlining an argument. That great teacher doesn’t want a student to just write the correct answers on the exam; he wants the student to spend hours and hours reading texts closely, figuring out why that formula works, or trying different approaches until landing on the right method.

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I think Greg Ashman would agree. Greg is an Aussie and the author of The Power of Explicit Teaching and Direct Instruction, and offers a thoughtful essay on his Substack about AI in education in general and Alpha School in particular. He nails the big challenge in schooling:

Reading, writing, mathematics, and by extension, the whole academic curriculum, are a hard slog. We are not naturally motivated by any of it. If motivation comes at all, it comes later.

It is this problem that education needs to address and it is a hard problem. We might assume that engaging visuals or a pseudo-intelligent computer program would help children over the motivational hump, but history tells us otherwise. It takes far more—external motivators that gradually transition to internal motivators as capabilities incrementally increase. Children need to practice things they don’t really want to practice.

Yes, yes, yes! Adam Tyner and I wrote about this back in 2018. Relying on “intrinsic motivation” for kids and teenagers is a fool’s errand.

Greg continues:

Perhaps the solution is always going to be person-shaped? Perhaps technology will eventually get there? Perhaps AI large language models represent the push that finally takes us there.

I’ll wait and see.

I find this take much more sensible than this hype job in the Free Press about Alpha School.

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Last Friday, the National Assessment Governing Board approved an expanded NAEP which offers states the opportunity to get results in twelfth grade math and reading, eighth grade science, and civics in both eighth and twelfth grades. As Linda Jacobson reports, the news is a welcome relief after last year’s uncertainty about NAEP’s future. My colleague Checker Finn has made the case for state-by-state twelfth grade scores for years, and it appears we will soon benefit from knowing whether students approaching the end of high school are prepared.

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Last week, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed a slate of improved charter school policies into law. The bill allows the state’s Teacher Salary Supplement to follow students to their charter school, includes charter teachers in the state retirement system, and provides low-interest loans for facilities. Charter school students also have expanded access to extracurriculars and to community college courses. The governor noted that ten charter schools operate in the state, with eight more authorized to open. —Isabella Luu, Iowa Public Radio

“A special education instructor placed on paid leave for allegedly abusing an autistic third-grader was elected president of the Seattle teachers’ union on Friday.” —Caitlin McCormack, New York Post

“Education Secretary Linda McMahon said states will be able to put conditions on scholarship organizations as part of the federal tax-credit scholarship program, weighing in on one of the biggest questions for governors considering whether to opt into the program,” writes Erica Meltzer in Chalkbeat. This is perplexing, contradicting as it does the conventional wisdom that the Treasury Department’s regulations are unlikely to let governors put their own stamp on the initiative. (Though I’d love to see states limit scholarships to low-income and working-class families and add testing and transparency requirements.)

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Anne Blankenhorn:

Michael:

I was reading your email about HQIMs and whether they should be dictated at the state level. Kymyona Burk came to Michigan to speak about Mississippi’s Marathon* a couple of weeks ago. She was really clear about the process and the fact that it took years.

She spoke about how the retention piece encouraged everyone to work really hard at prevention/intervention in K–2 so the students did not have to be retained in grade three. She also mentioned that Mississippi engaged parents in the process so they would understand the retention piece—and would be encouraged to help their kids at home. To me, that seems like the ultimate level of local control.

With regard to HQIMs, Kymyona did talk about how important it is to use the most effective curriculum. My takeaway was: Why not use what definitely is working in Mississippi? Students are not that different around the country. Why continue to re-invent the wheel?

In fact, our House School Aid Subcommittee Chair—Representative Tim Kelly—is in favor of districts using the same five HQIMs that Mississippi is using. So he inserted a provision in the Michigan House–passed K–12 budget that states that in order to receive science of reading curriculum funding, districts must use one of those five HQIMs. I say, “Why not?”

*As you know, it was not really the Mississippi Miracle as some would call it. It took a lot of hard work on all levels, a lot of time, and a long-term commitment to accomplish what they did.

Jocelyn Pickford and Josh Parrish have thoughts about this, too:

To put the bottom line upfront—yes, we need (and many states do) a “both/and” when it comes to state-level support and local-level ownership of high-quality instructional materials and practices. And you don’t have to just take our word for it. Last summer, the Collaborative for Student Success hosted a webinar: “The State of the State Lists: Methods, Models, and Myths about State Curriculum Support.” In partnership with colleagues at EdReports, Rivet Education, and both the Arkansas and Kentucky Departments of Education, we dove into this landscape and where the rubber meets the road.

Given that we had over 200 registrants and about 100 active participants during a late July, mid-day webinar, we think there are lots of believers in state support for quality instruction. We posted a blog with answers to the lively Q & A from the session where our colleagues shared the nuances of navigating the different layers of support and need for local autonomy.

We had previously shared that states with the most comprehensive approach to their laws (and lists!)—starting with a focus on teacher candidates—are faring better. No doubt these efforts are time-consuming—but when there are too many competing state directives, high-quality curriculum initiatives can be set up to fail and contribute to the (in our opinion) false narrative that the problem lies in the vetting process or the format of materials.

CurriculumHQ is the Collaborative’s platform for gathering and sharing information on these state supports. We hope folks will check it out and engage with us on what’s happening in their areas. We know there’s an audience of those out there doing the work who are hungry for opportunities to share best practices.

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See you Friday!

Mike

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