Khan Lab School

1200 Villa Street

Mountain View, CA 94041

9 Reviews

School District
Grade

K-12
Type

private

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Reviews

Submitted by student on February 22, 2025

I would rather die than go to this school. Every day it's the same annoying kids whose personalities are all based off of who they're talking to. The teachers sit around and do nothing while expecting you to do everything online. I am only here now because my parents are forcing me to but believe me I wouldn't hesitate to get out of here. This school is very broke and barely offers any extracurricular activities other than two or three sports which are just like cricket and track. If you want a real high school experience, you would be better off going anywhere but here. $35k could be spent in so many different ways than taking yourself to this excuse of a school. I would give this school a zero if I could. I'm currently trying anything to get myself out of this school so hopefully I don't have to continue with this living nightmare.
Submitted by parent on April 19, 2023

Our family has been at Khan Lab School for several years now.One important thing for prospective families to know is that of the ideas presented in Sal Khan's "The One World Schoolhouse," very few are still practiced at KLS. The year-round schedule has been abandoned entirely. Mixed-age learning isn't a daily reality but is only accomplished in occasional special sessions. Individualized academic leveling and pacing only exists in Math; all other subjects and homeroom are strictly grade-based. Students do not set individual learning goals; they are all given identical assignment sheets. Most teachers do not have one-on-one sessions with their students to check in on progress and hone executive skills (although this sometimes still happens for middle and high school students).At this time KLS operates much more like a good traditional school than it does as a reflection of its founding ideals. At a lab school, change is to be expected - but these changes are not being documented and published, and consequently many prospective families come to the school expecting it to operate differently from the current reality.The teachers are wonderful and dedicated, and have been throughout our time at the school. Recent administrative upheavals have been difficult for everybody and have been going on for over two years now.We loved the close-knit, responsive, progressive school that we joined. As the school has grown and changed, many of the things we loved about it have been either deliberately or incidentally eliminated.
Submitted by parent on September 09, 2020

When we went under the shelter in place order in the spring of 2020 all of our worlds were turned upside down. It was a different experience for everyone I know. However no one else I know had anywhere near the successful start of distance learning that our KLS families got from day 1. I'm sure it was TONS of work to pull it all together (and to continue iterating), but we never saw that. I mean we did see iterations for improvements, but they happened SO FAST! On day 1 teachers delivered a pretty consistent schedule to what we'd had before and made it look so easy that it could be taken for granted. My daughter is in her 3rd year at KLS and we of course can't wait to be back on campus again when it is safe. We have a really great community of families that we miss seeing in person at drop off/pick up and the many community activities.We love our Head of School (with us for 1.5 years now), she provides a sense of calming transparency in her weekly office hour check ins for anyone who wants to join.We feel so lucky to have found KLS!
Submitted by parent on September 09, 2020

We're so grateful that our daughters have been able to attend KLS for the last 5 years! The school has the perfect level of mastery based learning so that each girl feels appropriately challenged at their own levels. I cant imagine our kids going to school anywhere else!
Submitted by parent on September 01, 2020

We are so thrilled to be at Khan Lab School! Our children are happy, they love their teachers, love their friends and they love learning. Our family recommends KLS without reservation.
Submitted by parent on August 31, 2020

With our new leadership, KLS has had the highest teacher retention and student retention in the school's history (doing better than national private school averages)! The faculty hit the ground running last spring when we pivoted to learning from home, and my children have been able continue their studies without any gaps or interruptions. We are grateful to KLS for what it has been able to do in the last year+ in terms of school culture. The focus is rightly on the students and transformative education, and the teachers who have joined are wonderfully collegial with deeper and broader experience. The school is not about gimmicks or busy work - it is about giving kids a strong academic foundation, while also focusing on social learning and executive function skills. My kids are having substantive conversations about the world around them in ways that they grasp and feel good about. We're blessed to be a part of KLS!
Submitted by parent on August 31, 2020

KLS has lost it's way. New leadership and massive teacher turnover in the past 2 years has really impacted this school. Many of the unique classes (and their teachers) are no longer available. Also, the distance learning curriculum is very similar to local school districts, but with more stress and overwhelming amounts of busy work. Not the completely re-imagined and new approach to education it claims to be.
Submitted by parent on September 26, 2017

Perspective from my son, age 13:I'm a student at Khan Lab School in the sixth Independence Level. At KLS, if you, the student, have an idea of how to better the school, you are encouraged to express and advocate for it. Brandon, the Head of Middle & Upper School, set up a whiteboard specifically for student ideas, and it has received usage. In KLS’s Middle & Upper School, students rotate the responsibility every week of maintaining our space. All that was given to us was a list of the seven students, including me, who would be the week's cleaners. On day one of cleaning duty, there was no organization; everyone grabbed wipes and, by the end, each table had been wiped clean three times. Great for the tables, not great for the dirty door handles and furniture and the in-need-of-sweeping floors. By Thursday, however, in our ten-minute morning meeting, a staff member brought up the disjointed effort and requested that door handles and side rooms be wiped and that floors be swept. I took charge. Raising my hand, I suggested that all students on cleaning duty meet me to organize who would do what. Everyone was eager to improve our process, and that day I learned a key lesson in team management: ensure that everyone has a clear task that they can see contributes to an end goal. Our space was also significantly cleaner with the new system. But I didn't want my revelations to be forgotten the following week with the new rotation, so, after the fateful Thursday's cleaning I wrote down two suggestions on Brandon's public ideas forum to streamline the process for the future. Sure enough, by the next day's meeting, Brandon had seen and considered my ideas, and he asked me to type them up and email the document to him! My ideas had been heard and wanted, but more could be done. A fellow student who had helped with cleaning on Thursday brought up the issue of the Clorox wipes we were using to clean. They were chemical to the touch and smelled very strongly of cleaning agents. With the mindset that a problem at KLS is an opportunity for improvement, this student and I talked to Chi-Ray, the Head of Operations & Technology, and expressed our feelings. He told us that if we could find a better alternative that didn't cost more and was a disinfectant, he would implement it. That’s why this student and I spent two hours researching a better solution to KLS's cleaning, and we found it. We wrote a short report laying down the numbers and demonstrating that, if KLS adopted our proposal, it would save over $100 by the end of the year! Khan Lab School is still growing in many senses. What I'm most confident in, however, is the mentality that, if there is a problem, you, student or faculty, can fix it.
Submitted by parent on December 05, 2016

Khan Lab School has helped transform our 10 year old daughter from a passive learner who was slowly losing her zest for learning into an active and engaged student who loves coming to school each day.At age 8 at her old school, she had begun to doubt her abilities as a student, was bored with the "one size fits all" curriculum, and seemed to be losing her creative spark.Since coming to KLS, she has grown into a focused and self-motivated learner. As a family, we love that KLS has exposed her to a truly diverse set of students, teachers, and families -- all of whom are passionate about reinventing education and caring for students as individuals. The school's model emphasizes independence, and our daughter (10) has learned how to set her own weekly and long term goals in the core academic areas (i.e. Math, Reading, Writing, Computing, and a world language), as well as in wellness and social emotional learning. She challenges herself in areas beyond academics, like "risk-taking". With support from her teacher and peers, she went to a week-long science and nature camp with her class, even thought she was afraid to sleep away from home.Our daughters' teachers are creative, innovative, funny, kind and thoughtful. We are confident that they really know her and care about her.A favorite part of her school day is Studio Time (2 hours per day). The teachers design rigorous, interdisciplinary projects every term for the students' project-based learning (PBL). The students all work on group projects every afternoon. We have seen a big increase in her engagement in learning through both her self-paced work and the PBL.Khan Lab School is wonderful for our daughter, and we are confident it is preparing her academically, socially and creatively for the world that awaits her.