Mastery Transcript Consortium® (MTC) launched in 2017 as a national nonprofit membership organization to help make mastery learning—or competency-based education—available to all learners. The MTC approach was founded in recognition that the high school transcript was a boulder in the way of high school innovation and there was a better way to prepare high school students for the world ahead and presenting them to colleges and employers.
In May 2024, the MTC became a wholly owned subsidiary of Educational Testing Service (ETS). The acquisition aims to enhance competency-based education by integrating MTC's innovative learning records with ETS's assessment capabilities. The collaboration is part of the "Skills for the Future" initiative, a joint effort between ETS and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, designed to shift education from traditional time-based models to competency-based systems.
Joining forces with ETS was an opportunity for MTC to expand the resources it can deploy on behalf of its extensive school and college network spanning school systems serving more than half a million learners each year. This work can empower both K12 and higher education systems to implement competency-based systems and reliably validate that learners demonstrate the development of durable skills.
In 2017, working with member schools, MTC co-designed and built a software platform that members used to create scalable, flexible learning records— Mastery Transcripts and MTC Learning Records. Schools published Mastery Transcripts or Learning Records for their learners and delivered them securely to college admissions readers and/or employers.
MTC members (380 total membership, 218 private, 162 public) have been public and private high schools and out-of-school time organizations from across the United States —and several from around the world. A growing group of member schools used the Mastery Transcript as their official school transcript. This approach to recordkeeping and verification responded to the growing number of state education systems that endorsed personalized, competency-based education frameworks geared to prepare all high school graduates for a future of learning and work. State leaders and policymakers leveraged these frameworks and other resources to support the growth of innovative K–12 models. This approach also recognized the many youth-serving organizations—afterschool and out-of-school time (OST) organizations that provide powerful mastery learning experiences. The MTC Learning Record (MLR) has offered them a way to capture evidence of this learning and allow young people to bridge in-school and out-of-school growth experiences. The MLR has enabled learners to demonstrate both college and career readiness.
Mastery Transcript® and MTC Learning Record | Mastery Transcript Consortium® (MTC)