One of the central arguments of our Beyond the Portrait 50-state policy scan is that what matters most is not necessarily how many individual enabling conditions a state has in place – it is whether those conditions compound upon one another to create coherent infrastructure for portrait-aligned learning. A state can have strong graduation requirements and a well-developed portrait of a graduate and still leave students without meaningful access to the applied learning experiences those documents envision, if the funding and flexibility conditions that make those experiences possible are absent.
That gap between having conditions and having coherent infrastructure is what makes diagnosis difficult. A checklist can tell you what is present. It cannot tell you what is broken.
The Enabling Conditions Diagnostic is a free, interactive tool designed to help state and district leaders do exactly that.
What the Tool Does
The diagnostic is organized around five critical dependency chains: sequences of enabling conditions in which each condition strengthens and extends the one that follows it. A break at any point in a chain weakens everything downstream. The chains ask the questions that matter most to state leaders: Does your state measure what its portrait calls for? Do your flexibility policies create the conditions students need to access applied learning? Do your mastery systems connect to the credentials and pathways that make that mastery mean something?
The tool is built on the full 50-state dataset from Beyond the Portrait, which coded each state’s status on 22 enabling conditions as present, partial, or absent. When you select a state, the tool shows you which chains are fully intact, which are broken, and where the break occurs. Click on any individual condition and the chains it supports illuminate, making the ripple effects of a single policy gap visible.
How to Use It
The tool opens with a brief tutorial that walks users through the chain framework and the key interactions. From there, selecting a state populates a profile that includes chain status, a full condition-by-condition breakdown, and state models for each condition. Single-clicking a condition highlights the chains it touches. The tool also surfaces the conditions whose absence has the broadest structural impact, highlighting a starting point for leaders trying to determine where action is most likely to move the system.
Who It Is For
The diagnostic was designed for two audiences working toward the same goal. State policy leaders can use it to map where their infrastructure is coherent and where it has gaps, and to ground conversations with legislators, agencies, and partners in specific, evidence-based diagnoses rather than general impressions. Educators and advocates can use it to understand which state-level conditions are supporting or limiting the practices they are trying to implement in schools.
Get Started
The Enabling Conditions Diagnostic is available here. If you are working on portrait implementation, graduation reform, competency-based education, or applied learning expansion in your state, this tool was built for you.
