The school lets students skip traditional classrooms and lectures if they don’t fit how a student learns best. They can work independently at their own pace, earning credit based on what they learn, not for sitting in a class all year.

Or students can leave school each afternoon to complete a paid internship, earning credit for what they learn in the workplace.

Mayfield High School, with an enrollment of 1,200 students, is one of many high schools across the country increasingly offering students flexibility to shape their class schedules and how they earn credits toward diplomas, as career demands keep shifting and students grapple with family and life challenges.

It’s an approach that has grown as students mix high school classes with early college courses or seek different ways to try out jobs and train for them, none of which fit neatly into days divided by class periods.

“Let’s be real, our students have many more responsibilities in today’s world than we did back in the day,” said principal Brian Linn added. “They may be working to support their family. They may need that internship, because they need to go right into the world of work.”

Students “live in a personalized world outside of school,” said Linn, “so we have to personalize (school) to meet their needs.”

It’s a shift that has drawn and Battelle for Kids. Personalized learning has also become a greater priority for states, including , Vermont and , while schools that adopt the approach are cropping up from Washington, D.C. to

Two new paths have taken hold at Mayfield High School with this flexibility:

• A Learn and Earn program that offers 127 of the school’s 1,200 students paid internships in fields such as manufacturing and construction. Students often pick the chance to learn on the job over being trained in a trade in a school workshop as part of a career technical education program. 
• An alternative schedule and class experience that gives students more independence, simply called The Option. It’s a mix of study hall and class time with its own open space as big as a gym where students can do as much math or English as they want each day, as long as they finish all their work each week.

“We wanted to create a self-paced option for students,” Linn said. “To be very frank, we couldn’t think of a better name for it, so we called it The Option.”

It’s a program about 20% of the school’s students choose over taking classes the traditional way, with teachers leading a lesson. The Option allows them to do classwork at their own speed, while teachers act as guides instead of lecturers. Students read materials or watch videos, then answer questions or write about the lessons independently, seeking teachers when they need help.

“Option time, for lack of a better word, is a structured study hall,” said Paige Zenovic, an English teacher who chairs the program. “It’s basically the idea that the students are with their teacher for study hall.”

Students study multiple subjects – such as math, English, history — all within The Option’s high-ceilinged study space larger than a basketball court that was once a building trades workshop. It’s now renovated for tables that seat a handful of students and with a balcony and wide staircase where students can work. 

Teachers for multiple subjects are based there, so they and students can interact whenever they are there about any option classes at any time. Lessons are given to small groups of students and sometimes just in one-on-one sessions, in this version of what some call a “flipped classroom.” 

“You just will not see a 50-minute specific lecture with 25 students in the class,” Linn said. “You’ll see one 10- to 15-minute mini lesson.”

Superintendent Michael Barnes called The Option a “fully customizable” school day that lets students pick what subjects to work on when, so long as regular assessments show they are on track in a limited form of mastery-based learning, in which students work on academic material until they know it and can show competency in it.

“We allow our students to exercise agency over their own learning so they have voice and choice,” Barnes said. “They set their schedule every single day. They can determine what they want to work on, when they want to work on and when they want to assess.”

That independence helps teach students responsibility to do their work and time management skills.

“That’s a really important piece that doesn’t typically happen in the traditional class, because everyone’s supposed to be doing the same thing,” Zenovic said.

Because The Option is voluntary, students can choose to return to traditional classes. Some do, but many continue it all through high school. Senior Giovanna Zahedi has used The Option all four years of high school because she considers lectures unfocused and rambling.

“I find it really hard to concentrate in classrooms,” she said. “I just want to get straight to the point, just finish my schoolwork.”

Sophomore Madilyn Senning splits her classes between traditional classrooms and The Option, but says she prefers The Option.

“I have a hard time focusing when they’re lecturing the whole class,” she said. “I can work ahead, because a lot of the time I get things done faster than some other people in my classroom. It’s just easier for me to get my work done.”

The Option is joined by Learn to Earn as the two most aggressive ways the school gives students choices.

The school belongs to a consortium of 10 suburban school districts that share career technical education classes such as welding and auto repair between them. But those have become so popular that 17 out of 19 CTE programs are oversubscribed and turn students away. Welding, for example, has room for 35 students but had 175 applicants this year. 

“We don’t want to have to tell a student, no,” said Deanna Elsing, the school’s director of innovation. 

“A typical high school isn’t in a position to build a million plus dollar facility…to support the needs of our students’ personalized interest,” Elsing said. “But for the bargain price of free, we can partner with local industry, organizations and businesses and they can become the classroom.”

So Elsing started recruiting local businesses to bring in student interns — and pay them. That’s rare nationally, with fewer than five percent of high schoolers doing an internship or apprenticeship before graduating, according to federal data and surveys by the American Student Assistance nonprofit, now known as Britebound.

Started with just nine students three years ago, Learn and Earn now has 127 — about 10% of the school — doing internships in fields that include welding, manufacturing and home construction.

The program is open to juniors and seniors, who spend their first semester learning workplace etiquette, doing tours of companies and hearing presentations from different businesses. They then move on to working about 20 hours a week for businesses over the next year and a half, often including summer work.

That meant the school altering its schedule so the students can take academic classes in the morning, leave by 11:45 a.m. and be at their internships by 12:15. That lets them work all afternoon, often staying after school hours to keep working until the end of the work day, as many employers requested.

The school also added training sessions for employers, not just students, before interns would start at a company.

“It’s so important for our students to be able to look someone in the eyes, shake their hand, dress appropriately, test drug free, and have those professional skills,” Elsing said. “But we found over the last three years that some of these industries have not quite yet mastered how to properly engage and train a Gen Z or Gen Alpha student. Because they are 16, 17, 18-year-olds, they’re not going to come in as polished as your college graduate is going to come in.”

Jacob Reed, 19, who graduated from the high school last May, started working for nearby Kerek Industries, a manufacturer of parts for municipal transit systems, about 20 hours a week as an intern his junior year, continued as a senior and was hired after. He now works part-time while studying engineering at the local community college.

“I’ve already been in a professional work environment for over two years now, so I know what it’s like working jobs, coming every day, knowing what’s expected of me,” he said. “I think that gives me a leg up for sure.”

The company even adjusted his work schedule to accommodate final exams and for practices and games for the school’s football team. Because he could leave school to start work around noon, he could leave at 3 p.m. for practice.

Company owner John Kerek said he knows he has to train students more than when hiring adults, but he said manufacturing companies need employees and everyone has to start somewhere.

“I expect from day one I’m going to start at the very ground-level basics of ‘This is a machine shop..this is what this machine is capable of doing…this is what we’re using it for. ..this is how we check the parts that it’s making,” Kerek said. “I’ve learned repetition is key. The more I say something, the better it sticks, and the more I let them fail a little bit, the better it sticks too.”

Senior Mackenzie Lofton has a very different internship learning how to be a project manager for a construction business through the Brookes & Henderson Building Company, a builder of luxury homes. He first tried to do the traditional construction trades program through school, but too many students applied and he was shut out.

He has no regrets. Officially, he is a laborer that does low-skill jobs at houses under construction around the region. But the company is also giving him a look at construction he’d never see in class — how to run a project.

Zak Mowry, the company’s operations manager, said schools are good at teaching students specific trades, such as carpentry, electrical or plumbing work. But schools, he said, don’t provide an overarching look at how to plan and manage all those trades to finish a home. 

So most days Mackenzie sweeps floors and moves construction materials to help skilled workers. But he is also invited to company meetings to plan houses. And every Thursday, he shadows managers as they oversee different aspects of construction, ranging from foundations to heating and cooling. The company even created a hardcover manual and workbook for interns that explains key terms for each specialty and has questions they answer after each shadowing day.

“You see all the trades come into action,” he said. “ So you see the foundation being made, you see the electrical running wires, you see the plumbing coming in, you see all the hardware coming in. All those things that are behind the scenes, you get to see out in the field that they don’t teach you in the classroom.”

Just as importantly, Mackenzie is learning management skills by watching managers navigate disputes between different trades, architects and customers on multi-million dollar homes.

“I feel like I have way more experience because I’m actually in the field, while they’re just learning in classrooms,” he said. “You’re interacting with people, getting your social skills up. You also have to be on time, so you’re becoming more responsible as a man and as a person.”

Disclosure: XQ provides financial support to The 74. 

The school lets students skip traditional classrooms and lectures if they don’t fit how a student learns best. They can work independently at their own pace, earning credit based on what they learn, not for sitting in a class all year.

Or students can leave school each afternoon to complete a paid internship, earning credit for what they learn in the workplace.

Mayfield High School, with an enrollment of 1,200 students, is one of many high schools across the country increasingly offering students flexibility to shape their class schedules and how they earn credits toward diplomas, as career demands keep shifting and students grapple with family and life challenges.

It’s an approach that has grown as students mix high school classes with early college courses or seek different ways to try out jobs and train for them, none of which fit neatly into days divided by class periods.

“Let’s be real, our students have many more responsibilities in today’s world than we did back in the day,” said principal Brian Linn added. “They may be working to support their family. They may need that internship, because they need to go right into the world of work.”

Students “live in a personalized world outside of school,” said Linn, “so we have to personalize (school) to meet their needs.”

It’s a shift that has drawn and Battelle for Kids. Personalized learning has also become a greater priority for states, including , Vermont and , while schools that adopt the approach are cropping up from Washington, D.C. to

Two new paths have taken hold at Mayfield High School with this flexibility:

• A Learn and Earn program that offers 127 of the school’s 1,200 students paid internships in fields such as manufacturing and construction. Students often pick the chance to learn on the job over being trained in a trade in a school workshop as part of a career technical education program. 
• An alternative schedule and class experience that gives students more independence, simply called The Option. It’s a mix of study hall and class time with its own open space as big as a gym where students can do as much math or English as they want each day, as long as they finish all their work each week.

“We wanted to create a self-paced option for students,” Linn said. “To be very frank, we couldn’t think of a better name for it, so we called it The Option.”

It’s a program about 20% of the school’s students choose over taking classes the traditional way, with teachers leading a lesson. The Option allows them to do classwork at their own speed, while teachers act as guides instead of lecturers. Students read materials or watch videos, then answer questions or write about the lessons independently, seeking teachers when they need help.

“Option time, for lack of a better word, is a structured study hall,” said Paige Zenovic, an English teacher who chairs the program. “It’s basically the idea that the students are with their teacher for study hall.”

Students study multiple subjects – such as math, English, history — all within The Option’s high-ceilinged study space larger than a basketball court that was once a building trades workshop. It’s now renovated for tables that seat a handful of students and with a balcony and wide staircase where students can work. 

Teachers for multiple subjects are based there, so they and students can interact whenever they are there about any option classes at any time. Lessons are given to small groups of students and sometimes just in one-on-one sessions, in this version of what some call a “flipped classroom.” 

“You just will not see a 50-minute specific lecture with 25 students in the class,” Linn said. “You’ll see one 10- to 15-minute mini lesson.”

Superintendent Michael Barnes called The Option a “fully customizable” school day that lets students pick what subjects to work on when, so long as regular assessments show they are on track in a limited form of mastery-based learning, in which students work on academic material until they know it and can show competency in it.

“We allow our students to exercise agency over their own learning so they have voice and choice,” Barnes said. “They set their schedule every single day. They can determine what they want to work on, when they want to work on and when they want to assess.”

That independence helps teach students responsibility to do their work and time management skills.

“That’s a really important piece that doesn’t typically happen in the traditional class, because everyone’s supposed to be doing the same thing,” Zenovic said.

Because The Option is voluntary, students can choose to return to traditional classes. Some do, but many continue it all through high school. Senior Giovanna Zahedi has used The Option all four years of high school because she considers lectures unfocused and rambling.

“I find it really hard to concentrate in classrooms,” she said. “I just want to get straight to the point, just finish my schoolwork.”

Sophomore Madilyn Senning splits her classes between traditional classrooms and The Option, but says she prefers The Option.

“I have a hard time focusing when they’re lecturing the whole class,” she said. “I can work ahead, because a lot of the time I get things done faster than some other people in my classroom. It’s just easier for me to get my work done.”

The Option is joined by Learn to Earn as the two most aggressive ways the school gives students choices.

The school belongs to a consortium of 10 suburban school districts that share career technical education classes such as welding and auto repair between them. But those have become so popular that 17 out of 19 CTE programs are oversubscribed and turn students away. Welding, for example, has room for 35 students but had 175 applicants this year. 

“We don’t want to have to tell a student, no,” said Deanna Elsing, the school’s director of innovation. 

“A typical high school isn’t in a position to build a million plus dollar facility…to support the needs of our students’ personalized interest,” Elsing said. “But for the bargain price of free, we can partner with local industry, organizations and businesses and they can become the classroom.”

So Elsing started recruiting local businesses to bring in student interns — and pay them. That’s rare nationally, with fewer than five percent of high schoolers doing an internship or apprenticeship before graduating, according to federal data and surveys by the American Student Assistance nonprofit, now known as Britebound.

Started with just nine students three years ago, Learn and Earn now has 127 — about 10% of the school — doing internships in fields that include welding, manufacturing and home construction.

The program is open to juniors and seniors, who spend their first semester learning workplace etiquette, doing tours of companies and hearing presentations from different businesses. They then move on to working about 20 hours a week for businesses over the next year and a half, often including summer work.

That meant the school altering its schedule so the students can take academic classes in the morning, leave by 11:45 a.m. and be at their internships by 12:15. That lets them work all afternoon, often staying after school hours to keep working until the end of the work day, as many employers requested.

The school also added training sessions for employers, not just students, before interns would start at a company.

“It’s so important for our students to be able to look someone in the eyes, shake their hand, dress appropriately, test drug free, and have those professional skills,” Elsing said. “But we found over the last three years that some of these industries have not quite yet mastered how to properly engage and train a Gen Z or Gen Alpha student. Because they are 16, 17, 18-year-olds, they’re not going to come in as polished as your college graduate is going to come in.”

Jacob Reed, 19, who graduated from the high school last May, started working for nearby Kerek Industries, a manufacturer of parts for municipal transit systems, about 20 hours a week as an intern his junior year, continued as a senior and was hired after. He now works part-time while studying engineering at the local community college.

“I’ve already been in a professional work environment for over two years now, so I know what it’s like working jobs, coming every day, knowing what’s expected of me,” he said. “I think that gives me a leg up for sure.”

The company even adjusted his work schedule to accommodate final exams and for practices and games for the school’s football team. Because he could leave school to start work around noon, he could leave at 3 p.m. for practice.

Company owner John Kerek said he knows he has to train students more than when hiring adults, but he said manufacturing companies need employees and everyone has to start somewhere.

“I expect from day one I’m going to start at the very ground-level basics of ‘This is a machine shop..this is what this machine is capable of doing…this is what we’re using it for. ..this is how we check the parts that it’s making,” Kerek said. “I’ve learned repetition is key. The more I say something, the better it sticks, and the more I let them fail a little bit, the better it sticks too.”

Senior Mackenzie Lofton has a very different internship learning how to be a project manager for a construction business through the Brookes & Henderson Building Company, a builder of luxury homes. He first tried to do the traditional construction trades program through school, but too many students applied and he was shut out.

He has no regrets. Officially, he is a laborer that does low-skill jobs at houses under construction around the region. But the company is also giving him a look at construction he’d never see in class — how to run a project.

Zak Mowry, the company’s operations manager, said schools are good at teaching students specific trades, such as carpentry, electrical or plumbing work. But schools, he said, don’t provide an overarching look at how to plan and manage all those trades to finish a home. 

So most days Mackenzie sweeps floors and moves construction materials to help skilled workers. But he is also invited to company meetings to plan houses. And every Thursday, he shadows managers as they oversee different aspects of construction, ranging from foundations to heating and cooling. The company even created a hardcover manual and workbook for interns that explains key terms for each specialty and has questions they answer after each shadowing day.

“You see all the trades come into action,” he said. “ So you see the foundation being made, you see the electrical running wires, you see the plumbing coming in, you see all the hardware coming in. All those things that are behind the scenes, you get to see out in the field that they don’t teach you in the classroom.”

Just as importantly, Mackenzie is learning management skills by watching managers navigate disputes between different trades, architects and customers on multi-million dollar homes.

“I feel like I have way more experience because I’m actually in the field, while they’re just learning in classrooms,” he said. “You’re interacting with people, getting your social skills up. You also have to be on time, so you’re becoming more responsible as a man and as a person.”

Disclosure: XQ provides financial support to The 74. 

Repeatedly , the state legislature ordered Indianapolis education officials to rethink the mission of high schools. 

Current graduation requirements will be thrown out next year and new ones calling for more career preparation will take their place.

“Are the four years of high school as valuable as possible for students?” state education secretary Katie Jenner asked in an interview with The 74. “I’ve yet to meet a person who said, ‘Yes, they are.’ Most people say … if high school looked different for students, then we could better connect them to what’s what’s next.”

“If that’s the case, then what barriers do we need to get out of the way?” she continued. “How can we transform it in order to make it better for students.” 

Jenner said having students spend time in workplaces to see what careers fit them, or earning career credentials, will help both students and businesses.

“That’s really what we’re trying to think through in Indiana, to not only better support Indiana students, but to also be mindful of Indiana’s talent pipeline,” Jenner said.

Republican State Rep. Chuck Goodrich, who helped lead the charge earlier this year to create a key piece of the new focus — $5,000 Career Scholarship Accounts that sophomores, juniors and seniors can use for career training — said students need better opportunities to gain skills.

“Giving students hands-on applied learning opportunities and the ability to earn a credential before graduation is a game changer, not only for the student, not only for the family, but for Indiana,” Goodrich told the state Senate this spring. 

Indiana already has a requirement students show “demonstrable employability skills” to graduate from high school, but it currently counts playing on a school team, other extracurricular activities, community service, an after-school job or a capstone research project the same as doing an internship or apprenticeship.

The new requirements will be more work and skills-focused.

The Career Scholarship Accounts are an early piece of the overhaul the legislature passed this spring in House Bill 1002. The bill contains another immediate change — requiring schools to teach students more this upcoming academic year about career planning, available training programs, scholarships, and different jobs available, “with an emphasis on high wage, high demand industry,” according to the new law. 

Major parts of the overhaul, particularly which career preparation steps should be required to graduate and which just encouraged, are still to be determined.

The Indiana education department is holding focus groups with parents, educators and businesses about how to shape the new vision and should have proposals for the state board to discuss early next year. New graduation requirements will be set by the end of 2024, Jenner said, to kick in for the class of 2029.

Among the key items being discussed:

• A greater emphasis on students’ job shadowing, internships and apprenticeships that only “a tiny percentage” of students experience now, according to Jenner.
• Changing the courses required to graduate.
• Requiring more meeting time with career counselors or businesses
• Requiring students to earn credentials for careers before graduating.
• Piloting “mastery” approaches to measuring student progress, throwing out traditional A-F grades, replacing them with tracking student progress toward their mastery or competency of skills. Workplace skills like teamwork and critical thinking would be measured, not just core subjects like English and math.

The efforts are attracting some national attention. Patricia Levesque, CEO of the Excellence In Education Foundation, visited Indianapolis this fall to praise the state for being a national leader in preparing students for careers, not just college.

Though Indiana is better than other states in helping students earn credentials, she warned too many students are being guided to many credentials businesses aren’t seeking.

“Nearly 60 to 70 percent of the credentials earned by high school students that year had no value,” she said of Indiana. “No company was asking for those credentials, right? Students were earning something that didn’t have currency in the marketplace.”

Some legislators say they are concerned the overhaul is more an attempt to help businesses find employees than help students.

“This rethinking, reimagining of high school is our attempt at filling these jobs to me,” said Democratic State Sen. Shelli Yoder before voting against House Bill 1002. “We’re doing a disservice for students. And that’s not to say we don’t need to reimagine it … It’s going to help the workforce. But is it helping students?”

Schools, like Victory College Prep high school in Indianapolis, are already on board with the main idea of the change. That school has placed every 11th and 12th grader in internships with companies or nonprofits for 10 school days a year the last five years, other than some pandemic adjustments.

“We really believe here that graduation is not the end goal for our students,” said Rahul Jyoti, the school’s chief readiness officer. “We don’t want them to celebrate and say, ‘Hey, I graduated. This is great’. Because then real life hits you, especially for a lot of our students that come from the underserved communities, here in Indianapolis, and so really, this is the starting point.”

Jyoti said his school has been able to find 25 and 40 employers a year to host students, but wonders what will happen if every school in the state tries to find similar opportunities for every student.

Jenner said connecting with enough employers willing to take on the work of running internships or apprenticeships will be a challenge. 

“One of the threats is that we transform the high school diploma and…readiness for Work Based Learning … and there aren’t there aren’t enough spots for kids,” she said.

Solving that issue is a big part of her work this fall and was a key reason the state sent delegations to Switzerland, where school and business cooperation on apprenticeships is a part of the culture. She said work based learning experiences may need to be different for different industries and may have to evolve over time, but the state has to start somewhere.

“We’re getting after it because we have to and we must for kids,” she said. “We’re going to learn some lessons along the way and we’re gonna keep getting better from there. But we can’t wait to get started. We have to go. We have to try some things.”

By some measures, Sal Khan is the most influential math teacher in U.S. history.

The 46-year-old entrepreneur and former financial analyst is the founder of Khan Academy, a nonprofit site offering thousands of free video lessons on a range of K-12 subjects. Since its beginnings as a YouTube channel (which itself grew out of Khan’s early efforts to tutor his niece in math), the organization has blossomed into an internationally known learning tool reaching tens of millions students in over 100 countries. Among its English-speaking users, Khan’s gently probing voice has become the soundtrack to their efforts to learn algebra or geometry.

The organization’s mission grew during the pandemic, as amid widespread school closures. User minutes on the site grew steadily in 2020 while American students were largely learning in isolation from teachers and peers, and for a time, school systems across the country were attempting to recreate Khan Academy’s model on the fly.

Their efforts, while often heroic, were insufficient. Reams of COVID-era research have shown conclusively that remote instruction led to disastrous learning losses in foundational subjects, with particularly steep declines in math skills. And even after two years of doleful news about schools and learning, October’s release of NAEP results still managed to shock education observers.

The federal test, often called the “Nation’s Report Card,” showed that fourth and eighth graders both sustained unprecedented drops in math performance. The damage to older students was especially severe, with 38 percent of eighth graders scoring below the exam’s lowest level of proficiency during the 2021–22 school year. While the worst of the pandemic-related learning disruptions is behind us, a long climb remains ahead.

In an interview with The 74, Khan said that learning recovery can’t stop with a return to the pre-pandemic norm, which saw huge numbers of students ill-prepared for college and bound for frustrating bouts with remedial coursework. He believes that American math education should be more organized around the principles of “mastery learning,” a pedagogical strategy that focuses heavily on providing pupils the necessary support to address their existing knowledge gaps before moving on to new material.

Failing a shift toward more effective math instruction, he argued, the damage revealed by October’s NAEP scores will result in lasting harm to students’ prospects in life — and it won’t be distributed equally.

“My kids are doing just fine, and everyone in their school is doing fine,” Khan said. “But somebody else’s kid is on the other end of that average, doing pretty darn badly and probably unable to compete.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: What are your thoughts on the huge declines in math performance revealed by NAEP? Is this roughly what you were expecting, given the effects of COVID?

Sal Khan: My big takeaways are that it’s not surprising that the drops were larger in math, and it’s not surprising that they were larger in eighth grade than in fourth grade. We always talk about how math is cumulative — if you start having gaps earlier on in math, it becomes that much harder to even engage later on. Gaps obviously matter in reading comprehension, and you want a strong foundation, but you can still engage later on if you fall behind.

The silver lining on these results is that they put a spotlight on what’s happened, but it’s not as if scores went from decent to bad; they went from horrible to even-more-horrible. Pre-pandemic, about one-third of eighth-graders were proficient in math, and now one-fourth are proficient. And it’s actually worse than that in some of the large urban districts that we know need a lot of help. Detroit Public Schools went from [5 percent of eighth-graders being proficient in math to 4 percent]. If I looked up where I live — Mountain View, California, or Palo Alto Unified School District — I’m guessing those numbers are closer to 80 or 90 percent proficiency. So even though the averages are pretty bad, they also hide the problem.

The idea of math as a uniquely cumulative subject is one you hear a lot about. Can you explain how that works in greater detail?

In education, memorization and math facts are kind of nasty words, but I definitely believe that fluency is valuable. So I’ll talk about it on a theoretical level.

Say you’re a little shaky on what seven plus seven is, and you have to count on your fingers. Then you move on to multiplication, which is basically repeated addition: seven plus seven plus seven. If you have to compute those things and don’t know off the bat that seven plus seven equals 14, you’re not going to get the multiplication fluency either. All of a sudden, you start doing word problems or exponents, and you’re going to be in a lot of trouble. And this keeps happening! If you get a 70 percent on your negative numbers test, you’re going to be adding fractions with negative numbers next, and you might not even get a 70 on that test. So you compound these gaps, and of course it will eventually fail. The way I usually talk about it is with a homebuilding analogy, where if you have a weak foundation, what you build on top of it will collapse. 

This isn’t a crazy theory. I visited a school in the Bronx a few months ago, and they were working on exponent properties like: two cubed, to the seventh power. So, you multiply the exponents, and it would be two to 21st power. But the kids would get out the calculator to find out three times seven. They knew what to do, but the fluency gap was adding to the cognitive load, taking more time, and making things much more complex. And if you get to an algebraic equation where you have to get that in several steps — and God forbid someone says you can’t use a calculator because it’s just simple multiplication — it just gets harder and harder.

Put the NAEP data aside. Maybe 50 or 60 percent of American kids try to go to college, and of those who do, the majority are placed in remedial math — which is not high school math, it’s like seventh-grade math. Even college algebra is really a remedial class, essentially tenth- or eleventh-grade math, and most kids can’t place into college algebra. It shows you how they slow down around that point, and in my mind, it’s because of these gaps.

Remedial math is also kind of the kiss of death in terms of college completion, right?

Exactly. This is a whole other conversation, but where students in Title I high schools can get mastery in college algebra on Khan Academy, and then Howard University gives them transferable college credits for the subject. That’s one of the ways we think we can get people back on track. 

Another idea that circulated after the NAEP release was that eighth-grade math is a kind of gateway to more sophisticated academic concepts, making it an especially bad year to see reversals. 

Actually, they’re both interesting years. Fourth graders are starting to integrate a lot of the arithmetic they’ve learned up to that point, and in eighth grade, you’re combining the arithmetic with pre-algebra and starting on algebraic material. The eighth-grade Common Core standards are essentially Algebra I, and Algebra I is the most popular course on Khan Academy. It’s not surprising to me because that’s where people start hitting walls.

Why? Because it’s a new way of thinking about math. But for most people, it’s because their fluency in pre-algebraic or even arithmetic-level skills is pretty weak. If you look at the curve in the national data, kids fall further and further behind relative to where they should be, year in and year out. And when students are able to do personalized practice and address their unfinished learning, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that eighth grade is also when students see the biggest, most dramatic gains in math.

You mentioned that memorization is sort of a nasty word. But I think many people experience a bit of success with that in the early years of math, with the multiplication tables offering one example. Do you think there’s room for more of that in K-12 math — perhaps through methods like direct instruction, which places a lot of emphasis on explicit teaching methods and systematic lessons?

Yeah, although I’m actually a little bit allergic to direct instruction. I’m the chairman of two schools that I started, and for high schoolers, I think there should be no lecturing at our schools. You should be asking questions, making the students think about things, making them collaborate. With younger kids, of course there’s going to be more direction there, but it still shouldn’t really be a lecture. I think that’s really important, especially for young kids. What we call play, that’s really children exploring so that they can learn about the world. Kids love to explore and do things; they don’t love to sit in the chair with their fingers on their lips and learn to be docile. 

In the math wars, there’s the rote learning and memorization, whatever you want to call it, and there are higher-order skills and problem solving. I absolutely think it’s got to be both. Schools that only do the latter, like project-based learning schools, their kids still struggle to get engineering degrees even though they were potentially doing engineering-type lessons during high school. Because they didn’t learn fluency in some of the core skills! Meanwhile, I know plenty of people who went through traditional education systems that might have leaned a little bit towards rote learning — especially in other countries like India and China and Korea — and I don’t think that’s ideal either. But you do have to get the core fluencies before you get too conceptual, in many cases, and advocates of more progressive education don’t necessarily buy into that.

Those eighth-graders I met in the Bronx were not atypical. I just wanted to sit down with them for like 24 hours and make sure they could nail their multiplication tables. Some people think that if you make them memorize the multiplication tables, they won’t know what multiplication is. No, they understand the concepts, and they know what multiplication is. But can you imagine going through life saying, “I don’t know what three times seven is”? It’s actually a problem if you see a pair of pants that costs $70, but they’re on sale for 30 percent off, and you can’t figure out that you can save $21. You’re going to be in trouble. So I do think that math facts shouldn’t be a forbidden concept, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also do conceptual learning.

I feel the same way about history. When people say that kids can just Google things, I think, “I don’t know, it’s pretty useful for me to know when World War II was.” These are things that shouldn’t be in competition with one another.

You used the phrase “math wars,” and I’m wondering how much those are truly being fought. What we called the reading wars were really destructive, but also constructive in that they’ve produced a huge research literature about how to teach literacy. Does it strike you that the math world hasn’t really been through the same process, and that the “science of math” is therefore something of a mystery to both educators and kids?

Yes and no. The reading wars were whole-language vs. phonetics, and again, I think the answer is both: You probably start with phonics and move more toward whole-language as kids get older. You don’t need to fight these wars. 

It’s not like there aren’t already cases of kids learning math really well. There are lots. We started talking about how math is cumulative, and the strongest evidence for that — from well before Khan Academy existed — is around the notion of mastery learning, which always gives students the opportunity and incentive to fill in any gaps they have. And it’s had something like 200 , all of which were dramatic in terms of what they found for student learning. That’s essentially the pedagogical underpinnings that we’ve used; we’ve had 50-plus of Khan Academy, and they all have the exact same narrative.

So I don’t think it’s a secret of what we should do. The kids at KLS [Khan Lab School] — and they’re not indicative of a historically under-resourced community, it’s in the middle of Silicon Valley — are growing 1.5–2 times faster in math than demographically comparable kids in local public schools. That’s because they’re doing mastery learning, and they’re doing some things in peer-to-peer and active learning that are contributing as well. I think if you let kids work in their zone of proximal development, and you motivate them, you can actually accelerate people in math pretty quickly.

What about the long-term trends in American math results? Last year’s NAEP release shows pretty clearly that, even though we’ve stagnated or declined recently, we’re still quite far ahead — in some states, massively so — compared with the early 1990s. Do you think that’s a meaningful thing to keep in mind?

The long-term trends have definitely been positive. There has been progress, for sure, and I think that a lot of that has come from things like desegregating schools. When I was growing up in New Orleans, there were public schools that didn’t have air conditioners. These were the legacy schools from Jim Crow, so I think a lot of that progress is probably basic blocking and tackling, just having some level of equality before you even start talking about equity.

And there has been improvement in teaching as well. I believe it’s now mainstream for teachers to say, “I’m not going to just lecture at my students for an hour.” It’s far more typical now, compared with when you and I went to school, for the math teacher to give a short lecture and then break the class into groups to solve problems together. But the fact remains that it’s a disaster when only one-third of kids are proficient in math and a majority of kids going to college need math remediation at something like the seventh-grade level. 

Post-pandemic, the rate of learning might get back to where it was pre-pandemic. But it just means that you’ve been set back by 15 or 20 percent, at least, and now you’re going to continue to learn at that suboptimal rate. The average American kid learns at about .7 grade levels per year, and that accumulates to the point where lots of high school seniors are closer to the seventh-grade level than the twelfth-grade level. Which, again, is exactly what the college remediation numbers show. 

It’s a huge problem, and it’s hugely unequal. My kids are doing just fine, and everyone in their school is doing fine. But somebody else’s kid is on the other end of that average, doing pretty darn badly and probably unable to compete.

The NAEP results showed that almost 40 percent of American eighth graders scored below the test’s most basic proficiency level. What does it mean to be an adult with only the most rudimentary math skills? 

That 40 percent is going to be sitting in classrooms, getting more and more frustrated and continuing to think they’re not smart. 

And the people around them are also going to think they’re not smart. Imagine you’re a well-intentioned teacher thinking that you’re explaining ninth-grade math just fine, and this kid just doesn’t get it. By that point, there are going to be two problems: One, they have all these gaps that are hard for you, as a ninth-grade teacher, to address. And two, their self-esteem is shot, and they’re checked out. Some of these kids are going to drop out of high school, not even think about college, and be that much less likely to have a good path in front of them. It’s not a good scenario. 

I remember reading one account, though I’m not sure how true it is, that because the lead time in prison planning is around 10 years, the authorities would look at fourth-grade test scores to correlate the planning. That’s about the darkest idea you can imagine, but it’s not crazy. Prison is obviously an extreme circumstance, but dropping out of high school, or dropping out of college with debt, is where a lot of these kids are headed.

You may have also seen the research showing that, based on previous data tracking math scores and economic trends, a permanent drop in NAEP performance of this magnitude could erase something like $900 billion in future earnings.

And remember that it will disproportionately hit certain student demographics. If it were my child that fell into that “below basic” category, my wife or I would probably quit our day jobs. Knowing what I know about the system and its implications, and given that we have the resources, I would go all-in to help my kids catch up. And we’re talking about 30 or 40 percent of the country. 

In one Massachusetts school, a midday “office hours” block became permanent — time for students to vent, unwind, and deep focus. In a Colorado school district, school-run food drives doubled as a chance to give vulnerable families tech devices and curricula updates. And in New York City, one assistant principal knocked on doors to engage students who’d gone silent.

The practices are some of the hundreds of successful pandemic-era strategies shared by 70 schools in , Next Generation Learning Challenges’ recent collaborative research study.  

“It would have been easy as we were designing distance and hybrid in-person learning for 2020-21, to rotate all students through in-person instruction, giving all of them the same amount of reduced time on campus,” said Sarah Chostner of California’s Envision Education charter network. 

“Instead, we are seizing this opportunity to center our most marginalized students, dramatically increase teacher capacity, and advance student well-being and academic achievement.”

Spotlighting the many lessons learned in the last two years, the report identified trends that made it easier for schools to weather the challenges of the pandemic: students and adults shared agency over decisions; built healthy school culture and strong relationships; and were willing to change systems, like academic supports and technology.

Three schools and districts in particular made it their mission to prevent students, families and staff from disengaging:  

Urban Assembly Maker Academy

A public vocational high school of just under 500 in New York City, in Lower Manhattan is a tightnight community. When March 13, 2020 came and went without guidance from the Department of Education, staff took matters into their own hands and drove remote learning devices to families over the weekend. 

The move was the first of many quick pivots and adjustments enabling their highest-ever graduation rate, 94 percent, mid-pandemic.

The school scaled down content to a few key necessities for the close of the 2019-2020 school year to avoid piling on academic stress to the health and financial stressors of the pandemic.

“[It] allowed students to understand what success was going to look like and allowed teachers to narrow their planning and limit the content that they had to do — slow down and go deeper into fewer things and let students drive at their own pace,” said former principal Luke Bauer.

Students were already familiar with the concept as the Urban Assembly Maker prioritized such “” learning for years. 

And for three Fridays each month, school volunteers and the assistant principal would knock on family’s doors to connect with those who had stopped logging on or participating. “This had a real positive impact on those who had disconnected — it’s easy to hide so it was great to be seen,” said Bauer.

“We were always trying to monitor how many kids we were in contact with. Tracking who might have dropped out and who they were in connection with – making sure we had a system to keep us all informed about where kids were,” Bauer added.

Uxbridge High School

For the first six months of pandemic learning at Uxbridge High School in southeast Massachusetts, students were as much a part of restructuring as administrators.

“We were constantly dipsticking our kids’ emotional state of mind — how busy they thought they were, did they feel like they needed to connect with someone, were there areas they could improve?” said principal Michael Rubin.

The feedback prompted the creation of an “office hours” block, for connecting with each other and deciding exactly how to use their time.

The school constantly reimagined how schooltime was spent — because a hybrid schedule limited in-person connection with students, classes focused on more engaging projects and lessons. Reading long texts aloud, for example, stopped — students would do that on their own time. 

Even in terms of graduation — Uxbridge made timelines flexible for students. Two continued studies over the summer and three who had started the year as juniors made up coursework throughout the year. 

“We did not lose any seniors. Every senior who started the year graduated,” Rubin said.

And to support staff tasked with providing two weeks of lesson plans in case of quarantine, 10 days of professional development were provided. Teachers could use the time as they needed — no mandatory sessions or all-day workshops.

“The school deliberately constructs an to parallel its student learning culture—and extends that adult learning culture to include parents and caregivers as key learning resources,” Rubin said. 

St. Vrain Valley Schools 

A “high-tech” district of over 32,000 just northwest of Denver, St. Vrain Valley Schools immediately ramped up community engagement in March 2020. Food banks, two resource centers, and seven community wifi hotspots were set up, along with 3,000 iPads for elementary school families and individual hotspots for students’ homes. 

Their mission became, “serving whole families and the whole community, not just the kids.” Distributing half a million meals, “helped us communicate with our most vulnerable families. Those getting meals were also getting packets, devices, advice, resources. That’s how we found the families who needed the supports,” said Jackie Kapushion, deputy superintendent for the district, which just set a new record for graduation: 90 percent. 

The district also set out to redefine what student engagement looked like. While they tracked attendance, a central team, “trained principals to work with teachers to gauge student involvement. Were they just logging in, or were they attending with zoom cameras on and participating in class and finishing assignments?” Kapushion added. 

By the end of the year,  between 96 and 98 percent of students were participating.

Their advice to other school leaders: “Go out to the community. Talk with them about their needs and the state of the district.”