Breakout: Pioneers of the Future, Prison Guards of the Past, and the Epic Battle That Will Decide America's Fate

by Newt Gingrich

  Students using Khan Academy to personalize their learning, however, broke this mold. “When you let every student work at their own pace,” Khan said, “…over and over and over again, you see students who took a little bit of extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept, they just race ahead. So the same kids who you thought were slow six weeks ago you now would think are gifted.”

  Today, anyone can use the free dashboard features that the Los Altos classes developed with Khan Academy, and any parent, teacher, or tutor can sign up as a “coach.” These tools could be a lifeline for millions of children who are trapped in schools that are failing them. The current system passes them through, whether or not they’ve learned the material, and then asks them to build on it the next school year. Khan Academy or pioneering platforms like it could end this cycle of failure. There’s “no reason why it can’t happen in every classroom in America tomorrow,” Khan says.

  Khan Academy doesn’t just help rescue students who are falling behind. It also lets exceptional students speed ahead of the rigid, obsolete system that’s holding them back. The Khan Academy website features a note from nine-year-old Harshal, who was bored in school even though he was already two grades ahead. “Now, I can always look forward to doing something that challenges me when I get home,” he wrote. “Right now, I am doing derivatives in Khan Academy, which I never thought would happen.”2

  The website now offers more than four thousand videos on topics ranging from calculus to computer science to the Greek debt crisis to art history to American civics—almost all of them still recorded by Khan, though he’s now supported by a sizeable staff behind the scenes. The motto blazoned on the homepage is “Learn almost anything for free.” Six million students visit this virtual school every month.3

  Khan himself speaks of the technology as a breakout not just for students in American schools but for people of all ages, all over the world.

  Many visitors to Khan Academy are adults who are embarrassed that they need to brush up on skills they don’t have but need in order to get a job. One such student wrote:

  I really can’t begin to explain what seeing your site means to me. I’m a 36 year old man who 18 years ago wanted to be an engineer but as I progressed through school I got further and further behind.… As I watched your video explaining your vision I literally started crying because I saw that this is exactly what happened to me, the swiss cheese of the holes in my education added up to an insurmountable wall. I’m now on the way to becoming an engineer and I wanted to let you know that your videos have made a world of difference to me and mean that its possible for me to live a life I want rather than exist in a boring drudgery.4

  Khan Academy is helping thousands of persons like this man achieve a better life.

  It’s also providing opportunities for people who live in places where they receive little if any formal education. Much of the content has already been translated into other major languages. Salman Khan imagines people on six continents tutoring each other and working together to learn new skills—”a global one-world classroom,” he calls it. A classroom, maybe, with one amazing teacher and thousands of “coaches” to help.

  That might sound ambitious for one guy. But if Khan has accomplished so much with the help of only a few friends and colleagues, we may have only begun to see the breakout in learning that he will lead.

  Think about the best teacher you ever had. Maybe she was a math teacher who helped you see that you actually could do it. Or maybe she was an English teacher who knew how to interest you in books you’d never have wanted to touch. That teacher probably changed your life. She set you on a path to college. She shaped your interests and your future career. She changed the way you thought about the world.

  Imagine if every child in America had access to that teacher or to someone like her. And not just in one subject for one year. Imagine if every child could learn from a teacher like that in every subject, every year of his or her education—if every child in America could learn from the best math, science, English, and history teachers there are.

  It would be an education that no money can buy today. But soon it could be available for free to every child in America through a platform like Khan Academy. If it happens, it will be the beginning of a historic breakout.

  Not everyone is eager to embrace the possibilities opened up by technology, and not everyone is pleased with Sal Khan and his Khan Academy. In 2011 and 2012, when Khan started getting lots of media attention for his work, including a place in Time’s list of the world’s one hundred most influential people (with a profile written by Bill Gates), the old order’s antennae perked up.

  After all, if one guy with a tablet—a guy who professes no special pedagogical knowledge—can become “the world’s teacher” and get millions of students to learn what they never learned before, what have our professional teachers been doing all these years? Perhaps even more threatening, what does it mean for the future of the profession if it only takes one (or a few) people to teach millions of students?

  The prison guards of the past took notice and went on the attack.

  In the summer of 2012, some teachers turned Khan’s tool of choice, YouTube, into a weapon to use against him. Two math teachers appeared in a video critiquing one of Khan’s lessons as it played on a screen in front of them.5

  “Have you heard about this amazing new online teacher called ‘Khan Academy?’” Teacher One says. “This is a guy who’s putting all this content online, who’s supposedly gonna change education.”

  “Yes,” Teacher Two replies, “my principal wants to do that.”

  “Well I figured we could take a look at one of these videos,” Teacher One continues. “I gotta imagine a guy who’s got this much of a following has to be able to present this.”

  “Didn’t Bill Gates give him millions of dollars?” Teacher Two asks. “This is gonna be amazing! Like, the best teaching millions of dollars can buy.”

  “Well Bill Gates calls him the best teacher he’s ever seen, so I figure we have a lot that we can learn from this,” Teacher One says sarcastically. “Let me get it started.”

  Salman Khan’s voice begins, “Welcome to the presentation on multiplying and dividing negative numbers. . . .”

  “Only eight and a half minutes! I usually teach for hours on this,” Teacher Two cracks.

  The pair then continue through Khan’s whole video (one plucked from several thousand on the website) and criticize things like Khan’s handwriting (one of his arrows is too curved for their taste—it looks like a letter “d”), his choice of numbers (“l x l” might be taken for “|x|,” the absolute value of x, they say), and the order in which he explained his examples.

  At one point, Teacher One laughs at the idea that his students still “would be paying attention at this point.”

  The video went viral, racking up tens of thousands of views, generating a Twitter hashtag, and sparking a competition for other teachers to produce similar video attacks on Khan Academy.

  It was written up in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, Wired, and the Huffington Post.6 Education Week published a story headlined “Don’t Use Khan Academy Without Watching This First.”7

  Khan Academy replaced its video on multiplying and dividing negative numbers with one that addressed some of the complaints, but the criticism that emerged in the subsequent press coverage was more fundamental. Khan, it was said, is all procedures; it does not address deeper concepts in mathematics.

  The Washington Post published the most hysterical—and probably the most widely distributed—anti-Khan rant a month later in an article by Karim Kai Ani, “a former middle school teacher and math coach.”8

  Kai Ani wrote that the big problem with Khan Academy is that “the videos aren’t very good.” They are simplistic, he said. The way they teach the concept of slope as “rise over run” is terribly damaging, he suggested, because slope isn’t “rise over run” at all—that’s merel
y a way to “calculate slope.” (Never mind that teachers have taught “rise over run” for generations—largely because, as Khan points out in his response, “Slope actually is defined as change in y over change in x [or rise over run].”)9

  It is this kind of sloppiness, Kai Ani argued, that provokes “experienced educators … to push back against what they see as fundamental problems with Khan’s approach to teaching.” The real issue with Khan Academy isn’t the disruptive technology after all. It is Khan.

  These experienced educators are “concerned that he’s a bad teacher who people think is great.” They are “concerned that when bad teaching happens in the classroom, it’s a crisis; but that when it happens on YouTube, it’s a ‘revolution.’” The truth is, Kai Ani concluded, “there’s nothing revolutionary about Khan Academy at all.”

  Kai Ani and his fellow teachers have a point that the process of solving math problems should be supplemented by conceptual explanation. They might even be right that the cherry-picked video on multiplying and dividing negative numbers was heavy on the process. But that criticism doesn’t fit the work of the Khan Academy as a whole, which includes lessons on cryptography, Baroque art, and black holes.

  More to the point, who are these “experienced educators” to call Khan a “bad teacher who people think is great”? Millions of people are voting with their feet because they can tell that they’re learning from Khan what they haven’t learned in school.

  It’s a sign of everything that is wrong in American education that the representatives of our failed educational system feel entitled to decide whose teaching meets guild standards while ignoring the actual results with students.

  The carping of “experienced educators” is especially hard to stomach in light of the mediocrity (or worse) that prevails in many American classrooms. Even if Sal Khan’s handwriting isn’t perfect or his examples aren’t always bulletproof, isn’t his academy miles ahead of the middling or failing schools that are leaving so many young people intellectually crippled?

  One could easily get the impression that the detractors aren’t hostile because they think Khan is a bad teacher at all, but because they recognize he’s a great tutor doing much of their job for free.

  Of course, not all teachers have spurned Sal Khan. The schools that have adopted Khan Academy to “flip” their classrooms are a major part of his story.

  But the prison guards’ assault on Khan Academy in YouTube videos, education journals, and the Washington Post is not just funny satire.

  It is pernicious. The prison guards are trying to kill the future. We know they’re trying to kill it, because they’re not saying, “Gee, what an amazing start for one guy trying to cover the whole curriculum! Let’s make it better together, and then we will really have something.”

  No, they’re saying, “You can’t trust this! He isn’t certified. And you don’t understand that you’re not really learning from him. You need teachers in classrooms teaching just the way teachers have always taught. We will not have any of that new stuff here.”

  The prison guards don’t want a better version of Khan Academy. And they don’t want their colleagues “flipping” the classroom and rocking the boat. They want to stop any change—end of story.

  Not all teachers are prison guards of the past. Thousands of teachers in schools across the country are trying every day to find better ways to do their jobs. But even the most innovative teachers are trapped in an unchanging system that passes along to them unprepared students and expects them to work magic.

  Still, as the reaction to the Khan Academy reveals, many of America’s schools are in fact full of prison guards, jealously protecting their own privileges.

  The teachers’ unions in particular are determined to impose the failing present on America’s students. They exercise their considerable power to block charter schools, school choice, and other reforms that might give millions of students greater opportunity. They impudently resist competition, accountability, or quality assurance in the education of our children.

  Too many teachers protect themselves at the expense of their students, giving up on their mission and turning themselves into prison guards. How else can you explain forcing students to endure a bad teacher for years rather than allowing the teacher to be fired? Or chaining kids to schools that are failing rather than letting them try someplace where they might have a chance to succeed? How else could they oppose paying great teachers more than poor teachers? Or teacher evaluations that reveal whose students are learning and whose are not?

  Virtual Charter Schools

  Technology has done surprisingly little to change education. The education establishment, by and large, is interested in using technology to augment the existing system—thirty-five kids in a cinderblock classroom—rather than to transform it. Some schools have adopted digital whiteboards and installed video projectors, but they have obstructed the fundamental change that technology makes possible. Writing on a fancy digital screen at the front of a classroom instead of a chalkboard does not solve the problem that half the class is bored and the other half is lost.

  A radical innovation that takes up where Salman Khan leaves off is the virtual charter school movement. Like brick-and-mortar charter schools, virtual charter schools are an alternative to neighborhood public schools, but that’s where the similarity ends.

  The students in a virtual charter school like Florida’s Virtual Academies or Pennsylvania’s Agora Cyber Charter School don’t climb into a big yellow bus each morning. They head to the family room and log onto their computers. They make their way through videos on dividing with decimals, complete exercises on calculating area, and perform virtual chemistry experiments—all at their own speed, moving quickly through what comes easily and taking more time with what’s difficult. They can access the material at any time of day, so they enjoy a flexible schedule and pace.

  Work in schools like Agora or FLVA isn’t all independent, however. Students meet online at set times for classes with real teachers (also working from home) and other pupils. Communicating through microphone headsets, they can attend lectures and participate in discussions.

  Students often report that they receive more personal attention from teachers in their virtual charter schools than in their previous schools. The instructors can “drop in” electronically at any time and clarify concepts one-on-one. When they suspect a student does not fully grasp a topic, they call to quiz him a little.

  Although virtual charter schools replicate some of the most important features of traditional schools, they can look more like homeschooling than classroom education. Students benefit from their parents’ involvement in the school day. Mom or dad is a “learning coach” who makes sure they’re not playing Angry Birds when they should be discussing Atticus Finch. The coaches are in continuous contact with teachers to monitor their children’s progress. There’s no hiding poor test scores, inattention, or misbehavior from mom and dad.

  With this careful guidance from teachers and parents, students in virtual charter schools are free to pursue a radically different education. Students in traditional schools rarely have time for an apprenticeship at a hospital or radio station, but with a flexible schedule and the extra hours a virtual school opens up, these opportunities become real possibilities. It’s easy to imagine groups of online students meeting face-to-face several days a week to build a robot or visiting a different local museum every Wednesday. Others might form teams to publish a magazine or to plant a garden. There is a world of learning opportunities outside the traditional classroom.

  More than a hundred thousand10 students nationwide are already attending virtual charter schools like FLVA and Agora. Most of them are powered by software from K12, an online education company that produces thousands of hours of high-quality content in the K–12 curriculum.

  Critics of schools like Agora cite below-average test scores and high dropout rates. Brandishing a report that more than half the students at Agora are below grade
level in reading and math, they condemn the online model. It’s true that such numbers raise concerns, but the criticism seems shortsighted. Today virtual charter schools attract primarily those students whom the conventional public schools have failed. Many have switched to virtual charter schools after spending years, perhaps even their entire education, in deplorable schools. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that large numbers of such students are below grade level.

  This is not to say virtual schools are without any problems. Some teachers have complained about having to handle too many students. Others worry that too many kids are passed through without really understanding the material. No doubt there is lots of room for improvement. The important question is not what virtual charter schools are today, but what they could become tomorrow. The technology won’t always be limited to students who have a parent at home. Someday teachers themselves could look more like “learning coaches.”

  The possibilities are exciting. The schools are only beginning to integrate the continuous assessment Salman Khan spoke about, ensuring that every student understands crucial concepts before trying to build on them. Combined with the outside activities that a flexible schedule permits, the individualized structure and pace of the curriculum should make the virtual charter school education uniquely engaging. The almost infinite entertainment options that compete with school for kids’ attention make this a considerable advantage.

  Many children these days routinely play games on iPhones by the time they learn to talk. Before they are in kindergarten, they are used to getting the information they want when they want it through a computer or a tablet that talks to them. Three-year-olds will know how to ask Siri to read them Curious George. Long textbooks and dense fifty-minute lectures are going to seem intolerable to those kids by the time they reach sixth grade.

  Something will have to change. Computer-adaptive algebra games and an online discussion of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at home in the morning followed by an afternoon of building drones with other students sounds like a pretty exciting breakout in learning—and one that has a prayer of holding kids’ attention. It will be even more game-changing if it takes students out of failing schools and matches them with teachers and classmates who can help them succeed.