Revisiting our Commitment to Anti-Racism
As part of our drive toward a more equitable design team for Khan Academy and the world at large, we feel that now is a good time to share an update on our June 2020 post, written in the wake of the tragic killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many more who were taken from us too soon, as a way to share our progress and hold ourselves accountable.
In that post, I discussed four key areas that we, as a design team at a global education nonprofit, could make headway in toward creating a more equitable world. Today, I’d like to share the progress our design team has made so we hold ourselves accountable. We wish to be transparent about the work we are doing and the work that remains.
1. Deepen Understanding
2020 Goal
“We will continue to deepen our understanding of systemic racism and its impact on education. We’ve started a calendar of events and a growing reading list, and we will block out professional development time and resources to study anti-racism.”
2021 Update
Throughout 2020, the design team participated in a number of activities to deepen our understanding, including:
- Hosting a reading group of We Want to Do More Than Survive by Bettina Love
- Conducting user research on the challenges that students in historically under-resourced communities face when studying math
- Participating in company-wide DEI trainings
2. Revise Hiring Process
2020 Goal
“We will reassess our hiring processes and culture in order to identify opportunities to make them more inclusive and improve representation of BIPOC on our team. Given our mission to provide educational resources to underserved communities — so many of whom consist of BIPOC — it’s especially important that our team reflect the diversity of the people we serve. We will seek DEI training for our hiring managers and interviewers, set DEI targets to measure ourselves against, and audit our job descriptions, candidate sourcing, application reviews, and interview practices.”
2021 Update
A bright spot in our development over the last year is in this area. This up-front work helps open our recruitment pipeline to candidates who might not think of Khan Academy as an option.
- We branched out from our standard recruiting platforms such as LinkedIn to others such as SeekOut who have a strong emphasis on diversity hiring.
- We retooled our job descriptions to use language that is less exclusive (moving from terms such as “5 year of experience required” to “You may be a good fit if . . . ”).
- We modified our interview practices to allow for a range of situations (e.g. camera off-friendly, phone only, etc.).
These process improvements have helped the design team hire from a historically under-resourced community in the last year, and we currently have open positions. If you’re interested, we strongly encourage you to apply. We’re looking for diverse candidates from all backgrounds and experiences.
3. Design Principles
2020 Goal
“We will reassess our design principles to ensure we are explicitly approaching design and product decision-making with an anti-racist mindset.”
2021 Update
We took on an initiative with Project Inkblot to investigate universal design principles and how our team could incorporate them into our own work. We admittedly have more work in this area, and this is just getting started.
4. Design Process
2020 Goal
“We will examine our design process to ensure it elevates the voices of the BIPOC we aim to serve. To start, we will create a product advisory team of teachers that includes a significant number of BIPOC voices in order to keep us aligned with the needs and priorities of BIPOC students and teachers.”
2021 Update
In 2020, we started to build this with a mixture of representatives from our school district partners as well as folks who had decided to use Khan Academy on their own. This will be refined in 2021, focusing on students and teachers in the districts we partner with — most of which represent historically under-resourced communities.
What next?
Now that we are preparing for the US back-to-school period, we have an opportunity to reflect on the progress we’ve made thus far and what remains. Looking back, it would be an understatement to say that this past school year has been unlike any other, and we reconciled with many challenges, nearly all of which were exasperated by systemic racism. And while we did make progress as a design team and as an organization, there is more work to do; we will share an update to our go-forward commitments in a subsequent post. Systemic racism is still part of our society and we will keep advocating for change within our team, our company, and our world.
— The Khan Academy Design Team
