Khan Academy Ed Talks featuring Elisa Villanueva Beard - Wednesday, December 9

Hi everyone! Sal Khan here from Khan Academy. Welcome to Ed Talks on Khan Academy. I know what you're thinking: What are these Ed Talks? Well, this is kind of a subset of the Homeroom with Sal conversations that are more focused on education and are from experts or specialists in the field of education.

We have a really exciting conversation, but before we do that, I’m gonna give you my standard announcements. First of all, a reminder that we are not for profit. We can only exist through philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. So if you’re in a position to do so, please think about going to khanacademy.org/donate, and any donation amount makes a huge, huge difference.

I also want to give a special shout out to many corporations who've really stepped up and helped Khan Academy out during the COVID crisis. We were running a deficit even before the crisis, and that deficit only grew as our traffic to our site went to about 250 percent of normal. Special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, and Novartis.

Also want to announce that there's a version of this and the Homeroom with Sal live streams in Homeroom Sal, the podcast, wherever you might find your podcasts.

So, with that, I am excited to introduce Elisa Villanueva Beard, CEO of Teach for America. Elisa, thanks for coming.

“Hey Sal, thanks for having me! It’s good to be here and, you know, congratulations on all the work that you all have been leading. It's been inspiring to see how you all have been meeting the moment and so happy to be here in this discussion.”

“Likewise! And maybe a good place to start—there's a ton of questions I want to ask, and I want to encourage everyone watching. They can go on the message boards on Facebook or YouTube, wherever they're watching this, and they can ask questions that hopefully will be able to surface to Elisa. But also just to get everyone on the same page, explain to everyone watching what the focus of Teach for America is. I think most people have heard of it; it's one of the nonprofits that I've always looked up to when I started Khan Academy, but you tell me in your own words, what is Teach for America?”

“Well, our focus is working alongside many partners to take on educational inequity at the highest level, right? So what we know for sure at Teach for America is that potential is distributed equally across all lines of difference, but the opportunity and the access to meet that potential does not exist for all kids in all communities in our country. Long before COVID, our system was not serving many kids well enough, and so I think that's really important for folks to understand. Just to ground folks in that, when you look at our lowest-income communities, who are disproportionately children of color, about 50 percent of kids are graduating from high school, and that's compared to 96 percent of kids in the most affluent communities. Of those kids graduating from high school, about six percent make it to and through college. Teach for America exists to say that is not okay, and we are committed to creating a different reality.

So we know that the problem is systemic, and there needs to be change within and outside of education to really lead to a different reality. We know many interventions are needed in order to be able to take this on, and our contribution is leadership. So we go out and we recruit, support, and develop exceptional equity-oriented leaders who teach for at least two years in urban and rural America. They're expected to ensure that our kids get the education they deserve and, through that, are able to get this clarity of conviction and understanding of the system, the possibility of it, the greatness of our children, and become lifelong advocates in adjacent education.

We’ve been around for 30 years; we're now 65,000 strong with core members and alumni. Eight out of ten of our folks in our alumni network work within education or have a career serving a low-income community, which is incredible because most folks that joined us had no intention of taking on this career.”

“I can only imagine. You know, what is fast-forwarding to today? I am curious; we started to talk before we started going live, but how has COVID impacted Teach for America in all directions? What's going on with your existing teacher core who were in the classroom but now I’m guessing doing primarily distance learning? How is that affecting your pipeline of finding future leaders?”

“Yeah, so you know we’re in the moment, as we all know, the greatest disruption in education in U.S. history, recent history certainly. For us, right away—so I talked about we have this network of 65,000 folks—we right away knew that we centered on how we were gonna meet the moment. So, we're able to get our community, our network, learning together. We created an educator resource up to share best practices. Right away, we had a platform where our core members and alumni were able to put forth projects that they were trying to fund to just meet the basic needs for kids or things that were most pressing in our communities.

So we were able to do that, but for us, very practically, the first big pivot we had to make was our summer training. In March, when we realized that we weren't going to be able to run summer school programs—which is a main component of how we train our teachers—we had to figure out if we were even going to be able to bring in a core because we were going to have to train them in a fundamentally different way. When we went out and asked our principals and superintendents, ‘Do you want our teachers even though they haven’t taught kids, which is core to our model?’ we got a resounding yes! Now more than ever we need your teachers.

So we pulled together just our incredible staff, from national teams, regional teams, to design—we have our Miami-Dade executive director run our program—to design a new training curriculum in nine weeks. We executed on that in, you know, four weeks and two days, and it was an incredible endeavor. What we saw was our teachers coming together in one network and feeling, you know, really the most prepared we’ve seen in terms of how we what needs we were able to meet. We spent less money, and so we were able to pivot there, and we saw our core members just rising to the occasion. That was the highest retention we've had also throughout the summer, so folks were just so committed as we processed the world around us knowing, ‘Gosh, there’s no greater impact that I, you know, one can be making than in the classroom with students.’ It’s been quite inspiring to sort of see the staff and the network come together to meet the moment.”

“Yeah, there’s something powerful about that. The entire education world had to quickly go to virtual instruction, which was probably really good preparation. There’s a lot of negatives about it but really good preparation for the teachers having to then enter into a virtual environment. Right now, I’m curious about you on the training side. What do you all focus on in that training, and are there things that you all do in that training that you wish were part of kind of the mainstream schools of ed? What would you do if you could wave a magic wand on what happens in all teacher training in the U.S. or in the world?”

“Well, there are a few things, Sal, that we've learned over time that just really matter. One of the first things that’s so relevant to this moment is the power of relationships. I don't know how that brings to you as you hear that, but it’s been really critical in this very moment. Our stats are showing—as the stats that folks are sharing—is that we have about three million kids that haven’t engaged in learning since March. Either they don’t have devices or connectivity—about 17 million do not have connectivity or devices—which is something we just deeply need to take on.

But we know that the only way to engage kids and families into learning is through relationships. That's a big component of what does it mean to build the trust, and I believe change only happens as fast because there is trust and deep relationships. So that is a component of what we do. We, of course, also focus on rigorous content, and we were able to ensure that all of our core members got some training on the science of reading, and we know that this is just so critical. I think every teacher at school needs to ensure that all teachers get access to this. We do training around computational thinking as we think about 21st-century preparedness.

The fact that 65 percent of kids in grade school today are gonna seek out jobs that we don't even know what they are today is so critical. So how were we developing those critical thinking skills and the social-emotional skills that are needed? We also teach in a trauma-informed way, and so that's core to the training that we are able to provide to our teachers and the support, especially in this moment when our kids are in the middle of experiencing severe loss, fear, and uncertainty.

We’ve got to ensure that we're really able to meet the basic needs for kids, the human needs, and then be able to support them so that academically we're not leaving an entire generation behind, which is what so many people are talking about, and that’s still a choice to be made. Then, of course, we have an entire focus on racial equity, ensuring that our teachers are culturally competent teachers and able to support our kids in a way that's most responsible that leads to the most learning and engagement overall.”

“No, that makes a ton of sense. You know, having questions come in on social media from Facebook, Livy Valenzuela asks, ‘Do you believe children will be behind once we return to actual physical school? What can I do as a parent?’ You know, I know you're familiar, Sal, with all the studies coming out from NWEA, McKinsey, and so many folks who are analyzing the situation. The truth of the matter is that without question, kids on average are going to be behind, especially children growing up in low-income communities who are disproportionately children of color who were already likely behind on average coming into schools.

The fact that, as I said earlier, 17 million kids still don’t have access to devices and connectivity—and that’s only part of it. As you know, Sal, technology for technology’s sake is not the point. Once you even then have the technology, we then have to ensure that we are, you know, developing our teachers on how to then teach with this and ensure that that is in place so our kids are able to engage.

So I do believe that every indicator is telling us that our kids are going to be grossly behind. The things I think we’ve got to be focused on are, number one, ensuring that everyone truly does have access to a device and connectivity, because this isn’t about this pandemic; this is about the future. This is just a tool that every kid needs—it is the basics, like paper and pencils. We talked about everyone needs a backpack, paper, and a start to school; everyone needs access to a device and connectivity moving forward for us to continue to find the path forward to best educate all kids.

We’ve got to train our teachers on that. We also need to ensure that we have information about what our kids need. There are a lot of questions right now about testing and whether we should be testing our kids or not, and it's often tied to accountability but this is a moment to, you know, reimagine how we think about testing and accountability for this year. What I feel strongly about, as imperfect as tests are, we really need to know where our kids are so that we can appropriately intervene and so that we can be smart about our investments in ensuring that kids get what they need.

The last thing I’ll say is we need to make sure that we are advocating for dollars for funding. During the last great recession, we invested a lot more than we have in this moment through this crisis. Right now, we have seen five times less funding coming into schools with a much greater challenge and many complexities. Not only do we need to meet the basic needs of kids, but I’m watching educators in schools right after the pandemic figure out how are we going to feed our kids? We realized schools feed kids. Schools provide all these social nets for kids that suddenly are gone: safety, access to a clinic, etc.

Right away, our educators have been focused on meeting those needs. We are going to have to continue to do that and the trauma-informed teaching, but also you know the academics and be smart about that. We need to ensure that it's personalized and that we're really ensuring that parents and their families and kids are—and teachers, educators—are able to work together to figure out how to close those gaps.

So as a parent, I would just be asking questions about how do we know where our kids are, and where investments need to go, and do we have the investments needed to ensure that we're able to educate all kids and invest in our greatest natural resource we have in this country, which is our students.”

“Absolutely. And just to add, Olivier, to Lisa’s response, which I 100% agree with, you know, above and beyond everything that the schools are doing, when you ask what you can do as a parent, my advice there is—I don’t know how well your children are—but at least point there’s ways that you can evaluate where your kids are. You can go to Khan Academy, especially in math and science and other areas, but you can use what we call our Get Ready for Grade Level courses. They have something called a course challenge in it.

Let’s say you have a child who’s, I’m making it up, entering sixth grade or just entered sixth grade a few months ago. You can do the Get Ready for Sixth Grade course challenge. If they score 80-90% on it, that means they don’t have any significant gaps from pre-sixth grade, and then I would recommend them working at their own time and pace, 20 to 40 minutes a day in math, in personalized practice, going through and trying to get mastery in all of sixth grade on Khan Academy. If they are having trouble in the Get Ready for Sixth Grade, they can go and look at the units, or you can work with them to look at the units where they have trouble, and then they should get mastering those gaps, and then they can go on to the sixth-grade work.

I feel confident if they do that 20, 30, 40 minutes a day over the course of the school year and beyond, they're going to do just fine. They might even accelerate their learning. On the English and language arts side, there are tools Khan Academy you can use, and there are four paid tools that are pretty good too, like Lexia. Once again, you can do 20, 30 minutes a day. But it could often be as simple as, you know, asking them to read a magazine article depending on their age, read it, and then we'll discuss it at lunch.

If you create those kinds of habits over the course of the year, and then, you know, the writing—just make sure they don’t atrophy that skill. Say hey, once a week I want you to write something that you want to change at home, you know, change your bedtime. Something you want to change in the world. We'll discuss it. That's going to make sure they don't atrophy. But those are just some things you can make sure if your kids do fine just in your household. I have no doubt that they're not going to fall behind. It's still going to be sub-optimal, but they won't fall behind.”

“Yes, there’s a question here from Facebook, Laura Jones: ‘Even students who are straight-A honor students are failing. How do we help them recover from this? Even with devices, kids are struggling.’ Alisa, I'll add to that question, what are you all telling, you know, what are your teachers seeing, and what are you telling them for this? You know, there's a teacher who lives in my cul-de-sac who has, you know, I live in a middle-class, upper-middle-class neighborhood where she also is seeing five to ten percent of her kids are completely disengaged right now. How are y'all coaching the teaching corps to re-engage or keep these kids engaged and prevent the situation that Laura is talking about of a former straight-A student now failing classes?”

“This is such an important question, Sal, and there are a few things that come to mind. One is that we haven’t hit on yet is I observe that a lot of our—the way we’re trying to approach virtual teaching is the way we approached being in school, which really is not working for kids. I mean, there’s just enough data and information that we have. If we should just go talk to our kids—I mean, parents talk to their kids every day—and you often hear, ‘It’s boring. I don’t understand the point of it. It just feels so irrelevant and not pressing.’

This is an opportunity, and you know where TFA, we talk about the need for radical re-imagination. This is a time for creativity! This is a time to say that isn’t working. What is relevant to our kids? The work kids should be doing should be in context of what's happening in the world right now. There’s so much happening in the world right now that’s helping to build their own, you know, their knowledge and skills.

I read something on The 74 Million, and they’re doing these letters—student letters to adults saying ‘Hello, here’s what we need and want!’ Examples like get kids to, you know, in your economics class to actually go figure out how are you going to save the business that is going out of, you know, that doesn’t have because of COVID and the shutdown of the economy, is deeply struggling? Like what are the solutions to that, and what would you do, and you know, what would you tell the mayor or the governor?

Just like real-world context that we can actually really grab onto and figure out how do we start ensuring that there’s relevance. That one size fits all doesn’t work anymore to meet our kids where they are, and I don’t think they’re gonna show up unless they can see that this matters and is interesting and, you know, that they’re actually getting something for it.

The other thing that we observe going on, you know as we talk to our own teachers is our kids have a lot going on, you know? Our kids now are supporting their own families. They watch, you know, their families lose jobs. I observe some systems saying, you know, you got to show up for these hours and here’s the expectation, but it’s not in the context of a global pandemic and the impacts of what that is having on our kids, their families, and their lives.

We’ve just got to be more in conversation and in relationship with, again, families and the students themselves to really understand their circumstances to then be able to figure out, you know, how do we adapt? I’m watching some of our school leaders get really present with that and say we can’t expect kids to be in school all day. They’re not going to do it; they actually have to go work to support their family.

So instead we’re going to have these hours in the evening that seem to work better—six to nine or, you know, when this is when we’re going to actually host classes. We just need to really figure out how do we meet people where they are in this moment, and that’s what I’m observing of our network as well. There’s this one school in Saint Louis led by TFA alums, Cairo’s Academy, and they had technology already. Their whole method was year-round school; they do learning checks and chunks in seven weeks. They have the technology because they’re big on personalized learning, but they know that’s just one tool.

The thing they also have is the relationships and the deep understanding of how important that is to be able to execute. They were able to, through this pandemic, they have pods—there’s one adult to 10 kids—who are in a relationship understanding the needs, and that person also laisons to the families. There’s a constant, you know, adapting and ensuring that there’s like, you know, real understanding in order to ensure that we’re able to keep kids engaged, and their engagement rate is through the roof.

It takes us really thinking about the work differently and understanding and being empathetic to what our kids need and really present to that.”

“I absolutely. And you know the only thing I would add to that is depending on the age of the student, if you're talking about someone pre-high school, you know, grades matter and that they're a signal and that you don’t want to fail a whole grade and have to repeat it. But the important thing is that the child keeps mastering the concepts.

As we mentioned, there are tools to do that to make sure they keep mastering in high school. When the stakes are a little bit higher in terms of your transcript and college admissions, I would have a conversation—I mean definitely talk to the child, talk to the student—but also talk to the school about it, because I think right now you're seeing people are being, you know, they understand that this is a very weird situation, and there should be more outlets for kids who maybe are failing or struggling to eventually be able to get back on the horse and show that they know the material.

But, yeah, it's a real issue. Let's see one more question. We have time for one more question. This time goes by fast when we're having fun, Alyssa, from YouTube, Smart Bear, ‘How do we help students re-enter school?’ I mean, like before they were happy to enter schools because they had friends and there was no virus, but now students will be filled with fear to enter school because of the pandemic. Well, I guess it could be, I think most people aren’t thinking about seriously re-entering schools until at earliest the spring and maybe next school year, but I think even then the question is relevant. People might not be afraid of the virus then, but friendships might have been broken. All sorts of learning gaps. They’re not even used to the pattern of waking up and getting ready and getting on the school bus.

How do you think that's going to play out? What should we do?”

“Well, you know, Sal, this is where I go back to like my hope is that we don’t just say everyone should go back to school and be doing school in the same way, right? Because there are a segment of kids who are thriving in this environment who actually don’t like the social and get intimidated and, you know, are able to just sort of clear the air and really thrive in this environment. My question is, why can’t that continue to be true and also figure out how we can be doing schools and getting kids back with each other?

We do have enough research that shows that, you know, the social development part of this is really important, especially for the younger kids in being back at school. I mean, my kids have been—I have four sons—and they've been back in school now for nearly 11 weeks, and they love going to school. They go to a Montessori school, and they’ve really loved the opportunity to go back. It’s smaller schools, it’s smaller class sizes, and they’re able to, you know, it’s been interesting to watch my kids thrive in an environment that’s a bit different than what it was before.

I think we just have to really be in communication with our kids. Hopefully, think creatively of how do we do school now that it got interrupted? What did work about that for, you know, some kids? What didn’t work about that? How do we really listen to students and families and communities? I think solutions are within the community, and we often don’t spend enough time really understanding that to then inform our approach, which I just think is so key to being able to do this well.”

“Yeah, well, you know, there’s so much we could continue to talk about, Alisa. As I said, Teach for America is, I think, one of the not-for-profits that I always cite. Honestly, one of the reasons why I even thought Khan Academy could be a not-for-profit was I was like, ‘Well look, here’s a not-for-profit that is in education. They’ve been able to scale, able to have incredible impact.’ So you know, I've always looked up to the work that y’all do.

I think what we’re doing is very complementary in terms of, you know, y’all are working on kind of the human capital that really is so key in reaching students and the leadership, and we’re working on the tools and the content to help support both those teachers and the kids they serve and the families. So it’s been a pleasure to chat with you, and I hope we can keep this conversation going in future days, both on a live stream and not.”

“Yes, you got it! Thank you so much, Sal. Be well, happy holidays!”

“You too! Happy holidays! Well, thanks everyone for joining. Thanks for joining today's session of live stream. Hopefully, you’ll be able to join us tomorrow. We're gonna have Dr. Jarrett Bryant, assistant superintendent of Houston Independent School District, and what we're learning about post-secondary success, so once kids get to college and whatever else.

I will see you then, and until then, have a good evening or morning or wherever you are in the world. I’ll hopefully see you tomorrow!”