Future of Education?

"Future of Education?"

I stumbled across this video while trying to distract my mind from working, and I was just enamored. Salman Kahn is a former analyst in hedge fund and began tutoring his cousins remotely over YouTube. It has turned into what many think to be the future of education (Bill Gates' words, not mine). More importantly, it also nestles nicely into the framework the world is beginning to make sense to me--economics, innovation, productivity, free markets, education, and the like.

Anyone interested in the educational model out there, take a look. The 20 mintues is well worth it. If not here is a brief summary. Enjoy.

Summary
At about the 8th minute, Khan describes the traditional classroom:

…homework-lecture-homework-lecture-homework-snapshot exam. And then whether you get a 70%, 80%, 90% or 95%, the class moves onto the next topic.

Even the 95% student, what’s that 5% that he missed?

That’s analogous to learning to ride a bicycle where I give you a lecture, give a bike to you for a couple weeks and then come back and evaluate you. You can’t quite stop, you can’t make left turns. You’re an 80% bicyclist. I put a “C” stamp on your
forehead and then I give you a unicycle.

You fast forward and you see smart students start to struggle because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building.

This is a good point. The one-size fits all nature of the classroom lends itself to broad brushes and gaps that build and build on each other. In this world of specialization, customation, and your own pace, why still do it that way? We have coke machines that do that now. Who would of thought?

Khan continues:

Our model is learn math the way you learn anything. The way you learn to ride a bicycle. Stay on that bicycle.Fall off that bicycle. Do it as long as necessary until you have mastery.

Next, Khan articulates amazingly well a problem I have recognized with our education model, but have struggled to explain it:

The traditional model penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but does not expect mastery [e.g. time to move onto next subject even if you only
mastered 90% of the last one].

We encourage you to experiment. We encourage you to fail. But we do expect mastery.

Bingo. Communciate expectations, expect mastery, but allow flexibility.About 14 minutes in, Khan talks about the progress students make in his model vs. the traditional model.

When you go five days into it [learning a new subject], there are a group of kids who have raced ahead and a group of kids who are a little bit slower.

In the traditional model, you do the snapshot assessment. You say these
are the gifted kids and these are the slow kids. You say things like maybe
we should put them in different classes.

But, when you let every student work at their own pace, we see it over and over and over again, you see students who took a little bit extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept they just race ahead.

So the same kids you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted.

It makes you wonder if a lot of the labels that maybe many of us have benefited
from were really just due to a coincidence of time.

I believe these are penetrating points that cause us to turn the convential teaching model on its head. Technology and specialization have allowed for more choices. Kahn by introducing this model could spark some massive innoviation in the school systems.

The Money Ball

Most exciting to me is in the 11:30 mark as Kahn explains a teacher can walk in each day and visually observe the progress of each student. Look below:

Each row represents a student in the classroom and column the subject matter/module. As the teacher walks into the classroom for the day, he or she can see that "green" means they have mastered the topic (10 questions in a row correct), "blue" is working on it, and "red" means they are stuck. So, they teacher can best use the time and intervene on the red kids or get a green kid to be first in line to utor the red kid.

If it couldn't get any better, it does. Kahn states that he "wants to arm the educators with the most data that he possibly can just like you would in finance or any other sector." Look below:

What are they spending their time on? What questions are they missing? Where are they stopping in a session? A teacher has all the tools necessary to target problems and use technology to use her time most effectively.

Conclusion

So, I sometimes pretend to know way much more about education than I do. But, this is extremely interesting to me. Education should obey fairly the same laws of economics and response to incentives and circumstances. In Steve Moore's brilliant article in the WSJ on productivity gains and progress over the 20th century, he details the gains in productivity per worker in the private sector as nothing short of amazing over the past century. But, the output per government worker or teacher to be negative or far less. He explains:

Where are the productivity gains in government? Consider a core function of
state and local governments: schools. Over the period 1970-2005, school spending
per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized achievement test
scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period, public-school employment
doubled per student, according to a study by researchers at the University of
Washington. That is what economists call negative productivity.

But education is an industry where we measure performance backwards: We gauge school performance not by outputs, but by inputs. If quality falls, we say we didn’t
pay teachers enough or we need smaller class sizes or newer schools. If
education had undergone the same productivity revolution that manufacturing has,
we would have half as many educators, smaller school budgets, and higher
graduation rates and test scores.

This is an interesting revelation. If education had followed the same path as technology grew in industry over the past century, we would have half as many educators, smaller budgets, and higher scores. Is education exempt from the regular laws the govern human progress, specialization, and economics? Many would argue so. I am not so sure. Here's to hoping that Kahn's work spreads like economic progress over the past century. Kids will be better off.

Blake