The Future of Assessment Is Now

In this 2018 CoffeED interview, Christa Krohn, a math coach for the Orange City Schools in Pepper Pike, Ohio, explains why competency-based assessment asks parents to rethink what a grade means. Below it, a 2026 update looks at where state policy stands and how schools can answer the question parents ask first.

Play video: CoffeED: Christa Krohn (13 minutes 25 seconds)13:25

Changing expectations for competency-based assessments Christa Krohn is a math coach for the Orange City Schools district in Pepper Pike, Ohio, outside of Cleveland. Having been a math and physics teacher and adjunct college professor for 16 years, people assume that math was easy for her in high school, but it wasn’t. She had to continuously study and fight to learn, and she was only average or slightly above average at best. Her experience in school was frustrating because the traditional method of teaching was not effective. She just wasn’t getting it, but she kept fighting, learning and enduring.

She notes that her first breakthrough came in the fourth grade when she was learning measurement with quarts, pints, and cups. As usual, she just wasn’t understanding it. “It wasn’t until my father took me to the kitchen sink, got out all these things, and I just played with them,” Christa says. “That was the first moment I had this hands-on experiential discovery learning that really meant something to me.”

Christa says it wasn’t until she got to college and her math and physics professor started making these connections for her. He allowed her to re-create some monumental physics experiments in the lab so she could see how the math worked out. “It wasn’t until I was allowed to do them hands-on that things kind of sparked within me,” she says. If she had been tested, graded and assessed in the traditional way at the time she was struggling to understand, Christa says she would never have followed her path and life now would be very different.

Parents and our educational systems have the same fundamental goals, but everyone appears locked into certain traditional ideas. Methods of teaching and administrative communication are caught in preconceived notions that inherently resist change. Parents expect their children’s progress to be assessed in the form of information and data that simply tells them information one way or the other that is logged, recorded, and shared. It has a way of changing with competency-based education and parents can become uncomfortable with the new procedures and standards.

Parents still see traditional records, grades, and transcripts as necessary for higher education but they are starting to understand that there is also a shift towards competency-based education on the college and university level. This means that higher ed is also shifting away from the traditional grading system of conventional report cards and transcripts. Parents are starting to catch up and understand that accountability on the secondary level is changing to meet the needs of higher ed, but they are struggling to accept some of the new non-traditional methods. “It’s an ongoing education process,” Christa says, “and we just need to share this with more and more parents and really engage them in conversations to understand what this means for their child for the future.”

To change this mindset, Christa says we need a major cultural mind shift. She says the secret is to have the honest conversations with parents where they understand and accept that change to competency-based learning and assessment is the right choice. This is difficult from the start because everyone is still used to and leans towards the old traditional teaching and assessment practices. “Change is traditionally not something that schools do well,” Christa says. “We don’t keep up with it at the rate at which businesses and other entities change to keep up with things.”

Parents need to understand and accept that competency-based education and the accompanying assessment standards are slowly but surely becoming the norm. The methods will continue to appear more widespread throughout the K-12 and higher education realms and soon, there will be no going back.

Competency based assessment in 2026: what it is and how to explain it to families

Competency based assessment measures whether a student can show a defined skill or piece of knowledge, instead of reporting how many points were earned across a term. As Christa Krohn explains above, the hardest part is often the conversation with parents, who are used to grades, records and transcripts. People searching for the phrase often want two things: a plain definition and a sense of whether the idea has spread. This section offers both.

A plain definition

The definition that follows is edCircuit’s own explanation of the term, not a quotation. In a competency based approach, a school names the competencies students are expected to master, gives students more than one way and more than one chance to show them, and reports progress against those competencies. A single average of scores across assignments matters less. The related term used in policy is a learning framework, which the State of CBE site describes as one that expresses interrelated knowledge, skills and dispositions that are relevant, measurable and transferable. Krohn’s own story in the interview shows the thinking behind it: a fourth-grade lesson on quarts, pints and cups finally made sense when Krohn handled the containers at the kitchen sink, and Krohn says traditional testing at the time of that struggle would have changed the path of Krohn’s life.

Where state policy stands

The original article expects these methods to keep spreading in K-12 and higher education. The policy picture suggests spread, but unevenly. FullScale and KnowledgeWorks track competency-based education policy on the State of CBE map, which reports a snapshot as of June 2026. In its categories, 45 states have graduation requirements that allow earning credit through demonstrated competency and 47 have waivers for innovative or competency-based practices. Fewer have built the deeper pieces: 23 have a state vision such as a portrait of a graduate that covers academic and durable skills, 12 support pilots or networks, 8 offer funding, and 6 have learning frameworks. The site rates each category as yes, no with an exception, or no, so a reader should open the map for a specific state before drawing conclusions.

A separate FullScale research report, What We Can (and Can’t) See, describes a national landscape scan of 106 high schools engaged in competency-based learning. Its summary page explains that it looks at which practices are most visible, where implementation is harder to see, and whether current outcome measures capture quality. The summary gives no findings on grading, so this update does not report any, but it suggests that schools using the label differ in what they actually do.

How a school can answer the first parent question

The most useful parent meeting answers the question parents ask in some form: how will I know how my child is doing, and what will colleges see? Krohn’s advice in the interview is honest conversation that explains what the change means for a child’s future, and Krohn describes the work as an ongoing education process. Some practical steps follow from that.

• Show a real example. Put a traditional report card beside a competency report for the same student, and walk through what each says.
• Name the competencies in plain words, grade by grade, and say how many times a student can try again.
• Explain the transcript. The interview notes that parents see records and transcripts as necessary for higher education, so tell families exactly what the school will send to colleges.
• Keep a channel for questions open all year, not only at the start of a new system.

Parents who prefer traditional grades are not wrong to ask for clarity. The interview itself says parents expect progress to be reported as information and data that is logged, recorded and shared, and that competency-based education can leave parents uncomfortable with new procedures and standards. A school that treats those questions as reasonable will learn what its reports need to say, which it will not learn by treating them as resistance.

A sensible sequence is to start in one grade or subject, gather families’ questions during that first year, and publish the answers before expanding. The State of CBE map lists 12 states that support pilots or networks, so a small start is a route states themselves use. Whatever the pace, the school should be able to say, in one paragraph, what a student must show to earn credit and who decides whether the evidence is enough.

Interest in the phrase peaks in June and February in search data, and a rising question is simply what competency based assessment is, so a one-page plain-language answer posted on a school website will reach families when they look for it. Leaders designing a wider approach to testing and grading can start with the edCircuit assessment guide.

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