New Hampshire and the Carnegie Unit

More than a century ago, during the first U.S. wave of standardization, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching proposed a system to standardize high school credits by assigning one unit of value to a subject taught one hour a day, five days a week, for one school year. Since then, the Carnegie unit has admirably performed its singular purpose: transforming the ambiguities of education into a clear set of inputs, outputs, and calculations. Seat time yields credits; credits yield a diploma.

During the last 20 years, the Carnegie unit has come under widespread criticism. In fact, it was disowned by its family when the Carnegie Foundation's then-president, Ernest Boyer, "officially declare[d] the Carnegie unit obsolete" (Boyer, 1993). But despite its increasingly unwelcome and counterproductive place in U.S. high schools, the Carnegie unit persists because it has successfully taken control of the most intransigent elements of these schools: scheduling, grading, staffing, higher education admissions, and the four-year sequenced curriculum.