Reboot the School

Fifth-graders at eastside College Preparatory School in East Palo Alto, Calif., sit at their desks with netbooks. They're in the middle of a math lesson, listening as a teacher explains how to convert percentages to decimals. "If we get rid of the percent sign, we just have to move the decimal sign two places to the left," the instructor says. Pens scribble across notebooks.

Seven thousand miles away in Accra, Ghana, students at the African School for Excellence are studying logarithms. Their teacher is the same one firing off math tips in California--both groups of kids are learning by watching online...