Four Scoped Challenges for Four HGSE Courses.

IMPACTER Pathway builds measurement infrastructure that scores authentic student voice against published rubrics. Under California's Behavioral Health Services Act, the Santa Clara County Office of Education leads a statewide evaluation initiative. IMPACTER builds the measurement layer, with Stanford, Applied Survey Research, and Breaking Barriers California validating the work, and a public dashboard as the deliverable.

What Should Public Accountability Look Like When the Measure Is Strength-Based?

Nearly every public education dashboard is deficit-framed. This one measures protective evidence in student voice: coping, connection, help-seeking, reflection, forward orientation, composited into a Wellness Index that routes to MTSS support tiers. That inversion changes what "good performance" means, what incentives a public dashboard creates, and who should govern the thresholds.

• Q1The logic model.What is the full theory of change from screening administration to tier assignment to support delivered to student outcome? Which links are tested, and which are assumed?
• Q2Asset-based accountability.When the measure is strength-based rather than deficit-based, what does "good performance" mean at the school level, and what does that do to incentives?
• Q3Threshold legitimacy.Who has standing to set tier boundaries: the measurement vendor, the county office, the state commission, districts, families? Design the governance protocol.
• Q4Unintended consequences.If a public dashboard rewards higher scores and the input is student voice, what are the failure modes (coaching, prompt-gaming, selective administration, opt-out patterns), and how does the evaluation design detect them?

That sentence is not a stretch here. It's the literal design constraint. The dashboard is public by mandate, the consortium spans five organizations, and the population being measured is students whose voices are the data. Student teams would map the logic model, shape evaluation questions with real stakeholders, and deliver an evaluation proposal with a live client waiting for it.

• A participatory evaluation proposal for the public dashboard: questions, methods, stakeholder roles
• An indicator framework: what gets reported publicly, at what level of aggregation, on what cadence
• A stakeholder engagement protocol for threshold-setting and ongoing governance
• A risk register of gaming and unintended-consequence failure modes, with detection strategies

IMPACTER Pathway measures durable skills through authentic student voice, scored against rubrics and crosswalked into each district's own Portrait language, live today across California districts. We are the measurement partner in California's effort to build its first statewide Portrait of a Graduate assessment framework, which makes "what would it take for this to matter" a question with a direct line into state policy.

Redesign the System, Level by Level.

Measurement now exists: student voice can be scored against a district's own Portrait rubric. The redesign question is everything around it. The course's four-level structure maps one-to-one onto the problem:

• L1Classroom.A teacher receives a class of Portrait scores. What happens Monday? The "what do I do with this" layer is genuinely thin across the field. Design it.
• L2School.How does Portrait evidence enter structures that already exist (advisory, PLCs, senior capstone, MTSS teams) without adding seat time?
• L3District.How does Portrait evidence flow into LCAP goals, board reporting, and the accountability cycle, so the Portrait survives a superintendent transition?
• L4Policy.California is developing a statewide Portrait framework. What does a state have to legislate for durable-skill evidence to carry weight on a transcript?

The course's structure is the problem's structure. And the stakeholder panel is a feature, not a formality: we can seat real district partners on it, so the redesign is presented to the people who would have to live inside it.

• A system redesign proposal, "the Portrait-bearing high school," spanning all four levels
• A classroom-level playbook: what a teacher does with Portrait evidence, Monday morning
• A district integration map: LCAP, board reporting, and accountability-cycle touchpoints
• A policy brief: what states would need to legislate for Portrait evidence to carry transcript weight

IMPACTER Pathway scores authentic student voice against published four-level developmental rubrics (Foundational, Developing, Competent, Advanced), used by educators across California districts. Our machine-learning pipeline handles the scoring at scale; the educator-facing learning layer, how teachers come to understand and trust rubric-aligned evidence, is real, needed, and currently unbuilt.

Three Asset Targets, All Real.

• A1A rubric calibration teaching case.One de-identified student response: the audio, the verbatim transcript, the four rubric levels. Educators score it themselves, then see where trained human raters landed and why they disagreed.
• A2An educator onboarding module.The District → School → Class hierarchy, the first screening window, reading a class-level distribution, running the PLC conversation.
• A3Rubric-literacy micro-modules.One per competency: what Level 2 versus Level 3 looks like in observable student language, with real, de-identified exemplars.

We have a bona fide learning design need, not a marketing asset dressed up as one. The calibration case in particular is a multimedia teaching case in the strictest sense: real audio, a real rubric, real rater disagreement, and a learner (the educator) whose judgment is the thing being developed.

• Two to three built, working learning assets (module, teaching case, or micro-module set)
• A design rationale document we can extend to the remaining competencies
• A short usability read from real educator feedback sessions we arrange

IMPACTER Pathway measures durable skills through authentic student voice, returning rubric-aligned, growth-oriented results to students, families, and educators. The educator and district experiences are mature. The student-facing return of evidence is the surface we most need designed, prototyped, and tested with actual learners.

Two Prototypes, Tested with Real Students.

• P1The student result screen.How do you show a 10th grader a Developing-level result on Perspective-Taking so it reads as a growth trajectory rather than a verdict?
• P2The portable skills transcript.What does a student carry out of the system, to a job application, a scholarship, a college essay?
• P3The test.Both prototypes validated with real students: does seeing the evidence change what they believe about themselves, or what they do next?

The operative word is tested. This is the surface where we most need something built and validated with actual students rather than reasoned about internally, and the course is structured to do exactly that, with a client presentation at the end.

• A tested prototype of the student result experience, with the learning-sciences rationale explicit
• A tested prototype of a portable skills transcript
• Validation findings: what students understood, believed, and did differently
• A client presentation to IMPACTER's product leadership