First, this is a beautiful website. Seriously. Lovely stuff.

Second, you’re right: Khan Academy offers students a great opportunity to *practice* their skills. This is necessary, and can help them develop their mathematical muscle memory, as it were.

However, my concern was that this isn’t how many schools & districts are using KA. Instead, many are confusing Khan’s practice with core instruction, and using Khan Academy videos as students’ first touch-point to topics like, say, linear equations. (And to some extent, Khan Academy fuels this narrative.) If this is how we intend to use Khan Academy, then we’re going to run head-first into the inevitable problems that accompany ineffective pedagogy…a topic, incidentally, that few people seem to be addressing.

Third, in terms of the funding landscape, I can tell you first-hand that Khan Academy definitely *has* changed the narrative around what should and should not get funding. The simple fact is that many of the people controlling the purse strings, from venture capitalists to foundations, have absolutely no experience in education other than having been students themselves or having children in school now. As a result, they look at Khan Academy, analyze the usage statistics, and assume that it has “solved” the problem of math education. (A would-be funder asked me once, “Why does curriculum even matter?” This is an absurd question to anyone in education, but it highlights a very real dynamic in the funding landscape.)

Fourth, Khan Academy — or rather, the attention surrounding it — has created a very strange sense of [false] equivalency. There are many experienced teachers who share my concerns about Khan’s pedagogical effectiveness. However, because of the platform Khan Academy has been given, his voice is now considered equivalent to a teacher’s, even one who’s spent his/her career studying how students learn. This would not happen in any other profession, and — at least from my perspective — represents the most dangerous thing of all about our response to Khan Academy: it simply highlights how little we respect what teachers do, and what it means to teach.