Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’ | Cato @ Liberty

Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’ | Cato @ Liberty: "Khan’s programmer, Ben Kamens, has heard from teachers who’ve seen Khan Academy presentations and loved the idea but wondered whether they could modify it “to stop students from becoming this advanced.”

This attitude is a natural outgrowth of our decision to operate education as a monopoly. In a competitive marketplace, educators have incentives to serve each individual child to the best of their ability, because each child can easily be enrolled elsewhere if they fail to do so. That is why the for-profit Asian tutoring industry groups students by performance, not by age. There are “grades,” but they do not depend on when a student was born, only on what she knows and is able to do."

No comments: