Education & Youth Blog 

This past Sunday, the New York Times ran a front-page article on a new study by Caroline M. Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard. I urge anyone who has an interest in college access and success issues to read it. Hoxby and Avery looked at high-achieving (top 4%) high school seniors across income quartiles and found that only 34 percent of high-achieving high school seniors in the bottom fourth of income distribution attended any one of the country’s 238 most selective colleges. Among top students in the highest income quartile that figure was 78 percent.

Even more striking to me was the accompanying graphic (see below) showing students' college application strategies by income quartile, which shows that 53% of high-achieving students in the lowest income quartile apply to NO schools that are a match for them academically, compared to 11% of high-income students. The problem with this is that attending less selective schools than they are qualified for makes it much less likely that these students will actually graduate. And they certainly won't be attending more selective schools if they're not even applying to them.

By Rex Babiera, current independent education consultant and freelance writer, and former Director of Learning and Communications at The Ball Foundation’s Education Initiatives

After attending a panel of students on the verge of dropping out of school, Francisco Escobedo, Superintendent of Chula Vista (California) Elementary School District, told a group of educators (including me), “Their number one reason they may drop out is because schooling is boring to them.” No doubt, boredom stifles learning. When I started my teaching career in my twenties, I was an enthusiastic, but somewhat naïve high school science teacher. The last thing I wanted to do was to bore my students with a lesson. So I did a lot of fun demonstrations, included unconventional lab activities, and asked my students to work together often so that they might motivate one another. Looking back on this twenty years later, however, I think I may have mistaken entertainment for engagement. When applied to learning, engagement, not entertainment, is the opposite of boredom. Entertainment and fun are outcomes of engagement, not the other way around. Think about something, anything—a subject, a set of skills, a vocation, or a hobby—that you know deeply. How did you come to know it so well? Probably you took something you really enjoyed, chose to find out as much about it as possible, met people who shared what they knew, and shared what you found with others who were just as interested in it as you were. And learning was a pleasure in itself. In his TED talk, “The Child-driven Education,” Professor Sugata Mitra related this quote from author Arthur C. Clarke: “Where there is interest, education happens.”

Massive, open, online courses, or MOOCs, were a key topic of the higher education discourse during 2012. Discussions of how MOOCs might fundamentally change higher education spread from within the higher education community to mainstream publications. 2012 even saw the development of a MOOC about MOOCs. MOOCs have been a hot topic of discussion because of their potential to reduce the cost of delivering courses, enabling institutions to educate great numbers of students.

2 rattlesnakes.  2 tarantulas.  1 Peregrine Falcon.  1 flash flood.  1 night alone in a canyon wall.  80-foot rappels.  Hiking in and around a canyon in southeast Utah with 10 strangers and no one else around for miles and miles.
 
As of a few months ago, I could check all of these items off of my bucket list, having completed a 10-day Outward Bound "canyoneering" course.  As someone who had spent exactly two days camping in my life prior to this adventure (one of which was in my parents' back yard), this was a risk.  But life has taught me that with risk comes reward, and I jumped at the chance to experience something pure, primal, and potentially formative.  I admit it - I also wanted to turn off my cell phone for 10 days!
 
But during my days in the wilderness, I realized that there were bigger forces at play, carefully guiding me toward the personal growth that I hoped to attain.  So, I'd like to tell you a short story of what I learned the Utah desert, and how those lessons made me think differently about how we should be teaching our youth.
 

This post by Brad Bernatek and Matt Wilka is the concluding post in a seven-post series exploring the practices of leading blended learning practitioners across the country.

Read Blended Learning - Moving From New Programs to New Paradigms.