The Edge: Here's One Way to Stop the Blame-Gaming Over College Readiness

This nonprofit at the intersection between K-12 and higher ed is coaching students not only to succeed, but to redesign the system. ADVERTISEMENT [Advertisement]( [logo] [Read this newsletter on the web](. I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering innovation in and around academe. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week. This student-coaching organization wants to change an inequitable system, too. Some of education’s biggest blame-gaming happens when students arrive academically unprepared for college. One nonprofit that coaches students is working to change that dynamic — and a whole lot more. The organization, Beyond 12, reports data on the students it coaches back to their high schools. That gives them a chance to see how their graduates are faring in college and what they might adjust (think curriculum and support services, especially the summer after graduation). “We wanted to build an organization that reflects the joint responsibility between K-12 and higher education for student success,” says Alexandra Bernadotte, Beyond 12’s founder and CEO. I just interviewed her for the latest episode of my podcast series, [Innovation That Matters]( ADVERTISEMENT [Advertisement]( Subscribe to The Chronicle The Chronicle’s award-winning journalism challenges conventional wisdom, holds academic leaders accountable, and empowers you to do your job better — and it’s your support that makes our work possible. [Subscribe Today]( The willingness to step into that intersection — a spot too many treat as the Bermuda Triangle of education and try to avoid at all costs — is one way this coaching organization seems different and important to me. Without new approaches, says Berndadotte, the system will keep working all too well at doing the wrong things. “Higher education was designed to compound privilege,” she says. What she’d like to help realize is “a system that centers the voices of students who weren't at the table” decades or centuries ago. More on that in a bit. In [the podcast]( you can hear about Beyond 12’s philosophy of “co-active coaching” (it doesn’t assume students “need to be fixed”), its approach to technology (it blends automation with a human touch), and how the pandemic has delayed its aspirations to scale up to serve one million students nationwide, about a tenfold increase from today. This was my first chance to speak with Bernadotte, though I’d encountered Beyond 12 before. Years ago, it was one of the organizations enlisted by the U.S. Department of Education, during the Obama administration, to help displaced students from Corinthian Colleges and ITT Educational Services after their abrupt closures. The nonprofit was also one of the finalists in a [contest I wrote about]( in 2015 to describe the growing use of prizes to promote change in higher ed. Beyond 12 didn’t win — no one did — but that’s a story for another day. For now suffice to say that the experience, which included a pilot of the organization’s MyCoach app at the City University of New York, at least demonstrated the merits of a model that relies on not only technology but also humanity to encourage students’ academic progress. Bernadotte came to the United States from Haiti as a child, and in the podcast, you’ll also hear how her path to the Ivy League started with a conversation among doctors at Carney Hospital, in Boston, overheard by her mother, a phlebotomist. Dropped off at Dartmouth College by a 10-car caravan of proud relatives, Bernadotte didn’t flourish at first. She recalls that she “bombed” her freshman year and was able to right herself thanks to a sociology professor, Deborah Karyn King, who stepped up to help. Beyond 12 focuses on students from backgrounds similar to its founder’s: low-income, first-generation, and in many cases, in need of a little guidance to navigate the unfamiliar territory of college life. And it hires recent college graduates who identify with those challenges as “near peer” coaches. And the coaching seems to work, with higher graduation rates for coached students than for peers who aren’t part of the program. But what excites me most are Beyond 12’s plans for the future, which include working with the design firm IDEO on campus challenges to rethink the shape of higher education. The nonprofit is also starting a paid design fellowship to train students to identify and advocate for changes in how colleges work. So much talk about “reinventing” higher education these days doesn’t include those voices. I for one am eager to hear how conversations will change with more of these students at the heart of them. Quote of the Week. “When I decided on a career in student affairs 25 years ago, no one told me that one of my duties would be checking the names of shooting victims to see if any were connected to my university. I've done this regularly enough now that I know it is part of the job description.” — Will Simpkins, vice president for student affairs at Metropolitan State University of Denver, in [a post on Twitter]( the day after a gunman killed 10 people at a grocery store in nearby Boulder, Colo. Colleges’ embrace of digital courseware is real. Well, [this]( survey]( wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I asked [in the newsletter last week]( the market for commercial versus open educational resources might change as a result of the pandemic. But the data do put some numbers behind one of the findings I had reported anecdotally: The use of digital materials has gone way up. According to this survey — conducted in concert with several groups that promote online education — 71 percent of faculty members and administrators said their institutions had made “considerable” use of digital materials in teaching since the pandemic, compared with 25 percent before. And only about one-quarter of respondents expected to make less use of digital materials post-pandemic, while more than a third thought the use would increase, and a similar share said it would remain about the same. Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, [find them here](. To receive your own copy, free, register [here](. If you want to follow me on Twitter, [@GoldieStandard]( is my handle. Goldie’s Weekly Picks HUMOR [We, the Privileged Parents That Matter, Applaud the Netflix College-Admissions Scandal Doc]( By Eric Hoover [image] A veteran admissions reporter takes a humorous look at the obsession with Operation Varsity Blues — and why it’s a distraction from systemic inequities. WORK FORCE [The Pressure to Retrain Workers Could Be Intense for Colleges. Here’s What They Can Start Doing Now.]( By Scott Carlson [image] Many ideas are well-researched and have been long discussed, but not widely adopted. The pandemic might open new possibilities to expand them. ATHLETICS [In a Back Room, LSU’s Board Pushed for a Sports Shake-Up]( By Jack Stripling [image] The untold story of the dismissal of an athletics director, and the hand-picking of his successor, suggests micromanagement by an athletics-obsessed board. Paid for and Created by Florida International University [Ensuring a Sustainable Earth]( Producing water management plans and education programs, Florida International University’s Global Water Sustainability Program is bringing clean water solutions to developing countries throughout the world. ADVERTISEMENT [Advertisement]( Job Announcement Executive Director of Human Resource Services at Pikes Peak Community College.[Visit jobs.chronicle.com]( for more details. Paid for and Created by NVIDIA [It's Time for Colleges to Embrace Artificial Intelligence]( University of Florida, in partnership with NVIDIA, is striving to make AI technology fair to all and available to anyone. How is their new supercomputer revolutionizing higher ed? Faculty Diversity What Colleges Need to Do Now The growing racial-justice movement has led colleges to rethink diversity on many fronts, including in their faculty ranks. 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