News Alert: We are Growing.

For a one-month-old organization, the Mastery Transcript Consortium looks pretty healthy. We’re walking and talking. We’re making plans. We’re growing day by day.

Even with Spring Break dragging school leaders to the beach, the MTC still managed to nearly double its membership since its opening meeting on March 1. As of this writing, more than 85 schools have signed on to be members and founders. Our reach stretches from coast to coast and across the Pacific and Atlantic. There’s truly no flyover country in the MTC; we have schools in Minnesota and Georgia, Arizona and Virginia, Texas and Tennessee, South Korea and the Bahamas.

Check out the list. You probably know a lot of the schools – though we’re proud that schools of all ages, sizes and orientations have signed on to the effort.

We’re also growing in the social media world. We started with zero Twitter followers a month ago. We just crossed 300 yesterday. Facebook has seen similar growth. I would love for you to follow us. That’s the easiest way to track what’s happening with the MTC.

We’re also excited that major figures in education are lending their support to the MTC:

• Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa is an educational researcher and instructor at the Harvard University Extension School. She says the MTC “is a movement towards a better schema” for assessment that “embraces a better understanding of cognitive, affective, social and creative processes involved in human learning.”
• Annie Reznik is the Executive Director of The Coalition for Access, Affordability and Success and a Senior Research Fellow at the Learning Policy Institute. She applauds “the spirit of camaraderie in the Mastery Transcript Consortium as secondary school leaders work in concert to improve the external representation of their students’ academic experiences.”
• Denise Pope, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer in the Stanford Graduate School of Education and is the Co-Founder of Challenge Success. She is “excited to see so many schools working together in this consortium to create a product that can greatly improve student health and engagement with learning.”
• Tony Wagner is an Expert in Residence in the Harvard University Innovation Lab as well as a Senior Research Fellow in the Learning Policy Institute. He thinks the MTC may be a “game changer” and that our efforts may “well prove to be a tipping point in the transformation of education!” He’s so taken with our work that he’s even agreed to serve on the MTC Board.

As the momentum builds, so does the work we have to do. Our next step is to gather the Site Directors this summer and fall to begin operationalizing the vision. More on that soon.

In the meantime, we’re grateful to those schools who are eager to get to work, and we hope others join over the next months so that we have the best minds in place to create a high school transcript that will transform high school.