Homeroom with Sal & Superintendent Austin Beutner - Wednesday, September 30

Hi everyone! Sal Khan here from Khan Academy. Welcome to our homeroom live stream. I'm very excited about today's guest, Superintendent Austin Buettner from Los Angeles Unified School District.

So already, start thinking about some questions you might have for him and put them in the message boards on Facebook and YouTube below this video, or next to this video, wherever it shows up. We'll try to get to as many of those questions as we can.

But before we start into that conversation, I will give my standard reminders. First of all, Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization. We can only exist with philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. So if you're in a position to do so, please go to khanacademy.org/donate.

Also, special shout out to several organizations that have helped Khan Academy really accelerate what we're trying to do during the COVID crisis. As you can imagine, a lot of folks are leaning on us more than ever, which has made our server costs go up. We're trying to accelerate programs, so special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, Novartis, and the many other supporters of Khan Academy over the years that allow us to do what we're doing. But we're still running into a deficit, so we need your help.

Also, one last announcement: just a reminder of our podcast. We take the interesting bits of our conversations here, and I suspect today is going to be one of them, and we put them into a podcast so that you can actually listen to the homeroom while you drive or do other things, without creating some type of a safety hazard. So definitely check out Homeroom with Sal, the podcast, wherever you find your podcasts.

So with that, I'm excited to introduce Superintendent Austin Buettner. Superintendent Buettner, thanks for joining!

Austin Buettner: "Thanks for having me! I really appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation. So maybe a good place to start is just to lay the land. You are in charge of the second largest school district in the country; it's a highly complex job under any circumstances. But obviously, the last six or seven months have been especially unusual. I’d love to hear kind of a background on how you have handled this—what was it like last March and April, as closures were starting to happen? How have you navigated through the summer, and how are you thinking about it now?"

Sal Khan: "Great!"

Austin Buettner: "We're in the midst of a crisis that none of us have ever seen before. But if we remember what our North Star—the constellation North Star—is for us, which is student learning, support for the families we serve, and making sure we take care of our employees who do those first two things, we're going to get there.

Now, as you mentioned, Los Angeles is kind of big and unwieldy. We have about 700,000 students; more than 80 percent of them are from families living in poverty. We have about 75,000 employees spread across 700 square miles. So much of what we need to do, we need to do in scale. We need to be able to take an idea and turn it into a reality and scale.

What we've tried to do is respond to that same set of priorities. We immediately converted our school lunch effort into a community food relief effort. We've now provided more than 65 million meals to hungry children and adults—the largest school relief effort in the country. We've provided almost 10 million items with that. Whether they're books, noise-canceling headphones, recreational sports materials, or baby supplies, we made the effort to ensure we could keep students connected like this with their school community.

So we bought computers and worked in March alongside Apple to pull inventory out of their stores to make sure that we could get our youngest learners iPads. We worked with Verizon to create a template that allowed us to buy internet access very cheaply or to dramatically reduce the price for internet access that we could provide to students and their families for free. You know, we live for our students. Many of them live on the wrong side of the digital divide.

We tend to think of it as that area between South and North Dakota where there aren't cell towers. But actually, in many communities we serve, families can afford broadband. So we set out to do that as cost-effectively as we could. We started training our educators in what it means to teach and engage online. We've had three rounds of that. We took all 35,000 through a basic set of training, allowed another 15,000 to go for what I'll call the masters in it, and then we did it again during the summer. We did that all without missing a day of school, by the way.

To respond to learning needs in the summer, for the first time ever, we offered summer school for every student in our school district—everyone! We tried to take on some creative approaches, and you and I had this conversation before about what student engagement looks like in this form of teaching and learning. So we brought in a different set of partners. James Cameron took some of our high school students on a voyage of the Titanic, weaving in literacy, math, and absolute engagement with Fender music.

We created virtual music classes where Fender provided free guitars; we had a thousand people participate in the summer and kept it going. We have 2000 more this fall. The creators of Despicable Me and Secret Life of Pets worked with us on animation, and students learned to draw and tell stories.

With Snapchat, we created a book club and, as much as I might like to recommend books to our high schoolers, Alicia Keys over Snapchat helped us reach students where they are. It was pretty exciting to see the day we launched that within moments, 500 of our students had responded to her storytelling about a book that she's reading or had read, and they could download it for free, out of some charitable funds we raised—500 students in just a few minutes!

So we've tried to do things differently. I apologize for being a little late; I was just coming from taking COVID tests. The next chapter for us is that we've set up a system to provide testing for the COVID virus and all the contact tracing that goes with us in schools because we think it has to be part of a safe return for all the school community to campuses.

So we have to do things differently; it's part of the nature of it. One of the things I hope we do talk about is how we're learning from this and how some of what we're learning will make us, in the system, better when we get back to campuses. But there's no substitute for being in schools, absolutely."

Sal Khan: "And maybe, you know, there's so much of what you just talked about and some very cool projects. I guess, you know, reminding us that being Los Angeles is a fairly unique place, but some of what you mentioned—the lunch programs, especially trying to close the digital divide, or at least make it not as much of an issue. I'm curious, you know, we’ve been hearing talking to superintendents and district officials around the country that—one, I mean, that's not easy. I am curious how you were able to get the devices out—I've read other places outside of our conversations you know many tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of devices you all pulled off—but are you finding that there are still kids that are disengaged even after you get the devices out there?"

Austin Buettner: "It's not easy to get devices, so we looked ahead. The old observation one makes when you see a toddler walk is they bump into things because they're looking at their feet. You need to look down the road a little bit.

So we looked down the road and said, 'Okay, in February, we started ordering devices. We said this could go this way; they won't go bad. We'll figure it out.' In March, oh, in February—that's actually worth checking back. I don't think anyone was really talking about school closures back then.

So y'all were thinking ahead; you were doing some serious contingency planning.

Yeah. Now, engagement takes many different forms. So the first measure we have is whether every student is connected. When we started in March, we were short about 15 or 18 of the kids; within about four weeks, we were 100 percent connected because we said, first, they have to be part of the school community. Then we started to measure what does 'connected' mean? Are they engaging in classes?

Do all of our different tools and, to be clear, you all got how many devices did you have to get out to do that? I mean, just logistically that seems hard—15 of 700,000 kids; you're looking at over a hundred thousand devices."

Austin Buettner: "We had to connect about hundreds of thousands of devices and hundreds of thousands of internet connections, which is why, again, we had to reach out to Verizon and say, 'Can we do something different here?' Because the bespoke one-by-one connecting wasn't going to work—we needed a wholesale system to quickly get to that point.

Then we started talking to our partners, Khan Academy amongst them, to say, 'What? How do we teach online? What materials can we supplement with?' So whether it’s Zoom or Nearpod as connecting or communication technology, or different apps that may be math or language focused, we reached out to all of them and said we need more; we need to learn more; we need to measure engagement; we need to figure out what the efficacy or usage is for all of these because for us technology had always been a supplement; it was never the main event.

We took a quick inventory when our teachers were going through the trainings and were able to survey there were more than 400 different tools and technologies in use in our classrooms. That's too many—as a supplement, great! When it’s the core and the focus, we had to figure out where to place our bets, which ones were most widely used, what our feedback from our educators is, and we continue to have working groups where our teachers are working alongside the technology providers to give them feedback so that as the next generation or the next need we have, it’s built into the service they can provide for us.

We measure connection, we measure time utilization, we measure assignments. One of the things that you and I spoke when we first met, a long time ago now, how you were able to tell us just how much engagement there was on your platform in the various parts of it amongst our teachers. Well, that's very useful for us because we know there's a use case. The customers told us something, and we have a lot more available to us in terms of a digital footprint today.

How we use that wisely, what the shortcomings are, how that does or doesn’t compare to a classroom setting; you know, those are questions we're still unpacking."

Sal Khan: "Some people say, 'What's your attendance?' Well, we can measure physical attendance. Okay, now we assume a lot of things: we assume Saul's in his seat in the classroom, and therefore, he must be paying attention to learning something. Well, that's not always the case. The converse may be true: if Saul has not logged on, it may be that he is reading a book or working on a writing assignment, and just because you log on, I could turn off and you could watch my screen with my name; I might be taking a nap. One of my siblings might be banging away on the keyboard for me, or I might be distracted at home and dealing with other pressures.

What we can learn digitally isn't always, you know, a signal of noise; there's a lot of noise out there. We have to figure out where the signal is and what's valuable to us as we work alongside our teachers to get them the tools they need and help them learn how they can best use them.

And what does that look like right now? You know, we're kind of a couple of weeks into this new school year now. How does digital learning look in LA Unified? Is it pretty consistent? Are you seeing pockets of excellence or places where you think you could see some improvement?"

Austin Buettner: "So we're 90—almost 99 percent connected. Gotta start there because we started a new school year. For the high-needs population like we serve, there's a lot of transit, a lot of new families. Families have moved. We did a survey of families, about 100,000 families, and three-quarters of the families we serve have had someone in the household lose work due to COVID. So the impact on families is enormous.

So we started the school year with mostly about being connected: ‘Are you safe and well? Do we know each other?’ Because that’s the foundation for learning. If you don’t have that right, you can’t jump right into the homework assignment; it’s not going to work that way.

So we got to the 91 level; the next is we look at whether they are participating. Students participating in this type of engagement—is there dynamic participation engagement between teachers and students? We're also pretty high levels there. What's the daily attendance? There's a new state standard we comply with on how we measure attendance. I was just out of a middle school this morning; I said 99 percent attendance—kids are attending; they're part of it.

Now that engagement will differ by community, and it will differ by the type of student. We know that students who are struggling the most are young learners. I haven't seen anyone yet show me how you can teach someone to read over a Zoom call. Our English learners, those students with differences or disabilities, those who might have been struggling before school facilities were closed—the challenge is greater now, for sure.

The challenge is greater amongst our highest-needs families. So if you look at our enrollment pattern compared to prior years, you'd see we're up in fourth and fifth grade, we're up in high school, we're down meaningfully in kindergarten. So we had a bunch of educators go into the community and try to better understand that, and we heard back a couple of things. We heard that families struggling to get by don't necessarily have the support at home.

We heard some families have given up hope, lost work, and have left, which is a relatively expensive community in which to live in search of an opportunity. We’ve learned that some families have said, ‘Well, kindergarten—my child’s safe; they’re in care, whatever care might be.’ Until students are back in a school facility, the imperative is not there to enroll. In California, it's not law until a child is six to be enrolled.

So we've seen those challenges, so I could tell you kindergarten engagement's tougher; unless you've got an adult with you, kids aren't logging on by themselves or participating by themselves. High schoolers are more capable of learning independently. I was with a young man this morning who had perfect attendance and is doing great, and he's a water polo player—he's got it all put together, but he's built that foundation along the way.

And so our young learners, English learners, students with differences and disabilities—we need them back in classrooms as soon as it’s safe and appropriate."

Sal Khan: "And what does the classroom experience look like? Is it a bit of whatever was happening in a physical environment that has now been transplanted into some combination of video conference and then, you know, assignments on the Khan Academies of the world, or is there a lot more variation?"

Austin Buettner: "There's more variation. I think, you know, you know as well, if not better, than many—that would be a mistake if we just tried to replicate what we were doing. It wouldn't work. First of all, you'd have eight-hour Zoom days, and both students and teachers would lose their minds from that; that's not a good or effective way to teach.

What we're seeing—the spring was that, you know, trying to carry on, keep students engaged, but it was too late in the school year to change much. Summer was learning for students and learning for our educators about what we can do differently, how we use the time differently, and the new school year is more about that. So the engagement piece is focused on the interactive and the technology where information might be found or a viewing of Khan Academy might be done, separate from that.

You find a little more structure in the day and schedule, which can help families; it can help our aides and other non-rostered classroom individuals or teachers to make sure they can all participate. So there's a little more structure and schedule. We're just getting into assessments; we are assessing all students to see where they are with a low-stakes formative assessment of some sort, let's say DIBELS, for instance, in elementary for early readers, and that's a challenge.

You know, DIBELS in a traditional first grade, you can probably get done in one day, assuming most your students are able to stay on task. You don't test for it; I'm sorry, you don't prepare for it; there's no training for it. So you want to see where they are and meet them where they are.

Now take DIBELS to a Zoom where on any given day, one of your students may struggle with the technology; they may be distracted at home; there may not be quiet; there might be siblings or family members who inadvertently give them help or get in the way. The patience and tolerance for young learners to go through all of that—that's a tough journey. So we want that formative assessment because students need feedback; their families need feedback on where the work needs to be, how to build on the strengths, and try to address some of the challenges, but it's not so simple to say DIBELS in a classroom can go neatly and become DIBELS online; it's not that simple."

Sal Khan: "Yeah, and that's related to a question I have here from Facebook. Kids that care: 'Some parents at my school are pushing back on the amount of screen time and the use—' I guess in this case—'canvas as a learning platform. What or have you all done anything to modify the curriculum? What learning platform you know maybe the learning platform is not as relevant, but how are y'all? Are there some guidelines on the amount of screen time, or is it still kind of learning what families can handle because now the parents are kind of the teaching assistant?'"

Austin Buettner: "So we have—we sort of have a minimum set of standards, but it’s going to be different without question. All of the screen time limitations, in particular, for young learners, we have to be cognizant of that. They can’t—you know, we have a set of standards.

We leave flexibility in the hands of the educator who knows best. You know, Saul may want to turn off his camera; that’s okay—if that’s where Saul is, we still want Saul to participate; he’s still hearing; we know he’s participating. So we try not to be too rigid and top-down. We want to hear from the voice of the educator in the classroom, and you’ll see if you look at a schedule, you’ll see time on, time off, so the synchronous with some asynchronous time and back to synchronous, as opposed to, 'We're going to have three hours straight of synchronous.'

You know, you have an engaged audience, I know, but after three hours listening to us they would all be asleep, or they have turned off their computers. And the same has got to be recognized, both from a student perspective and an educator perspective. So yes, there have to be boundaries around that, and I think sometimes people want to look at the measure of synchronous time and say more is better, less is worse. Well, directionally, right—but there’s no science, as you and I both know, on how much is too much.

And so we’re trying to go into that carefully and recognize the unique needs of students because some will do better in this form, some will do better more independently, and we want teachers to have that flexibility with what they think is best for their students."

Sal Khan: "And what about in terms of the number or the coverage of standards; you know, in a normal school year, you’re covering oftentimes six, in some cases seven subjects if you include things like PE and art. And then obviously, you know, you’re trying to cover n standards in a year in an English or a math class. Is there a view to kind of free up that a little bit to try to say, 'Okay, this is really the must-haves,' and then there’s maybe some nice-to-have to do that online?"

Austin Buettner: "Where that real test will come, no pun intended, is hybrid. A lot of talk about hybrid, and let's just unpack what that is or isn’t. Hybrid exists because you can't get everyone back in the same classroom; it's not a choice and we willingly make. You have online or everybody back; we all want everybody back, but health protocols won't let everybody back at the same time.

So you have to have smaller cohorts, which means some will be in a classroom and some will be somewhere else accessed online. Okay, so that gets us to hybrid. Now think of the implication for a master schedule and secondary complex versus elementary. An elementary teacher could be with some students in the morning and the other half of the students in the afternoon, and when the students aren't with a teacher, there could be an aide or a playground supervisor—there are other ways to make sure that students are with us all day in elementary, and the focus on the core happens half day.

Okay, that's manageable; you can keep a small cohort together for medical reasons—small meaning 12 students, teacher, aide. They’ll fit within a classroom safely. If an outbreak of the virus were to occur, you can isolate it to a relatively small group, so it won't spread to the entire school.

Let's go to secondary: a more complex schedule, typical in our high schools or secondary schools—2 to 6—six different classes. So if you have 12 plus a teacher and an aide going on to six, the math will take you to 250 individuals that one person could come in contact with one or two degrees of separation because you go from your—you're not the same 12 all the way through.

So when we go back to schools in a real hybrid—not a, or I'll call, let's say a medically sound hybrid—where we're keeping the cohort small, we're going to have to look at that master schedule and say, 'What’s the priority of in-person instruction?' The rest may be at school instruction, but actually provided by an educator who’s online because we can't take you to sick all six of your classes in person.

Because now we no longer have a small cohort; you’ve been around 250 students. If one of you or your teacher were to have the virus occur, all 250 go home, but that's not sound from health practices. So we're looking at that now, and as we transition at some point, when it's safe and appropriate—Los Angeles, it's not yet—when it is, we're going to have to look at that complex master schedule.

And to your original point, there are gotta-haves and the foundation pieces, and then we will supplement the others as best we can. Not all of the requirements will be met in the same way we used to meet them, but we're in the middle of a pandemic. The point we look at and say is, 'Okay, online is online for almost all students; being back in the classroom is a benefit.'

Okay, if we can only offer you online, and in-person math and English—that's better than online. It will pale in comparison to what we used to do six months ago when you could have French and music and all of your electives and everything else in person as well. But if we can't, we can't, and so the health boundary and the instructional boundary have to coexist in the same program for students."

Sal Khan: "You know, it makes a ton of sense, and I cannot—I can only imagine, I mean scheduling is hard during a normal year. I can't even imagine that the, you know, the contact tracing and the cohort size, etc., etc. You know, I guess two questions in one, and this is related to one from Susan Garcia Dominguez. Hello Superintendent Buettner, what rules need to be rewritten for online learning? I’ll expand that a little bit for you; you know what has been the learning? I mean, you mentioned there's been learnings this year. What has—what do you think is the loss? What are kind of your fears here in maybe the damage that has already been done that might occur over the coming six months or so? And then what are the silver linings, if anything, of this—maybe from some of what the rule rewriting or whatever it might be?"

Austin Buettner: "Yeah, it's so—I won't use the word rule too much, but I think the loss and the potential benefits—I guess the losses are learning loss for sure. We spoke about already a lot of research on what the summer slide is; now students have been in online learning, but there's still been a slide for many. It's not hard to assume that's the case; it hasn't been studied, but let's assume that's the case.

And as each week and month goes by, we’re already at the six-month point where students have been in classrooms, so there will have been learning loss for many. There will be the social-emotional side, which is not getting enough attention. It started in this country as a health crisis, is becoming an education crisis, and will become a mental health crisis, and so many of the challenges we face in society present themselves in schools.

So we're expecting and planning for when students are back on campuses that some of the most foundational work will need to be done around the social-emotional side to allow educators to move on and start to get into the learning loss and how we not only catch up but take students ahead. Now, we're trying to intervene along the way. We are doing one-on-one instruction where we can do it safely outside; we've set up online tutoring for free to students and their families.

So we’re trying to intervene where we can, but the loss in learning, the trauma, and the challenge when we go back to classrooms is going to be enormous. I mentioned earlier, you know, 75 percent of families have had someone lose work—that’s trauma in a household which may have already been struggling to get by. God forbid a loss of life or health and safety issue with someone in the family due to COVID.

So that's coming; those are all the deficits. Now the challenge in the use of technology can—and I believe will—become of some benefit to us. Not—it will not supplant or replace great in-classroom learning, but look at what we did with Fender and say it’s an 'and.' The classes with Fender are teacher-led, so our music teachers are leading the classes, we have Fender bringing in their secret sauce, bringing the Fender Play app on top for students who want more, and one-on-one is about five; it’s amazing.

The work we do with Alicia Keys and Russell Westbrook around Snapchat is a different way because we think about the challenge in online as also an opportunity. The challenge in online is students aren't with us; they're not a captive audience. So we've got to keep them engaged. The opportunity is to figure out how to do that; use different tools and technologies; meet them where they are. At least the key is meeting them right where they are—they're coming to her; they're actually not coming to class; they're going to Alicia Keys.

So if we can take some of those skills and learnings and bring them back with us to the classroom, you know, I hope the Alicia Keys Snapchat book club is around with us for a long, long time, as is this Fender music class and some of the things we're doing. So when we do get back to classrooms, we'll know a lot more about how we can make the use of technology an important part of the everyday experience for all students, and we’ll learn a lot more about how we keep students engaged—not just online, but actually in a classroom.

Today, and hopefully maybe this time next year, things are close to normal or back to normal—how are you going to be viewing your job then? Is it a lot of just—you know, well, I don’t want to color your answer too much, but is it—you know, there’s the learning loss you'll have to deal with. What other things? And there are things that you don’t want to lose, potentially."

Austin Buettner: "Yeah, well, let’s—I don’t want to make this a money conversation because I think it’s more important as a values conversation—what we have to do to make sure our students have that opportunity to learn. And as you know so well, learning is cumulative, so those young learners who aren't building the foundational skills in literacy, math, and critical thinking will have a lifetime of consequence unless we get on that.

But there’s a money issue looming too. And for whatever set of reasons, schools are the forgotten child as part of the conversation about how we recover from COVID. The nation as a whole has risen to the occasion to respond to the needs of the healthcare community, and that’s great—we should. No one should be without whatever the appropriate treatment is, and those clinicians on the front line should be supported.

The front lines are going to be in our classrooms at the same time. We are facing the need to invest more to provide adult meals, meals for adults because they're hungry. We should, to provide devices, internet access, where we receive no dedicated funding for that, the cost of testing and tracing programs, sanitizing, cleaning classrooms.

We changed the air filtration system in every one of our schools—80 million square feet of buildings—we replaced the filters. We went from a MERV 8 to a MERV 13. We just skipped all the other MERVs in between, and what MERV 13 is—the filter is the same membrane as an N95 mask. All that costs money. So as we’re transitioning from a healthcare crisis to an education crisis and the social-emotional needs that come with that, if there’s not recovery funding, schools are going to be in a world of hurt.

Because municipal budgets, state budgets—where most school funding in California all comes from the state—states are under a lot of budget pressure. They’ve already said cuts are looming, and if the federal government or the state government can’t step up at the same time we have to invest more, we’re looking at budget cuts, and the intersection of those two things, it’s not promising."

Sal Khan: "Yeah, no. Well, I wish—I wish there was a rosier outlook, but I mean, that sounds like a very real set of circumstances that we're going to have to struggle with over the coming year. Well, you know, these conversations always go a lot faster than I expect. And I know—we just talked about it—all that you have on your plate, and it’s not an enviable position.

But it gives me comfort that folks like you are at the lead in the charge and how we navigate this very tough situation. So thank you so much, Superintendent Buettner, for joining us today."

Austin Buettner: "Thank you, and thank you for having me. And thank you and your colleagues—we found the work you’re doing at Khan Academy invaluable. It’s become a real not just option, but a real necessity for so many other educators to bring into the work. So thank you for the work you do and all your colleagues; I appreciate it."

Sal Khan: "No, well, it's our honor to be able to help. Thank you! Well, thank you everyone for joining today's live stream. I thought it was—you know, being a superintendent is a hard job in any circumstances, especially of a school district the size of Los Angeles Unified with 700,000-plus students.

You could only imagine how hard it is in a time like this when so much is changing. So it’s really heartening—I know Superintendent Buettner from before this conversation, and I’ve always been impressed with his work; but not an easy situation to be in.

But I thought it was really valuable in kind of understanding all of the levers. So with that, you know, thanks for joining today. Some of you all might have known through social media that I—I maybe mentioned it yesterday—last year, I was sprinting with my son yesterday, and I have trouble with moderation, and I tore my right calf muscle, which is not a pleasant thing. It feels just like it sounds, and it actually kind of pops; it’s horrible.

So that's why I wasn't able to make it yesterday. But you know, I'm always willing to go through the pain to have these conversations, so I'm doing all right now—much better; I'm all loaded up on ibuprofen. But anyway, thanks everyone for joining, and I look forward to seeing you all for our next homeroom conversation!"