Hi folks, Sal here from Khan Academy. Many of you have heard that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (also known as the NAPE or the Nation’s Report Card) came out and the results were not good. They were already bad pre-pandemic and they just got worse. The results were bad both in English and language arts and in math, but they were worse in math. Of the two cohorts measured (fourth and eighth graders), they were even worse in the 8th graders in math. This is in line with what we’ve always said: math is fundamentally cumulative.
In a traditional system, a student gets a C or D on an exam if they get 60-70% of a concept, the class moves on to the next concept, expecting the student to master that concept even though they weren’t proficient in the previous one. We’re surprised that only one-third of students are proficient in math at the 8th grade level, and if you measured in 10th or 12th grade, those numbers are just going to get worse and worse.
The other problem is that it’s not uniform. If you go to where my kids go to school, you probably have close to 100% of students being proficient. On the other hand, if you look at the data pre-pandemic in Detroit, only 6% of students were proficient, and post-pandemic, only 3% of students are proficient.
Just last month, we released a very rigorous, peer-reviewed study that showed if students during the pandemic put in just 30-60 minutes a week in Khan Academy, those students not only didn’t see the declines that I just described, they accelerated by almost 40% versus pre-pandemic national norms.
We have a lot of work to do to become more efficacious and engaging, but the name of the game now is how do we get this word out in front of more students, more teachers, and more parents. We need partners to help spread the word and partner and support us. We have a five-year goal where we want to accelerate 5 million American kids, especially with an emphasis on kids from historically under-resourced communities, by 50% or more. We think we can do that because the efficacy studies say that we can do that, and the nation needs us. We’re a small organization, with the budget of a large high school, and we have a means of moving the dial for the country. We’re going to need your continued support and partnership as we go into this next phase of this adventure. If we’re not able to do it in five years, we’re going to be seeing the same finger pointing and having the same narrative that everyone has right now. So thank you for being on this journey with us.