The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

by Salman Khan

  Inconveniently, however, studies showed that Japanese students did not do more homework than their American counterparts; in fact they did less. This was puzzling, but it turned out to be only one of many seeming anomalies that kept cropping up in comparative international studies.

  Among the nations whose students ranked near the top of international test results, some, like South Korea and Taiwan, did in fact assign a lot of homework. (This would also seem to be the case with China, though reliable statistics regarding that nation are hard to come by.) But other equally high-scoring countries—Denmark and Czechoslovakia (as it was then called), in addition to Japan—assigned very little. Then there were some very homework-heavy nations—Greece, Thailand, Iran—whose students tested poorly. France, whose students tested roughly as well as their U.S. counterparts, reportedly sent its middle-schoolers home with twice as much homework. And meanwhile, well before the turn of the new millennium, the all-time heavyweight champion of homework, the Soviet Union, had gone out of business altogether.

  What is one to make of all this contradictory and chaotic data? Speaking as an engineer and recovering hedge fund analyst, I would argue that the only conclusion that can be logically drawn is this: The amount of homework assigned—if considered without reference to a raft of many other complicating factors, such as cultural differences, reporting variations, and, not least, widely varying dynamics within families—is a really lousy indicator of future performance, either individual or national.

  Why then have parents, teachers, and policymakers continued to obsess about the amount of homework assigned at various grade levels? I believe there are two reasons. The first is simply that homework is an easy thing to argue about. Ten minutes? An hour? Reduced to a matter of duration, as opposed to quality or nuance, it’s easy to stake out a position. More deeply, however, people argue about how much homework there should be because homework itself seems to be a given—so deeply ingrained as part of our standard but archaic educational model that inquiries into the subject never really get down to bedrock.

  So then, let’s circle back to our original question: How much homework is the right amount?

  The answer is: No one knows. It all depends.

  If that answer seems unsatisfying and deflating, it actually points the way to a very useful insight: The reason we can’t come up with a meaningful answer is that we’re asking the wrong question. We should be asking something far more basic. Not how much homework, but why homework in the first place?

  Why are certain pedagogical tasks consigned to the classroom and the rigidly structured time increments of the school day, while others are pushed back into the looser hours of personal and family time?

  Why do we assume that teachers’ skills are best deployed in broadcasting information to an entire class, then sending kids home to work out problems on their own, often without the chance to ask questions or receive help? Given the pressures of fulfilling set curricula and meeting various governmental guidelines, it is often impossible to review or discuss homework assignments; how valuable is homework that doesn’t get reviewed?

  These are the kinds of questions we should be asking—questions that examine some of our longest-held educational habits and assumptions, and are therefore quite threatening to the educational establishment.

  Let’s start with a line of inquiry so deceptively simple that it seems to be a tautology, but in fact reveals some of the contradictions and misconceptions regarding homework: Why was homework designed to be done at home?

  Different people will give you different answers. Some believe it was to teach students responsibility, accountability, and time management. Others would say that it encouraged students to learn independently. I am actually a fan of these two assertions.

  Another line of reasoning is that homework was meant to involve parents in the process of their children’s education. The ideal scenario—straight out of 1950s television, though the idea is actually older—was built around the idea of an intact nuclear family sitting around together in the evening. Susie and Johnny would have their schoolbooks open on the dining room table or the living room floor, while Dad, recently home from a nine-to-five job, smoked his pipe, read the paper, and was free to expound wisdom on almost any subject, and Mom, who’d been home most of the day, vacuuming and baking cookies, could chime in deferentially on questions that were not Dad’s strong points. Whether this idyll ever really existed is open to discussion; in any event, certainly no one who cares about education should overlook the benefit of involving families in the schooling of their kids. But there are far better ways—as we’ll see—to welcome parents into the learning process, especially given that the two-parent, one-earner household has by now become the exception rather than the rule.

  For many if not most families, time together has become an increasingly rare and precious commodity. Moms work. Adults of both genders put in longer hours, endure longer commutes, travel on business. Kids confront an ever wider array of distractions and so-called social media whose net effect, ironically enough, is to make people less social, more head-down on their keyboards or keypads. Aside from that, as teaching modalities have evolved and more advanced subject matter has found its way into K-12 curricula, fewer parents are really equipped to help kids with their homework.

  So then, is doing homework really the best use of time that families might otherwise spend just being together? Studies suggest otherwise. One large survey conducted by the University of Michigan concluded that the single strongest predictor of better achievement scores and fewer behavioral problems was not time spent on homework, but rather the frequency and duration of family meals.11 If we think about it, this really shouldn’t be surprising. When families actually sit down and talk—when parents and children exchange ideas and truly show an interest in each other—kids absorb values, motivation, self-esteem; in short, they grow in exactly those attributes and attitudes that will make them enthusiastic and attentive learners. This is more important than mere homework.

  There is another unintended and undesirable side effect of homework as it is usually assigned and generally understood. Traditional homework is a driver of inequality, and in this regard it runs directly counter both to the stated aims of public education and to our sense of fairness. Insofar as parents can help with homework, moms and dads who are themselves well educated obviously have a huge advantage. Even when the homework help is indirect, households with books and families with a tradition of educational success have an unfair edge. Wealthier kids are less likely to be burdened with after-school jobs or chores that single parents—or exhausted parents—can’t perform. In short, homework contributes to an unlevel playing field in which, educationally speaking, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

  Given all these drawbacks, why has it been accepted as gospel for so long that homework is necessary?

  The answer, I think, lies not in the perceived virtues of homework but rather in the clear deficiencies of what happens in the classroom. Homework becomes necessary because not enough learning happens during the school day. Why is there a shortage of learning during the hours specifically designed for it? Because the broadcast, one-pace-fits-all lecture—the technique that is at the very heart of our standard classroom model—turns out to be a highly inefficient way to teach and learn.

  Flipping the Classroom

  When I started posting video lessons on YouTube, it became clear that many students around the world were using them to learn outside of a formal classroom. What was more surprising was that I soon got letters and comments from teachers. Some were pointing their students to the videos as a supplemental tool. Others, however, were using them to rethink their classrooms altogether.

  These teachers saw that I had already made available lectures that students could watch at their own time and pace. So the teachers decided to stop giving lectures themselves. Instead, they used scarce class time for the type of problem-solving more normally done as homework. Students could
then watch the videos at home. This solved two problems at once.

  As we’ve seen, students learn at different rates. Attention spans tend to max out at around fifteen minutes. Active learning creates more durable neural pathways than passive learning. Yet the passive in-class lecture—in which the entire class is expected to absorb information at the same rate, for fifty minutes or an hour, while sitting still and silent in their chairs—remains our dominant teaching mode. This results in the majority of students being lost or bored at any given time, even when there is a great lecturer.

  They then go home and attempt to do homework, which raises another set of concerns. Generally, kids are asked to work in a vacuum. If they get stuck on a problem, there’s nowhere to turn for help. Frustration—and often sleep deprivation—sets in. By the time class reconvenes, chances are the exact nature of the difficulty has been forgotten. Throughout this process, students get limited feedback on how well they are actually grasping the information. Until the unit exam, teachers too are left with little feedback on how well the students understand the topic. By then, however, gaps in student understanding cannot be fixed because the entire class has to move on to the next topic.

  In the model that these teachers were using—lecture at home, “homework” in class—students had the benefit of having the teacher and their peers around when they were problem-solving. That way, difficulties or misconceptions were addressed as they were actually occurring. The teachers, rather than giving broadcast lectures, worked with individual students who needed help. Students who caught on faster assisted those who were struggling. Teachers also had the benefit of forming personal connections with students and getting real feedback on student comprehension. The use of technology had, somewhat ironically, made a traditionally passive classroom interactive and human.

  Lectures at home—or, for that matter, on the bus, in the park, or interspersed with the in-class exercises—were also more productive. This kind of independent, on-demand learning was a much more active process than in-class lectures. Students decided what they needed to watch and when. They could pause and repeat as necessary; they took responsibility for their own learning. A student could review basic concepts that they were embarrassed to ask about in front of their peers. If the current topic was intuitive, the student could learn more advanced topics or go outside and play. If parents choose to get involved as learning partners, they could; the video lessons were available to them as well as to their kids.

  What about students who seldom did traditional homework? Wouldn’t it be even more difficult to have them watch videos at home? After all, there was now nothing tangible that they had to show the next day in class. First, I believe that the primary reason why most students don’t complete their homework is frustration. They don’t understand the material and no one is there to help and give feedback. But some people might argue that there are students who are just plain not going to do any type of homework for lack of motivation or time. Even if this is the case, in my opinion it is far better to miss out on the lecture than the problem-solving. The lectures are gravy; the real meat of the learning occurs when peers are learning and teaching one another alongside the teacher.

  Lectures done independently at a student’s pace; problem-solving in class. This notion of “flipping the classroom” was around before Khan Academy existed and clearly wasn’t my idea. However, the popularity of the Khan Academy video library seems to have pushed it into mainstream thinking. This association has been something of a double-edged sword. On one hand, I believe the flipped classroom is a simple but dramatic way to make classrooms more engaging for all involved. On the other hand, it is just an optimization within a Prussian assembly-line model of education. Although it makes class time more interactive and lectures more independent, the “flipped classroom” still has students moving together in age-based cohorts at roughly the same pace, with snapshot exams that are used more to label students than address their weaknesses. As we’ll see later in this book, technology now gives us the opportunity to go much, much further and fully liberate students’ intellect and creativity from the bonds of the Prussian model.

  The Economics of Schooling

  Before moving on from this critique of our standard educational model, I would like to briefly address one more strange and paradoxical thing about it: It may not be working very well, but it certainly is expensive.

  There are widely varying computations of what education actually costs. The methodologies for deriving the numbers are often tainted by competing ideologies, and so should be regarded with caution. But let’s consider a couple of figures that seem pretty solid and tough to argue with. In the United States, for the school year 2008–2009 (the most recent year for which comparative numbers are available), the average cost per student for a single year of secondary public education was $10,499. To put this number in perspective, consider that it is larger than the entire per capita gross domestic product of Russia or Brazil. In New York, the state with the highest education costs, the figure was $18,126 per student, more than the per capita GDP of such wealthy nations as South Korea and Saudi Arabia.

  Now, like everyone else involved in our education debates, I feel that money devoted to learning is money well spent—especially compared to the vast sums squandered on military contracting, farm subsidies, bridges to nowhere, and so forth. Still, waste in certain areas of our public life does not justify waste in others, and the sad truth is that a significant part of what we spend on education is just that—waste. We spend lavishly but not wisely. We obsess about more because we cannot envision or agree about better.

  At roughly $10,000 per student per year, the average American school is spending $250,000–$300,000 per classroom of twenty-five to thirty students. Where is that money going? Arguably, most of it should be going to teachers; but that isn’t how it works. Teachers’ salaries are a relatively small part of the expenditure. If we generously put a teacher’s salary and benefits at $100,000 per year—teachers in most of the country make far less—and the cost of maintaining a 1,000-square-foot classroom at $30,000 per year (a figure comparable to leasing high-end office space), we still have $120,000–$170,000 for each classroom to be spent on “other stuff.” This other stuff includes things like well-paid administrators, security guards, and well-manicured football fields—none of which have a direct role in students’ learning.

  Clearly, teachers could and should be significantly better paid if some of the fat were trimmed from the bureaucracy and if more wisdom than tradition went into decisions about what expenses really drive learning. It’s not the teachers’ fault if superintendents and boards make unproductive choices; still, in the blame game that much of our education debate has become, teachers have come in for criticism that is often unfair or at least disproportionate to their role in the fiscal mess and the misallocation of resources.

  In order to really address these problems, it’s not enough to fix things on the margin: Add a day in the calendar here, change teacher compensation there. We can’t just focus on things like student/teacher ratio. In regard to cost as well as standard classroom techniques, we need to question basic assumptions.

  For example, student/teacher ratio is important. Obviously, the fewer students per teacher, the more attention each student will get. But isn’t the student-to-valuable-time-with-the-teacher ratio more important? I have sat in eight-person college seminars where I never had a truly meaningful interaction with the professor; I have been in thirty-person classrooms where the teacher took a few minutes to work with me and mentor me directly on a regular basis.

  Improving the student/teacher time ratio doesn’t necessarily take money; it takes a willingness to rethink our classroom methods. If we move away from the broadcast lecture, students can have more of the teacher’s one-to-one attention; good teachers will get to do more of what led them to teaching in the first place—helping kids learn.

  Shifting the focus for a moment from public schools to private school
s, it can be argued that if the money spent on public education in the United States and other wealthy nations is a necessary extravagance, the money lavished on elite private schools borders on the obscene. To send a child to a top-tier day school costs around $40,000 a year (or roughly $400,000 to $800,000 per year for a classroom of ten to twenty students). Boarding schools may charge more than $60,000. For affluent families in our megacompetitive culture, the tuition is often just a down payment. When the school day is done, the private tutors take over, sometimes charging as much as $500 per hour; it is not unheard of for parents to spend six figures a year, in addition to tuition, on a child’s tutoring.12 The tutoring these days goes well beyond the standard SAT test prep, and is sometimes tailored to specific courses at specific private schools. In an otherwise terrible job market, high-end tutoring has become a boutique growth industry.

  But here’s the good news. If the outsized and somewhat hysterical spending on private education is unhealthy and unsustainable, it’s also completely unnecessary. First, most private schools do not show a discernible difference in results relative to public schools that cater to students with a similar demographic. Second, rigorous, high-quality, and personalized education can be delivered for far, far less money. It needn’t be the sole prerogative of the wealthiest families in the wealthiest nations. This kind of education can and should be available to everyone.

  What will make this goal attainable is the enlightened use of technology. Let me stress ENLIGHTENED use. Clearly, I believe that technology-enhanced teaching and learning is our best chance for an affordable and equitable educational future. But the key question is how the technology is used. It’s not enough to put a bunch of computers and smartboards into classrooms. The idea is to integrate the technology into how we teach and learn; without meaningful and imaginative integration, technology in the classroom could turn out to be just one more very expensive gimmick.