Inside One District’s Experiment to Anchor Learning Around Career-Ready Skills

When students in the Ephrata, Pa., district complete a project, their goal is not just to explain what content they know, but also to demonstrate the skills that will help them succeed after graduation.

As part of a broader effort to rethink expectations, educators in the 4,000-student district about an hour from Philadelphia rewrote the state’s learning standards as “I can” statements and detailed a framework of knowledge, skills, and dispositions—like innovation and resilience—students will need to succeed in a rapidly changing workforce.

As a result, teachers grade students on assignments by detailing how well they meet targets like, “I can use text evidence to show how an author supports their opinion,” and by completing rubrics that measure how well they demonstrated skills like creativity and problem-solving. Through an online dashboard, families can track the times their children demonstrated those “life ready graduate” skills. They can even see aggregate data by grade or school level that show growth in those skills throughout the year.

“It’s important to know things, but with AI, it’s getting even more important to be able to do things,” Superintendent Brian Troop said. “You have to have content knowledge, but if you can’t get it into play by applying those skills, it’s like you don’t have that knowledge in the first place.”

Ephrata’s Life Ready Graduate plan has fundamentally changed how teachers think about instruction, how students demonstrate learning, and how schools measure success, he said. After more than a decade of planning, students do more project-based learning and complete year-end cornerstone projects that draw upon their social-emotional skills. And the community holds the district accountable through metrics aligned to a vision of success that’s broader than scores on state standardized tests.

The work, which started in 2015, has evolved as districts around the country ask big questions about what their communities expect from them, how to demonstrate their value in an increasingly competitive school choice environment, and what their students need to thrive in the jobs of the future.

A task force of superintendents, educational psychologists, and education policy experts assembled by AASA, the School Superintendents Association, set out to examine these strategies in 2025. In March, they released their first set of recommendations for districts to rethink their own models for defining and measuring success, highlighting Ephrata and other districts that have created “portrait of a graduate” profiles that outline essential skills. The aim is to more clearly articulate and operationalize a concept that has sometimes been criticized as vague without sacrificing academic rigor, leaders said.

“Most districts, though they believe in skill development, will still measure their own improvement through just standardized tests,” said John Malloy, the senior vice president of AASA’s leadership network who helped lead the task force. “If we do believe that these real skills are important, we have to shift how we measure success.”

Employers call on schools to prepare students for jobs of the future

In Ephrata, measures of life ready graduate skills aren’t used for the same high-stakes purposes as traditional grades—like deciding whether a student will advance academically or calculating their GPA—but they do serve as an important indicator of student growth and educators’ progress in changing instruction, educators said.

As artificial intelligence begins to radically reshape industries, employers say future workers will need to demonstrate skills like resilience and critical thinking to keep pace with the shifting contours of their jobs. Asked in December what skills their young workers need most, executives from U.S. companies pointed to traits like the ability to synthesize information, expand on ideas, and work together to identify challenges.

In a February analysis of “portrait of a graduate” profiles from 270 districts, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning identified common aims: effective communication, adaptability, and reflection.

Portrait-of-a-graduate boosters say districts must create the profiles with input from local communities, and they must treat the results as more than a “nice to have” or an inspirational poster.

Ephrata schools created its graduate profile with input from families, students, and educators. Leaders met with local employers to discuss what makes a successful employee and offered them certificates to display, demonstrating their support for the work.

Demonstrating learning through cornerstone projects

To encourage more project-based instruction, the district adopted cornerstone projects in 2018, giving students choices in how to demonstrate their learning. Every grade level has a theme that drives projects and field trips throughout the year and becomes the basis of a presentation, portfolio, or other product viewed by educators and external audiences, like city officials or business owners, at its culmination.

In 5th grade, students learn how their community works by visiting government agencies, police stations, and civic organizations to learn about how their work affects people’s lives. At the end of the year, they create displays to explain the skills and preparation they will need for the particular roles they want to play in their communities as adults, inviting public officials to see their work. Throughout the year, teachers incorporate content related to the theme in classes, like asking students to analyze local polling data in math lessons.

“It’s like a backdrop of relevance every content area has an opportunity to connect to,” Troop said.

The cornerstone themes vary in subject matter, and each is anchored to a set of skills. In kindergarten, students spend one year learning about the importance of animals, researching their favorite and reflecting on the responsibility of caring for creatures. First graders learn about maps, globes, and topological features. In 3rd grade, students learn about the importance of water, creating projects to explain how it changes forms through condensation and evaporation and demonstrate empathy by explaining how a lack of potable water affects people who must carry containers long distances to their homes.

In 8th grade, students spend a year learning about entrepreneurship, demonstrating their learning through a year-end idea pitch to real business leaders in the style of the TV show “Shark Tank.”

About a third of high school graduates in Ephrata also earn a Life Ready Graduate endorsement that is recognized by local employers as an asset in the hiring process. To earn the recognition, students must fulfill these requirements between 11th and 12th grade: meet minimum requirements for GPA and attendance; avoid any behavior that results in a suspension; complete in-person or online courses in civics and financial literacy; hold a regular job or volunteer position, or participate in an extracurricular activity; and complete a portfolio exploring potential career pathways.

Schools communicate career readiness to the community

To help teachers rethink instruction, the district hired six coaches who help teachers design projects and define transparent learning goals.

Educational psychologists have long debated whether “soft skills” like grit and perspective taking can be consistently and reliably measured, cautioning against their use for high-stakes purposes like school improvement or grade promotion. When students assess their own skills through self-reported surveys, they are prone to biases that may make them over or underrate their own progress, researchers have found.

But researchers are exploring more reliable ways to measure success, said Malloy of AASA. And schools can help students grow in these areas, even if that growth can’t be measured as precisely as the correct answer to a math equation, he said.

In addition to their roles in career success, executive functioning skills like working memory, flexible thinking, and the ability to control emotions underlie academic success in core subjects like math and reading, Malloy said. For students, demonstrating growth in those areas is similar to showing they can play a musical instrument or master a sport, he said, adding that proficiency can be demonstrated in a variety of ways.

“Skills get developed by trial and error, learning and failing, and trying again,” he said.

In Ephrata, teachers created rubrics with “look fors” that help students understand how to demonstrate skills like creativity and collaboration in their assignments, Troop said.

In a single school year, Ephrata teachers incorporated more than 181,000 opportunities to demonstrate those life ready graduate skills into lessons and projects, AASA noted in a case study.

Schools also sought to give students more of a voice, choice, and creative input in how their schools function. When the district redesigned a school media center, students had so much say in the project that “they probably spent more time with the architects than the adults did,” Troop joked.

High school technology students helped design and build a “maker bus,” a retrofitted school bus painted bright purple and equipped with tools like a 3D printer, a laser cutter, and a cabinet full of tools. Teachers park the bus outside of elementary schools for a few weeks at a time to give students a space to work on projects and demonstrate creativity.

“Now, that’s a living example of us turning the keys over to the students, and promoting instructional changes that increase autonomy and agency,” Troop said.