Leveling the playing field

All sorts of people from all walks of life support Khan Academy, and there are a few big things that unite us. We believe education is a human right. We believe everyone deserves to get the education they need to succeed. We believe anyone can learn anything. We are dedicated to leveling the playing field.

You help to provide a free, high-quality education for anyone, anywhere in the world.

More people than ever before use Khan Academy to learn and reach their potential! Here are a few results your support has had in 2018.

Growth & Impact

71 million registered users By the end of 2018

We don’t just measure our success by number of registered users. We’ve learned that measuring Monthly Very Active Learners* (MVALs) gives us a better sense of our impact. The data show greater than expected improvements in academic performance associated with this level of usage.

MVALs are people who use Khan Academy 120 minutes a month or about one class period a week. Not every MVAL necessarily experiences significant academic gains, but this level of organic growth is an encouraging sign of what is possible.

In 2018, 1.5 million monthly very active learners or MVALs spent 120 minutes a month or completed about one class period a week using Khan Academy.

Khan Academy in Use Around the World

Obrigado, gracias, and धन्यवाद! In other words, thank you! You helped make it possible for people to learn in more than 190 countries and nearly 40 languages, including recently added Czech and Tamil!

This world map shows the total minutes spent on Khan Academy in 190 countries and nearly 40 languages in 2018 ranging from 100 to 100,000,000 minutes, totaling 8 billion minutes spent worldwide.

Deeper Investment for Bigger Impact

Through a combination of organic growth and partnerships with educators and governments, in just two years we’ve been able to make a significant impact with students and teachers in Brazil, India, and Spanish-speaking Latin America in Mexico and Peru. Your support funds local Khan Academy staff and content aligned with local standards.

In two years, we've increased our impact in Peru by 106%, India by 74%, Mexico by 43%, and Brazil by 7% through organic growth and partnerships with educators and governments.

New Courses and Additions

Khan Academy’s mastery learning system and content platform include thousands of exercises, videos, and articles that cover a range of core academic K–12 subjects. In 2018, we released…

172,628 Questions
4,837 Articles
27,297 Videos
Updates made to
  • Middle school math
  • AP Physics
  • AP Macroeconomics
  • Macroeconomics
  • AP US History
  • US History
  • AP Statistics
  • Statistics
  • AP Calculus AB
  • AP Calculus BC
  • Calculus
  • Careers
New 2018 courses
  • Illustrative math grades six to eight
  • AP US Government and Politics
  • US government and Civics
  • High school Biology
Marcus Webb
Marcus Webb has been saving money to go back to school to start a new career. He has been using Khan Academy’s free resources to fill in his educational gaps and build his confidence.
“With an incredibly thankful heart and tear-filled face, I just want to say thank you. It is not easy starting over in the middle of your life, and something like Khan Academy makes it completely possible for anyone anywhere to learn anything.”
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You bring world-class learning to classrooms across the US

Lack of access to quality education is a persistent barrier to progress in the United States. This lack of opportunity disproportionately affects low-income families and students of color. To make sure that all students have equal access, Khan Academy partners with teachers to bring Khan Academy to the place where most learning happens: the classroom! And it’s working!

Students using Khan Academy are already representative of the United States. We are doing even more to reach the underserved.

It’s a common misconception that Khan Academy primarily serves children who already have the resources to ensure educational success. In reality, the students using Khan Academy closely mirror the student population of the United States.

But that isn’t nearly good enough.

We want to make sure we help everyone who needs it, especially those students who traditionally face systemic barriers to academic opportunities. That’s why we started working closely with teachers and school districts, particularly those who are reaching underserved students. 2018 was the second year Khan Academy partnered with educators in school districts across the country to improve equity in educational access.

US public school students by school income level

Data show that Khan Academy MVAL students were proportionally less likely to attend affluent schools as US public school students and equally as likely to attend high poverty schools.

The graph above shows the percentage distribution by school poverty level of Khan Academy's US public school-based MVALs compared to the total population of US public school students. School poverty level is defined as the percentage of students in a school who are eligible for the Free and Reduced Price Lunch (FRPL) program, a federal program to provide food for students from low-income families. School FRPL data reflects the 2016-17 school year (the latest available data from the National Center for Education Statistics) and is binned into 10-percent increments such that the lowest poverty schools are those with 0-10% of students eligible for FRPL and the highest poverty schools have 91-100% of students eligible for FRPL. The Khan Academy data is the subset of Khan’s US monthly very active learners (MVALs) during the 2017-18 school year for whom we are able to infer school information (~250K student MVALs per month). Note that Khan Academy does not track information about where users attend school; this can only be inferred when a user is affiliated with a Khan Academy teacher who has identified the school where they teach. Overall, the distribution of Khan Academy’s US public school-based MVALs closely mirrors the US public school population: for both groups, 11% attend the highest poverty schools (in which nearly all students are eligible for FRPL), and about 5% attend the lowest poverty schools (in which few if any students are eligible for FRPL), with close alignment over the rest of the range.

US public school students by school race distribution

Graph showing Khan US public school-based MVALs vs US public school students with comparisons between Majority White schools, Majority Hispanic, Majority minority, and Majority Black. Khan Academy students were proportionally more likely to attend majority Hispanic schools. In other comparisons, Khan Academy students were less likely to attend majority-white schools, and of similar likelihood to attend minority-majority and majority-black schools.
Tim Vanderberg
Tim Vanderberg teaches in Hesperia, California. This high-desert city has a diverse population and a high percentage of families below the federal poverty line. Many of Tim’s students start sixth grade with debilitating gaps from not mastering math skills in earlier grades, and few are meeting grade-level standards. He uses Khan Academy to remediate and accelerate learning and build confidence.
“Growth mindset + Khan Academy = amazing success on the California state math test for the past two years (20× the growth of their district peers)! My students are determined, self-confident, and joyful in ways they’ve never experienced before!”

Partnering with teachers

Being in the classroom means we are doing even more to support teachers. Teaching a class of 30 to 50 students with a wide range of understanding is tough. That’s why we’ve built a dashboard and tools to help teachers supercharge their teaching and meet the needs of each individual student. And we didn’t stop there. We want to help more people become teachers.

In 2018 we were proud to announce that we have partnered with the makers of Praxis Core, a qualifying entrance exam required for many teaching positions, to provide free test prep for aspiring teachers.

“From its founding, Khan Academy was meant to be available to anyone who wanted to learn. And, we’ve always known that teachers are crucial for motivating and unlocking the potential of students. It’s why I am so excited to see teachers—more than 140,000 in 2018—incorporate Khan Academy into their teaching at an accelerated rate. When we partner with teachers and provide essential tools and insights that empower them to do their most effective work with students, we have a chance to measurably accelerate learning on a whole new scale.”

Ginny Lee President and COO

Personalized Learning Unlocks Potential: Efficacy Study in Long Beach

Two years ago we began a pilot program with the Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD) to explore how Khan Academy can work more deeply with teachers to unlock student success. LBUSD serves a diverse population with a wide range of individual learning needs. It’s a minority-majority school district with nearly 60% Hispanic, 12% African American, and 12% white students. Now 93% of sixth to twelfth graders, 35,000 students, are using Khan Academy to advance mastery learning. Students learn at their own pace, getting instruction and questions at just the right level for them.

“It’s a game changer for these young people”

Chris Steinhauser Superintendent of Long Beach Unified School District

Khan Academy and Long Beach Unified conducted a joint correlational study of more than 5,000 students in the 2017-2018 school year to investigate the efficacy of this large-scale implementation. We found that 30 min/week on Khan Academy is associated with an additional 22 points on the state assessment. Long Beach Unified reports that this difference is 2x the improvement seen in classrooms who did not use Khan Academy. These findings hold true regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, family income, or English language learner status.


Association between use of Khan Academy and 2018 Smarter Balanced Assessment mathematics score, compared to students with no use

After statistically controlling for students’ prior achievement and demographic characteristics

Khan Academy math usage for 30 minutes per week proved to improve more than 5,000 Long Beach students scores by 2 times in the Smarter Balanced Assessment.

You equalize access to college.

Students’ ability to achieve their goals shouldn’t depend on their families' ability to pay for test prep.

In 2018, 2.3 million studentsused Khan Academy to prepare for the SAT.

Khan Academy and the College Board teamed up in 2015 to offer 100% Free Official SAT Practice. With this year’s college admissions scandal dominating the news, it is particularly important to understand if Khan Academy’s SAT practice is helping equalize access to college. Last year we found that just six hours of practice on Khan Academy were associated with a 90 point score increase on the SAT, a 50% larger gain than students who did not practice on Khan Academy’s Official SAT Practice. Score gains were consistent across gender, family income, race, ethnicity, and parental education level. Significantly, we see students across race and parental education levels using Khan Academy practice at that beneficial frequency.

Similar Rates of Participation & Practice Across Race and Parental Education Levels

Of the percentage of linkers spending at least 6 hours on Official SAT Practice, 17% were African American, 30% were Asian, 13% were Hispanic or Latino, and 13% were White.

Of the percentage of linkers spending at least 6 hours on Official SAT Practice, 13% had less than a high school education, 12% had a high school or trade school education, 12% had completed some college or an associate Degree, 17% had a bachelor's degree, and 21% had a graduate degree.
Christine Clerger
Christine Clerger is a high school athlete and the daughter of Haitian immigrants living in Florida. Her previous SAT score would have made it difficult to get admitted to college, but she used Khan Academy’s free Official SAT practice to raise her score a life-changing 400 points! Now she’s on track to attend college on a scholarship.
“My first score was a 750, and I was not happy about it. My coach wasn't happy about it. My parents weren’t happy about it. And I thought, ‘Okay, I’ve got to do something to change it.’ So every day before track practice, I would study on Khan Academy. The day I checked my score I was like, ‘Am I really on the right person’s page?’ I was so excited. I went around the house waking everybody up. 1150. That’s a big, big change. Now I get the opportunity to basically go to any college I want.”

You make sure every child is ready for kindergarten.

No child should start kindergarten behind their peers, but it happens every new school year. We’re working to change that. In July 2018 your support launched Khan Academy Kids, a free mobile app primarily for children ages two to six with no ads or in-app purchases. Khan Academy Kids combines educational content and social-emotional learning to spark a lifelong love of learning and help kids develop the skills they need for school.

KHan Academy Kids iPad app

In the five months since Khan Academy Kids launched, we have seen astounding participation:

1.4M downloads
5M books read
22M math activities done
5M social emotional
activities done
Apple Store Google Play Amazon appstore
Ujaval gandi
Ujaval Gandi introduced Khan Academy Kids to her active three-year-old daughter to keep her entertained while learning.
“My daughter loves the Khan Academy Kids app. Through the app, she has learned how to listen to instructions, follow directions, and solve problems. Her vocabulary has improved by leaps and bounds. As parents, nothing gives us more joy than seeing her happily learning, reading, exploring, singing, and dancing with Kodi and friends.”

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