Very interesting and thoughtful. But I think the author gets it dead wrong.
"the budget cuts he seemed so giddy about invariably mean fewer teachers, and to argue that this is somehow beneficial to learning is to argue against years of research and practice" -- this is exactly the argument that Khan Academy is making: that we can cut teachers in favor of lessons taught by computer. The actual reason why "this time is different" is that we now have the power to create excellent lessons, through the power of computers, the internet, and crowds.
Maybe Khan Academy isn't good enough to replace teachers yet. (I would be surprised if it weren't already better than 75% of teachers, though. Most teachers aren't very good.)
Another claim the author makes: "Khan Academy makes it difficult for something better to come along" -- I would be SHOCKED if this were true. Sure, it's hard to compete with free, but KA is creating a new ecosystem of people who are looking to the internet for teaching materials! So if KA is really as bad as the author claims, then it's going to be MUCH easier than it is today to get better materials in the hands of kids.
Silly article. It offers no proof to their statement that students learning through Khan are on a "wild goose chase" for correct answers except for a 1973(!) paper. I believe it to be the opposite, the chances of you just guessing 10 correct answers in a row is ridiculously low. It encourages you to make sure every answer is correct before submitting it, otherwise you would have to start over again.
It doesn't address the issue that each student can learn at their own pace, which is the main part of Khan. It ignores people that had success with KA except for a quick mention. It also ignores the fact that Khan is a great teacher, and with this model anyone can learn from the best teacher there is.
It ignores the tools it gives teachers to see the progress of the students. It ignores the fact that teachers can give personalized assistance. it ignores that more advanced students can teach less advanced students.
It dismisses the achievement system while every single educator knows they work and have worked since the first teacher decided to give students gold stars. It only mentions it in passing to say that it doesn't work without offering any proof.
The truth is: There are a LOT of people who have their own idea of what the "perfect" teaching system is. When something comes around that challenges that, as with everything else, those people will try to say that it won't work. Let it be field tested, let's see the results. THEN we can say if it works or not.
EDIT: I forgot to say that it also ignores the fact that students can only advance once they completely mastered the subject. It doesn't mention that it puts the power in the hands of the students and let them take control of their own education by deciding which classes to take and when to take them. And as someone mentions, the author is also biased.
The article is pointing out that the Khan Academy is very similar to previous pedagogical attempts. You are also not presenting any evidence that the ways in which it differs are significant. I fail to see why you can claim that the article, which raises a valid objection to the Khan Academy, is silly, but your own arguments, also without data to back them up, are not.
But yes, let us get more data, that I can always get behind.
> I believe it to be the opposite, the chances of you just guessing 10 correct answers in a row is ridiculously low. It encourages you to make sure every answer is correct before submitting it, otherwise you would have to start over again.
That's not the point. You can learn to solve ten math problems in a row by simply memorizing algorithms to solve the problems, rather than learning the underlying concepts. The author criticizes Khan Academy because its methods emphasize the algorithms, rather than the concepts.
There's a good bit of research suggesting that the ability to solve quantitative problems isn't necessarily related to underlying qualitative understanding. Students could benefit from teaching methods designed to promote understanding.
Its weird that he complains that khan teaches the same that has been failing for generations, then goes and slams him for not hiring teachers (the people who have been teaching the same way for generations).
The article was super long and I bet most people won't make it down to the bottom where he goes on to explain that he actually likes khan academy and how it's a great thing. Too bad.
It's a contradictory rant and it's not obvious what the author wants from the reader beyond us purchasing his product. Ok, maybe that's a bit harsh but I honestly don't know what the takeaway is. Maybe it's the realization that KA isn't the answer to all our educational challenges, but that seems like a straw man. Given how many problems KA has solved for so many people, I think it has more than justified its existence, educational approach, and resource pools and funding.
The truth is that Khan Academy is helping millions of people - and I'm one of them - to learn topic that seemed out of their reach. Maybe KA hasn't understood all of the pieces of the educational puzzle, but given their resources and trajectory I think they can have the same kind of profound impact as Wikipedia.
This article is a joke. There is no evidence offered to support his conclusions, it's basically a long slander article that his peddling his shitty startup.
Happy to tell you more. My name is Karim. I'm the founder of Mathalicious and the author of the blog post. I'm also a former classroom teacher and middle school math coach, where I worked with other teachers to help improve instruction by focusing on 1) conceptual understanding, and 2) relevance.
It seems like the anti-post comments fall in three categories:
1. Khan is great
2. Mathalicious is just jealous
3. The author of the post is part of the establishment and should be ignored
Let's take those one at a time.
First, Khan is great for what it is. It's a wonderful resource for homework help, for review, for a refresher, etc., and I said as much in the post. However, Khan Academy is not great pedagogically. It presents math as a series of steps, is entirely traditional, does not address conceptual understanding, and should not be the first touch-point for students learning math. Unfortunately, this is exactly what's happening in any number of schools across the country, and the worry --- and it's not just mine, but many in the education community --- is that it will merely perpetuate the problem.
Second, the "you're just jealous because Khan is eating your lunch" critique is a bit silly. Mathalicious provides lessons to classroom teachers, not direct instruction to students. If Khan Academy were effective at teaching students in a meaningful way on the front end, this would actually be good for us. Our lessons focus mostly on applications of mathematics, and in this sense are the yin to the yang. Regardless, the critique that Khan's style of instruction is ineffective and has been proven so has nothing to do with something so subjective as jealousy. It's objective fact, something I'd imagine would resonate with computer scientists. That said, would I like it if Mathalicious had Khan's millions? Absolutely. Not only would it allow me to have an income --- something I've foregone for over two years --- but it would more importantly allow Mathalicious to make its lessons free to teachers, something that we simply cannot afford to do. (Still, we do allow users to choose their own price, including $5/month: the price of a Starbucks coffee.)
Third, this issue of my being part of the "establishment" because I'm a teacher... As a teacher, I've seen first-hand how broken the system is. I've taught next to people who knew very little math, and that frustrates nobody more than the teachers who have to pick up their slack. Either way, the "change must come from outside of the system" argument suggests that teachers therefore have no role to play in education reform. If there's anyone who actually believes this, please raise your hand.
In the end, here's my argument in a nutshell:
1. We have a math crisis caused by ineffective teaching and an emphasis on rote skills
2. This style of teaching has been demonstrated by research not to work
3. Khan's style of teaching is the same
4. Cash-strapped schools & districts are beginning to adopt Khan Academy as a core tool
5. This won't work and risks perpetuating the problem
6. We know from observing other countries that, to solve the problem, we must invest in professional development and effective curriculum
7. In part because Khan is free, and in part because of a sycophantic media narrative, we are less likely to do this so long as we think Khan Academy is the solution to the problem
1. ...and several other factors, like requiring all students in a class to move at the same pace.
2. We all, including Khan, recognize there is a problem.
3. You gravely mischaracterize Khan's approach. Yes, the video you selected (out of thousands) does promote rote methods, as do many of the exercises. But Khan is also at pains to demonstrate mathematical reasoning from first principles, and to emphasize why we use the methods we do, why they work, and what relevance they have to the real world - in real world terms that make at least as much sense to me as those used by mathalicious. These 'reason' and 'proof' videos are judiciously interspersed with the 'rote' videos and taken together form exactly the kind of compelling mathematical narrative you complain is lacking from typical math curricula.
4. This is great. Students can view and review Khan's videos as their core learning material, help each other, and make use of the teacher's limited time according to metrics which continually and repeatedly assess their personal level of comprehension (which, as they absorb substantial portions of a playlist, will expand far beyond the memorization of rote methods).
5. Hard data will soon show if you are right, but it is my impression that thousands have already benefited.
6. The Khan model, taken in its entirety, only encourages this.
7. If you listen to what Khan actually says in his various talks, he is proposing that his site has a novel and exciting role to play as part of a general restructuring of math education along the lines your propose.
You could have taken the view that the Khan Academy is a useful tool and resource, yet to capitalize on it we must redouble our efforts to improve education funding, classroom teaching methods and better curricula. That sounds reasonable. Instead you wrote an article attacking the Khan Academy as being a direct impediment to this kind of progress. Few respondents here on HN have found your arguments persuasive, and instead of replying to the kind of points I make above, you tellingly characterize us as follows:
It seems like the anti-post comments fall in three categories: 1. Khan is great 2. Mathalicious is just jealous 3. The author of the post is part of the establishment and should be ignored
The discussion here has been far more nuanced and sophisticated than you allow for - kind of like the way you discredit Khan's videos.
I agree with you gomphus, as an outsider reading this article it did make me feel kind of crappy.
The main feeling I got was:
"Look at the King! Look at the the King! Look at the King, the King, the King!
The King is in the altogether, but altogether, the altogether
He's altogether as naked as the day that he was born
The King is in the altogether, but altogether, the altogether
It's altogether the very least the King has ever worn"
I am sure there are drawbacks and improvements KA need to make, no doubt at all. But an all out attack from someone at a similar space, to me, seems counter-productive.
Thanks for the comments. Very helpful. Again, to reiterate, I actually like Khan Academy, and the post wasn't critiquing Khan as much as it was our turning Khan into something that it's not. The post wasn't about Khan. It was about us.
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Schools are experimenting with using it as a core instructional tool. That is not in question. Whether or not Khan himself is advocating this is besides the point (although they are involved in pilot programs). The point is that schools & districts are turning to a style of instruction that we know from research does not work, and that threatens to postpone the more important -- and necessary -- conversation about better teaching and better curriculum.
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That said, I have heard what Khan has said about how he envisions Khan Academy being used. (Awkward sentence; apologies). He wants teachers to be able to offload skills instruction in order to be freed up to pursue projects and other applications. In theory, this is terrific. As a former classroom teacher myself, I know how much time we spend on basic skills. However, my concern -- and let's be clear; I say this as a teacher -- is that if students aren't learning the skills correctly in the first place, then they won't be able to apply them.
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Finally, as someone who has spent considerable time -- and all of his savings -- trying to create a product that will help teachers teach better from the curriculum angle, I can tell you that Khan Academy has made it incredibly difficult to fund new projects in the ed space. Yes, there is more money than ever, but almost all of it is for platforms. Nobody wants to put money into effective content, because the media narrative has convinced them that the math problem has already been "solved." Having watched many, many Khan Academy videos, and having spoken to any number of teachers and school administrators, I have a difficult time believing this to be true.
Again, at its core, the blog post was about how Khan Academy was originally intended as a source for homework help; that we've begun to use it for much more than this; and that this risks perpetuating the underlying problem.
This seems fairly straightforward, uncontroversial, and I must admit that I'm surprised by how energetic (and in some cases, vitriolic) the response has been.
"Khan Academy is not great pedagogically" Sal's greatest ability is his empathy. His identification with the kids and elders alike. People turn to Khan Academy after they fail to understand their monotonic Math professors. And they aren't disappointed, at least not me.
Its easy to ignore all the thousands of students, like me, who have improved and understood concepts I hadnt learned before in formal school. We arent really visible, its like we dont exist.
Just as I havent seen anyone improving their understanding of mathematical concepts from the mathalicious school.
Okay, so the consensus is that the article is a joke (khan academy helped me a lot couple of years ago in high school so I agree). Why is it on the front page of HN then?
So that it won't be again.
Edit: Downvoting probably means that was not clear enough. I meant this will gather enough evidence for people to not post anything similar on Hacker News.
"When Bill Gates and others generously donated millions of dollars to Khan’s organization, he immediately turned around and used this money to hire an all-star team of…computer scientists. Of the twenty people who work at Khan Academy, none has ever taught in a K12 classroom in the the United States. Zero."
When you look at it like that, you never got it; leading to erroneous conclusions.
To address our challenges, we need to do what every other successful country has done: invest in professional development; give teachers more time to collaborate; and provide them with resources that help them not only meet the learning standards, but exceed them.
You could have copy/pasted that conclusion without altering a word from the debate about every other educational reform: school choice/vouchers, NCLB, high-stakes testing, teacher testing, etc etc. It's invariant under every proposal because the goal is to employ teachers and education of students is a welcome-but-unnecessary industrial byproduct.
It is also just as false that the US lags peer nations in professional development / collaboration time / pointless frippery ("resources that help them not only meet the learning standards, but exceed them") than it was the last 47 times this was brought up as a panacea.
You seem awefully cynical considering that you sell software to teachers (which they themself pay for) so that they can teach their children more efficiently.
I mean I have no love for unions and I am well aware that they have no great love for the students but even so, isn't your point a bit to cynical?
One can have a lot of respect for teachers and still like education reform.
That said, I've also worked with big companies. This does not obligate me to believe that big companies are universally properly managed collections of competent, self-effacing employees who would never dream of advancing their own interests at the stake of the job. It also does not obligate me to believe that big companies cannot be improved, even radically improved, by measures which would discomfit at least some people who work for big companies.
Indeed, if I hypothetically believed either of those two things prior to working for a big company, working for them would have cured me of those delusions, rapidly.
> the goal is to employ teachers and education of students is a welcome-but-unnecessary industrial byproduct.
This is pretty much exactly what I was thinking, albeit less eloquently, as I read this article. The entire article, while it made good points, always had an undertone of "Khan Academy is dangerous to me, therefore it's dangerous for everyone."
It could just be a difference of perspective - the author is a teacher and has been trained in a certain way of educating students, so any idea that isn't the way they were taught seems weird, scary, and wrong.
I'm not saying that Khan Academy is entirely the right direction to take - I haven't used it enough to say, and I'm too old to be able to stand in the shoes of its target demographic - but the entire time I read the article, I felt a bias underpinning the entire thing.
> I'm not saying that Khan Academy is entirely the right direction to take ...
Delivering a lecture is not what teachers should spend their time on most. Why should millions of teachers explain Pythagoras' theorem all over again, verbally, when we could hire the best one to make a video and then use that video?
Teachers should be education counsellors, couches if you want. They should spend their time guiding students, not regurgitating the same lecture for the 1000th time.
Khan Academy has no fault. The author is just a scared teacher. He should focus more on his students and leave the presentation of material to the most eloquent. There only needs to be one or a few of those.
"the goal is to employ teachers and education of students is a welcome-but-unnecessary industrial byproduct"
For an example of this -- look at the amount of times the Student-to-Teacher ratio is brought up. Which is such an interesting statistic because it implies that time with a terrible teacher is preferable to having the good teachers handle a few more students.
No. It implies that in general having fewer students makes it easier to be a good teacher. And that being in a smaller class makes it easier to be a successful student. The importance of class size is well-supported by systematic reviews and meta-analyses.
Been in the classroom for 17 years in higher education. I'm much better at my job now than I was 17 years ago. I've learned a lot in the intervening 17 years. Wisdom and experience count for something and imparting this onto other is useful.
Professional development can be helpful and to suggest that the goal is simply to employ teachers is ignorant and naive. I've never met a single teacher who has proposed an innovation with the goal of employing teachers. There are people who do care about teaching and some of those people are teachers and educational leaders. It does not appear to me that your cynicism is rooted in reality.
How do you know you're better at your job now than 17 years ago? Does an effective teacher evaluation system exist in your country that you can use as a reference to validate your claim?
Plus one for "how do you know?". My only caution to add in the case of teachers is that since the problem (or benefit) with standards is that there are so many of them, and since one corollary is that when a standard is chosen it's hard to change later and experimentation is rare, then the situation is doubly worse for teachers whose jobs revolve around a standard of performance because unless they have tenure the risk of a failed experiment aimed at helping the students learn (as opposed to only getting a high score with some performance standard) is too high. Anyway, your comment immediately reminded me of this anecdote I had saved in my quotes file that I thought was apt:
'One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction.
At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.”
God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”'
In the same way that a bad parent who becomes a better parent knows they are now a better parent. Some things are not quantifiable. I know of no effective national evaluation system for parenting and yet some parents are good parents. I know that I am a better teacher now than when I first started.
I'm not claiming to be a good teacher. I'm just claiming to be a better one. It's common for a practitioner to get better over time so one should assume that I've gotten better and not worse. What is the point of disputing this claim or doubting its veracity? I don't know the purpose of your question?
"You should believe me because I say so"? Really? I'm not saying you are or are not, but this line of justification is an insult to anyone who considers themselves rational thinkers.
Not really. I would have though that: 'do it a lot and you'll get better at it' is fairly self evident. Obviously testing of some sort would help us to determine how much better one became.
I'd go so far as to say that it would be very difficult not to improve at something you were doing over a period of time.
I think the point they're trying to make (through this admittedly condescending questioning) is that when the institution is fundamentally wrong, elongated experience can only pervert rather than further skills. Or f it does further, it is only furthering a perversion of some concept of what's right. I think there's a degree of truth to that but but it's oversimplifying a bit.
the bottom line is that america's eternal quest for a teacher metric is failing in relation to systems like the (perhaps overly touted) finnish one, where the discriminating factor for teacher quality is much more a measure of trust in the intuition of experienced teachers.
I think the 'I NEED MORE NUMBERS' mentality of empiricism you're using here has neutralised the prospective utility of the intuition of experienced teachers who would make effective consultants, if they ever come across something that works that they simply can't explain. Obviously, questioning their suggestions and looking for answers is the next step, but to insult their ability to think and view their opinions with derison? How are you helping anything talking that way?
I know that I am a better teacher now than when I first started.
Sure, you know that you're a better teacher than when you started. But can you prove it? What can you do that a fresh-out-of-college teacher can't? What can you do better? How can you show that you do your job better?
As a programmer, I have a similar problem. But I don't just throw up my hands and say, "Well, some things just can't be quantified." Instead, I try to quantify them. I try to show how my estimation skills have gotten better. I try to show how my code now has fewer bugs and requires less maintenance effort.
As a teacher, what can you show me to distinguish you from a wet-behind-the-ears graduate?
Patio11 made a claim that calls for reform, school choice, testing, etc. all had as their goal employment of teachers and that education of students was a by-product. Specifically he/she said this in regard to professional development.
I responded to the professional development aspect of Patio11's comment. My point being that seasoned professionals do have wisdom to impart on less experienced colleagues. I used myself as an example but the point made is clear (I think).
Even if I really am not a better teacher now than I was 17 years ago the point is still true. Well, in order for the point not to be true one has to believe that there is no wisdom gained from experience is teaching an that this is universally true. I know of no profession in which practitioners do not generally get better over time. Indeed,there is no profession in which no practitioner gets better over time.
So what is the point of requesting that I prove that I really have gotten better over time? It's not germane to my point unless one believes that no one ever gets better over time in teaching.
I know of no profession in which practitioners do not generally get better over time. Football players and Strippers don't automatically get better with time and despite learning new things their overall performance decreases with time. More generally any profession that deals with burnout either physical or mental has the same sort's of issues.
Look, my Mother has 2 PHD's in education and often does professional workshops for teachers. However, like most forms of professional development her workshops are both expensive and their value is hard to quantify. So it may pay better than her normal job but as she says it's of limited value.
Programming is a lot like teaching it takes a few years to get up to speed, but vary quickly years of experience stops being a useful metric.
What can you do that a fresh-out-of-college teacher can't?
I can plan lessons that include activities tailored for the needs of specific students. Training teachers find this hard and tend to plan for the median.
I can plan lessons more quickly than a training teacher, thus liberating time for more tailoring. I can use technology to differentiate delivery and to save time.
My feedback to each student is more accurately geared to that student's 'zone of proximal development'. I can set targets that mean something to each student.
I can 'reflect in action' in the classroom. I can read the situation in the whole class, and I can understand the logic behind mistakes that individual students make, and suggest alternative approaches.
How can you show that you do your job better?
In the institution where I teach we have QA observations and peer observations in place. That gives me some kind of benchmark.
Education is fuzzy, hard to measure, hard to standardise and quite hard work if you do it properly. As are many human occupations.
It's interesting to me that all of your examples are also very important aspects of being an excellent Dungeon Master. I never made this connection between teaching and DM'ing before.
In the same way that a bad parent who becomes a better parent knows they are now a better parent.
That's not a great example. There are loads of bad parents who think they are good parents. There's a bit of Dunning-Kruger effect, and also some bad parents who hold beliefs about what makes a good/bad parent that differ from the norm (i.e. some parents think beating their children is OK and think that modern society is wrong to condem that practice. They think they are good parents because they beat their children. This is wrong)
The problem with thinking you're good at a non-quantifiable, hard to measure thing is that almost everybody thinks they're better than average at them. Are you sure you aren't just measuring your previous methods of teaching against your current methods? There's no way they can hold up if you use that measure, but that doesn't mean your current methods are better.
When I was a student I didn't notice much difference in teaching ability unless the teacher hand only been teaching for a couple of years.
Are you a better programmer now than you were 5 years ago? How do you know? Has anyone evaluated your work and told you are now 18% more efficient than 5 years ago?
It may not be 100% accurate (since we are all masters at deluding ourselves), however it is possible to self-assess. Speaking as a teacher I know that my work is much better than it was 7 years ago (when I started). Simply delivering the material so many times has meant that I now have far more effective ways of describing and teaching certain concepts. I know that 7 years ago teaching a 10th grader how to iterate over an array would have taken 5 false starts and 4 weeks worth of instruction (bearing in mind that many lack motivation). Now the same content takes half the time because I can anticipate what kinds of questions will arise and how to deal with them effectively.
Oh and teacher evaluation is hard. Teachers fear it because it's done by non-teachers to teachers. And as some comments on this thread indicate the world is full of monday morning quarterbacks who have lots of opinions without any real experience.
In companies of any size, programmers generally go through quarterly, biannual, or annual performance reviews where they are assessed by the manager and peers. Programmers who are overperforming are promoted and given more responsibility (and money), those who are under-performing get coaching or are fired. This is the same as virtually every other job on the planet.
You can argue this kind of evaluation is not fair (it is certainly less scientific then test scores), but the point is that on the whole it works. And teachers don't have it. They mostly cannot be fired, and receive compensation on a schedule based purely on years of tenure and education.
A good analogy would be if programmers were given tenure after two years at a company and then could not be fired regardless of productivity or any other offense other than gross misconduct. If the programmers then (unsurprisingly) resisted every attempt, no matter how small, to reward high performance and punish incompetence, we would have an equivalent situation.
I understand your points and they're all fair in the context of programming as a job. Code is code and can be evaluated in an atomic fashion, its objectively either good(correct, efficient etc) or not.
How exactly do you accurately assess teaching? Test scores? I've worked at very tough schools. High unemployment, high crime area. Good teaching in this context meant the teacher showed up, made it through the year without having a mental breakdown and student attendance was > 50%.
On the flipside I've worked at top tier private schools where success was gauged by how many of our students were in the top n% for the state.
Teachers fear outside assessment from bureaucrats. Here in Australia we even have league tables for schools, and there has been talk of tying teacher pay to student performance. Obviously a worry if you are a classroom teacher who understands the human component of teaching (ie it's more than test results in a spreadsheet).
In my opinion to truly assess a teacher you'd need to observe their teaching for weeks to see how they deal with the myriad of situations that arise in the classroom. What we end up with though is standardised testing which ends up telling us what we already know.
Yeah I am fine with doing in-class evaluations, but I think if you think that through you would admit that those are biased in a different way. My point is really more about the importance of doing the kind of evaluation and talent management that every successful private sector company does--figure out who is doing well, and reward them, figure out who is doing poorly and try to help.
Basically I think all this "it can't be measured" stuff is a bit dishonest. My wife is a high school teacher, and amongst her department everyone knows who is good and who isn't, same as any job. The only difference is that that knowledge can't possible have any effect on your career.
In any case, the point you are making about standardized testing is completely beside the point. No one who advocates using testing advocates using only testing for teacher evaluation. And no one advocates using the raw scores. Of course teachers with poor students in bad schools will have worse raw scores then teachers with rich students in good schools. The proposed measurement is virtually always some kind of "value added" score that attempts to control for these variables and measure the teachers impact.
I think we're in agreement. I totally agree that good teachers need to be rewarded and that and bad teachers need to be identified and helped or sacked. We owe that to our kids.
I never said that it cant be measured. It's just really hard to do it right.
The solution is not to simply use private sector type performance reviews since correcting for differences within the school is difficult let alone correcting for differences between schools.
Measuring teacher performance is a hot area of debate around the world, and a consensus for how to "do it right" hasn't yet emerged.
Lots of questions need to be fairly addressed:
-- Will testing be able to differentiate between school-based and non-school-based influences on
student performance?
-- Will testing be able to differentiate between the influences of different teachers on individual students or groups of students? What might be the ultimate extent of increased standardised testing?
-- What criteria are intended to form the basis of a performance-based pay scheme?
-- If the predominant criterion used is to be student progress as measured by standardised testing, what measures will the Government take to ensure the implementation of valid and appropriate testing regimes and instruments?
These questions come from an issues paper published by Australian Primary Principals Association.
Also from the paper:
In jobs where pay is linked to performance:
The criteria for determining the payment of additional rewards are to be objectively determined: whether in volume of product or sales, increase in profits, or additional hours worked. More accurately put, the context of the industries in which systems of this kind work well are those
where outputs and outcomes are easily, and objectively, quantifiable. This quantification can usually (although not always) be reduced to monetary terms.
So how exactly to we quantify and reward the teacher who helps her students develop skills that 'are not quantifiable'?
PS: In Australia primary and secondary teachers can't get tenure, however given a powerful union it is difficult to sack teachers, and this admittedly is a big problem.
I don't think you understood the parent's points...
First, the main point was that programmers were evaluated by their peers and managers, i.e. the people who they work with, not bureaucrats.
Second, judging a programmer solely (in an atomic fashion) by their code is the exact same thing as judging a teacher solely by test scores. How do you know the code was not written at 2am the night of a release to stop vital information from being deleted every time a user submits a form.
On the flipside how do you know that the elegant code wasn't the combination of effort and discussion of several coders all considered to be in the top n% of some mailing list.
I think my point is really that we all tend to rush to judgement of professions outside of our own, when in reality we share the same human problems that are incredibly hard to formalize and hence provide a systematic solution for.
As a matter of fact, I work in a company with a close equivalent: due to the worker-friendly labor laws and a very powerful union, if a worker stays with the company for three years, firing him costs the company a years' salary (unless gross misconduct is demonstrated), thus giving high-salary positions (like programmers) an equivalent to tenure.
On the other hand, programmers are rarely/never advanced, there's no career plan.
As you suspect, it discourages studying and promotes laziness and getting out of date with current programming pratices.
And it also raises a tough mental barrier to exit, I'm unhappy here, but I really like having a safety net and have high fixed expenses and there's no unemployment in my country if I quit voluntarily, so I'm reluctant to quit unless I make my nest egg, which I've been putting off for some time.
Back to teachers, if there are no incentives, I suspect it might make them less motivated to stay up to date and better themselves - of course there are always those that are internally motivated and will do so whatever the environment, but many will be discouraged by it.
Forgive if someone has already stated the obvious, but the difficulty of rating the teacher profession, as opposed to other professions, lies in the intended outcome. For an engineer, there are many objectives metrics to measure code work against. The same is true for many non-programming corporate jobs (usual metric is $$$).
But what is the intended outcome of teaching?
Better test scores? (Google Scholar 'standardized testing and success' and take your side of the argument, but at best the jury is still out)
The three R's? Social development? Curiosity for learning? All of the above?
I understand your underlying point, but it is dangerous to contrasts teacher evaluations with other professional evaluations, lest we find ourselves programming students a science) and not teaching them (an art).
Crazy idea alert! With intended outcomes varying so much for teachers and teaching environments, I'd offer that teachers should be only evaluated by fellow teachers, parents, and students themselves.
I read this question as an insult. How could they not know they are better at their job after 17 years of doing it?
This is just my personal opinion but the true judge of a teacher's effectiveness is how much their students learned, and even that can only be used as a measure if the students were willing to learn in the first place.
Relying on some national standard to judge teachers hasn't seemed to help any country in history to have better teachers. I'd wager to guess that periods in history where education unilaterally improved are more due to the motivation of those being educated than anything else.
This is an incredibly depressing post. The discussion over educational reform has devolved into one side begging for teachers to stop being treated like cattle and the other saying, essentially, "if you cared about the kids, you'd be happy being treated like cattle."
Doctors go through significantly more schooling and receive significantly more professional development — yet they are still perceived with respect as professionals who care about their patients. Why can't we do the same for teachers?
Give it time. With the direction healthcare costs are going it's just a matter of time before the hate enters the profession. Soon people will see doctors, nurses, and administrators for what they really are: rent-seekers gouging taxpayers for enormous amounts of money by erecting barriers to entry, keeping accountability to a minimum, and charging endless procedures to the bottomless pits that are medicare and medicaid.
From my experience a significant percentage of the population already feels this way. Maybe it's because I have mostly dealt with the military health care system(which also uses civilian specialists), but most doctors seem arrogant, uncaring, and incompetent.
'... most doctors seem arrogant, uncaring, and incompetent' - it's unfortunate if this is your take-home from meeting doctors, but I have to say that is a serious overstatement.
Unfortunately this is the reality of healthcare for a great many of us in the states.
My experience with one of the larger HMO organizations here was very disconcerting.
I was bedridden with spinal joint pain for several days. They were unable to see me in a reasonable timeframe (2 week wait minimum), which meant by the time I was able to come in for a blood test the acute inflammation I was experiencing had passed, preventing screening for the condition I was concerned about (my dad and brother both have ankylosing spondylitis, making it extremely likely I do as well).
Worse than that, I found I had to educate the RN that was responsible for interpreting my test results (specifically that ankylosing spondylitis shows negative rheumatoid factor).
In addition to this, I've watched what's happened to friends with serious but not readily diagnosed diseases. One was in advanced stages of liver failure. In the end she only got a diagnosis by going to a hospital, making herself a bother and refusing to leave until someone took responsibility for actually finding out what was going on. The result was she avoided an unnecessary liver transplant. Her diagnosis was an uncommon but easily treatable autoimmune condition.
There's roughly 50% odds the transplant would have killed her by now (this was some 10 years ago). Taking an adversarial approach and having the support of a friend's mom who worked for the business side of the HMO in doing this probably saved her life.
It shouldn't have to be this way.
It's abusive to doctors that things are set up this way as well.
In any case, I don't mean to rant, but I just wanted to provide some counter anecdotes to to your feeling that the callousness and incompetence of medicine in the states was being exaggerated.
Wow, contrasting this with the latest 2 experiences my family had:
My stepfather went for a routine visit to the doctor in Vienna, Austria. They found a suspicious object, and decided to treat him immediately, and he was operated on the very next day. It ended up being benign, but I was amazed at their speed of treatment.
My uncle went for a cardiologist evaluation here in Montevideo, Uruguay (where we have a form of socialist-style medicine in the style called Mutualism). They found a suspicious spike in his heartbeat, which they suspected to be a treatable syndrome (Wolff-Parkinson-White), and decided to do some special evaluations. He was treated (with full anaesthetics) one week later (at almost zero cost).
Both were quite good experiences, times are a little slower in Uruguay but everybody has access to basic medicine.
That said, I suspect that for difficult-to-catch diseases, you have to make yourself a bother, otherwise you might slip through the cracks like your friend almost did (doctors here in Uruguay are heavily penalized if they take too much time with one patient).
Don't forget about the true rent-seeking, taxpayer gouging insurance companies. I find that by the time I've paid my $950 a month in insurance, paying another $40 copay to the doctor just makes me angry. When the cost to have semi-decent insurance is the same cost as leasing a BMW it's no wonder that people don't go to the doctor's.
[Note: I realize it might just be that my insurance is ridiculous. I'm looking into alternatives.]
Doctors go through significantly more schooling and receive significantly more professional development — yet they are still perceived with respect as professionals who care about their patients. Why can't we do the same for teachers?
Because peoplegenerally have much less exposure to doctors and when they are they're desperate for either treatment or hope. Both of these contribute.
Also, medical training is much harder than education. There are teachers at every average large high school who could have been doctors but they're a minority.
The study of medicine is grounded in hard sciences. There are many things that are known and many that aren't known but usually the line between the two is relatively clear. When something works or doesn't work, it is also often very easy to see.
The study of education is based on social sciences and everything is much more slippery. What is being taught to teachers right now is whichever theory is currently popular. When I earned my credentials to teach, it was quite frankly a joke most of the time. Getting an A was easy. Many of the people in my program were not competent enough to compete in a more difficult field or program.
In the years since, as my own children began working through the public school system, I am taken aback regularly by evidence that their teachers are poorly educated themselves.
I'm shocked that someone would be surprised that there is a gap between how people view doctors and teachers.
The US does not spend anywhere near tour nations in professional development nor build in the same collaboration time. It does not have as much coaching and other "frippery" . There is plenty of great research on this and while you are right that many pay lip service to improving these areas of US education, little is ever done to meaningfully invest in said improvements.
Also the article did not bring these up as a panacea. These kinds of complicated, cultural, and meaningful improvements will not be made easily, in a short period of time, etc.
I think this piece would be more effective, or at least somewhat effective, if its author had described a vision for online learning that takes the best of Khan's approach and combines it with, well, something interesting. The author never really explains what that something is. I don't think Khan Academy is perfect. Its gamification techniques will not work for all students. But it is an alternative for some students. If a kid who is ahead can stay with her peers at the same grade level while watching Khan videos at night, great. If a kid who is behind can stay with her grade level by using Khan to catch up without the shame of remedial math, even better.
Unfortunately all evidence so far seems to indicate that online approaches to learning, on average, do not work very well. To be clear, meta-analyses continue to reveal that schooling, as it exists now, works as well or better than tech centered or online education. I do not find this surprising, if you do not change the philosophy and pedagogy, no repackaging will overcome the serious inherent flaws in the approach. This is particularly pronounced in math Ed and I encourage anyone to dig into the research on what good teaching and learning of math is characterized by.
You wrote "...online approaches to learning, on average, do not work very well..."
Huh? Listen my good man, we aren't talking about the average online approach to learning, we're talking specifically about Khan Academy approach. And I know Khan Academy works for some kids because I've seen some kids using, and liking it -- both kids ahead of their peers and kids behind them.
Whether it works for all kids, on average, is totally irrelevant.
The one concrete criticism I could see in the article (aside from vague handwaving about "pedagogical underpinnings") was about providing a step-by-step series of instructions for solving a problem without real understanding.
But Khan doesn't actually do that. In my experience, he's very good at emphasizing why something works. He encourages people to remember the "why" well enough to work out the actual formulas for themselves, rather than just memorizing the formulas.
Personally I don't understand how one would go about teaching math without using step-by-step instructions, especially considering his example of teaching slope. He never says what would be a better way to teach slope than the textbook/Khan methods, he just claims (without submitting any proof) that those methods are completely ineffective. Well, it seems to be working for KA students, and it seems to be working for other countries.
I agree with pinchyfingers: Students are getting worse at math because they don't want to put the work in. And I don't think it should necessarily be the educator's burden to make each individual math topic more fun and exciting to try and trick students into using their brains. We need to find a way to get kids motivated about learning in general again.
In particular, he doesn't present the Khan Academy as a full replacement for primary education, but as an enhancement. In the second half of the video, he illustrates the teacher as maximizing the amount of useful interaction between themselves and the students.
Instead of spending class time lecturing and producing examples (things that technology can handle easily, and in some cases better than a human can), teachers use their class time to interact with students individually, helping them better understand the content and meaning behind it. This time becomes even more useful because the application gives statistics on how students are performing, and what directions they're moving in; it arms teachers with better data and more time to use it.
This is a good point that touches on what seems like a communication disconnect. While Khan advocates using it as an enhancement, many in education think it's more than that and use it accordingly (disclaimer: based on my experience, totally anecdotal). Perhaps decision-makers are viewing Khan Academy as THE SOLUTION, which is what the author takes issue with.
Is it an either/or proposition? Kahn has helped students pass their classes, brush up on subjects they're rusty on, tutor them through a tough unit and pass tests. I fail to see how this is a bad thing.
EDIT: I feel like I should expand on my initial reaction. Education isn't a product that you can sell, market or prepackage to have certain functionality. It's not a car or software. It's a process. You get out of it what you put in. No amount of great teachers, progressive curriculum or charter schooling is going to change the fact that the student still needs to participate.
Shoving students into holes and expecting them to learn this way is stupid. Expanding the ways in which they can engage their education is not. When we encourage people to exercise or eat better we don't expect that they will all do it the same way, why would we expect the same thing from education. I don't think Kahn Academy is the "Future of Education" any more than I think marathon running is the "Future of Fitness", but that doesn't mean it's bad for education.
This guy should probably come out and say Khan Academy is eating his lunch and he is pissed about it. The passive aggressive approach to talking about companies with better lessons and teaching styles gets completely undermined when you realize that this guy is selling math lessons[0] and you conclude that he thinks his stuff is better than Khan's. Yeah, maybe it is, but it looks really pretty weak to write an article like that and not mention the fact that you are selling a competing product. Where's the Chutzpah? Just say "Khan sucks, we are better, here's why".
Of course, the context is missing here in the writing, and Hacker News probably wasn't the intended audience, so maybe it was assumed people would make the assumption that Mathalicous' stuff was the better solution the author was talking about. But so far, the overall response has been pretty poor[1].
My idea on how to fix High School math. Spend the first 3 years doing nothing but mastering basic algebra.
I've seen from tutoring my siblings that basic algebra skills are what they lack. They concepts of trig and calculus aren't that difficult, it's the algebra that trips them up.
Leave the higher level math, for everyone but the most advanced students, to college. If I was a college math professor I'd rather teach a group of kids who have mastered algebra, than ones who've had a whirlwind tour of everything.
This might work for some people, but as someone relatively smart and good at math, this would just make me want to cry myself to sleep at night. A smart student can master algebra/algebra 2 curriculum in a couple of months. A problem with a lot of high achievers is that they already feel like they are wasting time in high school, this just aggravates that problem.
My suggestion:
Not everyone needs to learn that much math. Classes up to algebra 2 and also an intro to statistics are probably enough for most people. Note that this can be in high school or college.
However, for those who want to be mathematicians/scientists/engineers/technical people, math education should diverge probably around 7th grade. Rather than teaching pre-algebra or algebra or whatever they do now, they should start teaching the students how to do proofs. The best thing about Ma 1a at Caltech (http://www.math.caltech.edu/~2011-12/1term/ma001a1/) is that about 60% of the material could be taught to a smart motivated 7th grader. Making the students do proofs with help everyone figure out either that they love math and its beautiful or that they aren't really that interested in math. With a more rigorous understanding of basic math, learning applications like calculus is a lot easier.
Sal didn't start the Academy to change the way children are taught math in school. He made it to fulfill a need he saw in a majority of student -- the same thing the article points out.
That being said, I think Sal's TED talk (mentioned in another comment here) really hits the nail on the head. I do believe that education in its current North American form is flawed. I don't think exams are a proper way of testing anything more than memory retention and ability to perform repetitive tasks (do this, then this, then that, etc).
Khan Academy fills a void within the current education system. Yes the system is flawed, but that's beside the Academy's scope.
I'm in fulltime work, and for years have wished I could go back to university and get another degree. It isn't a qualification I want - I don't need it to get on in my career, for example - but knowledge. Now the internet is bringing me and thousands like me the opportunity to learn at our own pace for free.
I'm currently taking the Khan chemistry course and loving it. When you criticise Khan for not helping kids as much as a real teacher does, I think you miss the bigger picture. It's enabling people of all ages to broaden their knowledge, not just people in formal education.
This, to me, is the real revolution: free lifelong learning.
This is something I wish universities would provide: open enrollment for adults without the cookie-cutter bureaucratic undergraduate track and the 18-year-old-focused high-bar on-rails admissions process.
The "continuing education" programs that do exist are generally stunted and poor.
Would it be so terrible if I spent 10 years gradually taking classes in engineering and sciences, perhaps never earning a degree? Why is college something you do only once, when you're arguably too young to genuinely appreciate it or even know what you want?
This is why I find Khan Academy to be so fascinating.
If it helps, this is exactly what our school is built around. Every class we create is available both in a degree track as well as ala-carte to students exactly like yourself. You have the same professor and t/a support, grading and evaluation. You also have the same access to the resources in our learning system. We are tuition only (no fees) so we even charge the same amount as the degree seeking students ($100/credit, $400-$500 per class, $5k for masters). And, if you decide to go through admissions and seek a degree, any courses you take would apply towards that degree.
The only real difference between in degree and ala-carte is that degree seeking students will have more options for how to pay for their education. Once we are accredited, a vast array of financing becomes available for students pursuing a degree. Some are good (grants, scholarships, state subsidies) some are not (Student loans), but having options for our students helps a great deal. We structured our program this way because we come from your exact position: why can't I take the classes I want without all the BS?
I think the reason more schools don't do this is that it would expose the true cost of these classes, which at institutions like Stanford or MIT can easily exceed $5,000 per class. Actually, after fees, housing and books, $10k is closer to accurate. The market for $5k classes is not huge, and without putting everything on a gigantic student loan credit card, few rational consumers would pay the price.
"Khan Academy and its donors may preclude better products from coming along"
I just don't understand this. KA, Udacity, Coursera, Codecademy, MITx, teachontablo.com, this list goes on. I don't see how KA has done anything but prove the possibility of traction. When professors like Thrun and Norvig and investors like Paul Graham, Fred Wilson, and Peter Thiel are excited about the educational space, I believe the students will eventually win. It's no secret that many of the above have been inspired by Sal in one way or another.
The more products competing here, the better education will be. Yelling at Khan Academy because it's "the only thing that [exists]" feels...oddly misplaced.
> "Khan Academy and its donors may preclude better products from coming along"
The author is just bitter. One website on the internet does not preclude another. As you said, there are many startups. Focusing on just KA, the author might be wearing horse blinders.
If he is a teacher, he should be counseling his students instead to repeating the same lesson that can be learned from a video. There will always be a need for direct human tutoring.
I think it's a mistake for them to throw KA in the same category as traditional K-12 education in the first place. At least from my experience with it, people don't go on Kahn Academy to try to learn everything; it's more valuable when you're looking for knowledge about a specific subject, and you already have a reason for wanting to learn it.
The article's main criticism is that KA doesn't try to talk about all the possible uses of the subject matter. I'd rather they didn't, or at the very least kept it separate. Unless someone's being forced to sit down and watch educational videos, that doesn't add enough value to justify the time spent.
It may be that other competitors (including the ones you've mentioned) will try to fill the gap and take a more traditional education role. But saying something's bad just because it's not occupying the exact niche that the author wants it to? That's not a very useful criticism.
I think it's a mistake for them to throw KA in the same category as traditional K-12 education in the first place. At least from my experience with it, people don't go on Kahn Academy to try to learn everything; it's more valuable when you're looking for knowledge about a specific subject, and you already have a reason for wanting to learn it.
The article's main criticism is that KA doesn't try to talk about all the possible uses of the subject matter. I'd rather they didn't, or at the very least kept it separate. Unless someone's being forced to sit down and watch educational videos, that doesn't add enough value to justify the time spent.
It may be that other competitors (including the ones you've mentioned) will try to fill the gap and take a more traditional education role. But saying something's bad just because it's not occupying the exact niche that the author wants it to? That's not a very useful criticism.
I feel like KA frees up some of the time constraints of traditional educators so that they can spend more time doing the motivation and the possible uses of a subject matter.
I'm no teacher but if I was I'd much rather spend my time getting kids excited about stuff and then point them to the resources they need to get going. I'd also have more time to answer questions so the kids wouldn't get as frustrated or stuck.
I don't mean to quibble, but you should really replace Henry Ford with Karl Benz. By the time Henry Ford got into the act, cars had already proven their usefulness. Ford's innovation was making cars cheap enough for the average person to afford.
What are you talking about? The labor movement in the US was stronger during Ford's lifetime than it has been since then, and Ford always had good relations with it.
The author doesn't seem to have watched many of the khan academy videos, what KA excels in is in fact precisely what he's criticizing it for not doing: explaining what maths means.
191 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] thread"the budget cuts he seemed so giddy about invariably mean fewer teachers, and to argue that this is somehow beneficial to learning is to argue against years of research and practice" -- this is exactly the argument that Khan Academy is making: that we can cut teachers in favor of lessons taught by computer. The actual reason why "this time is different" is that we now have the power to create excellent lessons, through the power of computers, the internet, and crowds.
Maybe Khan Academy isn't good enough to replace teachers yet. (I would be surprised if it weren't already better than 75% of teachers, though. Most teachers aren't very good.)
Another claim the author makes: "Khan Academy makes it difficult for something better to come along" -- I would be SHOCKED if this were true. Sure, it's hard to compete with free, but KA is creating a new ecosystem of people who are looking to the internet for teaching materials! So if KA is really as bad as the author claims, then it's going to be MUCH easier than it is today to get better materials in the hands of kids.
It doesn't address the issue that each student can learn at their own pace, which is the main part of Khan. It ignores people that had success with KA except for a quick mention. It also ignores the fact that Khan is a great teacher, and with this model anyone can learn from the best teacher there is.
It ignores the tools it gives teachers to see the progress of the students. It ignores the fact that teachers can give personalized assistance. it ignores that more advanced students can teach less advanced students.
It dismisses the achievement system while every single educator knows they work and have worked since the first teacher decided to give students gold stars. It only mentions it in passing to say that it doesn't work without offering any proof.
The truth is: There are a LOT of people who have their own idea of what the "perfect" teaching system is. When something comes around that challenges that, as with everything else, those people will try to say that it won't work. Let it be field tested, let's see the results. THEN we can say if it works or not.
EDIT: I forgot to say that it also ignores the fact that students can only advance once they completely mastered the subject. It doesn't mention that it puts the power in the hands of the students and let them take control of their own education by deciding which classes to take and when to take them. And as someone mentions, the author is also biased.
But yes, let us get more data, that I can always get behind.
That's not the point. You can learn to solve ten math problems in a row by simply memorizing algorithms to solve the problems, rather than learning the underlying concepts. The author criticizes Khan Academy because its methods emphasize the algorithms, rather than the concepts.
There's a good bit of research suggesting that the ability to solve quantitative problems isn't necessarily related to underlying qualitative understanding. Students could benefit from teaching methods designed to promote understanding.
The article was super long and I bet most people won't make it down to the bottom where he goes on to explain that he actually likes khan academy and how it's a great thing. Too bad.
It seems like the anti-post comments fall in three categories:
1. Khan is great 2. Mathalicious is just jealous 3. The author of the post is part of the establishment and should be ignored
Let's take those one at a time.
First, Khan is great for what it is. It's a wonderful resource for homework help, for review, for a refresher, etc., and I said as much in the post. However, Khan Academy is not great pedagogically. It presents math as a series of steps, is entirely traditional, does not address conceptual understanding, and should not be the first touch-point for students learning math. Unfortunately, this is exactly what's happening in any number of schools across the country, and the worry --- and it's not just mine, but many in the education community --- is that it will merely perpetuate the problem.
Second, the "you're just jealous because Khan is eating your lunch" critique is a bit silly. Mathalicious provides lessons to classroom teachers, not direct instruction to students. If Khan Academy were effective at teaching students in a meaningful way on the front end, this would actually be good for us. Our lessons focus mostly on applications of mathematics, and in this sense are the yin to the yang. Regardless, the critique that Khan's style of instruction is ineffective and has been proven so has nothing to do with something so subjective as jealousy. It's objective fact, something I'd imagine would resonate with computer scientists. That said, would I like it if Mathalicious had Khan's millions? Absolutely. Not only would it allow me to have an income --- something I've foregone for over two years --- but it would more importantly allow Mathalicious to make its lessons free to teachers, something that we simply cannot afford to do. (Still, we do allow users to choose their own price, including $5/month: the price of a Starbucks coffee.)
Third, this issue of my being part of the "establishment" because I'm a teacher... As a teacher, I've seen first-hand how broken the system is. I've taught next to people who knew very little math, and that frustrates nobody more than the teachers who have to pick up their slack. Either way, the "change must come from outside of the system" argument suggests that teachers therefore have no role to play in education reform. If there's anyone who actually believes this, please raise your hand.
In the end, here's my argument in a nutshell:
1. We have a math crisis caused by ineffective teaching and an emphasis on rote skills 2. This style of teaching has been demonstrated by research not to work 3. Khan's style of teaching is the same 4. Cash-strapped schools & districts are beginning to adopt Khan Academy as a core tool 5. This won't work and risks perpetuating the problem 6. We know from observing other countries that, to solve the problem, we must invest in professional development and effective curriculum 7. In part because Khan is free, and in part because of a sycophantic media narrative, we are less likely to do this so long as we think Khan Academy is the solution to the problem
So, what part of that do people disagree with?
Karim
1. ...and several other factors, like requiring all students in a class to move at the same pace.
2. We all, including Khan, recognize there is a problem.
3. You gravely mischaracterize Khan's approach. Yes, the video you selected (out of thousands) does promote rote methods, as do many of the exercises. But Khan is also at pains to demonstrate mathematical reasoning from first principles, and to emphasize why we use the methods we do, why they work, and what relevance they have to the real world - in real world terms that make at least as much sense to me as those used by mathalicious. These 'reason' and 'proof' videos are judiciously interspersed with the 'rote' videos and taken together form exactly the kind of compelling mathematical narrative you complain is lacking from typical math curricula.
4. This is great. Students can view and review Khan's videos as their core learning material, help each other, and make use of the teacher's limited time according to metrics which continually and repeatedly assess their personal level of comprehension (which, as they absorb substantial portions of a playlist, will expand far beyond the memorization of rote methods).
5. Hard data will soon show if you are right, but it is my impression that thousands have already benefited.
6. The Khan model, taken in its entirety, only encourages this.
7. If you listen to what Khan actually says in his various talks, he is proposing that his site has a novel and exciting role to play as part of a general restructuring of math education along the lines your propose.
You could have taken the view that the Khan Academy is a useful tool and resource, yet to capitalize on it we must redouble our efforts to improve education funding, classroom teaching methods and better curricula. That sounds reasonable. Instead you wrote an article attacking the Khan Academy as being a direct impediment to this kind of progress. Few respondents here on HN have found your arguments persuasive, and instead of replying to the kind of points I make above, you tellingly characterize us as follows:
It seems like the anti-post comments fall in three categories: 1. Khan is great 2. Mathalicious is just jealous 3. The author of the post is part of the establishment and should be ignored
The discussion here has been far more nuanced and sophisticated than you allow for - kind of like the way you discredit Khan's videos.
The main feeling I got was:
"Look at the King! Look at the the King! Look at the King, the King, the King! The King is in the altogether, but altogether, the altogether He's altogether as naked as the day that he was born The King is in the altogether, but altogether, the altogether It's altogether the very least the King has ever worn"
I am sure there are drawbacks and improvements KA need to make, no doubt at all. But an all out attack from someone at a similar space, to me, seems counter-productive.
Just as I havent seen anyone improving their understanding of mathematical concepts from the mathalicious school.
When you look at it like that, you never got it; leading to erroneous conclusions.
You could have copy/pasted that conclusion without altering a word from the debate about every other educational reform: school choice/vouchers, NCLB, high-stakes testing, teacher testing, etc etc. It's invariant under every proposal because the goal is to employ teachers and education of students is a welcome-but-unnecessary industrial byproduct.
It is also just as false that the US lags peer nations in professional development / collaboration time / pointless frippery ("resources that help them not only meet the learning standards, but exceed them") than it was the last 47 times this was brought up as a panacea.
I mean I have no love for unions and I am well aware that they have no great love for the students but even so, isn't your point a bit to cynical?
That said, I've also worked with big companies. This does not obligate me to believe that big companies are universally properly managed collections of competent, self-effacing employees who would never dream of advancing their own interests at the stake of the job. It also does not obligate me to believe that big companies cannot be improved, even radically improved, by measures which would discomfit at least some people who work for big companies.
Indeed, if I hypothetically believed either of those two things prior to working for a big company, working for them would have cured me of those delusions, rapidly.
Does the whole "Bingo card" concept qualifies as efficient teaching? The word "gamification" seems to have been invented for it.
This is pretty much exactly what I was thinking, albeit less eloquently, as I read this article. The entire article, while it made good points, always had an undertone of "Khan Academy is dangerous to me, therefore it's dangerous for everyone."
It could just be a difference of perspective - the author is a teacher and has been trained in a certain way of educating students, so any idea that isn't the way they were taught seems weird, scary, and wrong.
I'm not saying that Khan Academy is entirely the right direction to take - I haven't used it enough to say, and I'm too old to be able to stand in the shoes of its target demographic - but the entire time I read the article, I felt a bias underpinning the entire thing.
Delivering a lecture is not what teachers should spend their time on most. Why should millions of teachers explain Pythagoras' theorem all over again, verbally, when we could hire the best one to make a video and then use that video?
Teachers should be education counsellors, couches if you want. They should spend their time guiding students, not regurgitating the same lecture for the 1000th time.
Khan Academy has no fault. The author is just a scared teacher. He should focus more on his students and leave the presentation of material to the most eloquent. There only needs to be one or a few of those.
For an example of this -- look at the amount of times the Student-to-Teacher ratio is brought up. Which is such an interesting statistic because it implies that time with a terrible teacher is preferable to having the good teachers handle a few more students.
[Citation needed]
IIRC in disciplined classes between the sizes of 6ish and 40ish the results are very similar.
Professional development can be helpful and to suggest that the goal is simply to employ teachers is ignorant and naive. I've never met a single teacher who has proposed an innovation with the goal of employing teachers. There are people who do care about teaching and some of those people are teachers and educational leaders. It does not appear to me that your cynicism is rooted in reality.
'One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction.
Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr., quoted in Medical World News (September 1, 1972), p. 45, as quoted in Tufte's 1974 book Data Analysis for Politics and Policy; http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/12...I'm not claiming to be a good teacher. I'm just claiming to be a better one. It's common for a practitioner to get better over time so one should assume that I've gotten better and not worse. What is the point of disputing this claim or doubting its veracity? I don't know the purpose of your question?
I'd go so far as to say that it would be very difficult not to improve at something you were doing over a period of time.
I think the 'I NEED MORE NUMBERS' mentality of empiricism you're using here has neutralised the prospective utility of the intuition of experienced teachers who would make effective consultants, if they ever come across something that works that they simply can't explain. Obviously, questioning their suggestions and looking for answers is the next step, but to insult their ability to think and view their opinions with derison? How are you helping anything talking that way?
Sure, you know that you're a better teacher than when you started. But can you prove it? What can you do that a fresh-out-of-college teacher can't? What can you do better? How can you show that you do your job better?
As a programmer, I have a similar problem. But I don't just throw up my hands and say, "Well, some things just can't be quantified." Instead, I try to quantify them. I try to show how my estimation skills have gotten better. I try to show how my code now has fewer bugs and requires less maintenance effort.
As a teacher, what can you show me to distinguish you from a wet-behind-the-ears graduate?
I responded to the professional development aspect of Patio11's comment. My point being that seasoned professionals do have wisdom to impart on less experienced colleagues. I used myself as an example but the point made is clear (I think).
Even if I really am not a better teacher now than I was 17 years ago the point is still true. Well, in order for the point not to be true one has to believe that there is no wisdom gained from experience is teaching an that this is universally true. I know of no profession in which practitioners do not generally get better over time. Indeed,there is no profession in which no practitioner gets better over time.
So what is the point of requesting that I prove that I really have gotten better over time? It's not germane to my point unless one believes that no one ever gets better over time in teaching.
Look, my Mother has 2 PHD's in education and often does professional workshops for teachers. However, like most forms of professional development her workshops are both expensive and their value is hard to quantify. So it may pay better than her normal job but as she says it's of limited value.
Programming is a lot like teaching it takes a few years to get up to speed, but vary quickly years of experience stops being a useful metric.
I can plan lessons that include activities tailored for the needs of specific students. Training teachers find this hard and tend to plan for the median.
I can plan lessons more quickly than a training teacher, thus liberating time for more tailoring. I can use technology to differentiate delivery and to save time.
My feedback to each student is more accurately geared to that student's 'zone of proximal development'. I can set targets that mean something to each student.
I can 'reflect in action' in the classroom. I can read the situation in the whole class, and I can understand the logic behind mistakes that individual students make, and suggest alternative approaches.
How can you show that you do your job better?
In the institution where I teach we have QA observations and peer observations in place. That gives me some kind of benchmark.
Education is fuzzy, hard to measure, hard to standardise and quite hard work if you do it properly. As are many human occupations.
That's not a great example. There are loads of bad parents who think they are good parents. There's a bit of Dunning-Kruger effect, and also some bad parents who hold beliefs about what makes a good/bad parent that differ from the norm (i.e. some parents think beating their children is OK and think that modern society is wrong to condem that practice. They think they are good parents because they beat their children. This is wrong)
When I was a student I didn't notice much difference in teaching ability unless the teacher hand only been teaching for a couple of years.
It may not be 100% accurate (since we are all masters at deluding ourselves), however it is possible to self-assess. Speaking as a teacher I know that my work is much better than it was 7 years ago (when I started). Simply delivering the material so many times has meant that I now have far more effective ways of describing and teaching certain concepts. I know that 7 years ago teaching a 10th grader how to iterate over an array would have taken 5 false starts and 4 weeks worth of instruction (bearing in mind that many lack motivation). Now the same content takes half the time because I can anticipate what kinds of questions will arise and how to deal with them effectively.
Oh and teacher evaluation is hard. Teachers fear it because it's done by non-teachers to teachers. And as some comments on this thread indicate the world is full of monday morning quarterbacks who have lots of opinions without any real experience.
You can argue this kind of evaluation is not fair (it is certainly less scientific then test scores), but the point is that on the whole it works. And teachers don't have it. They mostly cannot be fired, and receive compensation on a schedule based purely on years of tenure and education.
A good analogy would be if programmers were given tenure after two years at a company and then could not be fired regardless of productivity or any other offense other than gross misconduct. If the programmers then (unsurprisingly) resisted every attempt, no matter how small, to reward high performance and punish incompetence, we would have an equivalent situation.
How exactly do you accurately assess teaching? Test scores? I've worked at very tough schools. High unemployment, high crime area. Good teaching in this context meant the teacher showed up, made it through the year without having a mental breakdown and student attendance was > 50%.
On the flipside I've worked at top tier private schools where success was gauged by how many of our students were in the top n% for the state.
Teachers fear outside assessment from bureaucrats. Here in Australia we even have league tables for schools, and there has been talk of tying teacher pay to student performance. Obviously a worry if you are a classroom teacher who understands the human component of teaching (ie it's more than test results in a spreadsheet).
In my opinion to truly assess a teacher you'd need to observe their teaching for weeks to see how they deal with the myriad of situations that arise in the classroom. What we end up with though is standardised testing which ends up telling us what we already know.
Basically I think all this "it can't be measured" stuff is a bit dishonest. My wife is a high school teacher, and amongst her department everyone knows who is good and who isn't, same as any job. The only difference is that that knowledge can't possible have any effect on your career.
In any case, the point you are making about standardized testing is completely beside the point. No one who advocates using testing advocates using only testing for teacher evaluation. And no one advocates using the raw scores. Of course teachers with poor students in bad schools will have worse raw scores then teachers with rich students in good schools. The proposed measurement is virtually always some kind of "value added" score that attempts to control for these variables and measure the teachers impact.
I never said that it cant be measured. It's just really hard to do it right.
The solution is not to simply use private sector type performance reviews since correcting for differences within the school is difficult let alone correcting for differences between schools.
Measuring teacher performance is a hot area of debate around the world, and a consensus for how to "do it right" hasn't yet emerged.
Lots of questions need to be fairly addressed:
-- Will testing be able to differentiate between school-based and non-school-based influences on student performance?
-- Will testing be able to differentiate between the influences of different teachers on individual students or groups of students? What might be the ultimate extent of increased standardised testing?
-- What criteria are intended to form the basis of a performance-based pay scheme?
-- If the predominant criterion used is to be student progress as measured by standardised testing, what measures will the Government take to ensure the implementation of valid and appropriate testing regimes and instruments?
These questions come from an issues paper published by Australian Primary Principals Association.
Also from the paper:
In jobs where pay is linked to performance: The criteria for determining the payment of additional rewards are to be objectively determined: whether in volume of product or sales, increase in profits, or additional hours worked. More accurately put, the context of the industries in which systems of this kind work well are those where outputs and outcomes are easily, and objectively, quantifiable. This quantification can usually (although not always) be reduced to monetary terms.
So how exactly to we quantify and reward the teacher who helps her students develop skills that 'are not quantifiable'?
PS: In Australia primary and secondary teachers can't get tenure, however given a powerful union it is difficult to sack teachers, and this admittedly is a big problem.
Second, judging a programmer solely (in an atomic fashion) by their code is the exact same thing as judging a teacher solely by test scores. How do you know the code was not written at 2am the night of a release to stop vital information from being deleted every time a user submits a form.
On the flipside how do you know that the elegant code wasn't the combination of effort and discussion of several coders all considered to be in the top n% of some mailing list.
I think my point is really that we all tend to rush to judgement of professions outside of our own, when in reality we share the same human problems that are incredibly hard to formalize and hence provide a systematic solution for.
How do you know that?
On the other hand, programmers are rarely/never advanced, there's no career plan.
As you suspect, it discourages studying and promotes laziness and getting out of date with current programming pratices.
And it also raises a tough mental barrier to exit, I'm unhappy here, but I really like having a safety net and have high fixed expenses and there's no unemployment in my country if I quit voluntarily, so I'm reluctant to quit unless I make my nest egg, which I've been putting off for some time.
Back to teachers, if there are no incentives, I suspect it might make them less motivated to stay up to date and better themselves - of course there are always those that are internally motivated and will do so whatever the environment, but many will be discouraged by it.
But what is the intended outcome of teaching?
Better test scores? (Google Scholar 'standardized testing and success' and take your side of the argument, but at best the jury is still out)
The three R's? Social development? Curiosity for learning? All of the above?
I understand your underlying point, but it is dangerous to contrasts teacher evaluations with other professional evaluations, lest we find ourselves programming students a science) and not teaching them (an art).
Crazy idea alert! With intended outcomes varying so much for teachers and teaching environments, I'd offer that teachers should be only evaluated by fellow teachers, parents, and students themselves.
This is just my personal opinion but the true judge of a teacher's effectiveness is how much their students learned, and even that can only be used as a measure if the students were willing to learn in the first place.
Relying on some national standard to judge teachers hasn't seemed to help any country in history to have better teachers. I'd wager to guess that periods in history where education unilaterally improved are more due to the motivation of those being educated than anything else.
Doctors go through significantly more schooling and receive significantly more professional development — yet they are still perceived with respect as professionals who care about their patients. Why can't we do the same for teachers?
My experience with one of the larger HMO organizations here was very disconcerting.
I was bedridden with spinal joint pain for several days. They were unable to see me in a reasonable timeframe (2 week wait minimum), which meant by the time I was able to come in for a blood test the acute inflammation I was experiencing had passed, preventing screening for the condition I was concerned about (my dad and brother both have ankylosing spondylitis, making it extremely likely I do as well).
Worse than that, I found I had to educate the RN that was responsible for interpreting my test results (specifically that ankylosing spondylitis shows negative rheumatoid factor).
In addition to this, I've watched what's happened to friends with serious but not readily diagnosed diseases. One was in advanced stages of liver failure. In the end she only got a diagnosis by going to a hospital, making herself a bother and refusing to leave until someone took responsibility for actually finding out what was going on. The result was she avoided an unnecessary liver transplant. Her diagnosis was an uncommon but easily treatable autoimmune condition.
There's roughly 50% odds the transplant would have killed her by now (this was some 10 years ago). Taking an adversarial approach and having the support of a friend's mom who worked for the business side of the HMO in doing this probably saved her life.
It shouldn't have to be this way.
It's abusive to doctors that things are set up this way as well.
In any case, I don't mean to rant, but I just wanted to provide some counter anecdotes to to your feeling that the callousness and incompetence of medicine in the states was being exaggerated.
My stepfather went for a routine visit to the doctor in Vienna, Austria. They found a suspicious object, and decided to treat him immediately, and he was operated on the very next day. It ended up being benign, but I was amazed at their speed of treatment.
My uncle went for a cardiologist evaluation here in Montevideo, Uruguay (where we have a form of socialist-style medicine in the style called Mutualism). They found a suspicious spike in his heartbeat, which they suspected to be a treatable syndrome (Wolff-Parkinson-White), and decided to do some special evaluations. He was treated (with full anaesthetics) one week later (at almost zero cost).
Both were quite good experiences, times are a little slower in Uruguay but everybody has access to basic medicine.
That said, I suspect that for difficult-to-catch diseases, you have to make yourself a bother, otherwise you might slip through the cracks like your friend almost did (doctors here in Uruguay are heavily penalized if they take too much time with one patient).
[Note: I realize it might just be that my insurance is ridiculous. I'm looking into alternatives.]
Because peoplegenerally have much less exposure to doctors and when they are they're desperate for either treatment or hope. Both of these contribute.
Also, medical training is much harder than education. There are teachers at every average large high school who could have been doctors but they're a minority.
The study of education is based on social sciences and everything is much more slippery. What is being taught to teachers right now is whichever theory is currently popular. When I earned my credentials to teach, it was quite frankly a joke most of the time. Getting an A was easy. Many of the people in my program were not competent enough to compete in a more difficult field or program.
In the years since, as my own children began working through the public school system, I am taken aback regularly by evidence that their teachers are poorly educated themselves.
I'm shocked that someone would be surprised that there is a gap between how people view doctors and teachers.
Also the article did not bring these up as a panacea. These kinds of complicated, cultural, and meaningful improvements will not be made easily, in a short period of time, etc.
Frankly its author sounds bitter.
Huh? Listen my good man, we aren't talking about the average online approach to learning, we're talking specifically about Khan Academy approach. And I know Khan Academy works for some kids because I've seen some kids using, and liking it -- both kids ahead of their peers and kids behind them.
Whether it works for all kids, on average, is totally irrelevant.
So - what was stopping those experts from doing that already?
But Khan doesn't actually do that. In my experience, he's very good at emphasizing why something works. He encourages people to remember the "why" well enough to work out the actual formulas for themselves, rather than just memorizing the formulas.
I agree with pinchyfingers: Students are getting worse at math because they don't want to put the work in. And I don't think it should necessarily be the educator's burden to make each individual math topic more fun and exciting to try and trick students into using their brains. We need to find a way to get kids motivated about learning in general again.
In particular, he doesn't present the Khan Academy as a full replacement for primary education, but as an enhancement. In the second half of the video, he illustrates the teacher as maximizing the amount of useful interaction between themselves and the students.
Instead of spending class time lecturing and producing examples (things that technology can handle easily, and in some cases better than a human can), teachers use their class time to interact with students individually, helping them better understand the content and meaning behind it. This time becomes even more useful because the application gives statistics on how students are performing, and what directions they're moving in; it arms teachers with better data and more time to use it.
EDIT: I feel like I should expand on my initial reaction. Education isn't a product that you can sell, market or prepackage to have certain functionality. It's not a car or software. It's a process. You get out of it what you put in. No amount of great teachers, progressive curriculum or charter schooling is going to change the fact that the student still needs to participate.
Shoving students into holes and expecting them to learn this way is stupid. Expanding the ways in which they can engage their education is not. When we encourage people to exercise or eat better we don't expect that they will all do it the same way, why would we expect the same thing from education. I don't think Kahn Academy is the "Future of Education" any more than I think marathon running is the "Future of Fitness", but that doesn't mean it's bad for education.
Of course, the context is missing here in the writing, and Hacker News probably wasn't the intended audience, so maybe it was assumed people would make the assumption that Mathalicous' stuff was the better solution the author was talking about. But so far, the overall response has been pretty poor[1].
[0]http://www.mathalicious.com/sign-up/ [1]https://twitter.com/#!/mathalicious
I've seen from tutoring my siblings that basic algebra skills are what they lack. They concepts of trig and calculus aren't that difficult, it's the algebra that trips them up.
Leave the higher level math, for everyone but the most advanced students, to college. If I was a college math professor I'd rather teach a group of kids who have mastered algebra, than ones who've had a whirlwind tour of everything.
My suggestion: Not everyone needs to learn that much math. Classes up to algebra 2 and also an intro to statistics are probably enough for most people. Note that this can be in high school or college. However, for those who want to be mathematicians/scientists/engineers/technical people, math education should diverge probably around 7th grade. Rather than teaching pre-algebra or algebra or whatever they do now, they should start teaching the students how to do proofs. The best thing about Ma 1a at Caltech (http://www.math.caltech.edu/~2011-12/1term/ma001a1/) is that about 60% of the material could be taught to a smart motivated 7th grader. Making the students do proofs with help everyone figure out either that they love math and its beautiful or that they aren't really that interested in math. With a more rigorous understanding of basic math, learning applications like calculus is a lot easier.
That being said, I think Sal's TED talk (mentioned in another comment here) really hits the nail on the head. I do believe that education in its current North American form is flawed. I don't think exams are a proper way of testing anything more than memory retention and ability to perform repetitive tasks (do this, then this, then that, etc).
Khan Academy fills a void within the current education system. Yes the system is flawed, but that's beside the Academy's scope.
I'm currently taking the Khan chemistry course and loving it. When you criticise Khan for not helping kids as much as a real teacher does, I think you miss the bigger picture. It's enabling people of all ages to broaden their knowledge, not just people in formal education.
This, to me, is the real revolution: free lifelong learning.
The "continuing education" programs that do exist are generally stunted and poor.
Would it be so terrible if I spent 10 years gradually taking classes in engineering and sciences, perhaps never earning a degree? Why is college something you do only once, when you're arguably too young to genuinely appreciate it or even know what you want?
This is why I find Khan Academy to be so fascinating.
The only real difference between in degree and ala-carte is that degree seeking students will have more options for how to pay for their education. Once we are accredited, a vast array of financing becomes available for students pursuing a degree. Some are good (grants, scholarships, state subsidies) some are not (Student loans), but having options for our students helps a great deal. We structured our program this way because we come from your exact position: why can't I take the classes I want without all the BS?
I think the reason more schools don't do this is that it would expose the true cost of these classes, which at institutions like Stanford or MIT can easily exceed $5,000 per class. Actually, after fees, housing and books, $10k is closer to accurate. The market for $5k classes is not huge, and without putting everything on a gigantic student loan credit card, few rational consumers would pay the price.
"Khan Academy and its donors may preclude better products from coming along"
I just don't understand this. KA, Udacity, Coursera, Codecademy, MITx, teachontablo.com, this list goes on. I don't see how KA has done anything but prove the possibility of traction. When professors like Thrun and Norvig and investors like Paul Graham, Fred Wilson, and Peter Thiel are excited about the educational space, I believe the students will eventually win. It's no secret that many of the above have been inspired by Sal in one way or another.
The more products competing here, the better education will be. Yelling at Khan Academy because it's "the only thing that [exists]" feels...oddly misplaced.
The author is just bitter. One website on the internet does not preclude another. As you said, there are many startups. Focusing on just KA, the author might be wearing horse blinders.
If he is a teacher, he should be counseling his students instead to repeating the same lesson that can be learned from a video. There will always be a need for direct human tutoring.
The article's main criticism is that KA doesn't try to talk about all the possible uses of the subject matter. I'd rather they didn't, or at the very least kept it separate. Unless someone's being forced to sit down and watch educational videos, that doesn't add enough value to justify the time spent.
It may be that other competitors (including the ones you've mentioned) will try to fill the gap and take a more traditional education role. But saying something's bad just because it's not occupying the exact niche that the author wants it to? That's not a very useful criticism.
The article's main criticism is that KA doesn't try to talk about all the possible uses of the subject matter. I'd rather they didn't, or at the very least kept it separate. Unless someone's being forced to sit down and watch educational videos, that doesn't add enough value to justify the time spent.
It may be that other competitors (including the ones you've mentioned) will try to fill the gap and take a more traditional education role. But saying something's bad just because it's not occupying the exact niche that the author wants it to? That's not a very useful criticism.
I'm no teacher but if I was I'd much rather spend my time getting kids excited about stuff and then point them to the resources they need to get going. I'd also have more time to answer questions so the kids wouldn't get as frustrated or stuck.
I'm sure Henry Ford had people who thought cars were a bad idea.
Carry on.
Khan Academy helped me recover from a subpar high school education and gave me the tools to excel in college mathematics.