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The Co-Opting of Salman Khan and His Academy

By Terence Gillespie May 19, 2018

Seven years ago, I had Kahn Academy slated as a near perfect mathematics curriculum for my sons, when they were ready. The testimonials of grade-schoolers doing college calculus were impressive. That they were doing so by watching videos at their own pace was all I needed to hear.

Then, something awful happened.

Sal Kahn Met Google, then Bill Gates

Not long after discovering Kahn’s videos, I saw him discussing “Innovation in Education” with Bill Gates.

What did Kahn have to learn from Gates about education? Gates had skipped out of college to become a billionaire. And his common core was failing miserably?!

In fairness to Kahn, the outcry against common core, introduced in 2010, was not yet nation-wide. At the time of their meeting in 2012, it was not the anti-endorsement of Gates for “innovation in education” it would soon become.

In retrospect, the co-opting of Kahn and his academy began in 2010 when he received $2 million from Google for creating new courses and translating content into other languages.

They Even Got Math Wrong

Ironically, the worst complaints about common core are in Kahn’s area of expertise: mathematics. Isn’t math the easiest subject to get right in a curriculum?

According to common core expert James Pesta, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, the curriculum:

Changes math into writing and drawing. Instead of solving math problems, the students must draw circles, tubes, and squares to solve a problem.
Takes the natural parts and makes them non-intuitive.
Pushes exposure to algebra out to high-school from the usual start in 6th or 7th grade.
Shifts the purpose away from getting the right answer to getting a group consensus on what the correct answer might be.
Turns math into a subject for which even parents who are experts in math cannot help their children.

That’s great for kids who want to avoid math, altogether. But it’s a complete waste of time for kids that do.

Professor James Milgram, who did the calculations for the Apollo moonshots, explains why he wouldn’t sign off on common core math:

How could an expert in math like Khan, who’d made his reputation by helping grade-schoolers do college-level math, be fooled?

The Core of Common Core

In an interview on the Tom Woods show, Pesta says the unstated goal of common core is training parents to accept that only the state can teach their children, properly. Pesta also believes that common core is a vehicle for teaching children a one-sided ideological view:

Why else would they have children reading executive orders from President Obama and EPA tracts instead of the classics of literature?

The premise of Common Core, when you boil it right down, is that the state owns your kids, not you. And we all should be very worried about that.

Is Kahn’s Academy Salvageable?

It’s best to let Kahn speak for himself on whether his academy is a non-common-core alternative. Here’s Khan in 2013:

“…When we looked at the standards, when we looked at the items coming out of the assessment consortium, smarter balanced, we realized that this is a very very very good standard.”

“Right now, we have a team of teachers, of professors, of graduate students who are working closely with us, working very closely with many of the authors of the common core itself, to make sure that we intentionally create content that really hits at the conceptual spirit of the common core.”

Conceptual spirit, Sal?

Do you mean the “conceptual spirit” of forestalling algebra until high-school? The “conceptual spirit” of having children read presidential executive orders and EPA tracts instead of classic literature? The “conceptual spirit” of the most centrally federalized education scheme ever devised?

A popular question on Khan’s website is “Do you have content for non-Common Core users?”

After two paragraphs of stalling, the answer is:

Due to the small size of our content team, we don’t currently have the resources to pursue a curriculum alignment with non-Common Core standards.

2016 Update from Sal

“Now we have 150,000 exercises and many thousands of videos vetted by the authors of common core!”

Can I Trust You to be Alone with My Children?

Curriculums are best chosen the same way parents decide on a tutor. Trusting them to be alone with your children is a good start.

Would you trust a tutor who did any of the following to be alone with your child?

Leaves gaping holes in essential subjects.
Confuses them with lots of words when a simple answer will do.
Uses methods that even expert parents don’t understand.
Trains them on political agendas instead of teaching them the subject at hand.

Some accuse parents of using school as a babysitter. But, would even those parents hire a babysitter who behaved in such ways?

Failure to Who?

To parents that want the best education possible for their children, common core is a failure. However, it’s not a failure to Gates. His goals have little in common with those of individual parents.

Gates wants to impose “standards” on children, worldwide. Here he is admitting that doing so requires making a range of compromises that will hold many children back.

The uniform approach, sort of monolithic state-by-state approach that we have, yes that probably holds things back. But politically, to get that to change is very hard. I mean, charter schools at California shorts their charter schools in a way that most of them are are financially unstable right now. And, you know, the Union often are used for the status quo, whether it’s against charters or against personnel systems. So, it’s very very tough because everybody wants a minimum standard. And using a market-based approach you worry that you won’t hit that minimum and so you get these kinds of rigid approaches.”

That’s fair warning to all discerning parents. Common core cannot (and was not designed to) match the results of homeschooling or private schools. Neither must compromise with a union, take rigid monolithic approaches, or meet only minimum standards. All three of those “requirements” for Gates is tantamount to failure in a homeschool or private school.

Gates says that using a market-based approach makes him “worry that you won’t hit that minimum and so you get these kinds of rigid approaches.” Prior to his co-opting of Kahn, Sal’s market-based approach was mopping the floor with any educational innovation Gates had ever dreamed of. But, now he’s worried about turning education over to the market from which Kahn’s Academy emerged? This is either willful ignorance or another checkmark in the unqualified column for Gates on “innovation in education.”

Making Common Core Irrelevant

As tragic as it was to watch the co-opting of Salman Kahn and his academy, the work he began is being carried out by other teachers. Their classrooms are free of “rigid, monolithic, minimum” standards. And, the fruits of their market-based labor have already put any child with web access only a few clicks away from escaping Gate’s “innovations.”

Even with the many superior curriculums, already online, common core will not become irrelevant until parents become aware of them. They must also dare to walk away from so-called traditional models of education. Of course, referring to common core as traditional is like referring to an 8-year-old as a great great grandfather.

Outliers’ Perspective

Khan let his academy be co-opted by billionaires and “standards” with a regrettable “Conceptual spirit.” Thanks to other teachers who’ve taken up the work Kahn set out to do, the impact is minimal, if not zero.

Professor Pesta describes common core as “the most centrally federalized education scheme ever devised.” Unfortunately, states have a long history of injecting themselves into the arena of education. Aside from the Cathedral schools under Charlemagne in the early 9th century, state intervention in education has produced lackluster, and lately catastrophic, results.

Today, western civilization is still recovering from the Prussian model that replaced education with mere training. Common core takes the Prussian model and adds ideological indoctrination, the forestalling of exposure to essential subjects to early adulthood, and unnecessary confusion to straightforward subjects like math.

Remarkably, though still unvalidated or tested, common core consortiums managed to push their “standards” into the SAT college admission tests in 2016. Even parents dead-set against common core now believe they must go along with it lest their children are prevented from getting into college. This is false, but a topic for a separate essay.

The Solution is Yours

It is the responsibility of parents, not the state, to provide their children with an education. The shirking of that responsibility invites third parties into the mix.

Fortunately, all underperforming third parties can be disinvited if parents educate their children without relying on the state. That doesn’t necessarily mean doing it yourself but making it happen. If you can afford them, there are still excellent private schools “out there.” Alternatively, more curriculums arrive on the scene, every day.

Most property taxes are justified in the name of paying for local public schools. This will almost certainly mean forgoing the benefit of property tax money for the public schools your children will not be attending.

Update: After watching ~450 videos, I can wholeheartedly recommend three courses in the Ron Paul Homeschool Curriculum: Western Civilization I & II, and Government 1B. I’ll hold off on further recommendations until I’ve taken the course, personally. That also helps ensure my kids don’t get ahead of me, anytime soon!

BTW, those three courses are also available as bonuses when purchasing the “Master” level of Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom.

Children

Transcript: What Does ‘Educated’ Mean? — John Taylor Gatto

By Terence Gillespie February 21, 2018

This transcript is of an outstanding speech given by John Taylor Gatto on what it means to be truly educated.

John gives his ideas on how education should be framed and what he thinks makes for an educated person. He also details the characteristics of both an Amish education and that of the best boarding schools in the country.

I’ve read most of John’s books and this speech is the best framing of what it means to be truly educated. For parents who want to get started homeschooling their children, this is the perfect place to start.

The transcript is ~11,000 words with the video running 1 hour, 17 minutes. The excerpts, below, are 1/10 of the whole transcript.

(Note: All text, below, is John Taylor Gatto speaking)

Challenge Assumptions

One of the universal marks of an educated man or woman is that they know how to challenge assumptions. They don’t believe everything strangers tell them.

10 Kinds of Awareness to Build On

In the beginning of planning a curriculum, I think you need to consider ten separate kinds of awareness around which self-knowledge and self-awareness are built. The first is a personal reality.

We all need to know as much as we can about our relatives and our ancestors. What were their cultures? What are their cultures? What’re their situations, their goals, their struggles? Then, you need to inventory, by carefully testing your own talents and weaknesses, your own limits that come from your biological and cultural heritage. You just need to get a kind of profile yourself. it doesn’t happen in a week or a month; it’s an ongoing thing. I probably spend a little bit of time every day, at an advanced age thinking, about every single one of my relatives and wondering what part of me I can feel in harmony with that particular person.

Then, you need to have an intimate knowledge of history. I think you need to know local history, regional history, national history, and global history. Starting about 1917, the teaching of history in the United States was systematically and deliberately destroyed so that you wouldn’t be able to step back from your own life and figure out what on earth is going on.

On the other hand, I have some good news for you. It’s a fairly easy and greatly satisfying thing to self-correct that. So, an intimate knowledge of history that would include political history, and cultural history, maybe the history of labor, the history of science and technology, and other relevant forms, that’s the second thing.

The Amish Example

The Amish are a group of 150,000 well-mannered, prosperous, law-abiding people who came to America with little more than the clothes on their back. So they didn’t have any contacts to make the way easy for them and they have been persecuted by the state of Pennsylvania, the state of Wisconsin, the state of Ohio for the whole century.

So everybody’s heard about the Amish, but very few people know the astonishing details, and here they are. Virtually every adult Amish-er has an independent livelihood as the owner of a farm or a business.

The Amish realized that new government schools were social separators built on the principle of mechanical milk separators. They whirl a young mind about until both the social structure of the parents and their coherent consciousness are fragmented. Schools separate children from their personal past and from the past of the culture.

Education, as the government called it, separated people from the daily content of life dividing the world into disciplines, courses, classes, grades and teachers who remain strangers to their children in all but name. Even religion in a government school, if it was mentioned, would be studied analyzed and separated from the family and from daily life. It would become just another subject for critical analysis. Specialists armed with books, separated from the Amish and culture and training, would be entrusted with rearing their children and would encourage their children to liberate themselves from the shackles of home. For what purpose? To jump where? In what direction? of course the school, after it breaks your kids away from you, has no idea.

Boarding School Model

Now let’s take a look at what the parents of the finest and most expensive private boarding schools in America want from schooling.

I’ve been studying their expectations for 20 years, now, in order to compare them with my own goals. And I think you’ll find this interesting even if you don’t agree with all of it. I’m talking about the twenty ritziest private boarding schools in America. Schools like Groton, and St. Paul’s, and Deerfield, and Kent. There are only 20 of them, and some of them say there aren’t 20, there are only 18.

But, I’m going to warn you in advance to take careful notice that none of the principles these wealthy parents seek costs the single penny to develop. I don’t think they know that. That everybody could do one or all of these things with their own kids just as well as Exeter or st. Paul’s could. And I’m going to give you these ideas in no particular order of importance. You decide which of these are important.

Elite private schools want their children to learn good manners and to display those manners to everybody, even the humblest person, without thinking about it. So their manners would be reflexive.

That’s because they know that manners will make their children welcome everywhere, even in strange settings where they’re not known, someone will recognize that this is a well-bred person. Now tell me, does it cost anything at all to teach people good manners? I run into ghetto kids who are as mannerly as anybody on earth.

Undiluted Hard Knowledge

The second thing elite private school parents want is hard intellectual knowledge taught to their children, undiluted; they don’t want it watered down. I never taught any kids younger than 8th graders. But I will tell you that we started in eighth grade with Moby Dick, and as soon as I found out that the school edition had all the hard words and ideas taken out, I just threw it away and went out and bought enough copies for my kids and myself with a real thing. I mean Moby Dick’s is as hard a book to read as I think exists. This is your tough book to read. And what I found was after an initial struggle, maybe it lasted two weeks, the truth is that the dumbest kid and the brightest kid were thrilled with all these ideas interacting with each other and they could see the difference between the plotline of hunting a whale and all the ideas that spun out of the interaction of the crew and the officers and the captain with each other. I mean, it was a thrilling thing to do and I the truth is by that time I had lived in New York for a while, I was tremendously bored with what they handed me to teach.

If you pick up a bestseller from 1818, that would be James Fenimore Cooper’s last of the Mohicans, and you make sure that it’s unexpurgated, you will find yourself struggling to read a book that’s casting off political and scientific and philosophical ideas. I mean you got to read about three pages before the arrow gets out of the quiver. That was a best-seller in 1818. It sold the equivalent of five million copies a book today. It would be an outrageous best seller. It was bought by dirt farmers, and it was read by their kids.

Learn to Draw

Not one of my favorite human beings but the reason Charles Darwin’s book made such an enormous impact was Darwin drew; there are thousands of drawings in the book. And they’re not Rembrandt, but they’re accurate enough that you can see what the thing is. So, developing the powers of accurate observation, it’s not a natural thing to do. We don’t naturally see what’s in front of us or hear what other people say, either. So, some emphasis on that.

Learn How to Handle Pain

This one is a big one: practice in learning how to handle pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, and intellectual pain. If you wonder where the tremendous American interest in sports came from it comes from the aristocratic boarding schools of England that it was translated over here it was done not to win a game but to get people familiar with the idea that pain isn’t very painful, unless you think it is. Otherwise, it just goes away.

What you learn from these things is that you do have, I’ll say the God-given internal resources, but these people knew that you had the internal resources to overcome these things, that it was only to the common people that they seemed impossible to do. Once you tried to do them, they were easy to do, or fairly easy as long as you were disciplined. As long as you understood there was danger, as long as you are confident in yourself. Well, you want those things for your children, anyway.

Homeschooling Hope

I’d say, just to swell your heads here, I think that the homeschoolers are the most exciting contradiction of the direction of the 20th century that I’ve ever heard, seen, or read about. That without the slightest bit of assistance you just grab your bootstraps and lifted yourself up and now that you’re you’re substantial enough all over that you can’t be pushed around so easily.

Children

The Adventures of a Homeschooling Dad Part 1: Reconnaissance

By Terence Gillespie January 20, 2018

Though satisfied with our children’s private school, three factors are motivating my wife and me to start looking into homeschooling, again. The Christian school our boys attend is having financial problems, their high-school is aiming towards the new common core SATs for college admissions, and SB-277 will soon involve our non-vaccinated boys.

None of these factors affect us, right now, making it the perfect time to do some reconnaissance. Even if the financial problems get resolved, and we find a way around SB-277, the intrusion of common core into the high-school is enough motivation, by itself, to start vetting alternatives.

What Most Traditional School Options Have in Common

What most traditional school options (public, private, and charter) have in common is common core. As of August 2nd, 2010, most states have adopted the common core standards (though12 states later introduced legislation to repeal their adoption.) In common core states, 100% of their public and charter schools are affected. Though optional for private schools, 50-60% of them have gone common core and, even those who haven’t, are aiming their high-school curriculum towards the new common core SATs in place as of 2016.

Whether your state is affected, or not, most parents must understand what the common core standards are to make an informed choice at the traditional school level.

The Case Against Common Core

Common core sets the standards so high; anyone can walk right under them. — Mary Galamia, Testimony to NY State Assembly

If you have your kids in public school you’re going to lose them. There is no safe place. It’s a hard lesson, but, there’s no safe place. If you want your kids to grow up with your values, if you want your kids to become good at stuff, not full of ideology, you can’t keep them there, anymore. There are no safe schools.” — Duke Pesta

Common Core — Six Years Later

You’ve heard the phrase, “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging?” Common core digs you down three more levels. The ESSA act digs you down five more and then throws concrete over your head. — Duke Pesta

Standards, Assessments, & Curriculum Align

The principal sponsor and author of common core tell us that when we see the word “standards,” we should read “curriculum.”

Sponsor

When the tests are aligned with the common standards the curriculum will line-up, as well. — Bill Gates, 2009 (Before Common core standards were supposedly written)

Author

“Teachers will teach towards the tests. There is no force strong enough on this earth to prevent that. There’s no amount of hand-waving, there’s no amount of saying ‘they teach the standards, not the tests, we don’t do that here.’ Whatever. — David Coleman, Primary author of common core standards

How Christian Schools are Infiltrated

Figure out a way to put them in safe, private schools — because 50-60% of the private schools have gone common core — or homeschool them. — Duke Pesta

Prior to writing this article, I thought Christian schools were non-common-core “safe”. However, as of 2016, the SATs are now common core compliant. Private schools now claim they have no choice but to teach common core to prepare students for college admissions testing. Here’s the carefully worded way that’s presented to concerned (outraged?) parents:

“…private schools have flexibility when considering the Common Core (CCSS), and they are under no obligation to implement any piece that they do not feel best serves their educational goals … However, CCSS will have an impact on home and private education in expectations for higher learning. The CCSS emphasize college readiness, and agencies that administer national standardized tests used to determine a student’s readiness are rewriting those tests to align to the Common Core. One of the architects of the English language arts standards is David Coleman, the current president of the College Board. He is overseeing the renovation of the PSAT and SAT in both format and content to fully align with the CCSS. The redesigned PSAT will debut in 2015; the new SAT will be used beginning in 2016. These realities mean it is important for private schools to meet CCSS at a minimum to ensure their graduates will be successful in post-secondary school endeavors.

Translation: we had to go common core to help your child get into college.

If by “post-secondary school endeavors” they mean the usual commoditized degrees of sinking quality, then maybe not. Why enter into debt-slavery when ivy league schools are publishing their curriculums online, for free? Here are 24 free ivy league online courses you can take, today, for free.

Even for the usual university treadmills, the SATs are no longer the only game in town for admissions. Thanks to outraged parents, non-common-core alternatives for college admission testing are getting fast-tracked.

Goodbye SATs

When ACT and SAT chose to hitch its horse to the Common Core wagon, they may have doomed their futures in numerous states across the country. Without a significant reversal in policy, now-unknown alternative college entrance exams could rise to prominence faster than any test has previously been able to do in the history of U.S. education.

Hello Non-Common Core Alternatives

Vector ARC markets itself as a cheaper, better alternative to the SAT and ACT, and its creators claim it will only test students on the information they actually need to be successful in college and later in life, focusing heavily on the classical Western educational standards of the past. In another words, students won’t need to be in a classroom that teaches to a novel, highly technical test in order to successful. If students have the skills that have been considered essential for centuries in Western nations, they will do well on the Vector ARC test.

“At Vector A.R.C. we believe every student should be afforded a fair opportunity at college acceptance,” says Vector ARC on its website. “We don’t think students should be disadvantaged for not having studied in alignment with the Common Core State Standards. By offering an alternative assessment to both SAT and ACT, students who have selected an education not based on Common Core, will no longer be penalized in their college applications by being forced to take a test that aligns with [the Common Core State Standards].”

Charter School Myth

Parents often say, “Charter school” when the subject of common core comes up. It has a nice ring to it and the parents who say it probably think they “don’t have to deal” with common core.

Wrong.

For all the promised flexibility of charter schools, these public asset privatizations “must align with the Common Core State Standards..”

In short, the murky promise of privatization and the pleasantly sounding ring of “charter school” has given rise to the myth that they’re a non-common core option. They aren’t. Charter schools offer parents the illusion of flexibility while imposing the same mandatory common core standards.

How will Common Core affect Charter Schools?

Beware of Rebranding

Parental uproar has caused the peddlers of common core to rebrand it as “next generation” or just “standards.”

For a more honest rebrand, I would just tell parents to think of common core as, “Every Child Left Behind.”

Adventure Debrief, Part 1

My first reconnaissance adventure into homeschooling hit a roadblock right out of the starting gate in the form of common core (next generation, whatever.) I had no idea how bad it was. I also had no idea that it had already infected the private non-common-core Christian “safe” school our boys attend.

If our school doesn’t wake up and get off the common core track by realizing there are non-SAT alternatives for college admissions, we’ll have no choice but to pull the trigger on whatever alternative schooling options I can find.

For parents in non-common-core states, traditional school options are still on the table. Otherwise, the 40-50% of private schools that haven’t yet adopted common core are the best option at the traditional school level, in my opinion.

Underground History of American Education

For all the unexpected focus on common core in this adventure, this top-down, one-size-fits-all nonsense is nothing new when it comes to state involvement in education. I’m fortunate to have been prepared, in advance, for these challenges by the great teacher, John Taylor Gatto.

I read three of John’s books before our children were born. Given what I’ve just discovered, this homeschooling dad will be re-reading Gatto’s wonderful “Underground History of American Education”, “Weapons of Mass Instruction”, and “Dumbing Us Down” before embarking on the next adventure!