Author: Joe Ricketts

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The Jackson Fork Ranch Wins the 2023 World Championship Six Horse Hitch Competition 

I’m proud to share that my Jackson Fork Ranch team has won the 2023 World Championship Six Horse Hitch competition. The championship competition, which took place in September in Shipshewana, Indiana, is the culmination of the Six-Horse Hitch Classic Series. This prestigious final has grown to become the “Triple-Crown” of draft horse competitions. 

The world champion Jackson Fork Ranch team is made up of Percherons, a truly beautiful and powerful breed of draft horse. I’m thrilled to say we’ve won three of the past four competitions (we also took home World Six-Hitch Championships in 2020 and 2022). 

Each year, Six Horse hitches across the continent compete at state and county fairs and agricultural exhibitions to accumulate points for the Classic Series. Close to two hundred hitches travel within their region and beyond to compete. It all builds to a climax at the end of the series, when the five highest point hitches in each of three breed classifications are invited to compete. 

(Ross Honsberger, Jackson Fork Ranch’s equine manager and hitch trainer, pictured with the world champion Jackson Fork Ranch hitch)

So much of our success is due to the excellent work of Ross Honsberger, Jackson Fork Ranch’s equine manager and hitch trainer. With the assistance of Reece Mangels, Ross has trained the hitch since 2019. The Jackson Fork Ranch is currently breeding the show horse mares on the ranch with the intention of producing future champions. Several foals have been born on the ranch and geldings retire there as well.

Winning the 2023 World Championship is an incredible accomplishment, one that is the result of years of hard work and these amazing horses. I’m proud of the entire Jackson Fork Ranch team. 

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The Clarks Nutcracker: My Whitebark Pine Story

By Joe Ricketts

What first interested me about the Whitebark Pine wasn’t the tree at all. It was the Clarks Nutcracker. That little bird, I learned, has lived in a symbiotic partnership with the Whitebark Pine for millennia, distributing the tree’s seeds far and wide, and caching them every Fall as a food source during the winter and following Spring. And it’s those seeds from which we get new trees. It’s also those same, calorie-rich seeds that feed bears, red squirrels, and other species critical to a balanced and sustainable ecosystem. So with Whitebark Pine succumbing to blister rust, mountain pine beetles and climate change, the knock-on effects were far reaching. There are now more dead whitebark pines than live ones and in some places such as Glacier National Park, 90 percent of whitebark pines have died.

But my whitebark pine story is one of hope and restoration.

I first heard the story of the tree and the bird from Doug Smith, who at the time served as the Senior Wildlife Biologist at Yellowstone National Park. Doug introduced me to Diana Tomback, who has studied and advocated for these species for more than 30 years. Once I heard her describe how the birds and trees rely upon each other I knew it was a story that needed to be told. Raising awareness about this unique relationship, and the bigger issues facing the whitebark pine, was a critical step in helping to solve this crisis.  This was exactly the type of issue for which I established the Ricketts Conservation Foundation. 

In my mind, the most powerful way to tell a story is through film.  Seeing and hearing a story brings it to life in a way few other things can.  So I discussed the idea of documenting the Clarks Nutcracker and the Whitebark Pine story with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Center for Conservation Media.  Working closely with the talented team at Cornell, we got to work on what proved to be a multi-year project, capturing footage that had literally never been seen before. One of the resulting films – Hope and Restoration: Saving the Whitebark Pine – is a vital way to sound the call for people to rally behind.  A call to save this centuries-old relationship between a bird and a tree, and all the other animals and plants who depend on them.

We then approached American Forests to strategize and publicize this conservation crisis.  American Forest’s CEO, Jad Daley, was, unsurprisingly, already familiar with the Whitebark crisis and identified the Whitebark Pine Restoration Plan as a priority. 

Working together, we’re helping to get the word out, but it’s clear the movement needs more to be successful, including additional funding and people devoted to a restoration plan that uses the best available science and focuses on the highest priority areas to save.

Hope and Restoration is an official selection of the DC Environmental Film Festival, International Wildlife Film Festival and New York WILD Film Festival. To watch it and learn more about whitebark pine, go to https://savethewhitebarkpine.org

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AI Can Save Education From Itself

Technology such as ChatGPT threatens only the information-centric type of schooling, which has become obsolete.

By Joe Ricketts and Ray Ravaglia

ChatGPT, the new artificial-intelligence technology created by Open AI, has many worrying about the future of education. The two largest public school districts, New York and Los Angeles, have banned the chatbot from their devices and networks, concerned that students may use it to cheat on assignments. Though ChatGPT’s capabilities are limited, it will likely continue to disrupt education as the technology advances.

But educators needn’t fear this change. Such technologies are transformative, but they threaten only the information-centric type of education that is failing to help students succeed. What young people need today is educational models that help them take ownership of their studies. They need instruction that equips them with real-life skills and prepares them for an economy in which rote, mechanical tasks will be increasingly performed by machines. AI may be a useful invention that hastens much-needed educational reform.

In 2005, one of us (Mr. Ricketts) created Opportunity Education, a nonprofit that not only advocates this approach to education but also develops working models and tools to facilitate its implementation. Nearly 20 years later—and with more than a million students across more than 1,000 schools in the developing world—Opportunity Education has a great line of sight into what a skills-first approach means for young learners. As our economy continues to be driven by information, ensuring that our students possess relevant skills to succeed is more pressing than ever.

Practicing skills to enhance one’s facility with reasoning, analysis and argumentation—rather than memorizing basic information—should be central to learning. When an athlete trains by lifting weights or using a treadmill it typically isn’t to become the best at those specific activities, it’s because such exercises develop the strength and stamina necessary for a specific sport. Likewise, the work students complete in school isn’t principally about the exercises themselves but about developing essential skills such as identifying context, analyzing arguments, staking positions, drawing conclusions and stating them persuasively.

These are skills young people will need in future careers and, most important, that AI can’t replicate. Our experience with AI is perhaps best understood when compared with previous disruptions in education. When printed books, for example, began to emerge in the mid-1400s with the advent of the movable type, one can imagine university professors were filled with panic. Up until that point, lectures depended on a specific and exclusive model: Professors read from their manuscripts, while students hurriedly copied whatever they heard. If students could simply buy the book, teachers likely reckoned, they wouldn’t need to come to class.

Yet in practice, printing had the opposite effect: The number of universities exploded along with the total number of books. The new technology disrupted the mechanical aspect of education, but in doing so it allowed educators to refocus on higher-level skills—the strategic elements rather than the tactical. The same followed the introduction of calculators and spreadsheets, which freed up time that would have been spent memorizing rote algorithms for mathematical problems.

This change didn’t make the underlying skills unnecessary; it merely transformed what could be done with them. The effect of such technology as ChatGPT will likely be similar, with the mechanical production of text being displaced by higher-order thinking about how to best use those words. As the production of coherent prose becomes a simple task for a machine, possessing the skill to ask the right questions or stake out the right positions will become key. The AI will serve as an information-gathering and mechanical-organizing tool, but it won’t eliminate the fundamental need for critical thinking. These skills will persist and only increase in value.

Unless schools can address the strategic reasons for learning and provide an education that trains students in how to use the tools of information, they will inevitably be left behind by rapid innovation and change. They must remember that the value created by education isn’t a head full of facts. It’s a person with the skill to use these facts with the tools available to magnify his effect in the world. AI is best seen as another of these tools, which, when used strategically, can unleash student learning and performance in ways not yet seen.

Mr. Ricketts is founder of TD Ameritrade and CEO of Opportunity Education. Mr. Ravaglia is chief learning officer of Opportunity Education.

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Employers Want Workers with Skills, Not Credentials

I read an interesting pair of articles in the Wall Street Journal last week. They touched upon the challenges we face with the high school to college to career pipeline.  Our work at Opportunity Education makes this topic particularly interesting to me.

The first article, “Employers Rethink the Need for College Degrees in Tight Labor Market,” discusses how employers are beginning to move away from requiring undergraduate degrees as a condition of employment, preferring instead to see specific needed skills.

The second, “The Suicide of the Liberal Arts,” makes the point that the greater focus on specific courses of study rather than the more traditional liberal arts leaves students unfit for much other than entering graduate programs.

While seemingly at odds with one another, these articles actually both make one essential point: education needs to be about developing skills, both the specific skills that employers need, and the more general skills such as clear communication and analytical reasoning that are fundamental to many types of careers today. If we’re going to win at education, our educational system needs to give students these skills.

The failure of the education system to prepare students for success in the world in which they will live shows up in different ways at the different stages.  In high school, the emphasis is often on “all students college bound” without paying any attention to the career interests of students, the cost of college, or the potential return on investment for a college degree.  By the time students get to college, many of them will major in subjects where core skills have been replaced by specialized content. So rather than learning clear thinking and communicating, students are learning academic jargon that has no applicability outside academia. Employers make the problem worse by embracing a faith in credentials without understanding what the credentials mean.  A degree tells you little about what its holder knows, what skills she has, or what he can do.

What can be done to improve this situation? Through my foundation, Opportunity Education, I have developed a better high school, one where the focus is not on merely completing courses, it’s on developing the learning and work skills students need for success. 

By giving students some choice in how they study, and in what they study, they can develop their educational experience to suit their personal goals.  To ensure that they understand their career options, I created the Opportunity Education Pathways Program, in which students have up to four years of internships while also learning about topics such as professionalism, finance, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

For those students looking to move beyond high school, I am in the process of creating a “great books” college-level program in which students can study the seminal ideas and books that have shaped the world we live in over the past 2,500 years.  Through close reading and facilitated discussion, supported by high quality video productions, students will sharpen their minds and develop skills that colleges used to value and that employers still desperately need.

This is how we fix the high school to college to career pipeline:

  • First, give every student a high school education that prepares them for the world of work and that helps them identify their best-fit path to a meaningful career. 
  • Second, for paths that lead through college, give students a new affordable option. For some this might be a short program serving as a springboard to a specific degree program or career.  For others this might mean completing a full degree comparable in quality to that of the best colleges in the world.

If we do this, students will be positioned to make meaningful contributions to our country and to their communities, while also ensuring themselves a sound financial future.

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The Midwest Roundtable on Talent

I was pleased to participate recently in The Midwest Roundtable on Talent.  The event brought together business leaders and presidents from more than 60 colleges and universities to exchange ideas about how to prepare students for success in the 21st century workplace.  It’s a topic I care deeply about, and I enjoyed discussing Opportunity Education’s Quest Forward Academies and its Pathways Program with the group. 

The Quest Forward Academies are powered by Opportunity Education’s Quest Forward Learning curriculum.  It’s an approach to learning that focuses on giving students the skills to succeed in today’s world, and tomorrow’s.  The Pathways Program, which begins in 9th grade and supports students for up to 10 years, brings the importance of career readiness into focus before students have made the commitment to attend college. 

Real-life skills, career planning, financial literacy, and the important role that businesses play through internships and early jobs are things we need to be working on today if young people are going to live successful lives tomorrow.