While I seem to have fallen short of being a “one note Johnny,” my obsession with all things education is very obvious. This priority is based upon my passionate belief that the future of the United States is inexorably linked to the productivity of her citizens, which in turn is welded to the level of training and education of her students. Fundamentally, economic value at a macro national level is derived from two factors: natural resources and value-added-productivity. While we still have agricultural output (despite changing water availability) and many mineral values (particularly coal and natural gas), the vast majority of America’s wealth comes from the skills and innovative excellence of her people. We’ve exhausted significant resources and need to generate increasing value from our people.
As we face the “double dip” of this recession, the orgy of who can cut more from our national and local budgets seems to have produced the greatest threat to our educational system since its inception in the middle of the 19th century. Our math and science literacy rates and the percentage of high school graduates are below average for most developed countries (Wikipedia), and many developing nations – particularly India and China – are pushing their educational systems to generate vast numbers of graduating students who perform at level significantly above U.S. averages. Still, at almost every level in the United States – from local to federal – educational budgets are being slashed or are on the chopping block. With every cut, our long-term economic health, our ability to improve the trade imbalance and generate enough value to reduce our deficit in the future, takes a giant step in the wrong direction.
Public education in the U.S. has a long history: “Until the 1840s the education system was highly localized and available only to wealthy people. Reformers who wanted all children to gain the benefits of education opposed this. Prominent among them were Horace Mann in Massachusetts and Henry Barnard in Connecticut. Mann started the publication of the Common School Journal, which took the educational issues to the public. The common-school reformers argued for the case on the belief that common schooling could create good citizens, unite society and prevent crime and poverty. As a result of their efforts, free public education at the elementary level was available for all American children by the end of the 19th century. Massachusetts passed the first compulsory school attendance laws in 1852, followed by New York in 1853. By 1918 all states had passed laws requiring children to attend at least elementary school.” Essay by Deeptha Thattai (a volunteer with the Cincinnati chapter of the Association for India's Development).
Past blogs have focused on the use of programmed learning in the classroom, allowing teachers to intervene where bottleneck arise with individual students. We’ve looked at innovative programs across the nation, but with approximately 14,000 public school districts across the nation, and little in the way of coordination of national standards and resources, school districts are often distracted by social and policy issues (creationism vs. evolution, for example), letting the issue of how to raise standards while cutting the number of teachers fall into the garbage pile of secondary issues.
The fact is that most school curricula are mired in a traditional “textbook, class lectures and homework and test” structure that appears to work well only in manageable classrooms with a good student to teach ratio, a fact that appears to be expendable in an era of budget cuts. But we live in a YouTube era, where young minds, eyes and ears are trained to look, see and learn. YouTube has become the second most utilized search engine (kids often want their answers visually) in the U.S., and one non-profit, the Khan Academy (khanacademy.org), has generated YouTube-type content that might just revolutionize and revitalize American education.
Sal Khan was “just another hedge fund analyst,” when he started answering his cousin’s math questions by sending them little videos with answers and explanations. They could play the videos back without Khan’s ominous “don’t you understand” judgmental responses, look at the parts that matter most and master the subject. As these videos evolved, they were followed by a series of questions which, when ten in a row were answered correctly, led to the next video. The videos were posted on YouTube and became an instant hit. Kahn left his analyst position and created a non-profit (Bill Gates is one of the supporters) that has created literally thousands of online videos on primary and secondary (and a whole lot of college) level subjects, from history to science to math. To date, the Khan Academy has delivered close to 60 million lessons.
When the Los Altos, California (Silicon Valley) School District began applying these videos to fifth and seventh grade math classes, not only did overall standards soar, but even students that used to lag behind were given the ability to catch up at their own pace. Computers analyzed each student’s pace and progress, and as individual bottlenecks occurred, in-class teachers (or even fellow students who had developed sufficient proficiency) would aid those with questions and move them to the next level. Homework became class work, and lectures were no longer the mainstay of teaching under this format.
If you really want to see what is possible, where one giant ray of hope resides, I urge you to visit the above Website and watch the TED presentation. If you agree with me that this is an extraordinary method with immeasurable potential, bombard you local school districts with emails and letters and let them know that there is another way. Whether this is the solution is far from clear, but it clearly represents a solution that merits pursuing.
I’m Peter Dekom, searching for problems and looking for solutions.
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