Thoughts on the nation's report card

Hi folks, Sal here from Khan Academy. Many of you all have caught wind that the National Assessment of Educational Progress just came out, also known as the NAEP or the Nation's Report Card, and the results were not good. They were already bad pre-pandemic, and they just got worse. The results were bad both in English language arts and in math, but they were worse in math.

Of the two cohorts that they measured, fourth and eighth graders, they were even worse in the eighth graders in math. This is in line with what we've always said: math is fundamentally cumulative. In a traditional system, a student gets a sixty percent or seventy percent of a concept, they get a C or a D on that exam, and the class moves on to the next concept, somehow expecting the student to master that concept where they weren't proficient in the previous one.

Then all of a sudden, the student gets to eighth grade, where we knew they weren't proficient in almost every unit up to that point, and then we're surprised that only one-third of students are proficient in math at that point. Frankly, if you measured in 10th grade or 12th grade, those numbers are just going to get worse and worse.

The other problem is it's not like this was uniform. If you go to where my kids go to school, you probably have close to 100 percent of students proficient. But on the other hand, if you go to Detroit, if you look at the data pre-pandemic, six percent of students were proficient; post-pandemic, three percent of students are proficient. You can imagine there's a lot of finger-pointing going on, people saying, "Oh, it's because of this policy or that policy," but that's not helpful for anyone.

The helpful thing is to actually offer solutions. Just last month, we released a very rigorous peer-reviewed study, and we've had over 50 studies on Khan Academy—it's the most studied platform out there—that showed if students during the pandemic put in just 30 to 60 minutes a week in Khan Academy, then over the course of the school year, those students not only didn't see the declines that I just described, they accelerated by almost 40 percent versus pre-pandemic national norms.

So we have a lot of work. We're always going to be working on becoming more efficacious, more engaging, but the name of the game now is how do we just get this word out in front of more students, more teachers, and more parents? It's important to have partners like yourself who are helping spread the word, who have helped partner and support with us.

Because I see the next five years as a moment where we're either going to serve all of these students, especially students in communities like Detroit, or we're just going to accept that it's okay that large chunks, two-thirds or three-fourths of American students, really aren't at a level where they can engage and reach their potential.

So I want to thank you all for being on this journey with us. But I think this journey is about to hit another gear. We have a five-year goal where we want to accelerate 5 million American kids, especially with an emphasis on kids from historically under-resourced communities, by 50 percent or more. We think we can do that because one, the efficacy studies say that we can do that, but even more importantly, the nation needs us.

We're a small organization, the budget of a large high school, and we have a means of moving the dial for the country. But we're going to need your continued support and your continued partnership as we go into this next phase of this adventure where, you know, frankly, if we're not able to do it, I think in five years we're going to be doing the same finger-pointing and having the same narrative that everyone has right now.

So thank you for being on this journey. I think we're going to be able to solve this, but we're going to continue to need your help. So thank you for being part of this.