NC receives $4M to expand soft skills training for high school students

About 6,000 more North Carolina students will have a secondary high school transcript that lists their skills, in addition to their primary academic transcript, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (DPI) announced Monday.

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That's because of a new, $4 million U.S. Department of Education grant to DPI. In recent years, beginning under former Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt, DPI emphasized ensuring students are taught "durable," or soft, skills and then evaluated for their mastery of them. Those skills were outlined in Truitt's Portrait of a Graduate, which remains active, and identifies target skills: critical thinking, collaboration, communication, adaptability, empathy, a learner's mindset and personal responsibility.

DPI emphasized that these skills are critical in the age of artificial intelligence, because they are part of using human judgment.

 DPI's program 'Skills for the Future' implements those goals. It establishes rubrics for measuring skills and teaches educators how to use them and provide feedback to students.

North Carolina is receiving the grant under a federal program that provides funding, in part, to programs that expand student assessment.

Already, more than 6,000 students in seven school districts and four charter schools have submitted more than 14,000 pieces of academic work to be evaluated for those skills, according to the DPI news release. That came from a previous $4 million grant.

The new grant, lasting three years, will add another 6,000 students and new schools to the mix.

They'll receive a "Future-Ready Transcript," which DPI describes as "a record of demonstrated skills" that a student can share with colleges, employers or military recruiters alongside their academic transcript.

The grant will also help DPI make students' progress on the skills visible to their parents and guardians.

Since the 2022 rollout of the Portrait of a Graduate, DPI has characterized the soft skills emphasized in it as pivotal as schools and employers confront and use generative artificial intelligence. Human judgment is irreplaceable and will be "the primary currency of our future," DPI's guidance on artificial intelligence states.

Deploying the Portrait of a Graduate will ensure that "while AI may generate options, our students possess the agency, ethics, and wisdom to own the decisions," the guidance states.