A School Without Walls built one competency model for the whole school

A public school built around real work

A School Without Walls is a New York City public high school in lower Manhattan, part of District 2 and the NYC Outward Bound Schools network. Students attend up to three days a week in person and learn remotely the rest, treating the city itself as a classroom. In place of AP courses, students build their path from passion projects, internships, interdisciplinary projects, and college coursework through the school's CUNY College Now and NEON partnerships. The school serves 300 students with 15 faculty members.

Passion projects are the heart of the school. Students spend about half their Humanities time on a project of their own design and present the results to community audiences. Recent projects include a mobile 3D printing lab, a community mural, and an elective co-taught by a student.

That design creates a familiar problem. The most important work students do does not reduce cleanly to course grades.

One model for the whole school

Rather than adopt competencies course by course, the faculty defined seven schoolwide outcomes that apply in every class: Collaborate, Investigate, Connect, Analyze, Design, Present and Communicate, and Reflect.

Building the model was deliberate teacher work. The faculty read together about competency-based grading, established a common vocabulary, and convened a competency model task force. Teachers crosswalked the standards and practices of each content area against the outcomes, studied how peer schools organized their models, and brought in outside experts such as the Competency Collaborative.

Each outcome breaks down into specific "I can" statements, so Analyze covers close reading in an English seminar and mathematical analysis in a science class. The same language follows a student across the school day.

The model became the record

During the year, teachers track the outcomes in the Progress Tracker, marking levels as students earn them and linking student work as evidence. Students and families see progress against the same seven outcomes teachers plan with, alongside narrative progress reports.

At graduation, that evidence becomes a Mastery Transcript. An admissions reader sees the credits a student earned, featured work the student selected, and a school profile that explains how to read the record.

Students notice the difference. "I like how they actually go and look at your work and they give you advice on how it could be improved, what you did right, what you did wrong," says Justin, a student, about the reports. "Instead of just me seeing an A or a 100, because that doesn't really tell you how good you are."

The first graduating class

The Class of 2026 is the school's first graduating class. Its members have been accepted to 34 colleges and universities, including Northeastern, Howard, Fordham, Pratt, Sarah Lawrence, and CUNY and SUNY campuses across New York, along with out-of-state schools such as Middlebury and UC Santa Cruz.

The school is still building. Its next steps include adding advanced competencies, crosswalking the model with New York State's Portrait of a Graduate, and advocating for the CUNY and SUNY systems to embrace mastery transcripts statewide.

For a public school whose students learn through projects and real-world action, the record now matches the work. As Lily puts it, "It's truly a visual representation of critical thinking and creativity that goes beyond test scores or goes beyond any kind of unattainable rating system."