A Portrait of a Promise
Helping Families Understand the Portrait of a Graduate and Outcomes-Based Education
For generations, families have understood school through a familiar set of structures. Students attend school for a certain number of days, complete a prescribed collection of courses, earn credits, take required examinations, and, if they meet those requirements, receive a diploma.
That system is familiar. Familiar does not always mean sufficient.
A diploma indicates that a student has completed the established requirements. It does not necessarily tell us what that young person can do with what they learned. Can the graduate evaluate competing claims? Communicate an idea to different audiences? Apply knowledge to an unfamiliar problem? Work productively with others? Revise an approach after receiving feedback? Make an ethical decision? Set a goal and persist when the first attempt fails?
These are not alternatives to academic knowledge. They are what allow young people to use academic knowledge once they leave the classroom.
That is the central idea behind a Portrait of a Graduate and the movement toward outcomes-based education. The Portrait identifies the kind of graduate we hope to develop. Outcomes-based education then asks us to design the learning experiences, support systems, and assessments that will help every student become that graduate.
For parents and caregivers, this transition may initially sound like another wave of educational terminology. It may also raise legitimate questions. Are academic standards being lowered? Will students still learn essential content? What will happen to grades, tests, credits, and transcripts? How will colleges understand the new system? What happens when a student struggles? Will expectations remain consistent from one classroom or district to another?
Families deserve more than slogans in response. They deserve a clear explanation of what is changing, why it is changing, what will remain, and how the transition will affect their children.
What Is a Portrait of a Graduate?
A Portrait of a Graduate is a shared vision of the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and capacities students should possess when they complete high school. It answers a deceptively simple question:
What should every graduate know, be able to do, and be prepared to become?
New York State’s Portrait of a Graduate identifies six attributes. A graduate should be:
Academically Prepared
A Creative Innovator
A Critical Thinker
An Effective Communicator
A Global Citizen
Reflective and Future-Focused
These attributes are grounded in culturally responsive and sustaining education and are intended to prepare students to learn, grow, create, work, and contribute. The Portrait connects academic readiness with creativity, communication, reflection, civic responsibility, and the ability to navigate an increasingly complex world (New York State Education Department [NYSED], 2025a).
The Portrait is not a new course that students take in senior year. It is not a poster placed in a school lobby. It is not an extracurricular program reserved for students who already excel.
It is intended to become the organizing vision for the entire Pre-K–12 experience.
If effective communication is an outcome we value, students need regular opportunities to explain, present, listen, discuss, write, and communicate through multiple forms of media. If critical thinking matters, students must do more than recall information. They need to evaluate evidence, recognize patterns, question assumptions, and make defensible decisions. If reflection matters, students need opportunities to examine their work, use feedback, identify their strengths, and determine what to do next.
The Portrait describes the destination. It does not prescribe one identical journey for every student.
What Is Outcomes-Based Education?
Outcomes-based education begins with clarity about what students should ultimately know and be able to do. Educators then work backward to design curriculum, instruction, learning experiences, supports, and assessments aligned with those outcomes.
Traditional systems often begin with time and coverage:
What course is the student enrolled in?
How many instructional hours were completed?
What chapters were covered?
How many assignments were submitted?
What numerical average did the student earn?
An outcomes-based system adds another, more consequential question:
What evidence demonstrates that the student can actually use the learning?
This does not mean content disappears. Students cannot think critically about nothing. They cannot communicate effectively without knowledge, vocabulary, context, and ideas. They cannot solve complex mathematical, scientific, historical, civic, or social problems without a strong academic foundation.
The difference is that knowing is no longer treated as the final destination. Students are also expected to interpret, apply, create, communicate, and transfer what they know.
In an outcomes-based system, a student might demonstrate learning through a combination of traditional assessments, research, writing, presentations, performances, projects, exhibitions, portfolios, experiments, work-based learning, or other authentic tasks. The specific form may vary, but the learning expectations must remain explicit, rigorous, and transparent.
Well-designed competency-based systems include clear and transferable learning expectations, meaningful assessments, timely differentiated support, multiple learning pathways, student agency, and advancement based on evidence of learning rather than time alone (Levine & Patrick, 2019).
This is not about making school easier. In many ways, it asks more of students.
It is possible to memorize information for a test and forget it shortly afterward. It is much harder to use that information to solve an unfamiliar problem, defend a conclusion, create something meaningful, or respond thoughtfully to questions from an authentic audience.
The Portrait and Outcomes-Based Education Are Connected, but They Are Not the Same
The Portrait of a Graduate and outcomes-based education are often discussed together, but they serve different purposes.
The Portrait defines the broad outcomes we value. It describes the qualities and capacities we want graduates to carry into college, employment, civic life, relationships, and their communities.
Outcomes-based education is the approach used to align the educational system with those goals.
The connection looks like this:
The Portrait says graduates should be effective communicators.
Curriculum identifies how communication develops across grade levels and subject areas.
Teachers design opportunities for students to practice communication.
Students receive feedback and revise their work.
Assessments ask students to demonstrate communication in meaningful contexts.
Schools collect evidence of growth over time.
Families receive information about what the student can do and what the student is still developing.
Without this alignment, the Portrait risks becoming aspirational language rather than lived experience.
A school cannot claim that collaboration, creativity, reflection, and communication matter while measuring success almost entirely through isolated tasks, compliance, accumulated points, and timed examinations. If we value broader outcomes, students need real opportunities to develop and demonstrate them.
What This Transition Is Not
Families may hear terms such as outcomes-based, competency-based, performance-based, mastery-based, personalized, and student-centered. Because these terms are sometimes used inconsistently, confusion is understandable.
It is important to be clear about what the transition should not mean.
It is not the abandonment of academic content
Academic preparation is the first attribute in New York’s Portrait. Students still need strong foundations in literacy, mathematics, science, social studies, the arts, world languages, physical education, technology, and other areas of learning.
The goal is to help students retain, connect, and use that knowledge.
It is not every student doing whatever they want
Student voice and choice do not eliminate common expectations. Students may have different ways of exploring or demonstrating learning, but those options should remain aligned with shared standards and clearly defined criteria.
Flexibility in pathway does not require ambiguity in destination.
It is not eliminating assessment
Outcomes-based education actually depends on strong assessment. If advancement is connected to demonstrated learning, educators need valid, reliable, and equitable ways to determine what students know and can do.
Assessment may become more varied, but it does not become less important. Research on competency-based education has also identified assessment as an area that requires further development, consistency, and study (Evans et al., 2021).
It is not lowering expectations for students who struggle
An outcomes-based system should maintain high expectations while changing the support, time, feedback, and learning pathway available to students.
The expectation remains. The support becomes more responsive.
It is not simply replacing teachers with technology
Personalization is not synonymous with placing every child in front of adaptive software. Relationships, discussion, feedback, modeling, collaboration, and professional judgment remain essential. Technology may support learning, but it cannot define learning.
It is not change that should happen without families
If families only encounter the new system when a report card changes or a traditional test is replaced, communication has started too late. Parents and caregivers must be included in understanding the goals, examining the proposed changes, identifying concerns, and evaluating whether the new system is working for all students.
Why Change Is Necessary
The world students are entering requires both knowledge and the ability to use it.
Young people are surrounded by information, but access to information does not ensure that they can evaluate its accuracy. They communicate constantly, but frequency of communication does not ensure clarity, empathy, or responsibility. They will encounter rapidly changing technologies, workplaces, civic challenges, and social conditions that cannot be addressed by memorizing one correct response.
At the same time, employers, colleges, families, and communities consistently value capacities such as problem-solving, communication, adaptability, collaboration, initiative, and ethical judgment. Schools have always contributed to the development of these capacities, but they have not always defined, taught, measured, or reported them with the same clarity used for traditional academic content.
The Portrait of a Graduate makes those expectations visible.
It also challenges us to confront a long-standing weakness in traditional systems: students can sometimes earn points, pass courses, and accumulate credits while retaining significant gaps in understanding. A numerical average can conceal those gaps. A student may compensate for limited understanding in one essential area by earning points in another. Once the final grade is recorded, the system often moves forward regardless of what was actually mastered.
Outcomes-based approaches attempt to make learning more transparent. Students and families should be able to answer:
What is the student expected to learn?
What does proficiency look like?
What evidence has the student produced?
What has the student already demonstrated?
Where is additional support needed?
What is the next step?
That is more useful than simply knowing that a student earned an 82.
Why Families May Be Uneasy
Educational leaders must resist the temptation to treat family concerns as resistance to innovation. Parents and caregivers are being asked to trust a system that may look different from the one they experienced.
Grades, credits, class rank, Regents examinations, transcripts, honor rolls, and course sequences have long served as signals, even when those signals were imperfect. When schools propose changing them, families reasonably want to understand what will replace them.
Some parents may worry that subjective projects will replace objective measures. Others may worry that group work will obscure individual learning. Families of students with disabilities may wonder whether supports will lead to genuinely equitable access or reduced expectations. Families of high-achieving students may worry about pace and advanced opportunities. Multilingual families may need communication that goes beyond translating a technical presentation. Families applying to colleges may be concerned about how new transcripts or credentials will be interpreted.
These are not distractions from implementation. They are part of implementation.
Trust will not be built by repeating that the new system is better. It will be built by showing families the learning expectations, sharing examples of student work, explaining how educators judge proficiency, acknowledging unanswered questions, and demonstrating how quality and consistency will be protected.
What Schools Need to Do
This transition requires considerably more than adopting new vocabulary.
Build a shared understanding of the outcomes
Schools must define what each Portrait attribute looks like across developmental levels and disciplines. What does effective communication look like in second grade, seventh-grade science, a high school art studio, a career and technical education program, or a work-based learning placement?
The attributes must be translated into observable learning without reducing complex human capacities to a checklist.
Align curriculum from Pre-K through graduation
The Portrait cannot begin in high school. Communication, curiosity, reflection, creativity, responsibility, and problem-solving develop over time.
Districts need to identify where students will be introduced to each competency, where they will practice it, and where they will independently demonstrate it. This requires vertical and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Invest in educators
Teachers need time and professional learning to design meaningful tasks, create and use common rubrics, provide actionable feedback, examine student work, calibrate expectations, and develop appropriate supports.
We cannot ask educators to redesign learning while preserving every existing demand and simply adding the Portrait on top. Leaders must examine what can be integrated, revised, or removed.
Develop trustworthy assessments
Projects and performances are not inherently rigorous simply because they differ from tests. High-quality performance assessments require clear criteria, appropriate academic content, individual accountability, accessible entry points, and consistent scoring.
Assessment systems should include multiple forms of evidence rather than placing the entire weight of a student’s future on a single test or project. Meaningful assessment should be integrated with curriculum, instruction, and professional learning (Badrinarayan et al., 2023).
Protect equity
More flexibility can create opportunity, but poorly designed flexibility can also deepen inequality.
All students need access to rich projects, advanced learning, the arts, technology, career exploration, extracurricular experiences, expert feedback, and authentic audiences. Schools must ensure that students with disabilities, multilingual learners, students experiencing poverty, and students in small or under-resourced districts are not offered narrower interpretations of the Portrait.
Equity cannot mean allowing some students to create, lead, investigate, and contribute while others complete remedial worksheets in preparation for those opportunities.
Create transparent reporting systems
Families need reporting tools that communicate more, not less.
A strong outcomes-based report should show the competencies assessed, the evidence considered, the student’s current level of performance, progress over time, areas of strength, areas requiring attention, and the support being provided. Schools must explain how this information connects with course grades, credits, transcripts, graduation requirements, and college admissions.
Phase the work thoughtfully
This is system change. It should include pilots, feedback cycles, professional learning, quality reviews, and opportunities to revise.
Research suggests that competency-based education is better understood as a continuum of practices than as an all-or-nothing model. The evidence base regarding student outcomes remains developing, and implementation varies substantially across settings (Evans et al., 2021). That should encourage thoughtful design and evaluation, not rushed adoption or automatic rejection.
What Parents and Caregivers Can Do
Families should not be expected to become curriculum or assessment experts. They should, however, be genuine partners in shaping and evaluating the transition.
Ask to see what the words mean
When a school says students will become critical thinkers or effective communicators, ask what those attributes look like in practice.
Ask:
How will this develop from elementary through high school?
What will students actually do?
How will teachers know whether a student is progressing?
May families see examples of work at different proficiency levels?
Focus conversations on learning, not only grades
Instead of asking only, “What did you get?” families can also ask:
What did you learn?
What can you do now that you could not do before?
What was difficult?
What feedback did you receive?
What did you revise?
Where else could you use this learning?
What do you need to do next?
These questions reinforce the habits embedded in the Portrait without requiring families to recreate school at home.
Encourage productive struggle
Outcomes-based learning often includes revision, feedback, and multiple attempts. A first effort that does not meet the standard is not necessarily failure. It is information about what the learner needs next.
This does not mean deadlines and responsibility disappear. It means that learning remains the goal rather than the collection of points.
Share knowledge about the whole child
Families know interests, responsibilities, cultural experiences, strengths, motivations, challenges, and abilities that may not be visible in school. That knowledge can help educators design relevant opportunities and recognize competencies students demonstrate outside the classroom.
Learning does not occur only inside school walls.
Participate before decisions are finalized
Attend forums, respond to surveys, serve on advisory groups, examine sample rubrics, and ask how family feedback will influence decisions. Schools should create several ways to participate, because attendance at an evening meeting cannot be the only gateway to partnership.
Continue asking difficult questions
Families should ask how expectations will remain consistent, how individual contributions will be evaluated, how students who need more time will be supported, how advanced learners will continue to grow, and how colleges and employers will interpret new credentials.
Support for change does not require silence. Responsible partnership includes scrutiny.
What Communities Need to Do
If the Portrait describes graduates who can work, create, communicate, and contribute, students need places to practice those capacities beyond simulated classroom exercises.
Community organizations, businesses, colleges, cultural institutions, libraries, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and civic groups can provide authentic problems, mentors, internships, audiences, research opportunities, service experiences, feedback, and expertise.
Communities must also reconsider how they recognize readiness.
If employers say they value problem-solving, communication, initiative, and collaboration, they should help schools define those outcomes and provide opportunities for students to demonstrate them. Colleges should communicate how they will interpret performance assessments, portfolios, capstones, microcredentials, and redesigned transcripts. Community partners should ensure that opportunities are accessible to students who lack transportation, financial resources, personal connections, or flexible schedules.
The transition cannot rest solely on teachers. If we want graduates prepared to contribute to a community, the community has to become part of their preparation.
What We Need to Do Next
The Portrait of a Graduate gives us a shared destination. The difficult work is building a coherent route toward it.
We need to:
Communicate the purpose of the change before introducing its structures.
Define the outcomes in language students and families can understand.
Protect academic knowledge while increasing application and transfer.
Build competencies across all grade levels and subjects.
Give educators time to design, collaborate, assess, and recalibrate.
Use multiple forms of evidence to evaluate student learning.
Maintain transparent, rigorous, and consistent expectations.
Provide timely support without lowering the destination.
Include students and families as partners in design and evaluation.
Expand community-based and work-based learning opportunities.
Monitor outcomes and inequities honestly.
Revise the system when evidence shows that an approach is not working.
We need to avoid presenting this transition as a finished solution.
A Portrait of a Graduate is a promise. It is a promise that the diploma will represent more than time completed and requirements checked. It is a promise that students will leave school with both knowledge and the ability to use it. It is a promise that their capacity to communicate, think, create, reflect, adapt, and contribute will matter.
A portrait is not the person.
Posting six attributes on a wall will not develop them. Renaming assignments will not transform learning. Replacing a number with a proficiency label will not automatically create a more equitable system. The promise becomes real only when curriculum, instruction, assessment, professional learning, family partnership, schedules, resources, and community opportunities are aligned around the outcomes we claim to value.
Parents and caregivers do not need to be convinced through educational jargon. They need to be invited into an honest conversation about what we want for children and what it will take to get there.
Most families already want graduates who are knowledgeable, thoughtful, creative, responsible, reflective, and able to communicate. The disagreement is rarely about whether those qualities matter. The questions are whether schools can develop them intentionally, whether we can assess them credibly, whether every child will have an equitable opportunity to demonstrate them, and whether the adults responsible for the system are willing to make the necessary changes.
Those are the questions we should be asking.
This transition is not simply about changing how students graduate. It is about changing what we believe graduation should mean.
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References
Badrinarayan, A., Darling-Hammond, L., DiNapoli, M. A., Jr., Kini, T., Miller, T., & Woods, J. (2023). Developing assessment systems that support teaching and learning: Recommendations for federal support. Learning Policy Institute. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/developing-assessment-systems-federal-support-brief
Evans, C. M., Landl, E., & Thompson, J. (2021). Making sense of K–12 competency-based education: A systematic literature review of implementation and outcomes research from 2000 to 2019. The Journal of Competency-Based Education, 6(2), e01228. https://doi.org/10.1002/cbe2.1228
Levine, E., & Patrick, S. (2019). What is competency-based education? An updated definition. Aurora Institute. https://aurora-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/what-is-competency-based-education-an-updated-definition-web.pdf
New York State Education Department. (2023). New York State Blue Ribbon Commission on Graduation Measures: Recommendations for future-ready students. https://www.nysed.gov/sites/default/files/programs/grad-measures/nys-blue-ribbon-commission-graduation-measures-report.pdf
New York State Education Department. (2025a). New York State Portrait of a Graduate. https://www.nysed.gov/grad-measures/new-york-state-portrait-graduate
New York State Education Department. (2025b, July 14). Board of Regents and Department adopt New York State Portrait of a Graduate. https://www.nysed.gov/news/2025/board-regents-and-department-adopt-new-york-state-portrait-graduate
Terrell, J. H., Ahigian, R., Garvey, M., & Barzee, S. (2025). Building future-ready students: The state of Portraits of a Graduate frameworks. Region 2 Comprehensive Center. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED673550.pdf
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