The Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning’s blog shared the results of two pretty interesting surveys.

In one, 500 recent drop outs were asked about the reasons they decided to drop out of school.

The other survey collected data from over 23,000 3-5 minute visits around the country. Here’s a short summary of the results (it’s a quote from the McRel blog, but you should visit it and read the whole post):

“Students walk into a classroom and are seated in rows of desks for whole group instruction for the majority (54%) of their day. The teacher stands in front of the room lecturing for just over 20% of the day. When the teacher isn’t lecturing, students are doing workshops for 16% of their school day. Technology, the world students live in outside of the classroom, is only used by teachers in 22% of all lessons. Students only use technology in the classroom 21% of the time. Students are engaged kinesthetic activities in just 4% of all observations. Just under two-thirds of observations (60%) indicate that instruction is at the lowest two levels of the Blooms Taxonomy.”

It’s a sad commentary, and as the McREL blog points out, there’s probably a connection between the two survey results.

It would also be interesting to consider if the results of the classroom visits might be different if you just went to ESL classes…