Some Thoughts on “Let's teach for mastery -- not test scores” | Sal Khan

I watched Sal Khan talking about the need to teach students for mastery instead of just giving them an education based on another reason - like their age or how much time they spent on a unit. It makes a lot of sense to me, and I think it is a good message for schools, especially public schools to reflect upon:

Do public schools operate based on mastery learning? The schools try to implement many of mastery learning’s ideas, and they try to use much of the terminology. However, the public education system does not operate based on mastery learning - very far from it.

Sal made some great analogies that hit home particularly hard. He said that in martial arts a student starts with the white belt with white belt instruction - the fundamentals. Only when that student has mastered those white belt fundamentals does the student advance to the next belt - the yellow belt. The process is not rushed - at least it is not adulterated by martial arts masters who are not tempted by just giving easy belts for easy money and cheap thrills. He makes another analogy to building a house. The foundation is first built, and it must be sound and correct. People should not say, “Eh, it’s 80% correct. Let’s now move on to the first floor.” And then after the first floor is built, they say “Hmm, it’s 75% correct, let’s move on to the second floor.” And then eventually, the whole structure collapses because the material was never mastered from the beginning.

The public school system is doing something similar. We are putting students into grades based on their age levels. Schools are then required to teach those students based on standards that are suited for students of that age level. Of course, the current academic level of a student is not based on age. Even more so, ESL students are put into grades based on their age levels, and they are put into mainstream classes even though they do not know English, and a lot of them are SIFE students (Students with Interrupted Formal Education). In fact, a lot of these ESL SIFE students are put in mainstream classes the first day they enter into American schools, not knowing any English at all. So a first-year Newcomer on the student’s first day may be in a lesson learning about high school grammar like appositives, and the class would cover ACT vocabulary words like numismatist, while that student does not even know simple English words like “he” or “she”. The ESL SIFE student would then go to math class, which is Algebra for 9th graders. The student may have had no education in his/her home country, and the student may have had no previous math education. But the education system says that this student must be in Algebra as a 9th grader in order to get the credits to graduate. Some programs do a better job of having some kind of Newcomer program in which Newcomers get some remedial learning and English language learning. I taught in a school that had this program, but the students soon have to leave the program for the mainstream program, especially the older students so they can graduate. I taught the older and younger students the first semester in all of the subjects, and then the second semester the older students had to move on to algebra in the spring. The younger students could stay with me for math at their level. I remember teaching the younger students about multiplication while the older students were in algebra. The older students then returned, and they joined our multiplication game. The younger students actually learned the multiplication we learned, but the older students could not compete with us … they just did not know how to do multiplication. Instead, they were lost in algebra class in which multiplication is a basic skill needed to operate within algebra. This is one of the problems that occur when schools rush to put students in classes and curriculums that are not appropriate for their levels.

I could talk more about this, but I need to go.