August 4, 2022

One often hears that in life, the most important thing is just showing up.  In education, just showing up is certainly necessary, after all, truancy laws make the alternative somewhat unpalatable.  But given the performance of most schools, just showing up isn’t sufficient.

Determining what might actually be essential for effective education has been a driving impulse behind our work at Opportunity Education.  In developing Quest Forward Learning, Opportunity Education began by conducting a thorough review of the education research and of best practices from established programs to determine what factors drive ownership of learning among adolescent high school students.  This was done to address the observation that even though students will spend more time engaged in learning while in high school than at any other time in their lives, most students view school not as an investment but as a tax on their time.  Rather than making the most of their studies to lay the groundwork for a successful future, they too often find school boring and irrelevant.  In looking for ways to reverse this trend we identified engagement as the potential crucial ingredient to improving ownership of learning.  

Corporate leaders have long recognized the…