Last Updated on March 6, 2026 by Chicago Policy Review Staff
Outside Contributor: Nathan Lesch is a second-year PhD student studying American political institutions at Columbia University, Department of Political Science.
Introduction
Most American schools follow a Carnegie Unit-derived system, where students’ attainment is determined by the number of hours they spend in the classroom, in conjunction with grades that range from A to F. While many alternatives to this traditional manner of education have been proposed, few garnered the momentum that competency-based education had in the early 2010s.
Implementing competency-based education includes four key components: progression based on students’ mastery of pre-determined knowledge; personalized and interactive progress; flexibility in location and rate of learning; and incorporation of developing key personality traits and social skills into the curriculum. In practice, competency-based learning programs can vary widely in implementation, ranging from simple pedagogical principles that teachers can implement in their classrooms to complete overhauls of existing educational systems. Proponents of competency-based education believe it ensures students graduate high school with necessary skills, while also allowing them to more efficiently allocate time between their strengths and weaknesses.
Maine adopted state-wide competency-based education legislation in 2012. Unfortunately, the program was an abject failure, and the state quickly did away with it. By 2018, competency-based education graduation requirements were eliminated. Due to implementation issues, no students had spent their whole four years of high school under a competency-based learning curriculum.That said, the case is illustrative of key principles that future policymakers should keep in mind if they wish to revisit competency-based education in the future.
Background
The movement toward competency-based education began when private philanthropic groups, particularly the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, began spreading the approach. The Gates Foundation saw competency-based education as a complement to its other education agendas, reducing class sizes and incorporating more technology into classroom instruction. The foundation helped establish and fund the Re-Inventing Schools Coalition (RISC), an organization meant to spread competency-based education. RISC was not the only organization doing this work, though. Jobs for the Future (JFF) also supported competency-based education, but focused on state-level advocacy—rather than at the district level, like RISC. JFF justified its support by claiming that the traditional education system was leaving high school graduates ill-equipped to enter the workforce. As a result of this advocacy, many states made legislative changes that enabled or facilitated the spread of competency-based education programs. Early adopters of competency-based standards included New Hampshire and Ohio.
Part of the reason for this quick spread of competency-based education was due to optimism among academic literature (before Maine’s experiment) that the approach could ameliorate some of education’s performance woes. Unfortunately, its researchers were mainly affiliated with, or funded by, the very same private philanthropies that had already decided that competency-based education was a valuable alternative to traditional education in the United States. As such, some of the research was meant to reinforce the philanthropies’ existing advocacy for competency-based education. There were, however, some valid research findings in this pre-Maine time period. For instance, a case analysis of the Boston Day and Evening Academy (BDEA), a public charter school that exclusively serves children who have struggled in traditional educational settings, found that the school’s competency-based program improved the college-readiness of students who had previously been off-track.
Case Study
Perhaps unsurprisingly, philanthropies drove Maine’s competency-based education program. The Gates Foundation supplied funds indirectly through the Nellie Mae Education Foundation. Nellie Mae funded the state’s two pilot programs, in Portland and Sanford, and was particularly successful in generating support from business groups. Further, Nellie Mae provided funding to establish the Center for Best Practice, a quasi-governmental agency sympathetic to competency-based education, meant for producing high-quality research on innovative educational practices. These efforts were able to generate significant support for competency-based education among legislators and high-ranking state bureaucrats, despite some grassroots opposition.
As such, Maine passed “An Act To Prepare Maine People for the Future Economy,” which required all public schools in the state to switch to competency-based education within the next two years. Support for this measure was bipartisan, and it easily passed both chambers of Maine’s legislature.
Unfortunately, problems began to arise. The incredible latitude that school districts were given—in conjunction with the state’s lack of monetary or programmatic support—was ruinous.
Maine required students to demonstrate mastery in eight subjects: career/education development, English language arts, health/physical education, mathematics, science/technology, social studies, visual/performing arts, and world languages. Additionally, students had to demonstrate competency in “Guiding Principles”. These principles included elusive values like critical thinking and informed citizenship. The law allowed students to demonstrate proficiency in various ways, including a traditional exam, a portfolio of work, a project, or a performance.
Considerable discretion was also left to administrators and teachers. Each district was tasked with defining “proficiency” in the required subjects. This meant schools had to maintain a delicate balance, because if standards were too high, an unprecedented number of students could fail to graduate. If they were set too low, it would defeat the purpose of the whole exercise. Additionally, schools weren’t required to change their grading systems, so some retained their A-F scale. Teachers in many other districts, however, started awarding students scores of 1 through 4—with 3 equaling proficiency—for each of the key standards. Moreover, schools were only given a 0.1 percent increase in state funding over the previous year to implement competency-based education.
The result was considerable variation between students’ classroom experiences, depending on the teacher they had, even when taking the same class in the same school. Quality of instruction dropped. Many parents also felt that the shift to competency-based grading constituted a loosening of standards. Iterative re-evaluation, they felt, lowered the stakes of homework and examinations, which caused their children to lose motivation and develop bad learning habits. Additionally, some felt that the original education system better reflected the working world. The grading system was also a source of frustration. Students and parents did not understand the scale, and little was done to explain it to them. Further, students worried about the impact that this new system would have on their college admissions. Some students reported being bored with the pace of learning under competency-based education.
Given these issues, it should come as no surprise that Maine’s competency-based education experiment was short-lived. By 2018, complaints from teachers, parents, and students, coupled with growing concerns about the program’s effects on graduation rates, caused the state to scrap competency-based graduation requirements. At this time, Maine’s state government had little idea about the effectiveness of its competency-based education experiment, as repeated delays in getting the program running meant that no students had completed the entirety of high school under a competency-based learning curriculum. The state also did not know how many school districts had fully implemented competency-based education. Moreover, as it became apparent that the program was failing, Nellie Mae and its allies (like the Gates Foundation) began separating themselves from the experiment.
Discussion & Conclusion
Maine’s competency-based education experiment was a failure—and a costly one—as it effectively ended the movement toward this model of education, at least in the immediate years following the program’s end. The reasons for this failure abound and include both policy and implementation problems.
The state relied especially on nonprofit advocacy organizations to drive the legislative development of competency-based education. As a result, considerable discretion was left up to school districts. Unfortunately, these districts were not provided with the monetary or technical resources to make these decisions. Administrators and teachers did not know how to communicate competency-based education with students and their parents, nor did they know how to evaluate and grade students. The state did nothing to ameliorate these issues. As a result, most schools were unable to develop fully fleshed-out competency-based education programs before the state eventually scrapped the experiment.
Despite these failures, much can be learned from Maine’s experience. To this end, considering the preferences and concerns of students, and thinking more critically about decentralizing responsibilities, are important steps for future policymakers.
Future competency-based education programs should try to normalize students’ experiences across classrooms within participating schools. Students didn’t like having wildly different classroom experiences. They felt a lack of fairness—and perhaps a loss of agency. Considering these feelings is important because students can have a strong impact on both teachers and their parents. If students are causing problems in the classroom or telling their parents that a new program is problematic, opposition to the program can quickly mount.
When making decisions about decentralizing responsibilities, policymakers should think deeply about capacity. To their credit, Maine’s legislature likely thought that, by building considerable flexibility into the implementation of competency-based education, they were allowing school districts to craft their own programs in whichever way they thought suited them best. This failed, though, because teachers and school administrators did not have the capacity to make decisions about defining and evaluating competency. While some flexibility would likely have benefited Maine’s school districts, leaving essentially every substantive decision to under-resourced schools caused problems.
Competency-based education can have a place in the American educational system; however, it needs to occupy more modest ground than the entire state of Maine. Rather than mandating a statewide overhaul, states should encourage and support local pilot programs, allowing districts and schools to develop, test and refine educational models that fit their unique contexts and capacities. Lessons learned from these local pilots can then inform broader policy decisions, ensuring that any move toward statewide adoption is grounded in proven, scalable practices and genuine local capacity. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to improving public education in the United States; effective reform must balance state-level vision with local innovation and readiness.