Steven Pearlstein: Mark them tardy to the revolution

Textbook publishers such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill, and online education companies such as Herndon-based K12 or The Washington Post Co.’s Kaplan division, for years have had similar digital offerings, which are already used widely as core curriculum by home schoolers and charter schools and as supplement to more traditional teaching in a growing number of public schools. So in a way, it is curious that it is Khan who has become, as Bloomberg Businessweek put it last week, “a quasi-religious figure in a country desperate for a math Moses.” In the past year, Khan has been featured on the nightly news programs of NBC and ABC, interviewed by PBS’s Charlie Rose, spoken at the Aspen Ideas Festival and given a TED talk introduced by Bill Gates.

Surely one reason for all the attention is that, unlike virtually all of the other offerings, Khan’s are available to anyone for free, produced by his nonprofit “academy” with the philanthropic support of such luminaries as Gates, Google, venture capitalist John Doerr and Netflix founder Reid Hastings. Khan Academy, in effect, offers itself as the open-source alternative to the proprietary “walled gardens” of the for-profit education industry, a disruptive new player whose free offerings could one day do to Pearson or the University of Phoenix what Napster did to the music industry, or Craigslist and the Huffington Post have done to newspapers.

Steven Pearlstein is a Pulitzer Prize-winning business and economics columnist at The Washington Post.

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What is even more exciting — or threatening, depending on your point of view — is what the Khan Academy model might do to the rest of the educational establishment.

Think about it for a minute. If education moves to a teaching model in which students learn through online tutorials, exercises and evaluations created by a handful of the best educators in the world, then how many teachers will we need preparing lesson plans and delivering lectures and grading quizzes and tests? Surely we’ll need some for one-on-one tutoring, or to run small group discussions, or teach things that can’t or shouldn’t be taught online. Despite assurances to the contrary, however, there’s likely to be fewer than we have now — fewer but better-paid with more interesting jobs — just as has happened in nearly every other industry that has gone through a similar transformation.

The disruption doesn’t stop there. If students are allowed to progress through each subject at their own pace, they won’t be second-graders or sixth-graders any longer, since at any time they are likely to be at different grades in different subjects. Indeed, the whole notion of a 45-minute “class,” or the six-hour “school day,” or even the August through June school “calendar” — the entire framework of the educational experience — will become somewhat irrelevant. And as Khan loves to point out, grading will suddenly become simple: Everyone gets an A in every course, with the only question being how long it takes each student to earn it.

Given these implications, you can understand why the education establishment has been in no hurry to embrace a digital future. The battles over standardized testing and adoption of common national standards were just the warm-up. Now that the opposition to them has been largely overcome, capital and creative talent will pour in to develop both the hardware and the software of the new education technology.

Over the next decade, look for teaching to be transformed from an art into something much closer to a science, look for learning to become highly individualized, and look for education to go from being a cottage industry to one that takes full advantage of the economies of scale and scope. And as in every other industry, look for quality to go up and cost to go down.

Sal Khan, of course, had none of that in mind when he set out to help his niece Nadia with her seventh-grade math homework. But the fact that he and his “academy” have drawn so much support and attention is a pretty good indication that this revolution is finally about to begin.