How AI and Charter Schools Could Close the Tutoring Gap

The greatest school in history isn’t Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard or any other university you know. And no matter how hard you try, your kids won’t get in. Why? Partly because it was so selective it only admitted one student — but mainly because it closed in 336 BC. For me, Aristotle’s seven-year tutelage of Alexander is the education against which all others should be judged (after all, more than 2,300 years later we still refer to the lone pupil as “The Great”). It’s the ultimate testament to the power of tutoring — a power that artificial intelligence is poised to unlock.

The problem with tutoring is it can’t scale. Or it couldn’t. Because even as we’re besieged by concerns that AI-aided plagiarism is destroying education, we’re starting to see evidence that AI-enabled tutoring might supercharge it. Getting the technology right, though, will require lots of real-life experimentation. While there’s a limit to how much our traditional public school system allows for this kind of test-and-learn approach, this need creates an opportunity for the country’s growing crop of charter schools to make a unique contribution to the future of education.