Dear Friends,

The greatest school in history didn’t have a campus. It didn’t have a curriculum. And it only had one student.

That student was Alexander. His teacher was Aristotle. And for seven years—beginning in 343 BC—the man who defined Western thought taught the man who conquered most of the known world. It’s hard to imagine a stronger case for the power of tutoring.

But even if you had unlimited resources, you couldn’t replicate it. Tutoring has always been the gold standard of education—astonishingly effective and fundamentally unscalable.

Until now.

Artificial intelligence might finally allow us to scale what only the wealthy could once afford. And as someone who paid rent tutoring math after college, I don’t say that lightly. AI-based tutors are already improving student performance in pilot programs from Pennsylvania to sub-Saharan Africa. In one study, an AI math tutor accessed via WhatsApp raised performance as much as a year of in-person schooling.

This doesn’t mean AI is a perfect replacement for human educators. It’s not. But it might be a powerful substitute for the one thing millions of students currently have: nothing.

There’s a catch, though.

To make AI tutoring effective, we need experimentation. We don’t yet know what works best—what designs help students stay engaged, what interventions support teachers, what equity looks like in a digital classroom. That kind of test-and-learn process is hard for traditional public schools to pull off.

Which brings us to charter schools.

Charters aren’t better than traditional public schools, but they are more flexible. They can try new staffing models, iterate on curriculum, and—most importantly—fail in public. In innovation, failure is not just acceptable; it’s essential. Because failure teaches. And if we want to make AI tutoring work at scale, we need fast, messy, accountable learning.

That’s where charters shine. They can be the labs where we figure out how to take something once reserved for emperors and offer it to every kid with a smartphone.

Not every experiment will succeed—but some will. And when they do, the results won’t just help students in charter schools—they’ll help every child in the country.

We tend to think of breakthroughs as things that happen once. But the real revolution comes later—when the breakthroughs are refined, scaled, and made ordinary.

Alexander had Aristotle. If we get this right, our children might, too.

—Gautam

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Further Reading….

If you like this kind of deep dive on leadership and innovation, I’ve got some more suggestions. Here are some books you’ll love.