Tag: Opportunity Education

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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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Opportunity Education’s Pathways Program

I think about how actions I take today will impact what happens in the future. It’s not something I try to do; it’s what my mind does naturally.


So even as Opportunity Education’s Quest Forward Learning program continues to help young learners acquire the academic essentials and skills they’ll need to tackle life’s challenges, my mind has been thinking about what happens next for these young people and how I can help them to succeed.


Some of these kids will go to college, or trade school, or the military, or find a job with further training opportunities. But whatever path they choose, I want Opportunity Education to take actions today that will help them succeed in their futures.


It’s from this thinking that Opportunity Education’s Pathways Program emerged. It’s a global program that supports students through high school, post-secondary education, and into their first career. (I say first career because, in the world today, people are likely to have more than one career.)


Finding a good, financially viable path in life is difficult, particularly for low-income students. Opportunity Education’s Pathways Program helps young people understand their options – including the cost-benefit of different choices – and to make a plan for when school is done. Most importantly, we make a commitment to provide support to these young people for 10 years from the beginning of high school.

The Pathways Program is being rolled out at Opportunity Education’s United States and Tanzanian locations.  We recently held our first Career Day in Moshi, Tanzania with 91 high school students from Mtakuja Secondary School.  Presenters included university representatives, government officials from the Tanzania vocational training authority (VETA), the National Council for Technical Education (NACTE), as well as school officials, teachers and Opportunity Education representatives.  It was a full-day event with presentations on a wide range of paths that included things like psychology, veterinarian medicine, nursing, law, and immigration police. 


While it’s early days for the Pathways Program, we already plan to hold two events like this annually in Tanzania. These will be supported by in-school advising through career clubs and individual support.


I want to see young people have every chance for success and for Opportunity Education to help them get started on their paths. It’s my hope that the Pathways Program will help them get started on their way.

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Seamless Learning at Opportunity Education’s Quest Forward Academy

I think a lot of people want to get back to something that feels more like normal, and for families with school age kids, starting classes can be big part of that. But opening a school right now needs to be done in the right way.

At Opportunity Education, the foundation I established to help empower young people, we gave a lot of thought to how reopening should work at our Quest Forward Academies.

We are, of course, following all the guidance from federal and state health officials, including having everyone consistently wear masks, sanitizing hands regularly, and socially distancing.

But just like our Quest Forward Learning program is designed to reimagine education for a modern age, we wanted to approach on campus learning in a way that made sense in today’s world. To do that, we developed Seamless Learning.

At the center of Seamless Learning is our focus on the learning, not the buildings. What does that mean in practice?

• Where allowed by local officials, all our classes are running simultaneously on both Zoom and in physical classrooms.

• Parents and students work with the school to determine if their student should be remote or in person.

• Regardless of where the student is located, he or she can fully participate in each class and review recorded video for any missed class or topic.

Right now, the Quest Forward Academy Omaha is working in the Seamless mode, with approximately 20 students participating remotely over Zoom and everyone else learning on campus. (Santa Rosa is still working fully in distance learning mode as schools are closed for in-person learning in Sonoma County, CA.)

We are living through a period of rapid and disruptive change. It is a difficult time but my experience has been that innovation happens at moments like this. I think Opportunity Education’s Seamless Learning is going to prove to be one of those moments of innovation, and some of what we are learning is going to stick.

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Introducing the Summer Bridge Program

COVID-19 has affected so many aspects of our lives, including the educational experience school-age children had (or didn’t have) this year.  For kids entering 9th grade, their disrupted 8th grade experiences add unhelpful stress as they start high school. 

This got me thinking about how we could use Opportunity Education’s Quest Forward Learning curriculum to help young people entering high school be better prepared so they could start 9th grade with confidence instead of anxiety.  I discussed the idea with my teams at Opportunity Education and Quest Forward Academy who were able quickly to put together the Summer Bridge Program, terrific 2-week crash courses in Math and English. 

I’m underwriting the costs, so the Summer Bridge Program is free of charge.  The response to this point has been terrific.  You can learn more about this Summer Bridge Program here.