Many states and school districts are developing and adopting “portrait of a graduate” documents that outline the key skills, attributes, and mindsets that students should develop by graduation.
At least 26 states have a portrait of a graduate or outline guidance for districts to create their own, according to a 2026 report from America Succeeds, a nonprofit focused on education and workforce development.
But are those portraits influencing changes in curriculum, instruction, assessment, and professional development for teachers to help students develop these skills?
Not yet, concludes a draft research study that was presented and discussed at the ISTELive 26 + ASCD Annual Conference, a technology and curriculum event for educators held in Orlando, Fla., earlier this summer.
The researchers interviewed leaders from 15 school districts in the United States ranging in size from 750 to 82,000 students that were in the process of implementing portraits of a graduate. They found that nine districts’ implementation efforts were underway but not yet systematic, five districts were showing more coordinated implementation efforts, and only one district had a “transformational integration” across most or all domains examined. The research paper is currently under peer review.
In a recent interview with Education Week, the researchers—Scott McLeod, a professor of education leadership at the University of Colorado Denver, and Lori McEwen, an adjunct professor of educational policy and practice at Boston College and an education consultant—discussed what makes a portrait transformational and the challenges districts face in getting there.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How are districts ensuring these portraits aren’t just another poster on the wall?
McEwen: For many [district leaders], it starts with their belief in it. Several folks talked about how important they thought it was, the promise that they thought having a portrait held for making these changes and for helping students to develop these skills.
Something else that we found is we had some leaders who take an approach that is very much a grassroots approach, letting teachers decide how they would allow and support the portrait to show up in their learning. In one district where teachers came together, they were able to develop some things on their own and then were visiting each other’s classrooms. It took off faster than the strategic plan had intended for it to take off in terms of their development of bringing the portrait into different elements of school. So there is that level of grassroots, teacher autonomy, teacher agency that I think is really important.
What did you find in your research?
McEwen: We looked at [district implementation] through an alignment continuum. What we found is that it’s not as though districts were just all in one place or another in terms of implementing the portrait. They could be in one place [along the continuum] in one element, and [a different place] on another element.
In one of our districts, we found that even though they’d done a lot of work with the portrait—it was in the program of studies, it was definitely a North Star—they didn’t have this specifically written into their curriculum documents. They weren’t as far along the continuum because they hadn’t codified it in that area, but in other areas, they were moving along, especially with having stakeholder buy-in.
The portraits are inviting people to move in some new directions, and our belief systems, mindsets, and past experiences about what school should be and what school should look like keep pulling us back toward the traditional model.
It’s not a binary—you’re either implementing it or not. There are all of these elements of the system that are important for any initiative.
It was really telling how many folks were so excited and gung ho about this but hadn’t made the next step to strategically codify it into all of these other processes and documents about the way you run a system.
What barriers do ‘portrait of a graduate’ initiatives face in influencing how schools work?
McLeod: What we both see over and over again is that the number one barrier to doing this work is how deeply embedded our mindsets are about what school should look like. The portraits are inviting schools to rethink, in many ways, the basic purpose, premise, and processes of P-12 schooling.
Schools that are designed to prepare kids to be good regurgitators of low-level content look very different from schools that are meant to prepare future-ready problem-solvers for global challenges. The portraits are inviting people to move in some new directions, and our belief systems, mindsets, and past experiences about what school should be and what school should look like keep pulling us back toward the traditional model. There’s always that essential tension that overlays all of this.
McEwen: Another major challenge that came up for our respondents was the COVID-19 pandemic. I can’t tell you how many people said, “We were on our way, we were getting started, people were excited,” and what COVID-19 really did was bring people in some places back to basics. It was so difficult to see students learning remotely. Teachers were so overwhelmed. The notion that we would make more changes when people got back, rather than go back to what we were used to, was just a bridge too far for many of our districts.
The study mentions assessment as a challenge that districts face. Could you elaborate on that?
McLeod: Teachers are familiar with how to assess lower-level learning—quizzes, tests, essays, exams; multiple choice, fill in the blank, write a five-paragraph essay. When you start talking about assessing collaboration, creativity, critical thinking or global citizenship, teachers and school districts writ large are pretty unfamiliar with what those assessment structures look like.
People will say this is what we want, but we don’t know how to assess it. And given that we don’t know how to assess it, we’re going to revert back to the assessments that we know, which then, of course, drives the instruction back to what we’ve always done. If we’re doing lower-level assessments, then we’re going to do lower-level instruction.
McEwen: I hope that nobody’s trying to say that the portrait should be something that is ever graded [in a traditional way], so that some kids are “B” communicators and “A” collaborators. There’s a problem with thinking that everything has to be assessed in that certain way.
What are some ways schools are already moving toward building ‘portrait of a graduate’ competencies?
McLeod: A reason a lot of students are successful in their [career and technical education] pathways is because they’re not just sitting passively and listening in classrooms; they’re actively applying what they’re learning and doing and creating. It’s that hands-on, applied nature of the work that the portrait is inviting, that we already see signs of success in places like CTE and extracurricular robotics club and the debate team and theater. We just haven’t moved it into English or math or science or whatever.
McEwen: We did have a lot of leaders talk about building in project-based learning and trying to engage students in more real-world applications. CTE would be the best example of that, but we see others doing it in meaningful projects and meaningful project-based learning. That is where we saw folks seeing how it can all come together in an academic classroom.
