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Community Corner

Khan Academy Key to School Reform?

Among the dimming memories of childhood, I recall how my first grade class was divided into three reading groups by bird color. Sister Mary Charles didn't tell us how she did it. But it became clear to us, after the first time each student read aloud, Bluebirds were the favored flock. I don't remember my group, but I assume I was a Bluebird, since three of us were later allowed to skip 5th grade, the only way good students were tracked, beyond first grade aviaries, in the 1950's.

For me, skipping 5th grade was a mixed blessing. It boosted my self-esteem, of course, but it also kept me from learning about fractions. My first four years had come so easily in every subject that, when I struggled with 6th grade math, I decided to hate the subject.

As I moved through high school and college I gradually gave up on any career goal requiring advanced math skills. I wound up becoming a high school English teacher, later a university administrator, both personally rewarding career paths. It was a relatively small thing for me to miss out on mastering math. I had the advantages of supportive parents and a stable home life, unburdened by poverty.

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But what about students who don't have the advantages I had, those who come to school hungry, not only for food, but a future? Too often they're tracked into remedial groups, based on standardized test scores, required to move up from one grade level to the next, despite failing to master basic skills? No Child Left Behind is still a worthy goal, but we now know measuring its achievement by standardized test scores alone doesn't work. It relies primarily on improving test-taking ability, rather than mastery of basic skills.     

Who'd have thought a Bengali-American hedge fund analyst with no teacher training would become one of the most innovative educators in the United States today? Salman Khan's book, The One World School House: Education Reimagined, (October 2012), tracks his progression from tutoring a young cousin on YouTube, to creating Khan Academy, a free online school for millions of students of all ages throughout the world.

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Khan says it's time to make a radical change to a lockstep educational system introduced in this country more than 100 years ago, borrowed from 19th century Prussia, where schools were designed to produce a steady supply of well-trained, compliant factory workers.

Khan's especially critical of standardized tests, calling them only snapshots of what students know at a given moment in time. They tell us little or nothing about someone's potential to learn a subject or how long that learning will be retained. We don't know if a question answered correctly reflects deep understanding or a lucky guess. Carelessness and test anxiety, as well as a lack of learning, can produce incorrect answers.   

According to Kahn, grades can be just as misleading in measuring learning as standardized tests. They only tell us how successful students have been overall in a school subject over a period of time. They don't tell us what specific skills have been mastered in the subject, critically important in mathematics, where sequential mastery of skills is essential to learning.  

Khan's individualized mastery of skills online teaching methodology, supplementing classroom instruction, has shown remarkable results in a number of California schools, enabling students in remedial classes to catch up, and sometimes even surpass, their peers in more advanced classes.      

I'm taking math from Khan Academy, attending classes by iPad in 15-minute sessions at varying times each day. It's all about mastering skills, beginning with simple arithmetic to increasingly more challenging problems. You must get at least five correct answers in a row before you can move on to more complex ones. For each problem there's a button to click for a series of hints. Need more help? There's a brief video to coach you.

The feedback is relentlessly positive, a smiley face for each correct answer, and achievement badges along the way. There's only a vibrating of the answer button to indicate an incorrect answer. A virtual headshaking of "no," rather than a flashing "WRONG!" inspires you to continue trying, rather than branding you as a loser.  

This time around, my math education is unrelated to a career choice. It's just mental calisthenics for a retired guy attempting to climb Mount Calculus, just because it's there. And also to gain insight into its potential for real school reform.

Email me at richard_riehl@yahoo.com


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