Avichal Garg on the Future of Education

OurBlook interview with Avichal Garg, chief technology officer of PrepMe

Many people in the United States are highly concerned about improving the quality of education. They believe schools are underfunded and students are underperforming, and some have shown their dismay by joining the voucher and charter school movements. What do you think is the state of education in America ... its strengths and weaknesses?

AG: When education works in the U.S., it is the best in the world. Our elite students are among the best in the world and at the post-secondary level our universities are unquestionably the best in the world. The issue is that the average level of education in the United States is not as high as it could be. We have to deal with factors that few other countries have to deal with ... geographic diversity, racial and cultural diversity, economic diversity, a population 10x larger than most other countries ... and these make running an efficient education system extremely difficult. To be fair, many of these factors are simultaneously our strengths as a country, and so we're in the extremely difficult position.

Regardless of what the weaknesses may be, and that depends on who you ask, I believe the critical thing to keep in mind is that we have to preserve our ability to innovate and experiment. Being fixed in dogma is not a viable strategy and we have to let parents, districts and educators try many new approaches to understand what works and how it will scale. There are a number of experiments running now (vouchers, charter schools, virtual schools, merit pay systems, national standards) that will set the stage for the next 50 years. As we start to understand how these different approaches work in the real world, we'll have a good basis for policy. As long as we enable innovation in education, we'll be OK in the long term.

What are the goals of the educational system, and are they what you think they should be?

AG: The goal should be to produce self-sufficient, self-motivated learners who can be adequately prepared to do the work they would like to do. I think most teachers and educators strive to this end but due to lack of resources, often students don't make it to that end goal.

How has the major school reform movement ... No Child Left Behind ... impacted either positively or negatively the educational system? Should it be continued or scrapped? Are there any improvements that could be made?

AG: NCLB has been net neutral thus far. It did a lot right and it did a lot wrong. In the long term, however, I think it has pointed us in the right direction. There needs to be accountability in our public education sector; it will just take us a while to finetune everything and make sure incentives are aligned, students are learning, and educators have the resources they need to succeed.

You're a former product manager at Google, and you use algorithms similar to Google's in your online education company to deliver customized learning to students across the country. Can you tell us more about how this works, does it replace or supplement education in the schools, and how successful has this method proved to be?

AG: We supplement teachers in schools, and have no desire to replace them. Computers are great at finding patterns in data, delivering content cheaply and in a personalized way to each student, and producing reports for people to analyze. Teachers will always be better than computers at motivation, interpersonal communication, and anything related to human emotion. No one will replace a teacher's interaction with a student. Our goal is to enable teachers to have as many of those interactions as possible by taking over all of the mundane things that computers are great at.

Our method involves having students interacting with our software during class with the teacher floating around the room to interact with students in small groups and one-on-one. Students learn at their own pace and the teacher has access to detailed reports that show how her students are during as a group or as individuals. Our software identifies how each student learns, creates an optimal learning path for that individual, and then keeps adapting to that student's needs as the system learns more about the student's abilities. PrepMe's method produces SAT score improvements of 305 points and ACT score improvements of 5 points.

How might social media and ever-changing technology improve classrooms and the learning environment for teachers and students? How might they be impeding the educational process?

AG: Social media are extremely powerful because we are all fundamentally social creatures. We learn a tremendous amount in our daily lives through our interactions (digital and in the real world). We have more access to information than ever before and I think our educational models will need to transform in light of this. There is a lot that educators and companies can learn from companies such as Zynga, makers of Farmville, a digital farming game on Facebook with 60 million active users a month. Clearly they are doing something right to engage that many users in a simple game online. We can learn from these non-educational companies and approaches that might be useful for education.

The flip side is clearly that it can be a distraction. Having unlimited information and the ability to interact means that it's very easy to get sidetracked.

What do you see as the future of education in the U.S. ... will it get better or worse?

AG: Education will get better because we've just started to scratch the surface of what is possible using technology. Technology is great at solving problems that require massive efficiency and massive scale. As entrepreneurs and educators run experiments to understand what is possible, we'll chip away at the problems we see today and in 25 years we'll have a system that is far more efficient and operates at much higher quality.

Is there anything else you'd like to say about any aspect of this topic?

AG: The key to America's success in the last 50 years has been our education system. We need to produce the best and the brightest students in the world because today's society is one built around information and brainpower. The more smart people we have in our society, the greater our future potential. As long as we remember that our long term health as a society, an economy, and as a democracy is tied to our ability to produce smart students, we will prioritize education; and as long as we prioritize our children's education, we will have a happy, healthy, and prosperous country.

(Avichal is CTO and co-founder of PrepMe.com. He was previously a product manager at Google ... first in Search Quality, working on the core of the search engine ... and then in Ads Quality on the core advertising engine. He has previous engineering experience at Amazon and Procter & Gamble. He has a B.S. in computer science and a graduate degree in management science, both from Stanford.)

(About PrepMe: Avichal says, "PrepMe is an online education company that uses its proprietary adaptive learning technology to deliver customized learning to students across the country. Our first set of products provide high-quality ACT, PSAT, and SAT preparation that help students improve not just test-taking skills, but core reading, writing, and mathematics skills as well. Over 50,000 students have used PrepMe and our programs are used by the entire State of Maine, many of the country's top charter schools, and public schools around the country. We have been featured on the front cover of FORTUNE Small Business Magazine and the front page of BusinessWeek.com.")

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