A growing number of states and districts are turning to competency-based education (CBE) as a strategy for enabling students to become college and career ready. CBE is an approach that removes time as the measure of learning, replacing it with credit awarded based on students’ demonstrated mastery of competencies—regardless of the time learning takes. A growing number of states and districts are using their CBE reforms as an opportunity to ensure that students not only gain academic content knowledge but also develop the capacity to promote deeper learning competencies, applying their learning to new problems, contexts, and disciplines, and adopting the required skills and dispositions to become adaptive, lifelong learners.

This resource was produced as part of the Great Lakes and Midwest Regional Deeper Learning Initiative and is intended to illustrate the various ways in which state education agencies can advance CBE initiatives. It provides an overview of CBE and a guiding action framework to advance CBE strategies and offers selected profiles of CBE-related work within the region, as well as a list of CBE resources.