Khan Academy Ed Talk with Bob Hughes - Tuesday, March 23

Hi everyone, Sal Khan here from Khan Academy. Welcome to our Ed Talks live stream, which you could view as a flavor of our Homeroom live stream. Uh, and before we jump into a very exciting conversation with Bob Hughes, who's the Director of K-12 U.S. Education for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, we're going to talk about all things education with a focus on math and algebra.

I will give my standard reminders that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization. We can only exist through donations from folks like yourself, so if you're in a position to do so, please think about making a donation at khanacademy.org/donate. I also want to give a special shout-out to several organizations that stepped up, especially during the COVID crisis when more folks than ever were dependent on Khan Academy, and we were running a larger deficit than ever because our server costs went up and everything else went up.

So, special thanks to Bank of America, AT&T, Google.org, Novartis, Fastly, General Motors, and many of y'all who have donated at all different levels to allow us to support all of you in the best way possible during the pandemic and beyond. I also want to give a quick reminder that there is a podcast version of this live stream, Homeroom with Sal, the podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

So with that, I am excited to introduce our guest, Bob Hughes, Director of U.S. K-12 Education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bob, welcome!

Bob: Sal, it's great to be here. I have to tell you, I talked to my dad about you last night. He said thank him; I learned calculus on the Khan Academy website.

Sal: Oh, was your dad learning calculus for fun or for pragmatic reasons?

Bob: For fun! He's 85, so he really enjoyed it and has actually dipped into the humanities as well. So, you're a family favorite. It's great to be here.

Sal: No, that's always good to hear, especially when people are learning math for math's sake. Although, you know, there’s no shame in learning it for pragmatic reasons. So, Bob, we've known each other for a while, but I always have fun going to these conversations because we can go deeper than we normally go.

But I will remind everyone watching on Facebook and YouTube, if you have any questions for Bob or myself about foundations, about math, about education, about really anything about Bob's life, feel free to put those questions in the chat. We have team members who will surface it to us, and I'll try to get to as many of those questions as possible.

But Bob and I have to give full disclaimer: The Gates Foundation, I think many folks know, is one of the largest funders of Khan Academy, so I definitely have a bias going into this interview, I will just call out.

Bob: So behind the grant agreement, we've signed the grant agreements. So yeah, I think it said like no hard questions in the grant agreement. In fact, you know, I was like sure; I’m gonna ask you a few hard ones. But maybe a good place to start, Bob, is what does the Director of U.S. K-12 Education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation do? What is your focus, what do you hope to do in the world?

Bob: So we've been working with Bill and Melinda—I’ve been working with Bill and Melinda for five years—to really think about how we can take good research-based knowledge and turn it into practices that can benefit more kids. Specifically, we shifted our strategy about five years ago to really focus on Black and Latino youth and youth experiencing poverty.

When we look at the data in the United States, you may remember in the old days, waiting for Superman when we were talking a lot about how the United States was 15th in the world. Well, we looked at that data and we disaggregated it by race, and we consistently saw that white students were in the top two or three nations in the world on tests like the PISA exam, and African American and Latino students were way down at the bottom of the OECD countries who were actually taking the exam.

So we really thought, just as a matter of mathematics, how are we going to improve U.S. public education? So we really decided to shift our focus to Black and Latino young people and students experiencing poverty of all colors. You know, we believe that the strategies we're pursuing—and I can tell you some of them—will help all kids, but we're really focused on those target populations.

Things we're doing are right up your alley. One of the reasons we support you, Sal, is we deeply believe in curriculum and comprehensive instructional systems, the goal being that you give students opportunities both inside the classroom and outside the classroom to master those skills that are so essential to adult success. So we put a lot of energy into building full course curriculum over the last five years and then trying to scale those with districts and intermediaries across the country.

A second thing we're really focused on is teacher prep. We need great teachers. We're lucky to have so many good ones, but we need so many more. So we're really hunkered down on this teacher residency model where you prepare a teacher much like you would prepare a doctor or a nurse, where you put them in a high-performing school and give them real support.

And then a final big area—and there are a couple of others, but I'll just stick with some of the headlines—is something we call continuous improvement networks for school improvement. So, in 24 cities across the country, we've been funding intermediaries to really focus on one of three big problems: getting kids on track by the end of eighth grade, that ninth-grade transition year which is so important and predictive of adult success, and ultimately transitions between high school and a post-secondary experience, like a two- or four-year community college.

So, we're really hunkered down on those, and we've asked groups to come up with innovative strategies based on research and data they can implement in their communities. Then we're slowly tracking those and trying to get good lessons from the field and spread those across the country.

Sal: And what's your sense of either cynicism or optimism? You know, when I talk to a lot of you folks in the education world, which we're both in, there are people who are excited about certain things, but they're like, "Yeah, you know, decades of smart people trying really good ideas," but it seems to not make there have been measurable positive impacts. But when you look at the whole arc of things, there's at least not a feeling that there's been a dramatic improvement over the last several decades. What's your sense? If that is true, what's your sense of why it's been so difficult, and what gives you hope that the next 20 or 30 or 40 years could be different?

Bob: Well, I think we've put some really important pieces of the puzzle in place that will enable us to make real progress over the next 10 or 15 years. A concrete example is the Common Core Standards. Those are really powerful in aligning lots of people along a common framework to really help folks understand what works and what should be mastered by students—what should they know and be able to do along a developmental progression.

Now, what we're doing is the second stage of that work, which is really thinking about curriculum, thinking about SEL, thinking about all the supports that need to be in place to make the promise of those standards a reality for young people in their schools. So, you know, we're starting to see bright spots in lots of different areas.

Urban areas frequently are criticized as being cesspools of ineffective practice, but in fact, you see in places like New York and even in Los Angeles, in a variety of urban areas, increases in graduation rates, slow increases in standardized test scores, slow increases in preparation for career and college, as measured in New York for example by completion of the Advanced Regents exam. All of those things are good.

So yes, we haven't had a tidal wave or a giant transformation, but I think every single day we’re making small steps that ensure that more kids will be able to complete standards and go on to a productive life. I'm super optimistic actually, and it's just hard work. Education doesn't correct for a lot of social challenges, but it's absolutely necessary, and we have to invest in that as we think about ways of improving social mobility more broadly in housing, income supports, child supports, and a variety of different areas.

Sal: Absolutely. You know, I want to double-click on the Common Core a little bit because I'm very familiar with the history of it, but it has since become somewhat politicized over the years. Explain how the Common Core came about. I think it's important for people to realize it because there’s sometimes this perception that it’s this very much top-down thing that happened. What was the underlying narrative behind it?

Bob: I can’t give you the specific detail because I was busy in schools at the time, but I was paying attention to the newspapers and I know a couple of the actors who were involved. But really what happened was states recognized that they needed fewer, higher, and clearer standards. So states really started to lobby to get much more in the weeds about one what young people needed to know and do, and it was really building on an earlier standards movement from the ‘80s and ‘90s, but really stripping it down and getting much more to basics.

So, the states lobbied and then got the National Governors Association and a variety of other groups to push for these Common Core standards. More broadly, they were ratified by individual states. They definitely were accelerated by the U.S. Department of Education. But you know, the standards are remarkably enduring. They become politicized, but I think 40 to 43 states—I don’t know the exact number—have continued with this idea of standards.

They've modified, they've tinkered, they've made them more appropriate to their local context, but the core of the standards movement is still there, and it's incredibly powerful, even when there's some tinkering around the edges and driving better curriculum, better supplemental support services, and better assessments for young people.

So, yeah, it's still a little bit of a lightning rod, but it's really made a big difference in quality. Now we have to push even deeper and understand what is it that motivates young people, how do we create materials and opportunities for them to learn, and how do we support teachers in that really complicated task?

Sal: Absolutely. I always get this question whenever I speak at conferences or I speak to the press, and I always say look, first of all, the politicization of it doesn't make sense to me. This was done really as a governor; to your point, like states by state, they said it’s, you know, pre-Common Core, the big states—New York, California, and Texas—had all of the power because that’s where the publishers would cater to, and then everyone else would get some derivative version of what the publishers were creating for New York, California, and Texas.

And then we also know that in any standards creation, everyone kind of wants to throw in their favorite pet project, but we realize, looking at countries like Singapore and Finland, that it's the best practice, and it makes common sense to focus on fewer things, but do them with real depth. And I’d also argue that if you look at the correlation between being able to do well in the Common Core standards and any other strong standards, especially many of them very much derived from the Common Core, is very, very high.

So, yeah, it does feel like a little bit of a red herring for all of that focus on that. What's your sense? You know, you're talking about you have the standards, and then the layer above that is the curriculum, which is, you know, what are students and teachers doing on a daily basis, what are their practice problems, what does the instruction look like? How much is it a curricular design issue versus the implementation of the curriculum inside of the classroom, or is it both?

Bob: I think it's really both. What's exciting about where we've come in the last five years is when the foundation started doing this work, we really invested in unit plans—the ability to create small units that teachers would generate and implement in their classes. That was powerful! There were a number of good units that were developed, but unfortunately it meant that we were always individualizing the work. We were always creating idiosyncratic units that couldn't be shared across groups of teachers to really improve their practice over time.

Teaching is really important as an individual, but it's a team sport. So what we're seeing now is the emergence of a second generation of curriculum where not only is there a common scope and sequence, but there's lots of teacher choice and the ability of teachers working together to judge whether or not they're having an impact in particular classrooms on a daily or weekly basis.

I think that's the big next advance. You see places like Washington, D.C. doing their LEAP program, where they adopted a common curriculum, and it wasn't really just to shackle teachers and say you had to teach to the curriculum; it was actually to give them a basis to then modify the curricular materials against the needs of their individual students, the variation they saw in their classes, and work with their colleagues to almost like Japanese lesson study: study the lesson, implement the study, the lesson, understand which students were successful and which students failed, and then come back and re-engineer that lesson for the next day.

So it's real-time improvement. It's real-time measurement. It's not a standardized test, but it's a constant monitoring of student progress against the Common Core's conceptualization of what we want students to know and be able to do that really becomes powerful and really exciting when you see it well done.

So we're putting our foot on the gas. We've worked hard to kind of identify a bunch of resources that are aligned to the Common Core. We're now in the process of going deeper, figuring out what is effective for which students when and why, and use those design principles to push for a deeper sense of quality in the curriculum space.

And then, you know, you're right, Sal, teachers are crucial, so really kind of doing embedded professional development so the object of study in professional development isn't something abstract that a supervisor develops. It's what students are learning in your classroom: why are they learning, which students are not learning, why are they failing to master a concept, and really building professional development that helps teachers solve those problems in real time. That's what job-embedded professional development is about, and that's what I'm excited about.

And then, you know, we shouldn't forget students and families in this equation, and that's where I think Khan Academy is so crucial. The fact that young people can kind of go and get extra help, follow scope and sequence on Khan's platform is really powerful, and it enables them to do the deliberative practice that reinforces the work they're doing in classes.

So I think it's the mixture of what we do in class and out of class that can really be powerful in driving kids to higher levels of mastery.

Sal: Yeah, not just young people! I've heard about 85-year-olds learning calculus on the platform.

Bob: Sure, changing occasionally. You know, the more the merrier, I say. Everybody should be on the platform!

Sal: No, absolutely. And I know, you know, you mentioned that you have a renewed or double down focus on historically under-resourced populations, but also there's this focus on math. And I know in particular Algebra One. What is it about Algebra One that—and you’re preaching to the choir because whatever you say, I’m going to double down on why Algebra One is so important—but in your mind, why do you see that as something of a really important leverage point?

Bob: Well, you know, I knew intellectually that Algebra One was important. When you look at the data, it’s a foundational language and gateway course for higher STEM classes. We also know it's one of the most failed courses in high school. Students who don't succeed at it really struggle for the remaining three years that they're there. In some ways, it's that pivot point where you're really not learning your mathematics tables but you're using how to apply mathematics to solving problems.

So it's that first foray into abstract reasoning, and it's so crucial, not only in math but in a variety of other subjects. But the funny part to me was I knew all that intellectually, but we've started to gravitate towards some of the math work largely because that's where the field wanted to go. What we started to see was when we created the networks for school improvement, for example, there was a real interest in mathematics as a key subject matter area to getting young people on track by the end of eighth grade, or it was a subject that young people were struggling with in ninth grade.

So we increasingly saw a significant number of our grantees hunkering down on mathematics. We also saw the ability to really build great products with grantees around mathematics and get them out, like illustrative math and a variety of the open education resource materials that were available. So we gravitated toward math largely because the field was gravitating toward math, and I'm glad they are.

So many jobs are related to STEM, and so much is determined by whether a young person can succeed in math. What I'm super excited about now is not only thinking about algebra and all the math that goes into it, but the emerging movement around math pathways, really doubling down on statistics and data science for young people, which I think will expand the opportunities that young people have and make it much more relevant to the day-to-day life in courses and in majors in college that aren't necessarily related to statistical or algebraic thinking but really much broader.

So there’s lots going on in math; it's an incredibly exciting field. I was not particularly good at math as a kid, but I'm super excited about math as an adult. I did take a diagnostic—I still have a little work to do on my own algebra skills.

Sal: I'm going to start using the word "calculate" more. That's a new word to me.

Bob: I'm going to!

Sal: No, well, you know, and I'll just double down on what you're saying. I mean, you know the stats better than I do. 70, I think at 65, 70% of all kids who go to community college in the U.S. have to take remedial math, which is essentially the community college is saying, "You're not even ready yet to learn college algebra." And college algebra is essentially like Algebra One and a half. It's like someplace in between Algebra One and Algebra Two.

And we also know that college algebra is one of these courses that you have to take if you want to pretty much get a major in anything. And, you know, some people have debated does that have to be a requirement? But to your point, which I agree with, you know I've met employers, funders of Khan Academy, who say they divide their employees—they run restaurants—and they divide their employees into those who know algebra and those who do not know algebra.

Those who are capable of learning algebra, and the ones that know algebra, he puts them into training programs; they become managers, they become district managers; while those who don't know algebra, they're kind of stuck doing the non-managerial, the non-career track job. So, you know, for better or for worse, the world views algebra that way, and there's probably some good evidence to your point that it is how you can show critical abstract reasoning.

Why do you think so many kids, you know, algebra is in theory learned as early as eighth or ninth grade—in some places starts to be learned actually in the Common Core, starts to be learned in sixth or seventh grade—and then kids take other classes called geometry, and Algebra Two, and pre-calculus which is really just more algebra, and then sometimes even take stats or calculus, and then they go to college and they’re told, "You're not ready yet to learn algebra."

What do you think is going on?

Bob: I think we just need to rethink how we teach algebra and all the mathematics that lead up to algebra, and then make algebra relevant to young people in their lives. So I think it ranges from the dearth of really high-quality teachers—we've done a lousy job preparing math teachers; we can do a better job, and we're seeing some exemplary programs exist across the country.

I think there are real challenges in making math relevant. So we've sometimes adopted pedagogies that don't necessarily show why we're learning a particular math problem, why it evolved in the history of mathematics, and what problem it's solving. So I think making it much more relevant, just in its own history, is important; but then, what problems can you solve in the world using this math?

I remember I've sat in math classes that were just deadly, and then I've sat in math classes that were so exciting because the teacher was making math real in the lives of kids, in the lives of communities, in the lives of workers. What are you going to need when you're growing up and functioning in a job? What kind of math is going to be essential to doing that job well?

So I think, you know, there's a whole pedagogical aspect of math and then, you know, the new technologies really give us opportunities to try to think about math in different ways. Some people learn math by visualizing it; other people learn math through multiple ways of solving a problem to get the right answer.

All of those new strategies and techniques are powerful. So in a word, creating more coherence, creating greater relevance, and creating a pedagogy that enables young people to persist and succeed over time—I think if we can really institutionalize and scale those tools, we're going to see rapid growth in math over the next five to ten years.

Sal: And what's your sense of just students' foundational knowledge? Because, you know, to some degree when they go to college in the conversation, you're not even ready to learn algebra yet, it's almost a side effect—a byproduct of year after year maybe the students didn't have the foundations to go to the next course, but the next course was being taught, and then all of a sudden it gets enforced at the college level, which is—you could imagine—incredibly demoralizing.

You know, I visited middle school classes that should be learning algebra, where it's clear that a good number of the kids are, you know, you ask them eight times seven—they know what multiplication is—but they have to recompute it. They don't immediately jump to, "Oh, it's 56." They don't, and then all that computational knowledge—what's the—how do you think we can address that? This ability for students to make sure they have strong foundations so that we're building on top of that as opposed to just promoting them year after year, and then they eventually become part of that 70% statistic.

Bob: It’s a great question. I think one of the challenges is to understand with greater precision what students know and don't know in a particular area. So foundational skills are essential, right, but foundational skills and knowledge are crucial—not fluidity in math as defined by time.

For example, one of the things I didn’t mention but I think about a lot because of my own personal experience in mathematics is what turns a person on to believe that they’re a math person or what alienates a person from being a math person early on in their lives? That’s true of writing; that's true of reading. But in math in particular, why is it that so many young kids, particularly girls, particularly poor kids, don't think of themselves as math people, even though they may have the native ability to do the work?

And, you know, in my own experience, I screwed up in science, right? I was in a parochial school; I was in math. I fell behind. I became embarrassed about that. I was able to, through the intervention of a really good teacher who brought me back at the end of the year, didn’t make me feel bad, said, "We're going to work on this together." Pasted it—that individualization—that's so crucial for many young people in education. She did that for a number of years and was able to kind of really bring me back in a six-month period to be back on grade level.

I was lucky. I think lots of young people that I've spoken with don’t have teachers like that who have the time or resource and facility to be able to give the individualization. If I hadn't gotten that, I'm sure I would have been alienated from math, disenfranchised from math, not believing I was good at math, and then slowly getting alienated and not motivated.

So I think it’s foundational skills, and I think it’s the way we emphasize those foundational skills to build math identity and enthusiasm for math. It's not only being able to do math, but I hope we can get to a place where kids actually enjoy math because it's an incredibly elegant and beautiful way of representing the universe.

You know, I once had a math teacher who said a beautiful problem is like a beautiful poem. I don’t think if I'm that far—I’m much more a poetry person than a beautiful problem and math person—but I think there's a real grain of truth in that. The more we can excite students about math in that way, the more likely we will be able to see gains in student achievement.

Sal: Yeah, well, I know. I agree. I love poetry too, but sometimes when you see a beautiful product in math or a beautiful— it says something very deep about the universe—that's what's amazing. You know, the math that you're doing is just abstract symbols, but it's representing a very pure idea that I think sometimes can give you chills.

I mean, I could start geeking out on all of those things. You know, there’s a lot of talk right now because of the pandemic learning loss, kids who've been disengaged. I'm curious about what y'all have been seeing on that front, but also in this last bill coming through Congress, 120—I think six billion dollars—is going down to the states, which will then go to the districts and the schools, 20% of which has been kind of tagged for learning loss. This is a lot of money that is flowing into the states into school systems.

What's your hopes and fears there? Do you think this can be a long-term accelerant? Because I don't think there's ever been an example of this much money flowing to schools this quickly.

Bob: Well, just to give you an example, we spend 300 million dollars a year at the Gates Foundation on public education. Schools are about to receive 120 billion dollars a year, so that really dwarfs everything that's occurring in philanthropy. So one of the things we've been working on is to really try to think about how to create coherence and coordination, so people don't just spend money on the best idea that they've thought through, but they really are connected to the research and thinking hard about what are the elements that students need to be successful.

So over the last few weeks, we've been working with three really outstanding groups—the Council of Chief State School Officers, Chiefs for Change, and the Council of Great City Schools—to really build out a 10-point framework on key elements that need to be addressed in any recovery effort and then really start to disseminate that and figure out what are the best practices, best organizations, and tools and resources that can be implemented in each one of those areas.

So concretely, we know that much of the learning loss need for acceleration has been created by the digital divide. We still have eight to 12 million students who don't have regular access, either to equipment or excess access to the internet. We need to solve that problem, and hopefully seven billion of the dollars that are going through that stimulus package are designed to go through the FCC and start to address it.

We're going to have to continue to work with districts and states to both solve the problem in the short term and then in the long term. But then, you know, what are the strategies that are research-based that can be helpful? Curriculum is really important; end of year courses is really important; opportunities to go on Khan Academy and do the extra homework is really important; but there are also just individual needs like tutoring.

We've been lucky to work with a variety of different tutoring groups that have seen real advances of, you know, acceleration of one to two years in a year of tutoring. So it'll really be about identifying those best practices and coordinating. I'm sure, like you, I really have the opportunity to talk to a lot of superintendents and chiefs around the country. It's one of the joys of my job, and I have to say I've been blown away by how thoughtful people are absorbing this amount of money in ways that are sustainable over time and really enable us to build back better.

But "build back braver" is going to be crucial, and I think, you know, in the next two or three months, we're going to see some really interesting plans coming from a variety of different districts addressing learning loss, addressing social emotional needs, and thinking hard about the digital divide—thinking hard about, you know, the host of things that need to happen to enable our young people to recover quickly.

Sal: I completely agree. I've actually just starting because I talked to so many of these superintendents of large districts, chief academic officers, state commissioners, or state superintendents, and they are all both excited and fearful of what's about to happen because it's a huge opportunity to do a lot of good, but there's a lot of political pressure to put the money to work fast, but also not to squander, which is reasonable political pressure on both fronts.

But because of—but I've been very impressed with how people have been thinking about it, you know, how do you ramp into it? It's over roughly the next three years or so, and how do you not make it so it's just this blip, and then it doesn't sustain itself? How do you use these resources to do real structural change?

And obviously, I've had my bigger hat—the Khan Academy hat—which plays a role where kids can asynchronously get practice, feedback, and work in a classroom, and then this new effort around schoolhouse.world, which is around tutoring, which is exactly why this focus on tutoring—because it's great to be able to go to Khan Academy, but unless you have folks to mentor you, coach you, you have a community to be in, it’s a lot harder for a lot of students to be able to engage at that level.

So, yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how all this evolves. I want to make sure I get to questions from folks. Let’s see. I’ve asked some of these.

Well, I'll ask one which is kind of a fun question—it’s a less deep policy question—but I think you have a unique vantage point. This is from SmartBear on YouTube: What does it feel like working with Bill and Melinda? What are they like?

Bob: Bill and Melinda are fantastic! You know, I’ve been in meetings with you, Sal. You know that Bill is one of the smartest people you’ll ever deal with. He really wants to ask the hard questions, kick the tires. He has a point of view; he tells you what that point of view is, and he really expects you to tell your point of view back and not be intimidated by him.

We’ve had just amazing conversations. I never walk into the room—I feel like I know a lot about education—but I never walk in the room not learning something from Bill and not learning something from Melinda. They’re incredibly thoughtful and incredibly committed to this work. They’ve been doing it now for 23, 24 years and they’re really in it for the long haul.

They really want to ensure that, you know, the foundation’s motto is "all lives have equal value." They want to make sure that every young person has a good education and can meet their potential, and it’s a real pleasure.

Sal: Yeah, I was trained originally as a lawyer, so I conceptualize every meeting with Bill Gates as a little bit like a Supreme Court argument. You get about five minutes to state your case, and then you better be ready for the questions because they’re fast and furious, but they’re always directed towards the larger purpose of what we’re trying to do.

Bob: Yeah, I have to—you spent more time with them, but in my interactions, you know, Bill is one of the few people that, you know, in my meeting he’s able to push hard, and he pushes hard on all the exact right places. How do we know we’re reaching the right kids? How do we know we’re getting traction? How do we know we’re supporting teachers? How do we know?

Sal: And then like the next meeting could be with people who are working on health care or, you know, fighting polio or whatever, and then he pushes them too. Like, you know, these are the experts in the field.

Bob: So I don’t feel as bad.

Sal: And, you know, not being intimidated by Bill is easier said than done, but it’s good in terms of, you know—I see we’re almost out of time—but let’s make sure I have a one more question.

Well, this is a question from Charles Lamar Drayden on Facebook asking, you know, your views on standardized testing—and the question is saying measurement tools showing correlation between success and standardized testing—but what are your views on standardized testing? It’s a bit of a hot topic, but I always say what part do you disagree with—the standardized or the testing, or is there something else? Or how you use it? How do you view it?

Bob: I think tests are important. I think we need to be innovating a lot more in the space, to be honest with you. I, you know, one thing that’s fascinating is grades are very predictive of adult success—extraordinarily predictive. That may be a matter of statistics; it’s multiple opportunities to view some young person, it has SEL and executive function skills embedded in it—it can also be very damaging to a student if it doesn’t really include opportunities to rethink and redo work.

So I think we need assessments. I think testing is good. I think part of learning is having a little anxiety about what you’re learning to retain it and then ultimately synthesizing it with other things over the course of the year. But we need to make sure that the tests we give are usable for families, usable for students, and ultimately usable to advance equity.

So I think of it, I guess—the reality for me is there are four things we ask tests to do, and it may be too many, and we need to start thinking about that. We need tests to give students feedback on where they are; we need tests to give teachers feedback on where students are and what they should do next; we need tests that enable us to compare schools and make sure we're living up to our equity responsibilities; and ultimately, we need tests to place students at the next level of education in ways that are appropriate with their skills, interests, and abilities.

So, you know, I think we need to do a lot more in assessment, and I think at the foundation, we're committed to innovating around it.

Sal: No, I couldn’t agree more. You know, there’s nothing wrong with testing, nothing wrong with standardized, but there are other ways to do it because now when you do work on an online platform, it is standardized and it is assessing where you are, but it's continuous.

It can be part of the learning, and also you can make it more actionable. So it's not—there are ways to do it that maybe solve some of the issues, and then if you make it actionable, where you're actually able to make positive constructive actions based on it, then it could be a good thing.

So, Bob, I know we're over time. Maybe just, you know, final thoughts on anyone listening. You know, we have parents listening, we have students listening, we have teachers. What would be the big takeaway that you would want them to have for their own lives or their own children's lives, and then for the education system as a whole?

Bob: I would just say we’re coming off of an incredibly complicated time with the COVID pandemic. It's going to be super challenging to address lots of the problems that young people have at this moment, but just lean in. I know teachers are going to be leaning in; schools are going to be leaning in.

We have resources to be really creative, and I think it's important to address what harm students have experienced over the last year, year and a half. But I also think we need to be a little brave and think about how can we transform the system so we don’t go back to where we were where we had difficulties and challenges, but we build a system that more effectively addresses the needs of young people—that more effectively supports students and our parents and communities in that education process—that uses technology in new ways.

We know everybody's had an experience of a virtual platform at this point. How do we take what was sometimes ranch actor quickly put together and actually use it to drive a better type of personalization for young people?

So I think it's a time of incredible promise if we lean into it—real challenges as there always are, but real opportunities if we’re brave enough to seize them.

Sal: Right. Well, Bob, thanks so much for chatting with you, and obviously we collaborate on a lot of fronts. It always leaves me energized and excited about—and I agree with you, I think the future is—I think we’re at a point where sometimes it's darkest before the dawn, and there's a lot of really exciting things that I think will fundamentally accelerate a lot of folks' learning over the next 10 years.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Bob: Well, Sal, thanks for everything you do, and thanks to the team at Khan. You guys do amazing work. We're really proud to sponsor you.

Sal: Thank you so much. It means a lot to us and all the people listening.

Well, thanks everyone for joining. Hopefully you enjoyed that conversation with Bob as much as I did. I look forward to future conversations like that, and please join us at the next Ed Talks and, or Homeroom. With that, I'll see you. I think I'm—I think this is the last one for my week, and then I'm going on vacation, so it might be a little while since we see each other, but stay tuned.