经济学人下载:电子教学-跃然于教室间

By contrast, spend a few minutes playing with the KhanAcademy dashboard of a class in Los Altos, and you see a vision of the future. You can follow the progress of each child—where she started, how she progressed, where she got stuck and “unstuck” (as Ms Thordarson likes to put it). You can also view the progress of the entire class. And you could aggregate the information of all the classes taught by one teacher, of an entire school or even district, with data covering a whole year.

相反，花点时间用Khan软件看看Los Altos学校一个班级的学习情况，你就会发现这种教学工具大有可为。你可以跟踪每个学生的学习进度——她从哪开始，如何进步，在哪遇到了困难又如何“解开”了难题（Thordarson老师总是这么说），还可以看到整个班级的进步。由于全年都有数据覆盖，对于同一个老师的授课信息，整个学校甚至是整个市区的教育信息你都能了如指掌。

Dennis van Roekel, the president of the National Education Association (NEA), the largest labour union in America with 3.2m members, goes ballistic at this suggestion. “Don’t demean the profession” by implying that you can rate teachers with numbers, he says. Besides, this sort of thing would introduce destructive competition into a culture that should be collaborative, he adds (without explaining why data-driven evaluations have not destroyed collaboration in other industries).

国家教育协会（简称NEA，全美最大的劳工协会，有320万成员）的主席Dennis van Roeke十分反对这种提议。他表示，不要总说老师是按照分数进行评价的，这是在“贬低这项职业”。另外，他补充到，这种教学工具会带来灾难性的竞争，而我们需要却是互帮互助的文化氛围。（但他并没有解释为什么数据化的评价体系不会破坏其他行业的合作。）

The NEA and its supporters will eventually lose this fight, says Kate Walsh, the president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a think-tank that unions love to hate. “It will be considered fair game to collect the data” and to use them to get better teachers in America’s classrooms, she says. It may or may not be KhanAcademy’s software that produces this information. Nonetheless, the academy, “by offering a different model, is forcing the issue that people have speculated about”, says Mr Hanushek at Stanford. “These technological ideas offer the possibility of breaking a logjam.”

全国教师水平委员会引起了国家教协的极大反感，该委员会主席Kate Walsh表示国家教协及其支持者注定会失败。她说，“收集教育数据这种评价方法是公平的”，而且我们要用这种方法找出更优秀的老师来在课堂上授课。不管是不是Khan学院的软件提供了这些信息，毕竟是这个学院“通过提供不同的模式来让大家关注到一个曾经考虑过的问题”。“这些技术给打破僵局提供了新思路。”