Dive Brief:

• In Pittsburgh, a program called the Pittsburgh City of Learning is giving students digital badges for completing summer educational opportunities.
• The initiative is a collaboration among a group of nonprofits and city organizations to help give students proof of what they learned over the summer for potential employers or universities.
• Students get badges for mastering skills and store them in an online portfolio, which can be shared publicly.

Dive Insight:

City officials say the badges offer a way to recognize student achievement in realms that are often underrecognized and hard to test. The program has focused on skills tied to college and career readiness, as well as key fields like robotics or coding. Educators helped pick and define the skills students need.

“I think what’s really exciting is that as we all know there’s kind of this lack of meaningful ways of showcasing what students have learned, particularly in out-of-school time,” said Cathy Lewis Long, the executive director of the Sprout Fund, which oversees City of Learning. The badges offer a way of doing that. 

The program is built around three flagship programs: Learn and Earn, a youth employment program; Summer Dreamers Academy, which focuses on digital and reading literacy; and a library-run summer reading program. But the city has also thrown the doors open to anyone who wants to participate. More than 40 organizations are using the badge system, and City of Learning is also working on getting local and national businesses like Best Buy to recognize them. At least one university has agreed to accept them.

Lewis Long said that districts should consider the program as a rigorous way of acknowledging what students are learning without relying on standardized testing.