Khan Academy and Stand Together Trust Announce Partnership to Unleash the Power of Technology to Transform Education

Stand Together Trust Commits $20M in Multi-Year Commitment to Support Innovation  

ARLINGTON, Va., Jan. 25, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Stand Together Trust and Khan Academy, Schoolhouse.world, and Khan Lab School today announced a five-year strategic partnership to provide personalized, mastery-based education for learners and educators everywhere. The $20M commitment from Stand Together Trust will enable Khan Academy, Schoolhouse.world, and Khan Lab School to continue to innovate with new technologies to be on the cutting edge of transforming education. 

Through this partnership, Stand Together Trust and Khan Academy will empower schools, educators, and parents to drive innovation by providing a cutting-edge, flexible platform that makes public schools more personalized through mastery-based education, while giving leaders in the unconventional school space a strong foundation from which they can launch their own revolutionary visions for education.

Over the next five years, the Khan Academy platform will expand to reach millions of new students in the United States with new content and resources for teachers, while building additional success resources and support for education entrepreneurs and school districts, advancing mastery-based learning by:

• Harnessing the power of technology, like A.I., to foster interactive and personalized learning and teaching experiences and bring it to every classroom.
• Strengthening and enhancing core courses to improve educational outcomes for all learners.
• Widely sharing innovative educational resources with students, parents, and teachers.

"Khan Academy exists to open opportunities for all," said founder and CEO Sal Khan. "We are excited to be able to accelerate our work at this unique moment because we see enormous potential in artificial intelligence. When we carefully adapt A.I. for a learning environment, personalization, and mastery-based learning can reach whole new levels."

In 2023, Khan Academy launched Khanmigo, an A.I.- powered Socratic guide that is a tutor for students and an assistant for teachers. Khanmigo intelligently and dynamically engages students in learning while also saving teachers time so that they can focus on the very human work of instructing a classroom full of students. 

"Stand Together Trust is excited to continue our partnership with Khan Academy to give families the freedom, flexibility, and confidence to pick and choose and supplement the education that works best for their individual children," said Derek Johnson, Executive Director, Stand Together Trust. "Stand Together Trust and Sal Khan share a vision for education that transforms the status quo so that every learner, parent, teacher, microschool, homeschool, public school, or school district can access a truly world-class, mastery-based education."

Every learner has unique skills and deserves an education that helps them identify their gifts, master those skills, and reach their fullest potential. Students need this support now.  National math and reading scores in the U.S. hit historic lows in 2022. Recent data from the U.S. shows the pandemic has erased two decades of progress in math and reading, with the largest drops ever recorded in 4th- and 8th-grade math.

The evidence that Khan Academy is an effective solution is clear—Khan Academy helps to close deep learning gaps and drive learning gains.

Led by education innovator Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, Khan Lab School, Khan Lab School Wichita, and Schoolhouse.world, the Khan Academy mastery-based learning model celebrates each individual student and ignites their love of learning by empowering them to own their educational experience, at a pace that's right for them. Unlike traditional learning, students in mastery-learning classrooms are not pushed ahead in lockstep, which can cause the accumulation of gaps in knowledge. By enhancing the capabilities of Khan Academy, Schoolhouse.world, and Khan Lab School, there will be a portable, flexible, and customizable education option for families.

About Khan Academy
Khan Academy is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. The AI guide Khanmigo, a tutor for students and an assistant for teachers, is being piloted by more than 40 school districts in the United States, as well as Brazil and Peru. Khanmigo is integrated into Khan Academy's learning platform to enable new levels of personalization and mastery-based learning.  Khan Academy partners with more than 500 schools and districts across the country that serve students who are historically under-resourced. The organization's award-winning free app for young children ages two to eight is Khan Academy Kids. School districts use Khan Academy Kids, Khan Academy Districts and MAP Accelerator to help teachers differentiate instruction. Worldwide, more than 160 million registered learners have used Khan Academy in 190 countries and more than 50  languages. For more information, please see research findings about Khan Academy and our press center.

About Schoolhouse.world
Schoolhouse.world is a non-profit startup co-founded by Sal Khan in 2020 with the mission of connecting the world through learning. The peer tutoring platform empowers learners everywhere with free online tutoring over Zoom. Over 50,000 students from 150 countries have been tutored on Schoolhouse by 7,000 volunteer tutors, many of whom are high schoolers themselves. Schoolhouse has partnered with 10 state departments of education and 15 universities to expand access to free tutoring. For more information, visit Schoolhouse.world.

About Khan Schools Network
Khan Schools Network (KSN), established in 2023, is an organization with a mission to: assist organizations that are interested in the creation of mastery-based schools through our school design and partner program, develop and share open source mastery-based educational resources, including curriculum, instructional materials, and a school design playbook, and to actively engage in research and development endeavors, particularly those with scalable goals, in collaboration with our partners. We strongly believe that every student has the potential to succeed both academically and personally under the right conditions and we care most about creating systems that enable any young person to develop the knowledge, skills, character, and self-reflective learning approaches they need to lead purposeful lives.  

About Khan Lab School
Khan Lab School (KLS), founded in 2014 by Salman Khan, is an innovative K-12 institution nestled in the heart of Silicon Valley. This mastery-based school focuses on learning outcomes that matter most and evaluates student growth with meaningful metrics rather than traditional letter grades. Functioning as a hub for educational innovation, Khan Lab School is at the forefront of developing educational materials and methodologies that set a new benchmark for educational best practices. Khan Lab School is an incubator that spins out new programs and also provides a test environment for products such as Khan Academy's Khanmigo.

About Stand Together Trust
Stand Together Trust invests in social entrepreneurs developing solutions to America's most pressing problems.  Learn more at www.standtogethertrust.org and www.standtogether.org. Join the Stand Together philanthropic community on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and  YouTube.

SOURCE Stand Together Trust