Guest Post: Will Online Khan Academy 'Educate the World"?

EWA's 66th National Seminar, held at Stanford University, took place earlier this month. We asked some of the journalists attending to contribute posts from the sessions. The majority of the content will soon be available at EdMedia Commons. Over the next few weeks I'll be sharing a few of the posts, including the ones from our keynote sessions. Justin Pope, higher education reporter for the Associated Press, is today's guest blogger.

Is Sal Khan the Messiah? No, seriously. At EWA’s 2013 National Seminar, veteran PBS reporter John Merrow introduced Khan—the charismatic former hedge fund adviser who turned the math tutorial videos he made for his cousins into an education website with thousands of videos watched by millions around the world—by recalling meeting a group of five Hasidic rabbis who had come to hear Khan speak recently in New York. They mentioned the Torah’s prediction of a man in the fifth millennium who “will come to educate the world.” They didn’t seem to be joking - more like scoping out a candidate.

Khan’s talk at EWA’s conference was an engaging hit, and a perhaps heartening reminder that people still matter even at a time when technology and innovation are the dominant topic of conversation. How else to explain the success of Khan Academy, where more than 6 million people a month watch his tutorial videos? Khan himself acknowledged that the idea of using technology to educate a wide audience is decades old, and that his technology is nothing special. “I wasn’t even the 2nd person to make math videos, I was probably the 50th” he said. But something about Khan’s teaching style resonated, and now he’s scouring the globe for other experts who can replicate that magic in the subjects (not many, it seems) he can’t teach. He’s up to 7,000 videos in seven languages.

Merrow teased him, “you must be a huge disappointment to the hedge fund industry” as Khan laid out his vision to keep Khan Academy a nonprofit. Khan said he didn’t leave much wiggle room, declaring the enterprise “non-buy-outable.” Khan has, however, started a partnership with Bank of America to develop videos on financial literacy. “We were skeptical. We thought they were going to throw ads all over their site,” he said. “It was literally six months of us throwing edge cases at them.” He insists he got the answers he needed, and he faces no limitations on his teaching.

So, is Khan Academy a threat to teachers? Khan says he hopes not, though he admits that’s the perception -- that Khan Academy is Amazon.com and teachers are the traditional bookstore. “For us it’s all about how do we take the physical experience of the teacher and move them up the value chain,” he said.

Some things to watch for Khan Academy: The site’s starting to realize the pedagogical gold mine it has in the form of data from the millions of people watching its videos and working through its exercises. Khan Academy has more students than all the MOOCs (companies that offer massive open online courses) combined. Such information hasn’t always been nobly used by others Khan admits, but what will he do with it? Its potential— already it can run massive experiments on intriguing questions like whether an inspirational quote at the top of a test improves performance -- could produce transformative insights into how students learn and create a rapid feedback loop of teaching improvement.

Second, how will Khan Academy coursework fit into the broader movement to expand credentialing? Of those millions of users, many will no doubt be clamoring for ways to prove to employers or schools they’ve mastered the material. Khan says the world is moving to competency-based learning, but what role exactly will his academy play? Evolutionary? Revolutionary? Messianic?

  Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. Follow her on Twitter: @EWAEmily.

Guest Post: Stanford Ed School Dean Claude Steele on Stereotype Threat in Academics

EWA's 66th National Seminar, held at Stanford University, took place earlier this month. We asked some of the journalists attending to contribute posts from the sessions. The majority of the content will soon be available at EdMedia Commons. Over the next few weeks I'll be sharing a few of the posts, including the ones from our keynote sessions. Nanette Asimov, higher education reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, is today's guest blogger.

Consider this mystery: Black students and other subjects of negative stereotyping, like girls in math class, typically score lower than their peers on exams—even if they are demonstrably smart and grew up in privileged environments.

“Why should that be?” asked social psychologist Claude Steele, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education, posing the question to a few hundred journalists gathered at Stanford University for the Education Writers Association conference on May 2.

The enigma has driven Steele’s research for long enough that the answers are clear, if not yet widely known. When students care deeply about a test they’re taking, Steele said, they internalize stereotypes about themselves—and it throws them off their game. “You know you could be judged, and the prospect of being seen that way is distracting,” he said. He calls it the “stereotype threat.”

Don’t believe it?

In an experiment, a bunch of brainy math students each took a tough math test alone in a room, and the women scored 15 points lower than the men, Steele said. (“The Larry Summers” phenomenon, he said, drawing laughter.) But how to prove that genetics wasn’t the cause?

By removing the “stereotype threat” effect. In the next experiment, Steele’s researchers told the women: “Look, you may have heard that women don’t do as well. That’s not true for the test you’re taking today.”

Voila! Women’s performance equaled that of the men, Steele said.

Again and again, experiments prove you can excise the stereotype threat, he said. In another example, researchers told black test-takers that “this is just a puzzle—have as much fun as you can.

“As soon as you have that instruction in place, blacks scored exactly the same as whites,” Steele said.

Can the stereotype threat be eliminated outside the lab?

Steele said it could. He told the journalists that New York Times columnist Charles Blow, an African-American, had felt uncomfortable while a grad student at the University of Chicago and wondered what to do about it. “He realizes he’s being seen through the lens of a stereotype,” Steele said.

So Blow tried something unexpected: He whistled Vivaldi whenever he walked across campus. Suddenly, “people don’t see him through that lens—he’s just another grad student,” Steele said. “So there are artful, magnificent ways people get around these threats.” Steele was so taken with Blow’s story that he titled his 2010 book on the stereotype threat “Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us.”

In the Q&A, several journalists asked which other groups might experience the effect: Disabled? Yes. Elderly? Sure. Men? Well, if the ingredients are right—high personal interest and low external expectations—yes.

Just one question challenged Steele’s conclusions. A black journalist suggested that Steele, who is also black, was “blaming the victims for folks who are underperforming.” Steele said he hoped not. “The only mistake they’ve made is to care about their performance.”

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. Follow her on Twitter: @EWAEmily.

Forced Federal Budget Cuts Means Fewer Students Tested in Social Studies

I was interested to read over on the Politics K-12 blog about plans to scale back national exams in social studies as a result of sequestration, a move that might save money in the short term but educators say could do long-term damage to efforts to cultivate a more informed citizenry.

Beginning next year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress in three subjects -- civics, history, and geography -- is expected to be "indefinitely" postponed for students grades 4 and 12, although eighth graders will continue to take the exam, reports Education Week blogger Alyson Klein. That move, in response to the forced federal budget cuts triggered by the sequester, will save $6.8 million. From Politics K-12:

"I don't think it was any particular lack of interest in social studies," on the part of the executive committee, said Jack Buckley, the (National Center on Education Statistics) commissioner. Instead, he said the panel was "trying to make the best decision from a bad set of options."

The decision to cut back the NAEP, known as "The Nation's Report Card," probably won't be surprising to civics teachers like Derek Vandergrift of Waltham High School in Massachusetts. Last year I interviewed Vandergrift, an award-winning Milken Educator, about how the nation's academic priorities had shifted under No Child Left Behind. He told me he had seen money pulled away from civics and put toward reading, writing and mathematics -- the core subjects covered on the high-stakes exams required under the federal education law. Now it seems civics is being hit yet again -- this time as a result of what Politics K-12 termed "Brokedown Congress."

Pro Publica recently put out Everything We Know About What's Happened Under Sequestration, and the education section focuses on cuts to Head Start programs and how the reduction is hurting schools on American Indian reservations that are heavily dependent on federal dollars. I've also written about how the sequester is continuing to cause headaches for states and districts, and how the poorest schools face the deepest cuts. 

For more on federal funding, check out EWA's Story Starters resource. You might also want to check out my post from April examining the question of whether high school students should be required to pass a citizenship test.

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. Follow her on Twitter: @EWAEmily.

Guest Post: Arne Duncan's Kick-Off Keynote at EWA's 66th National Seminar

EWA's 66th National Seminar, held at Stanford University, took place earlier this month. We asked some of the journalists attending to contribute posts from the sessions. Additional content, including videos and podcasts, will soon be available at EdMedia Commons. Over the next few weeks I'll be sharing a few of posts here, including those from the keynote sessions. Joy Resmovits of the Huffington Post is today's guest blogger.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is a man of many words, armed with well-rehearsed phrases to spell out his agenda. At the Education Writers Association May 1 lunch in California, Duncan brought out his greatest hits – while throwing new material into the mix.

First, the new:

The day before his EWA engagement in Palo Alto, Duncan spoke at the NewSchools Venture Fund summit in nearby Burlingame. There, he delivered a sharp critique of the lack of diversity among the education reform crowd. He chided "lily-white CEOs" for "posing with black and brown" students while their management teams are usually all or mostly white. That reality, he said, can limit the ultimate goal of education reform efforts: to level the playing field. If kids don't see role models whose faces reflect their own, Duncan said, why should they be motivated to pay attention in school and pay for college?

When asked to elaborate on this sentiment at EWA, Duncan spared no mercy. "Everybody wants to be listened to, [but] you disenfranchise communities when you don't listen to parents," he said. "You can put a limit on how far students can go." Duncan went on to sharply criticize education schools; pointing to insufficient diversity among teachers, he threw blame on institutions responsible for educating them. "Schools of education show little interest in increasing that diversity," the education secretary argued.

Duncan also left open the possibility of further investigation into charges of cheating in Washington, D.C's public schools. Veteran PBS reporter John Merrow – who has raised questions about former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s response to allegations that educators there changed student test responses – wanted to know if Duncan still supports her. Duncan didn't give a clear answer, turning the conversation instead to cheating in Atlanta and Chicago. The Atlanta cheating case, he said, was about leadership. When he was CEO of Chicago Public Schools, he said, "We had to let go a number of teachers." If any city is "turning a blind eye to things that are illegal and immoral, that's unacceptable," he said. D.C., he noted, has been investigated for cheating repeatedly. Should it be investigated further? "I don't know," he said.

Now, from Duncan's greatest hits:

· What education candidates? Duncan has long been interested in raising the profile of education as a voting issue. Naturally, he expressed this to a room of reporters. "It's amazing to me how … everybody is pro education. Nobody's running on an anti-education platform. The real question is what do they do," he said. "I don't think there's a ... public conversation on what do they do. … Hold all of us accountable."

· Boosting our littlest learners: Over the last few months, we've seen the Obama administration unveil a proposal to dramatically increase the number of "high-quality" preschool slots for 4-year-olds. While this pitch is widely believed to be dead on arrival given that it depends on an increased tobacco tax, Duncan is still stumping for it. "We don't take lightly an ask for $75 billion," he said. "We still think it's one of the best investments we can make."

And in anticipation of a common critique of Head Start – that there's "fadeout" of its positive effects in later grades – Duncan questioned the evaluation that produced that data point. "It's a fair question to talk about fadeout … but to evaluate a program based on 20 percent of people who didn't attend," Duncan said, seemed misleading. He also said it doesn't take into account the benefits of the "non-cognitive side of early childhood."

When a reporter noted the plan's diminished prospects for passage, Duncan acknowledged that reality. "I'm not naive or anything," he said. "Yes Congress is dysfunctional, we all know that. [But] 27 governors talked about early education" in their State of the State speeches. "If we have ministers and moms talking about this," Duncan said, that might push the issue over the edge. "I'm not pretending it's going to be easy, but it's something I'm going to put a lot of time and energy into."

· Teacher Effectiveness: The cornerstone of the Obama administration's education efforts in its first term was a focus on changing the teaching profession – in particular, incentivizing "rigorous" teacher evaluations. Duncan said that professional development for teachers is in a sorry state, and when he tells teachers how much federal money is spent on those efforts, "they usually laugh or cry. They are not feeling it." Duncan said he is casting about for "better ways to measure what are we doing to obtain that great talent."

· School Violence: Duncan called the preponderance of school shootings around the country "absolutely stunning and unacceptable." Beyond the physical injuries, he said, students are left to cope with the psychological ramifications of having their friends or family touched by gun violence. "One high school in Chicago has had two dozen kids shot," he said. "Is there a high school in Iraq or Afghanistan that has had two dozen kids shot?" Lawmakers who didn't cast a vote in favor of the gun control bill, he said, showed "dumbed down courage."

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. Follow her on Twitter: @EWAEmily.

Guest Post: Data Offers Education Reporters Fresh Angles on Familiar Stories

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) held its annual meeting in San Francisco last week, and I asked The Hechinger Report's Jon Marcus to share a guest post.

The Common Core State Standards. Teacher quality. College access.

None of these are particularly new topics on the education beat. But they can be reported in new ways using data, according to researchers who collect it.

Take the Common Core. Data shows that states whose education standards are already closest to the Common Core do best, said Bill Schmidt, co-director of the Center for the Study of Curriculum at Michigan State University.

There are survey results about the Common Core, too. Ninety percent of 13,000 teachers polled said they have heard about and like the standards, and 70 percent have read them.

The bad news, as Schmidt put it, is that only half of elementary, 60 percent of middle, and 70 percent of high school teachers feel well-prepared to teach the topics required by the Common Core, 80 percent thought the standards were “pretty much the same” as what they’re teaching now, and only a quarter were willing to relinquish subjects that the Common Core requires be shifted to another grade.

“That really begins to affect the coherence and the focus,” Schmidt said.

Worse still, he said, “Nobody’s paid much attention to the kids.” And surveys of students find that half are concerned about earning good grades, 45 percent about getting into a good college, and only 29 percent about learning.

“It’s just a matter of playing the game,” Schmidt said these results show. “These more challenging standards might just not be that well received.”

How well teachers teach, meanwhile, is now the subject of so-called observational data based on a longitudinal database called Measures of Effective Teaching, or MET, a project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Sample videos of teachers teaching have been collected over the last few years and are being scored based on such measures as behavior management, organization, and pace and rigor of instruction, said Brian Rowan, a professor in the School of Education at the University of Michigan.

The conclusions so far: Most practicing teachers manage behavior well, have orderly classrooms, and get along well with their students, and many conduct fast-paced and organized lessons. But few conduct lessons that are highly intellectually challenging, meaning that they include such things as analysis, modeling, and classroom discussion.

“Teachers are actually not engaging much in that,” Rowan said.

“There’s substantial evidence that high-quality, targeted professional development to teach particular content in particular ways would bring the teaching up,” he said. “I think there’s going to be massive need for more professional development.”

Those students who do make it through their high school years face an uneven playing field in the college admissions race, said Laura Perna, a professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

Her data about access show a gap of 25 percentage points between the proportion of lowest-income students enrolled in college and the highest, and about the same difference between whites and nonwhites.

“We’ve been making progress improving some outcomes, but we’re not closing gaps across groups,” Perna said.

One reason is that, in primary and secondary schools, she said, “there’s great disparity as to which students from different backgrounds have the opportunity to participate in rigorous coursework.”

Increases in tuition, too, take a larger toll on low-income students, Perna said.

And now reporters can find the data to prove it.

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. Follow her on Twitter: @EWAEmily.

'Ted Talks Education': A Sneak Peek of Tonight's Television Debut

TED Talks makes its first foray into television tonight, and the decision to focus on public schools wasn’t a tough call, said Chris Anderson, curator of the nonprofit organization that built its niche showcasing inspirational speakers in a variety of live and online formats.

“Re-imagining education is a topic we love at TED because we think figuring it out will be the key to a more hopeful future,” Anderson said. (You can read my full Q&A with him here.)

Co-sponsored by WNET and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (as part of its American Graduate: Let’s Make it Happen campaign), “TED Talks Education” is hosted by musician John Legend, taps well-known innovators such as Geoffrey Canada (CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone), and author Sir Ken Robinson, TED.com’s most-watched speaker. I had the opportunity to watch the program being taped in the theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music: Mixed into the marquis names are teachers and students who share their own experiences and lessons from the trenches of the nation’s public schools. Among them is Rita Pierson, a veteran Texas educator who was taught at every grade level, primarily with kids living in high-poverty neighborhoods.

With many of her students arriving for school often years behind grade level, Pierson found a novel approach to offering encouragement without masking the reality of the hard work ahead:

“I gave a quiz: 20 questions. Student missed 18. I put a plus-2 on the paper and a big smiley face. He said `Ms. Pierson, is this an F?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Then why you'd put a smiley face?’ And I said, ‘Because you’re on the road. ... Minus-18 sucks all the life out of you. Plus-two says, `I ain't all bad.'" 

Pierson balances her positivity with pragmatism. There are going to be difficult days and difficult students but it helps to realize "the tough ones show up for a reason - it's the connection, it's the relationship," Pierson said. "Is this job tough? You betcha ... but it is not impossible. We can do this."

For those who watch Pierson and wonder whether there’s a way to replicate her brand of teaching, consider Bill Gates’ contribution to the program. He delivers a succinct explanation of the ambitious Measures of Effective Teaching project undertaken by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. As part of the project, video cameras were placed in classrooms across the country to record teachers at work. The foundation’s research team used a wealth of data, including assessments, interviews, and observations, to identify successful instruction.

Gates tells the audience that “everyone needs a coach” -- he confessed he has one for bridge -- but that most teachers get “almost no systematic feedback.” He pointed out that until the recent wave of interest in developing teacher evaluation models swept the country, most teachers heard only one word: Satisfactory. And even in districts that are currently revamping evaluation policies, too few of them connect those to giving teachers meaningful feedback on how to improve their performance, Gates said.

The MET project found that “teachers that did well on observations had far better student outcomes,” Gates said. “That tells us we’re asking the right questions.”

In his TED talk, Gates estimates the cost of a nationwide investment in teacher feedback to be $5 billion. (Feel free to insert your own joke about asking Gates to look for that under the cushions of his sofa.) In reality $5 billion is not an insubstantial sum, particularly given the federal sequester and cuts being made to core programs serving the neediest students. But Gates also contends that $5 billion represents less than 2 percent of what the nation’s schools spend on teachers’ salaries. Better feedback could translate into improved instruction, better student learning, more teachers staying on the job, and a reduced need for expensive remediation programs. Given those possibilities, that $5 billion starts to look like a bargain.

There have been some good-natured spoofs of the earnestness that permeates many TED Talks videos --  but that’s actually one of the things that can make them so affecting. Is it a bad thing to feel inspired, even if you don’t believe the glow lasts long? At the same time what, really, is the usefulness of these sorts of exercises? Is there a way to measure the TED Talks impact beyond online views and conference attendance?

Here’s how Anderson answered that question when I posed it to him in an email:

“Powerful ideas, shared the right way, lead to action. Period. Many who watch TED Talks have their own story about where these ideas have led them. Often at their core is an expanded sense of possibility and a determination to play a more proactive role in shaping the future. But a talk's impact might take years to make itself evident. A changed mindset is for life.”

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. Follow her on Twitter: @EWAEmily.

Guest Post: When Are Middle Schoolers Ready for Algebra?

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) held its annual meeting in San Francisco last week, and I asked The Hechinger Report's Jill Barshay-- and author of the new Education By the Numbers blog -- to share a guest post.

In a study of middle-school math education in a California school district, standardized test scores and grades were a much better predictor of whether a student would pass eighth-grade algebra than whether his seventh-grade math teacher thought he was ready for it. That’s according to an unpublished paper, The Missing Link in Algebra Policy Analysis: A Case Study of Placement in Eighth-Grade Algebra by Andrew Thomas (Walden University), Michael H. Butler (Public Works, Inc.), Robert Kaplinsky (Downey Unified School District) presented at the AERA annual meeting.

The issue of when a student takes his first algebra course is of great interest to academic scholars and policy makers. Some theorize that taking algebra early in eighth grade will lead to more students taking advanced math courses in high school and ultimately going to college. Kids that don’t study algebra in eighth grade are tracked into curricula that effectively shut them off from many educational opportunities. Many states around the nation have been pushing schools to teach algebra earlier. But there’s also concern that pushing unprepared kids into algebra too soon sets them up for failure. California recently reversed its decision to require algebra in eighth grade.

This particular study found that middle-school math teachers recommended that a little more than half of their students (53%) take the more advanced algebra class in eighth grade. But half of these purportedly “stronger” students ultimately failed to get at least a C grade in the class. The district was not identified in the study. These same teachers recommended that 38 percent of their students take a more basic arithmetic class, often called “pre-algebra,” postponing algebra until ninth grade. But a big chunk of these students – 209 of them -- were nonetheless put into algebra classes and many of them succeeded in passing the course.

This study shows that teachers make two types of judgment errors. They overestimate the abilities of half the students they think are strong. And they underestimate the abilities of a big chunk of students they perceive as weak. In both cases, the mistakes can be heartbreaking for the student.

What’s fascinating is that, if the math teachers just looked at the grades they themselves gave their students in seventh grade, these errors would have mostly vanished. Most students who got at least a B in seventh grade math succeeded in eighth grade algebra. Can you believe that there were teachers who gave a student a B in seventh grade math, but didn’t think the kid was ready for algebra? And they thought many of their C students were ready? Did the teacher think his own grading system was bogus?

(These results make me question the whole validity of teacher recommendations. Why are they so important to college admissions departments?)

An even better predictor than grades was the student’s score on the annual California State assessment test. But the results of that test come out too late for the school to use it for placements.

The school district also developed its own home-made diagnostic test. But it was not a good predictor of whether a student was ready for eighth grade algebra.

Not all algebra classes are the same. Another paper, Breaking Down the Achievement Gaps Among High School Graduates: Contributions of Geometry Content Rigor by Kathryn S. Schiller (University at Albany - SUNY), Janis D. Brown (U.S. Department of Education), Robert Colby Perkins (Westat), Stephen E. Roey (Westat), found that there was wide variation in the content of high school math courses with the very same title. Some are rigorous. Some are lame. Even an honors geometry course could be quite watered down. The weird thing is that there was no correlation between the rigor of the math class a student took and the score he got on the NAEP. Whites and Asians tend to outscore blacks and Hispanics regardless of the rigor of the math class they took.

Better to go for the easy A or fail a hard class? That’s the question asked in a working paper, entitled Success and Failure in Eighth-Grade Mathematics: Examining Outcomes Among Middle Schoolers in the HSLS:09 by Keith E. Howard (Chapman University), Marty Romero (University of California - Los Angeles), Derrick Saddler (University of South Florida), Allison Scott (University of California - Berkeley). The researchers found that the California State standardized-test scores were about the same for similar students whose only difference was that one failed algebra in eighth grade while the other passed an easier math class. But there were significant psychological wounds. The ones who failed felt that they weren’t good at math, didn’t like the subject and they didn’t pursue math later in high school. The equally weak students who lived in ignorant bliss liked math more and continued with the subject.

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. Follow her on Twitter: @EWAEmily.