The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

by Salman Khan

  But if the two groups had differences, they had similarities as well—mainly enthusiasm and curiosity. Now, as every teacher knows, there are things you can measure and things that you can’t. Energy level in a classroom is one of the things you can’t plot on a curve but is palpable and important nonetheless. And it was clear from the very start of our program that the energy level had been boosted. Kids were eager to start “Khan time” and some didn’t want to go to recess afterwards. They started exploring concepts on their own; they spontaneously began helping one another. In the seventh-grade classes as well as the fifth-grade ones, kids were starting to take control of their learning.

  Part of the excitement was that for these students and teachers, the curriculum was developing before their very eyes. But they weren’t just watching it develop; they were actively participating in the process—not just accepting change but driving it. Ben Kamens and Jason Rosoff, our software designers who were now doing the heavy lifting on the engineering side, sat in on classes, seeing how kids were actually using and responding to the different features, tweaking this or that according to a teacher’s specifications. The feedback loop continually evolved. We started giving kids electronic achievement badges for advancing through concepts—a cost-free way to boost motivation and confidence. Kids came to realize that software was made by real people, and that education was not some monstrous, soulless weight imposed on them, but a living, breathing thing designed for their benefit and with their help. Forgive me for gushing, but there was magic going on in those classrooms, and the magic confirmed a belief I’d had ever since talking with my cousins about my earliest video lessons: that the best tools are built when there is open, respectful, two-way conversation between those who make the tools and those who use them.

  But okay, it’s all well and good to talk about energy and magic and all those feel-good, California-style things; still, I was keenly aware that at the end of the day, the success or failure of the pilot program would be measured not in terms of these intangibles but by the hard-edged, flawed but inevitable, in-your-face criterion of performance on standardized tests. And I admit that as the day grew closer when our students would be taking their respective grade levels of the CSTs (California Standards Tests) I once again got pretty nervous.

  But let me be clear about why I was nervous. It wasn’t that I had strong doubts that our kids were learning math. I was confident they were learning, and that, moreover, they were learning at a deeper and more durable level than most conventional classrooms afforded. My concern, rather, was with the congruence, or lack thereof, between what our kids were learning and what the tests were testing.

  This is one of the paradoxes and potential dangers of standardized tests: They measure mastery of a particular curriculum, but not necessarily of the underlying topics and concepts on which the curriculum should be based. The curriculum, in turn, becomes shaped by the expectations of what will be tested. So there’s a kind of circular logic, an endless loop going on. Teach what will be tested; test what most likely had been taught. Topics and ideas and levels of understanding that go beyond the probable parameters of the test tend to be ignored; they aren’t worth the classroom time.

  We were trying to enable learning in a different and, we believed, more organic way, a way aimed at conceptual understanding rather than test prep. Because we encouraged students to progress at their own pace, we had some very advanced fifth graders already working on algebra and even trigonometry. But this impressive advancement would go unrecognized on the CSTs, which only tested proficiency in the usual fifth-grade material. Further, with regard to the fifth-grade classes, we were up against some pretty tough comparisons, as 91 percent of students in conventional Los Altos classes were already testing as “proficient” or “advanced” for their grade level.

  With regard to the seventh-grade classes, we had a somewhat different set of concerns. These students had been significantly underperforming their peers before participating in the pilot program; they badly needed remediation. Would our unconventional approach have provided it?

  Test day came. We crossed our fingers and waited for results. When they came in, they were overwhelmingly positive.

  Our fifth graders posted a stellar 96 percent at proficient or advanced grade level. I do have to say that a good bit of this outperformance was probably due to the amazing teachers in the pilot classes rather than just our resources. It did decisively prove to the district that despite the fact that our software was still at a nascent state and that we weren’t teaching to the test, the experiment was definitely not doing any harm. In light of the test results, coupled with the positive feedback from teachers, students, and parents, the board decided to use the Khan Academy as part of the math curriculum for all fifth- and sixth-grade math classes in the district for the following school year. In keeping with the Pinball Philosophy, we had done well at the game and so were being allowed to play again.

  But the truly dramatic results were with the seventh-grade classes. Relative to a year prior, their average score on the grade level exam improved by 106 percent. Twice as many students were now at grade level. A handful of students jumped two categories, from “below basic” to “proficient.” A few even leapfrogged into the “advanced” category. As gratifying as these results were to us, it was equally pleasing to tap one more nail into the coffin of tracking. Our underserved, underperforming, and purportedly “slow” kids were now operating at the same—or higher—level as their more affluent peers.

  I want to emphasize this last point. Remedial math classes are often viewed as something of an academic graveyard. Once students are deemed “slow,” they tend to fall farther and farther behind their peers. Now, all of a sudden, we were seeing that students who were put in the “slower” math classes could actually leapfrog ahead of their “non-slow” peers. Even better, the experience with both the fifth and seventh graders showed that there really was no reason to track students into separate classrooms to begin with. Now every student could work at his or her own pace; it was unpredictable who could eventually advance the most. It should be noted that this initial data came from a very small data set, a handful of classrooms, and was not designed as a truly controlled experiment. It did, however, point in a very promising direction.

  By the summer of 2011, we began ramping up our team to manage a district-wide pilot with twelve hundred students in Los Altos. Many, many more teachers and schools were also eager to work with us. Given that we wanted to push our own learning and see how the Khan Academy could be applied in different use cases, we chose a handful of public, charter, and private schools in California that served very different types of students—seventy classrooms in total. Because all of the student and teacher tools we were using with our pilots were available for anyone to use, it became clear from our server data that there were also more than ten thousand teacher-led classrooms or cohorts, serving 350,000 students around the world, that were using us independently of any formal pilot program.

  At the time of this writing, we are just beginning to get data from this larger wave of pilots, but the preliminary information seems even more exciting than what we saw from the first, limited pilot in Los Altos.

  Let’s consider the Oakland Unity High School pilot, where 95 percent of the students are African American or Latino and 85 percent receive free or reduced lunch. First the subjective. In a recent blog post, David Castillo, the principal, and Peter McIntosh, a math teacher, wrote about how in previous years they “found that students failed to engage in the coursework and spent little to no time studying.” They went on to describe how “students were disengaged from their learning responsibilities and the derailing of their studying began as early as elementary school.” However, their descriptions of what is culturally happening in their pilot classrooms is exciting. They wrote:

  We believe that our use of Khan Academy is resulting in a fundamental change in student character—with responsibility replacing apathy and effort replac
ing laziness. We believe that this character change is the primary reason behind the stunning results we are beginning to experience—at both the class level and in individual students.

  And the data from the students’ tests scores is indeed exciting. Students are scoring 10 to 40 percent higher on average across a battery of exams covering different domains in algebra. The percentage of students showing reasonable proficiency in various topic areas is even more significant. For example, the percentage of students who now scored at least 80 percent on their recently administered “Systems of Equations” exam grew by a factor of four. It is perhaps too early to pick out a trend, but it looks like the relative improvement compared to prior years is only growing more dramatic as the class moves into more and more advanced topics.

  We’re getting similar results from the other pilots. A group of sixth graders had entered the KIPP pilot from local Oakland public schools with a roughly third-grade-level mastery of math. Six months later, most of the class was operating at fifth- and sixth-grade levels. The teachers had never seen groups of students move ahead two and three grade levels in a matter of months. We are hoping to see much, much more data like this in the months to come.

  Education for All Ages

  Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

  —HENRY FORD

  It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

  —MARGARET MEAD

  Please bear with me now as I segue into a very different sort of intersection between the Khan Academy and the real world—the real world of grown-ups interested in lifelong learning and in maintaining active minds.

  Back in 2008, when the worldwide credit crisis was paralyzing markets and causing banks to fail, I, like everybody else, was trying to figure out just what the heck was going on. The issues were quite complicated, the technical jargon was fairly daunting, and I think it’s fair to say that some on Wall Street and in the government preferred to keep the rest of us a bit confused. So I tried to break through to a reasonable level of understanding in the way that comes most naturally to me—by breaking the subject down into manageable but clearly interconnected chunks and making sure I had a conceptual grasp of one aspect of the problem before moving on to the next. Because it was clear to me that many other people were also grappling with these suddenly pressing economic riddles—What, exactly, was a collateralized debt obligation? How did the Treasury Department relate to the Federal Reserve? What is quantitative easing and how is it different than just printing money?—I started posting video lessons about the banking crisis. To be honest, I didn’t give a lot of thought to the question of who exactly the videos were for. I did them because I felt the need to do them.

  Then a completely unexpected thing happened. Almost as soon as the videos went live, I started hearing from professional journalists and commentators who’d watched them—business writers, financial advisers, anchors of TV shows about economics and investing. (I even got a somewhat scary email from an investment banker thanking me for my video explaining mortgage-backed securities. The gist of the message was, Thanks, now I understand what I do for a living.) At the peak of the crisis, CNN invited me to speak on their network, to do a sort of live fifteen-minute lesson complete with my electronic blackboard.

  This experience and the feedback I received from it convinced me that Khan Academy had a duty to do much more than just present standard academic topics for traditional school-age students. There was a deep need to help educate people of all ages regarding the ever-changing dynamics of the world around them. With the world becoming more and more complex, true democracy—not to mention peace of mind—was at risk if average folks couldn’t understand what was happening and why.

  This realization, in turn, led to an even more basic question about the artificial boundaries of formal education. Why does “education” stop at some point? Why isn’t it lifelong? Doesn’t it seem arbitrary and in fact a little tragic that we invest so much in learning through formal education for twelve or sixteen or twenty years, and then just turn off the spigot when we reach full adulthood?

  Some studies suggest that most people stop learning new things in their thirties. I use the word “suggest” advisedly, since studies on such a vast and amorphous subject can never be precise or absolute. Some people keep learning. Almost everyone learns something every day. As sentient human beings, how could we not? Still, the basic point is tough to deny. At some point in life, learning new things becomes less of a priority. At some fulcrum moment, we have learned most of what we will ever know. The learning curve flattens out. Except for the laziest or most incurious among us, it doesn’t flatline altogether. We get blips here and there from travel, from hobbies, from a new everyday technology that forces us to stretch our awareness of how things work. But for the most part we confront life equipped with things we’ve learned before—sometimes long before. New knowledge becomes a smaller and smaller part of the mix. The problem is that as the pace of change accelerates all around us, the ability to learn new things may be the most important skill of all. Is it realistic to expect adults to be able to do this?

  The answer is a resounding yes. According to a recent paper issued by the Royal Society of London, “the brain has extraordinary adaptability, sometimes referred to as ‘neuroplasticity.’ This is due to the process by which connections between neurons are strengthened when they are simultaneously activated; often summarized as, ‘neurons that fire together wire together.’ The effect is known as experience-dependent plasticity and is present throughout life” (italics added).2

  Not only is the ability to learn lifelong, but, within certain limits, it is in our power to maximize and guide this ability. As we saw earlier in our brief discussion of neuroscience and memory, handling and storing information in the brain is a physical process. It takes energy; it burns calories; it leads to the synthesis of new proteins and the alteration of existing ones. In all these regards, brainwork is closely analogous to physical exercise, and likewise subject to the rule of use-it-or-lose-it. Moreover, we don’t simply choose to exercise our brains or not; we can even choose which parts of our brains to work on. One fascinating aspect of the Royal Society’s report concerned a study of London cabdrivers. Faced with the necessity of learning every nook and cranny of London’s famously difficult geography, the cabbies literally grew “extra” gray matter in the parts of their brains dedicated to spatial relations and navigation. When the drivers retired and no longer exercised their navigational skills, their brain volume in those areas diminished. Similar studies have been done on musicians and even jugglers, with consistent findings; when knowledge or skill is acquired or enhanced, there is ongoing neural development in the part of the brain where that specific subject or skill is based.

  It must be said that not all the news from neuroscience is good when it comes to the capacity for lifelong learning. Certain aspects of neural plasticity do diminish with age. The older brain has a tougher time assembling the most basic building blocks of learning. This makes it somewhat more challenging for adults to learn entirely new things and explains, for example, why it seems to be easier to learn a foreign language early in life. On the other hand, adults seem to be better at learning by association. With a bigger knowledge base to begin with, and long-established habits of logic and deduction, grown-ups are more likely to grasp new concepts by way of their connections to ideas already known.3

  This suggests that, all things considered, learning is not necessarily easier or harder at one stage of life or another, but that our approach to learning might be different in adulthood. There’s even a separate word to describe this approach and the teaching methods most appropriate to it: androgogy. This is in contrast to the more familiar pedagogy, broadly defined as the art and science of teaching children. The key differen
ce? Pedagogy puts the emphasis on the teacher; the teacher decides what will be learned, when it will be learned, and how the learning will be tested. Androgogy, on the other hand, puts the emphasis and the responsibility on the learner himself. Adults don’t have to learn; they choose to learn. This active choosing and the motivation behind it serve to focus our attention and thereby make learning easier. As it was expressed by Malcolm Knowles in his seminal book The Adult Learner, “If we know why we are learning and if the reason fits our needs as we perceive them, we will learn quickly and deeply.”4

  All of the above seems to indicate that the Khan Academy approach dovetails very neatly with the needs and inclinations of adult learners. Adult learners are, above all, self-motivated; Internet-based video lessons that are available at the learner’s convenience certainly tap into this self-motivation. Likewise, that the lessons are self-paced pays due respect to adults’ sense of responsibility and self-knowledge; learners take in as much or as little as they can handle in a sitting; they can attend to their learning as their complicated schedules allow. Moreover, as we have seen, adults seem to learn most easily and naturally by associating new knowledge and concepts with things already known, and it is absolutely basic to Khan Academy principles to emphasize these connections—to teach in accordance with the way the grown-up mind works anyway.