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Khan Academy began in 2006 as a tidy collection of math and science tutorial videos from its founder Salman Khan, a hedge-fund analyst who had posted the material to help friends and relatives. Its popularity snowballed, and in recent years Khan has beefed up the software that sits behind and around the video lessons, delivering interactive practice exercises and enabling conversation and remote teaching. From just two programmers at the beginning of 2011 and five programmers a year ago, Khan is up to 20 coders now, not counting 15 summer interns.

How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education

Matthew Carpenter, age 10, has completed 642 inverse trigonometry problems at KhanAcademy.org.
Photo: Joe Pugliese

“This,” says Matthew Carpenter, “is my favorite exercise.” I peer over his shoulder at his laptop screen to see the math problem the fifth grader is pondering. It’s an inverse trigonometric function: cos-1(1) = ?

Khan Academy, with Khan as the only teacher, appears on YouTube and elsewhere and is by any measure the most popular educational site on the web. Khan's playlist of 1,630 tutorials (at last count) are now seen an average of 70,000 times a day -- nearly double the student body at Harvard and Stanford combined. Since he began his tutorials in late 2006, Khan Academy has received 18 million page views worldwide.

From the "when all else fails, lower your standards" department: Average reading and writing SAT scores for high school students declined to their lowest levels (dropping 1 point to 496, while math remained the same at 514). The article does note that more lower-income students with less access to high-quality education are taking the test, possibly providing an explanation for the lower test scores.

Imagine you're a high school student on the bus headed to campus when suddenly you see another student with a loaded .22 caliber RG-14 revolver on their lap. The armed student stands up, and puts the gun to another students head. The victims cries "Are you going to shoot me bro?" and the gunman responses, "Yeah, I'm going to whack you," while you and the rest of the students on the bus watch.

The staff of Normandy Crossing Elementary School outside Houston eagerly awaited the results of state achievement tests this spring. For the principal and assistant principal, high scores could buoy their careers at a time when success is increasingly measured by such tests. For fifth-grade math and science teachers, the rewards were more tangible: a bonus of $2,850. But when the results came back, some seemed too good to be true......

The American Civil Liberties Union is asking the U.S. Department of Education to investigate what it calls "unlawful" single-sex education programs in Birmingham's Huffman Middle School and another district in Idaho. The ACLU filed complaints with the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, saying the programs appear to violate federal law by forcing students into a single-sex environment with little or no alternative options, rely on harmful gender stereotypes and deprive students of equal educational opportunities merely because of their sex.

It's so FRUSTRATING when people cannot comprehend the simplicity of Free Market Economics. I wish I could send then all Economics 101 and any Peter Schiff books... Someone needs to get education on real economics in these government mandated schools or we will yet again be another "Roman Empire."

The indoctrination is so wide spread and common, it will be *nearly* impossible to turn around in our life time. Might as well find a way to bring reality to the young masses, even if it is through their system.

Repeat after me, I am free. Do you feel free in society with all of its rules such as go to work, send your kids to school, follow fashion, act normal, walk on the pavement, watch TV, save for your old age, and obey the law? Repeat after me, I am free.