On a federal level, the Trump Administration’s executive order to advance AI education is a step in the right direction, says Sal Khan, CEO of Khan Academy.
District Administration had the opportunity to sit down with Khan to learn what the order means for the future of education and why students—and teachers—must be well-trained in AI.
Note: The following transcript has been edited for brevity.
What was your initial reaction to this executive order? Is this a step in the right direction?
AI can be a tool to help us improve education outcomes. I don’t think it’s a silver bullet by itself, but it can be part of a portfolio of things that can improve education outcomes. I also agree that it is going to be a skill that’s important for the future.
There are still some details on how it manifests in terms of incentives and dollars but the principle is sound.
What are some of the most essential AI skills students should be developing?
One of the things we’ve seen since rolling out Khanmigo, our AI assistant, a little over two years ago, is that some students naturally know how to interact with an AI. They ask good questions. They’re able to put themselves in the mind of the AI to communicate in ways that can help them.
However, there are a lot of students who struggle with that and, at first, we thought this was an AI issue, but the more we talked to educators, we learned the same students are struggling with communicating face-to-face with their teachers. They might instead need help articulating what their actual problem is.
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I think it’s a broader skill that arguably has always been super important. If you don’t know how to advocate for yourself, if you don’t know how to structure what you need, even an AI won’t be able to answer your questions.
That’s even more true in a world where help or support in the form of AI is always going to be there. At a very basic level, that’s the first skill, which is how you articulate what you need.
The executive order also mentions giving teachers professional development to properly integrate AI. What skills do they need to teach with AI?
I talk a lot about how these tools are constantly changing, and who knows where they’re gonna be in five or 10 years. But I do think even where the tools are right now, they already can dramatically improve and enhance what teachers do regularly.
Khan Academy’s tools help teachers do things such as lesson planning and writing progress reports. Our AI isn’t grading papers yet, but that’s coming. This fall, we’re going to start a pilot called Khan Academy Classroom, where teachers can not only create lesson plans but administer these things to their students and it’s going to even include AI-created activities.
Teachers will also be getting the insights back, not just like a raw data dashboard, but real insights that reveal students who need more support. I think we’re getting to a world where AI will dramatically streamline teachers’ daily workflow and not only streamline it but allow them to create richer lessons, have more time for their students, more personalization and more differentiation in the classroom, which has always been a gold standard.
What do major players like Khan Academy and other educational institutions need from their policymakers to further move the needle with AI?
We’re already seeing districts pilot AI programs on their own and teachers are on board. They see the need for it already. I do think if there were dollars that were released at the federal or state level to train teachers in AI and have tools that help students in AI, that might help.
I don’t think that’s a must, though. The tools have gotten dramatically cheaper. Two years ago, we thought that just the computation cost of using a frontier model with Khanmigo was going to be like $50, $60 a year.
Now with Khanmigo, we’re providing the professional development, the training, all the integration for like $10 to $15 per student per year in these districts. To some degree, AI isn’t even that much of an incremental cost, but it wouldn’t hurt if the districts had more there.
I don’t know if this is something the government needs to provide but clearer best practices and guidelines are necessary. I’ve been speaking at some universities and I’ve found that there are a number of students who are falsely accused of using AI. There are huge repercussions if you get accused of cheating, especially in these cases.
