2-Sigma in 2 Hours: How Alpha Schools are Using AI to Revolutionize Education

MacKenzie Price, founder of Alpha School & 2 Hour Learning, discusses her revolutionary educational model that uses AI to enable students to master traditional academics in just 2 hours per day while achieving 2.3x faster learning rates than statistical models predict. The conversation explores how Alpha School combines adaptive learning apps with personalized curriculum systems rather than giving students direct chatbot access, and how this frees up afternoons for field trips, independent projects, and interest exploration. They discuss the transformation of teachers into "Guides" who focus entirely on motivation, mentorship, and emotional support rather than content delivery, creating transformative relationships with every student as the rule rather than the exception. The episode reveals how this AI-powered approach maintains rigorous academic standards while potentially revolutionizing education without disrupting the teaching profession. Sponsors: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is the next-generation cloud that delivers better performance, faster speeds, and significantly lower costs, including up to 50% less for compute, 70% for storage, and 80% for networking. Run any workload, from infrastructure to AI, in a high-availability environment and try OCI for free with zero commitment at https://oracle.com/cognitive The AGNTCY: The AGNTCY is an open-source collective dedicated to building the Internet of Agents, enabling AI agents to communicate and collaborate seamlessly across frameworks. Join a community of engineers focused on high-quality multi-agent software and support the initiative at ⁠https://agntcy.org NetSuite by Oracle: NetSuite by Oracle is the AI-powered business management suite trusted by over 41,000 businesses, offering a unified platform for accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR. Gain total visibility and control to make quick decisions and automate everyday tasks—download the free ebook, Navigating Global Trade: Three Insights for Leaders, at https://netsuite.com/cognitive PRODUCED BY: https://aipodcast.ing CHAPTERS: (00:00) About the Episode (04:01) Introduction and Welcome (04:26) AI Revolution in Education (06:45) Two Sigma Effect Explained (10:49) Understanding Two Sigma Results (Part 1) (16:28) Sponsors: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure | The AGNTCY (18:28) Understanding Two Sigma Results (Part 2) (18:28) AI Scalability and Efficiency (22:39) AI Tutor Experience Design (30:48) Technology Evolution at Alpha (38:29) Early AI Implementation (Part 1) (38:36) Sponsor: NetSuite by Oracle (39:59) Early AI Implementation (Part 2) (45:43) Fifth Grade Math Investigation (49:51) Future of Personalized Learning (54:48) Multimodal Learning Experiences (58:52) Role of Guides (01:05:25) Hiring and Teacher Transformation (01:10:27) Economics and Scalability (01:18:03) DIY Education Advice (01:22:10) Outro

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nathan Labenz?

  Hello and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm speaking with Mackenzie Price, founder of Alpha School and two-hour learning, and pioneer of a new educational model that's using AI to scale one-on-one mastery-based tutoring to help students learn two to 10 times faster, such that they can finish their traditional academic subjects in the morning and then spend their afternoons taking field trips, working on independent projects, and otherwise exploring and cultivating their interests. Importantly, just because the Alpha School model is futuristic and gives kids lots of free time to explore does not mean they've gone soft on academic standards. On the contrary, Mackenzie frames learning time as productive struggle, and Alpha Schools

• 0:43Nathan Labenz?

  demand focused effort and expect students to master all of the usual common core subjects. The results speak for themselves. Despite spending just two hours per day on academics, which means spending some 20 to 30 hours per subject per year, or just 10 to 15% of the 200 hours per subject per year that's standard today, Alpha School students learn 2.3 times more per school year than statistical models predict they would in a normal school, and their school-level results on standardized tests are nearly always in the 99th percentile. In this conversation, we explore both the AI product implementation and the way in which the rest of the school experience is changing, starting with why Mackenzie does not recommend that schools give students access to chatbots and what they do instead,

• 1:28Nathan Labenz?

  which is to combine an ever-evolving mix of adaptive learning apps, which they both build and buy, with systems that analyze learning rates and patterns and make personalized curriculum recommendations, plus more and more lesson-level personalization and multimodal support all the time. We also discuss what kids are doing in the afternoon once their academics are complete, how Alpha School is beginning to teach them to use AI as a superpower, and how the Alpha School model can be adapted to different price points, including the possibility of public charter schools and the new homeschool option they're starting to roll out. Perhaps most importantly, we explore the evolution of the role of the teacher, which Alpha Schools call guides or coaches, and what it means both for kids and the future of work more generally.

• 2:11Nathan Labenz?

  As Mackenzie explains, because Alpha's guides don't have to worry about delivering academic content, they can focus entirely on motivation, mentorship, and emotional support. And the school can both hire for those skills and hold guides accountable to making sure that each and every kid truly loves school. I find this vision super exciting, both because this does seem like one major area of the economy that AI can positively transform without also disrupting the labor market, and because when I think back on my own education, it was clearly the teachers who made the extra effort to engage me with special projects, one-on-one conversations, and possibilities for my future that I'd never considered, who made the biggest impact on me. I was privileged to have quite a few who made their mark.

• 2:54Nathan Labenz?

  Mr. Francis and Mr. Rogers in 6th grade, Mrs. McBane for Biology, Mr. Vance and Ms. Kohut for High School English, Mrs. Voss for AP History, Mr. Andriy Osco for Chemistry and Physics, and Mr. Medorsky for Government. The idea that every kid could have that kind of transformative relationship with teachers, not just as the exception but as the rule, could easily be more impactful than the AI-powered instruction itself. The bottom line for me as a parent of a 6-year-old who just finished Montessori kindergarten and a 4-year-old who starts in the fall, is simply that I'm thrilled that the AI revolution is coming to education before my kids have had to endure much time in the one-size-fits-all, lecture-based classroom model that's dominated education since the Industrial Revolution.

• 3:36Nathan Labenz?

  And I really look forward to seeing how the combination of AI instruction and human mentorship helps them learn and develop at a rate and in ways that our generation could only have dreamed of. This, it seems to me, is one of the most exciting upsides of the cognitive revolution. With that, I hope you enjoy this fascinating exploration of the AI revolution in education with Mackenzie Price, founder of Alpha School and 2-Hour Learning. Mackenzie Price, co-founder of Alpha School and 2-Hour Learning, welcome to the cognitive revolution.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Thank you, Nathan. I'm so excited to be here. I love anything cognitive and revolutions are great, especially when it comes to education. So I'm in.

• 4:14Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, the AI revolution is coming to everything and education, as you're demonstrating, is no exception.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  And so needed, right? Like so needed. It's time for education to change. So yeah, this is great.

• 4:27Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, no doubt. I'm excited for multiple reasons. I am always interested in the intersection of AI and anything. And regular listeners will know, I'm also a parent. It's the first day of summer vacation here. My six-year-old just finished his Montessori kindergarten. My four-year-old is excited because the next time his big brother goes to school, he gets to go too.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  He's going to school. Very fun.

• 4:47Nathan Labenz?

  Now I'm most going to be worried about the two-year-old who's going to be home by himself, and that's going to be quite an adjustment come fall. But well, you know, seasons in life.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  You know, one of the things I've been saying, Nathan, there has never been a more exciting time to be a five-year-old, especially with what's happening in education and how much we're going to see it change in the next 10 years. That your kids are so lucky. My daughters are 17 and 19, and I so wish that I could like shrink them back and start their education journey over because there's just so much exciting things that are going to happen. I think we're going to really see like that change that we've needed to see in education for the last couple hundred years is finally going to be a realization.

• 5:24Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, I share that sentiment. It seems like a tough time to be somebody who's kind of in college or graduating from college or just entering the job market. But the world, you know, is assuming everything goes reasonably well. Not something I take for granted, but putting the positive hat on for this conversation at least, I think in education, it likely will go very well. It's other things I'm more concerned about.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  It totally is. Well, and you think about higher ed and the state of higher ed. I've had a lot of university presidents that I've been in conversation with in the last couple of months who are kind of realizing like, what do we do now that the half-life of knowledge is, what, six months, you know, in the age of AI? What is it that we're doing to equip these people? Back to, you know, I've got a daughter who's in college herself and we had the conversation this last weekend around if she's interested in law or consulting or whatever she's doing, she's got to be AI first. That is the key to making sure that our job skills are successful and translate. You've got to figure out how to use AI to give superpowers. And that's what we actually teach our students, literally starting in kindergarten.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  We teach our kids how they can use AI tools to give them superpowers and be able to focus on what I always consider kind of the gray frontier, right? AI is really good at knowing the black and white of existing knowledge. And where humans are going to need to be successful is they need to be out on the frontier, kind of pioneering new knowledge and new ways of thinking. And, and that's what we're trying to equip our young people to go do.

• 6:47Nathan Labenz?

  Perfect. Well, let's take it from the top. I've often quipped, but I don't know a lot about this, that AI could enable the two sigma for all era in education. Can you unpack that two sigma effect and kind of just give us a state of current understanding of what really matters, what really drives outcomes in education? And, you know, just set the stage for then what you're building toward that goal.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Well, I'm going to start by answering that question by going way back. I'm going to go back like a thousand years to think about, you know, Socrates, you know, who was tutoring Plato, who was tutoring Aristotle, who tutored Alexander the Great, who took over most of the known world by the time he was 22 years old. Back then, we had a one-to-one mastery-based tutoring system. And of course, it was only saved for the very, very elite, right? For royalty and the intellectual elite of that time. But, you know, that was kind of this rich environment. We think about the Socratic method of discussion and how people could go deep into a topic and become experts.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  And then a couple hundred years ago, with the start of the industrial revolution, we had to figure out how do we educate the masses? And how do we do it inexpensively, right? And so that was really the birth of the teacher in front of the classroom model. And that's what we've been doing for the last couple hundred years. Now, for the last 40 years, since I was an elementary school student, there have been learning science. Research papers that talk about how kids can learn two, five, 10 times faster. And every single one of those papers refers to that being able to be done in a one-to-one mastery-based model. So when you think about the two sigma, Bloom had his taxonomy two sigma thing, which is basically showing you if you get two sigma improvement in learning when you had this one-to-one mastery-based level.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Now, every single one of those research papers starts or ends with, unfortunately, these types of results are not possible in the teacher in front of the classroom, you know, time-based model where every kid goes at the same pace. You know, a teacher takes a group of fifth graders who are wildly different levels of knowledge. And, you know, starting in August and ending in May, has to figure out how to teach fifth grade curriculum to kids who, some of whom already know the material and sit there bored and disengage. Others who don't even know their fourth or third or second grade material and, you know, are lost. And so that's fundamentally kind of what we're looking at is how do you incorporate these learning science principles into a classroom. It's not impossible.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  But that's what's incredible about artificial intelligence. When AI has come out, it is finally the tool that is going to allow us to provide precise and specific, not only measurement of what a student knows and what a student doesn't know, but it's also going to be able to create those personalized lesson plans that allow us to meet every single kid in that one-to-one tutoring experience where they have truly an expert that's able to go with them at the pace and level of education that they need. And we're also able to do it to mastery so that a kid doesn't move forward until they have full mastery, you know, knowledge of that. And so when you think about when the microscope was invented and what that did for biology, right?

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Or the telescope and what that did for physics, we have such an awesome opportunity now that artificial intelligence is going to be that tool that allows us to take learning science and turn it from this sort of fuzzy, unclear, depends on the teacher, depends on the kid, depends on the environment, depends on what's going on at home, all these things. It's finally going to allow us to create learning science as a precise science with clear inputs and clear outputs and give us those results. And that's what is so exciting. Add to that the fact that it's scalable. And then it can be accessible for any and all kids, no matter where they come to it. So, you know, that's what gets me up out of bed every day.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  It's just like, this is finally the chance that we have to truly bring education and great outcomes for all students.

• 10:52Nathan Labenz?

  I love that you brought up the Alexander the Great thing. I was going to bring it up if you didn't actually. And I wondered if you could maybe just unpack a little bit, what exactly two sigma means? I mean, I understand that it's sort of two standard deviations, right? Is sort of the measure. So we're in a sense, saying that we could take the average student and bring their performance up to, if my recollection is right, that would be like basically the top 5% of students?

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can get really phenomenal results. And you know, it's funny, I was, I'll just give you a little bit of my history. I was pretty good in school, but I actually hated school. Growing up, I was always that kid who would like raise my hand and be like, I'm sorry, why do I need to know this? I promise you, I'm not going to be doing anything that requires me to understand major details of chemistry, or physics, or calculus, or whatever on that. So it's funny, because even my math is a little bit shaky when we look at this. But here's fundamentally what we're looking at is when we put kids in a one-to-one environment, where we're going at the pace that they need, and we're providing the level of material that they need, that's where you can see these phenomenal results. Now, Bloom's, Bloom's two sigma problem is one that a lot of people who get into learning,

• 12:00Speaker 01

  research and stuff, they'll, they'll pick apart and say, well, that depends on the audience, where they, you know, they took them and how they measure this. Let me tell you kind of practically what we do and how we're getting the results that we're getting, where our kids are learning. We just got our results from the 2425 academic school year. We're at 2.3 times learning. Now, the way we measure that is we use something called the NWEA MAP assessment. It's a MAP is a test that's given to about 10 million students in the United States. It's public school, private school, homeschool kids. It's an adaptive test that kind of is able to move along with the child to constantly figuring out their knowledge, as opposed to some state tests where they just test you on a certain level of curriculum and you get a percentage on that.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  And so what we do, there's something called a RIT score, which is basically the score that, you know, perform in math, reading, language, science. And as part of that, depending on the percentile of a child and what their score is and their age, they're basically able to say, okay, we anticipate that this child will grow at this trajectory. And so they might say, okay, for a student who is 85th percentile in math, we expect the student to go up four points over, you know, in a given year. The results that we hold at our schools is that that student will go up twice the amount that's projected on maps. So let's say if that student is supposed to go up four points in a traditional world, we're going to deliver a point increase. And where we found what works is we can take a kid, no matter where they show up to us.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  If they come to us in the 10th percentile or they come to us in the 98th percentile, we can deliver a personalized learning experience for that child that meets their needs where they're at, that fills in holes they have. And when you see those kinds of results, we can see kids going up multiple grades in a period of a year, right? And this is another example of just kind of practical knowledge. You take a math curriculum, like let's say fifth grade math. Generally, you know, in a traditional school, you're spending about 180 days in a year in school. You may have a little bit of homework that you're doing on that. So kids are spending probably 200 hours minimum doing something like fifth grade math. What we've found is that you can complete fifth grade math in about 20 to 30 hours.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Isn't that insane? And so this really points kind of just the benefit of one-to-one learning where kids are going at their pace. You get rid of so much of the inefficiency of a typical classroom experience. First of all, you know, those 180 hours, it's not all 180 hours are spent learning new material, right? But the other thing is the quality of the engagement that we're able to deliver when a kid is getting that one-to-one mastery tutoring experience is so much higher than sitting in a classroom kind of like this, watching a teacher deliver a certain amount of information over time. And so I think sometimes one of the things, responses we get to our results, and we like to be very open with the results we're getting,

• 14:59Speaker 01

  is people are incredulous and they're like, that can't be possible. And you're only doing it in two hours a day. How is that possible? But I think the bigger question is just when we look back at how inefficient. The time-based classroom is, it is a joke. And that's why only a third of our students in the United States are reading or doing math at grade level, right? And the problem gets more and more compounded as students get more and more varied in their knowledge. So, you know, I look at teachers who are doing this most impossible job. How in the world is a teacher supposed to take a group of 20, 25, 30 kids who are all at such different levels and be expected to get them all through the curriculum that

• 15:40Speaker 01

  they have to do, plus even possibly fill holes or challenge the kids who need more advanced information? You know, it's a very sad state of affairs when you look at the way the current education system is done. And one of the things that I focus a lot of my energy on is helping people understand that when artificial intelligence comes on the scene, the answer is not going to be through a chatbot on every kid's computer and, you know, have the teacher use the chatbot for some extra lesson planning, you know, on that. It really allows us to finally disrupt that teacher in front of the classroom model and move teachers into a role that they can actually have a much larger impact on, which for us, we believe is motivational and emotional support and mentorship.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

• 16:29Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, there's a lot there. There's a number of huge themes. I mean, you know, in terms of just guiding people to understand what's possible with AI, I always come back to a couple of things that you highlighted there. One is just making things scalable that weren't previously scalable. There's so many in business, it's often just like, we would always like to be doing more prospecting, you know? We can almost never do enough of that. We'd always like to be doing more recruiting, can never do enough of that. But how many business leaders are doing as much as they ideally would aspire to, like almost none, right? So making things scalable that aren't previously scalable. Also, I usually frame this in terms of

• 17:04Nathan Labenz?

  Cost savings more than time savings, but that 90% savings is another thing that I kind of steer people toward expecting. You know, if you do implement a good AI process for whatever process it is, you're trying to get AI to take over for you, 90% savings is usually what I would coach people to expect. So it's interesting that also translates to just how much faster folks can learn. And that doesn't come as a huge surprise to me, but it is still a striking result.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's something that I think, you know, homeschool parents have known this for a long time. It doesn't take six hours of sitting in class a day for, you know, for a student to not just do academics, but actually crush their academics. So that's the other fundamental thing with our model is that what we're doing is we're giving kids back their most valuable resource, which is time to go do other things. So when you walk into one of our schools, we're saying to the kids, all right, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna spend two hours of what we call productive struggle, two hours of focus time focusing on core subjects. And then, starting at noon, you're free to go work on really interesting projects and activities and group things that they're doing. What we talk about is learning life skills. That's a whole other section of it.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  But really what we're doing is we're providing the motivation for a student to be able to say, hey, yeah, I will put my 25 minutes into each subject of focus energy. And then that frees up my afternoons to go work on these interesting projects. There's a whole other component to motivation, which is what our teachers are focused on. And frankly, Nathan, that is the challenge with the majority of, I would say, probably students in our world is if you don't have a motivated student, then there's not gonna be a lot of learning going on. And it's something that unfortunately, in the traditional system, there's really absolutely no focus put into that aspect of it, which is motivation.

• 18:56Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, talk about things that are hard to scale. Another one of my quips is there's never been a better time to be a motivated learner. And I feel that when I'm motivated to learn something, it's like very obvious that AI can teach me extremely well in a lot of cases. I've been using it mostly for biology lately.

• 19:13Nathan Labenz?

  But let's maybe come back to the motivation and sort of the afternoon in a minute. I'd love to go a little bit deeper, quite a bit deeper, actually, on the AI assisted learning experience. So everybody in our audience has used ChatGPT, of course, and Claude and probably Gemini, especially now that they've got competitive models and lots of other products. Probably have not used anything, and I personally have used Khan Academy and a couple other sort of more educationally framed experiences. But what is the experience like? I mean, you said it's not just put a chatbot on there. Like, that works for me because I'm motivated. What is the experience? How would you describe the experience for the kids? And by the way, your comment earlier on the difficulty of measuring, that's another classic theme in AI.

• 19:59Nathan Labenz?

  You know, my company, Waymark, we do creative work for small businesses. Good luck measuring that, right? It's all about taste and it's all about what somebody likes versus another. And there's not like a ground truth. There's not even necessarily agreement. But we can all agree that like it's way better to have the AI spit out a decent first draft for you. And in many cases, better than what our users used to do on their own. So I'm definitely sold that like sometimes these things can be hard to measure and it's the qualitative experience in the end, in many cases, matters most. So yeah, tell us about the qualitative experience. Like, what's the UI like? What's the experience like? Are there personas? Is this still structured in terms of like courses with lessons?

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, no. So let me, let me do that as an explanation because I think people always want to know, okay, you have this AI tutor and we've gotten this. You know, we get a lot of news headlines that say this is the school with no teachers. They have an AI tutor, you know, kind of running the show. But let me give you kind of the, the experience of what this is like for a student that is going through this. So first of all, when you think about what the components of AI are, the one that most people have come to mind is the chat. Interface, right? When I go to ChatGPT and I ask it for, you know, help on, I was just filming a script this morning and I asked ChatGPT, "Look at this script and give me a better ending for this," you know, whatever it is. That's actually the component that we do not use. So if you go to one of our students at one of our schools and say, "Hey, tell me about your AI tutor."

• 21:23Speaker 01

  They're not going to say, "Oh yeah, this little cartoon figure pops up and it starts teaching me about math." We don't use that. And here's the reason. If you give a kid a chatbot interface, generally, it's going to be used to cheat, right? We would love this idea that they engage in Socratic discussion with this chat feature and, and maybe what you're doing when you said you're doing this with biology. But unfortunately, most of the time, kids are like, "Copy, paste, what's the answer and I'm putting it in, right? Or write this essay for me." So that's actually one feature we do not use. What we're using is, we're taking Common Core curriculum, so K through A Common Core, and then at the high school level, Advanced Placement Curriculum.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  So our students are learning the same curriculum that kids in a traditional school environment are using. We're not having, you know, an LLM, generate lesson plans that are coming there. What we're doing is we're taking the curriculum that we're there, we're using adaptive apps, things like Alex or iXL or Grammarly or EGOMP, or a lot of apps that we've built ourselves, AlphaMath, AlphaRead, Alphawrite. We have another reading thing called TeachTales that, you know, we'll talk about. But what our kids are doing is they're using these adaptive apps. However, when they log into what we call Dash, which is basically our AI tutor kind of learning platform, they log into Dash and they say, "Okay, it's time to go do math."

• 22:47Speaker 01

  What we do is we take that child to exactly the lesson that they need to learn within whichever adaptive app the AI tutor has determined is where the child should be doing that. So when you think about adaptive apps, not all apps are equal at all, grade levels are all subjects. So part of what we've done over the last 11 years is we've been able to curate which curriculums and which apps are best for teaching different subjects, right? Whether that's math or reading or science or language. How to do reading comprehension. So unlike in a, you know, traditional app world, let's say IXL is an example. If you hand a kid IXL on a tablet, they could maybe say, hey, I want to go play on this lesson. Uh, I'm going to do a little bit of this lesson and then I'm going to back out of it.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  When it starts getting hard, I'm going to go over and jump to this lesson. The experience we have curates what a kid is able to work on that makes sure that they're always working at the level they are. Then what our AI tutor is doing is in the background, it is analyzing how accurate and how quickly is a child moving through any specific lesson. And then it can provide coaching to a student to be able to say, hey, uh, we noticed that your level of accuracy is a little bit low here and we see that it's because you're not taking time to read the explanation when you get an answer wrong. You're skipping to the next question. So we're going to slow down or we're noticing that your accuracy level is a little bit low here. You're taking time to read it, you're challenged.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  So what we realize is I think we need to go back and we need to revisit a previous lesson to make sure that you've got the required knowledge that you need in order to be successful in this subject. So what it's really doing is it's providing a very curated experience to make sure that a child is learning the level of curriculum that they need at the pace that works for them and then putting them in what we call the, the zone of proximal development. It's this idea that here's what a learner is really capable, like their sweet spot where they're challenged to the right level of challenge where they're not being overworked, but they're not being unsupported either. And they're able to go with that. The other thing that we kind of are able to look at is something called cognitive load theory. And again, this is a lot of

• 24:58Speaker 01

  kind of learning science principles that we can now finally incorporate into a student's learning experience. But cognitive load theory basically talks about like the amount of information that we can put in someone's working memory and they can process at any given time. So basically working memory is like, here's what I can put into my head and be able to still manage. And if my working memory gets overloaded, pretty soon I will just start like, you know. Short circuiting, right? I I won't understand. And so one of the things that's great about this personalized learning experience is we can say, okay, these are the number of concepts that a child can learn about. And if they start to get overwhelmed, then they're going to go out of their their zone of proximal development where it's too hard and we take it down.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  On the other end, a kid who can go quickly and learn material quickly needs to get that. I'll give you another example. Let's say it takes you, Nathan, five reps of a concept for you to understand that concept. You shouldn't have to sit through 10 reps if you got it after five. And for me, maybe it takes me 15 reps to understand something. I shouldn't only get 10. And so that's the other aspect of kind of like this personalized AI tutor. What you're gonna see a kid tell you, if you said, okay, tell me about your AI tutor, they're gonna say, well, I go into my dashboard. I go to my subject that I'm going to be working on, which is 25 minutes of whatever core subject. It takes me to the adaptive app that is right for what I'm doing. And then I go through the questions and they're doing everything from

• 26:28Speaker 01

  video, reading, audio support. You know, they're engaged in different things. They're writing notes on paper along with this. And then basically what our AI tutor is able to do is continue building out the personalized lessons for where that kid is. It also gives the student, the teacher and the parent the ability to see literally on a daily basis, how much material has a student worked through? How long is it taking them to get through certain lessons? If it's taking longer than it should take, what are the things we need to do as far as coaching them? Or where's the challenge that a kid is having? And really what we're doing is we're teaching the kid the skill of being able to learn. How do they gather resources to learn something? And so

• 27:09Speaker 01

  another question that people will often ask is, okay, if a kid gets stuck on on on something, they're not understanding, what do they do? Let's say they're trying to learn a concept. The AI tutor will give a couple of different examples or explanations. Maybe watch this video, read this explanation. If you're still struggling, go into this resource library and see other explanations that have helped other students who have struggled with this problem. And it'll also say, let's go back and revisit something. So for example, that kid Maybe is struggling a little bit with fractions. The AI tutor will say, you know what? We need to go back and revisit the multiplication table. And that's another concept called spaced repetition, where we're constantly quizzing kids on the material that they've learned in the past. Versus, of course, in a traditional classroom, you learn material and you may never see that material again.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  You know, you have to hope you remember it. So that's kind of what what that experience looks like. The other aspect of AI that we're using is the vision model. So what we're doing is we are analyzing how a student is working through the material. And for example, when we provide coaching to a student, the AI tutor will say, hey, you're not you're not spending enough time reading an explanation. And here are examples of that. And we can literally go back and show them the recording of when they were looking at a question, got the question wrong, explanation popped up and they moved right to the next question. What is it that you do? And what we find there is that's really helping kids take ownership of their learning experience. And instead of being kind of reactive passengers

• 28:36Speaker 01

  who show up in a classroom and sit and listen to a teacher talk, and that's it. These kids are learning, okay, if I take time to understand this now, it actually helps me go faster and more efficiently through remaining lessons.

• 28:50Nathan Labenz?

  I guess maybe one

• 28:53Nathan Labenz?

  high level question is, you started the school a number of years ago. AI was nowhere near where it is today then. So you've kind of had a chance to ride this technology wave and obviously been, you know, aggressive early adopters of the technology. How has this changed? And you could take that in any number of directions. But even I kind of pinged a friend who's in the education tech and education science space. And he said, you know, one huge challenge generally has been like, any assessment sort of begs the question of like, relative to what, you know, and and sort of. We kind of landed on the idea that like longitudinal helps a lot because if you can

• 29:34Nathan Labenz?

  compare a kid to their past self, like that's much better than to some sort of abstract aggregate statistic. But it strikes me as, and then I was thinking, okay, well, that's interesting. How would I build an AI product to do that? And I was like, well, the easy thing to do now is with Gemini 2.5 Pro in particular, and a million tokens of context, I could just gather up a bunch of stuff that the student has done over the last two months, perhaps, and say, here's everything that this kid has done over the last two months, like assess it on these dimensions. And I honestly think that would work probably pretty well these days. But you didn't have that, right? For a long time. So could you maybe describe the evolution of like, how you were doing these things?

• 30:14Nathan Labenz?

  Or to the degree you were pre-AI and then sort of what early AI unlocked and then, you know, kind of how the latest advances are starting to change how you're doing these?

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Huge difference in how what we're doing has evolved and especially over the last, you know, three years. But when I started the first school in 2014, I started it when my girls were going in the third grade and first grade. And the reason I started the school was because I was frustrated with the lack of ability for my kids to kind of get time in a traditional environment to dig into things they were interested in and also really receive that kind of level of knowledge. So just as an easy example, both my girls went into kindergarten already being able to read chapter books, and yet they would sit in their kindergarten class and the teacher would be talking about how A sounds like ah or a and B sounds like buh.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  And, and, and that was just hard time. Now, again, this is not the teacher's fault. This is a model issue, right? You've got a classroom of kids and you got to take basically the lowest common denominator and say, okay, we're going to start with assuming you've never seen the alphabet before, uh, when you do that. So when I started in 2014, uh, there were apps that were out on the market, right? Khan Academy had already been out there. Alex was out there. Uh, there were quite a few different apps that were used. And so we knew that we could use adaptive apps that would allow kids to jump in at the level they were at. So, you know, when my third grade daughter started at the school, She didn't have to sit and do third grade content. She could work her way up and do fourth, fifth, sixth grade content.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Now, here was the problem with those apps. Kids could really bounce around a lot in the apps. You could, you could be doing, you know, you could say, I'm going to work on some geometric patterns and shaping. And then as soon as the questions got hard, a kid could hop out of that and go work on something else. We call them anti-patterns, which are things like topic shopping or, or not even engaging in that. A kid could certainly just sit on a computer and, and do one question every 15 minutes, right? And that would be inefficient. The other thing that we found is that when we first started the school, we were sort of letting kids be in charge of where their learning took them. And one of the, one of the moments when we realized, okay, we need to put some guardrails up. We had a first grade student. He loved math.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  He was obsessed with math and he just wanted to do math all the time. But he got to the point where he was doing eighth grade level math and he needed somebody to read the word problems to him because he couldn't read, right? And that's when we realized this kid is not going to spend time reading on his own. We have to make sure we do something. So one of the things that came out pretty early was we incorporated the Pomodoro technique of 25 minutes of focused attention in each of the core subjects each day. Now, there is a lot of alternative ed schools that will say, hey, if a kid doesn't want to focus on reading for a few months, no problem. They want to go deep in math or something else, that's fine. We took a different approach, which is, again, making sure that students are spending time in each of the core subjects, you know, every day and kind of moving along that level.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  But there was frankly, quite a bit of inefficiency and kids could mess around. Now, in 22, that's when we really saw the power of, of AI coming out and realizing, oh my gosh, we can now use this as a measurement tool. We can use this as an analysis tool to, again, build lesson plans that make sure a student is learning in a linear fashion. The material that they need to learn, go back and fill holes for material that they don't know. And that, this is where, you know, when you talk about assessments come in, we can take assessments, standardized assessments, which in a traditional environment are kind of...

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Pointless and have gotten a bad rap. And the reason is because nothing really changes for a child based on how they do on a standardized assessment. Maybe the school gets a grade on how they're doing, but nothing changes for the student. In our world, we can take an assessment for a student and we feed that back into our AI tutor and we build an updated lesson plan that says, hey, let's go back and revisit these concepts, you know, in each of these different subjects and grow from there. So one of the things we saw a big difference in was from 22 to basically the school year of like 21, 22 to 22 and 23, when we incorporated this AI tutor and personalized learning system and made a couple of other changes that I can get into.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  That's when we saw our, our learning rates go from 1.5 to 2 plus. That has been a huge difference. And if you look at our, you know, I, I can show you graphs of our, of our learning rates over the last several years. And there was a major step change when we incorporated AI to make sure we were providing again, the right level and pace of material and that we were making sure kids weren't wasting time or having what we call, you know, their focus was right. The other big part of that, which didn't have to do with the AI, is that there was some time when we were thinking, well, maybe there's a world where we're still having teachers do some academic teaching. And the big change we made in the fall of 2022 was that we said, we're going to do

• 35:17Speaker 01

  no academic teaching. We are going to allow the AI tutors to do all of the academic teaching. And what we found was when we got out of that hybrid environment, we had learning rates just go, you know, like crazy. And so that's been kind of the big change that happened in the last three years. And I think the other key thing that, you know, we'll get into in more detail, but you know, for 15 years, ed tech has been this touted as this great solution that's going to make all the difference and it's never really worked. And there's two reasons it's not worked. One is I don't think if you take a kid who's in a time-based classroom, you know, going through seventh grade math in a school year, and then three times a week, you have them

• 36:00Speaker 01

  go spend 15 minutes of time doing Khan Academy or some other app. That doesn't really help. It just plunks the kid back in that same time-based system. And often, that 15 minutes of time on an app isn't time well-used. So I do not advocate for the idea of handing a kid an iPad and a random app and saying, "Let me know when you've graduated high school," right? It doesn't work. But the other key component to that is the motivation aspect, which is a whole other part of what's made our model work.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

• 36:37Nathan Labenz?

  So in the 22 timeframe, that would have been like, at least in a language model, in language model terms, that would be like GPT-3? Were you using language models at that time to process assessments and design?

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we almost started early, and we actually have not, we haven't partnered with any particular LLM. We have really been using Alpha as our testing ground for kind of seeing what the latest and greatest is when it comes to LLMs. I do believe when we get into scaling and how to make this more affordable, there's probably going to be answers where you're able to, you know, again, take LLMs that have gotten less expensive. We burn a lot of money on just the data and analysis we're using and the vision model of it, right? Understanding how a kid is working through a problem is giving us the data that we need to understand. One, how do kids generally work through this? How much time should it take to complete a lesson? And then be able to troubleshoot if it's taking a kid longer? Why is it? Is it because they literally weren't even engaging in the computer?

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Or it's because they were, you know, not reading the question? Or they weren't watching the video or whatever that, you know, that part was? But so we never partnered with, we haven't partnered with anyone up to this point, and we're constantly testing that out. So it's part of the reason that, again, it's expensive right now. We're burning a lot of AI. I think over time, and I really believe in the next five years, we're going to get to the point where every kid can have a tablet for $1,000 a year. It's going to allow them to learn all of their information and kind of go. And I'm excited for where that comes out. And, you know, I think, I think it's sooner than we think as far as bringing costs down and what AI is doing for that and allowing us to, again, collect so much information on how students learn

• 38:20Speaker 01

  that we're going to be able to continue building that into our system.

• 38:25Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, there's no doubt that the cost curve is extremely favorable. Sam Altman just said in the last 24 hours or so that the typical chat GPT query consumes basically a third of a watt hour of energy, which at least in my jurisdiction with the, you know, electricity rates I pay is like a few hundredths of a cent. So already like the fundamental costs when operating at scale are quite low and they, there are forecasts that it will continue to get lower, at least given, you know, like a fixed level of intelligence, you know, and the models that you need for like most of this stuff are, we have those level, you know, of models today. So the costs will definitely.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  The other thing that's going to happen, yeah, the costs will go, the other thing though, that's going to happen, and we're, we're still in the early phases of this, but for example, we have an app that we created called Teach Tales. It's something that anyone can go and use. And what it does is it allows us to create, you know, reading comprehension that's at the proper deck style level of a child, like their reading level, and it incorporates their interests. And so that's one of the other things that's going to be so exciting about generative AI is being able to take the knowledge graph of what a student knows and then overlay it with their interest graph. We do that with some reading comprehension already, but that's going to get even better as we're able to say, okay, let's learn math and let's, let's relate it to baseball statistics or fashion design, you know, and be able to

• 39:50Speaker 01

  incorporate those things. And so I think there's, we're just at the beginning of the ability we're going to have as AI gets better at generating curriculum that doesn't have hallucinations, you know, that we can do because thus far, we haven't really been focusing on that part because there have been issues with just accuracy, right? And if you say, hey, give me a fifth grade math curriculum, you are going to get some mistakes on there, but that's getting better and it's allowing us to do a lot more with regard to, you know, student engagement and having them learn. We already are able to do that from a reading comprehension perspective. We can, kids can give their opinions on like, I thought that was interesting and I want more articles like this, you know, more reading.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Examples that are like this, which is really helpful. But you know, that part of engagement and being able to connect a kid. That's another learning science principle is, you know, again, the more knowledge that you have in your head, the better you can draw on analogies and right. That's what allows us to do even more exponential learning experiences where kids can quickly be able to grab something that they already know and relate it to a new concept that they're learning. And that's where it's only going to get better with AI over the next months, years. It's one of the things too, Nathan, that, you know, when we have parents who are thinking about putting their kid in our schools. One of the things we say is, hey, the only constant is change. We are constantly rolling out updates to our apps. We're constantly rolling out updates to, you know, our learning system.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  And then we're looking at the data that we have, the measurement data. And I'll give you an example of that. You know, in January of 2025, we had our our map report come out because our students take map assessments three times a year. And in January, we saw our classes were 99th percentile across the board in every grade, every subject except fifth grade math. We were 93rd percentile. And so our academic team was able to jump in and be like, okay, what's going on in fifth grade math? We've obviously got some sort of a curriculum issue or something's going on that's causing us to not perform as well there. And we can go in and troubleshoot. And that's where I think AI is giving us that precise measurement and assessment. And in fact, again, doing it in a more pure environment than if you were in a traditional classroom where you're like, well, I don't know.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Was it a bad teacher? Was it bad curriculum where the kid's not doing anything during the time at school? You know, what was happening? Here we're able to really see again, all of the different inputs and then more accurately analyze what that output measure is and how we can improve it.

• 42:21Nathan Labenz?

  Can you share the big reveal? Like, what did you ultimately find when you got into that fifth grade math?

• 42:25Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I think we realized, well, there are a couple of things. There's a few different apps that are out there. And, you know, give you an example, there's an app called Math Academy. And Math Academy is a really great math app for kids that are advanced and kids that really like math. It doesn't do as good of a job for the average kid who's just getting through math, you know, like who doesn't really love math. And so that's an example of something that we found, and that's not specific for fifth grade, but in general, we've realized, okay, about 25% of our students really like learning off of Math Academy. The majority of our students are going to our Alpha Math or iExcel, you know, as, as a lesson. And so sometimes it's everything from, okay, this app isn't right.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  The other thing we've seen is, you know, when you look at, you can measure something called DOK, Depth of Knowledge. How far down is an app teaching a student in some subject and are they getting in the right level? We had an SAT blitz that we did for our high school students this fall. And one of the apps that we were using, we saw that they were really good on Depth of Knowledge 1 and 2, but they didn't go enough into 3 and 4. And we actually gave feedback to that app company and that app company rolled out a new version. So that's the other thing that I think is really exciting about what's happening with regard to innovation in ed tech is, you know, and I think why a lot of these app companies really like Alpha, because they're getting so much data

• 43:46Speaker 01

  on how students are using it that again, isn't been, you know, dirtied by, well, we don't know what's going on in the classroom with the teacher and what they've been teaching as far as curriculum. This really is, how are kids learning the material? How are they performing? And, you know, that's where I've now gotten, I've got an academic team now of psychometricians who are literally figuring out, here's all the best ways to help, you know, kids learn and both learning science principles as well as the actual curriculum, what are we doing? And, you know, that's where LLMs and AI in general is going to get so much better at, again, delivering customized content, you know, that hits a student where they're at and also, you know, can start providing things that help them with engagement.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  But to be clear, we're already there in certain things. Our high school students, you know, are taking their AP courses and our students created Really great catchy songs and ended up doing a soundtrack that was helping them with their AP US history studying. So, you know, it was kind of like the updated Hamilton soundtrack that they used AI to to feed that in. I remember my daughter, when she was taking AP art history, she was singing a song that had the same melody of some Taylor Swift songs to memorize her canons, right? And that's also just another example of we're teaching our kids academics by by leveraging the power of AI in the morning, but not to cheat. But in the afternoons, our kids are learning how to use AI tools to give them superpowers.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  And so that's things like our high school students being able to create songs that help them, you know, memorize the material that they need for their AP tests. And it's a lot of fun. It's fun to hear like, I kind of know that song. I know the melody, but I do not know those artistic references that are being made.

• 45:28Nathan Labenz?

  Somewhere, I think at my parents' house, I believe there's still a VHS tape that has from my AP history course, my rendition of Stonewall Jackson's Way, which hopefully won't ever appear on the internet. How, as you envision the future of this like personalization, I mean, it seems like

• 45:49Nathan Labenz?

  I'm not clear right now on whether you are sort of, you know, sticking to common core and like doing these sort of standard assessments because you need that, because you think that's like a good true north, or because you sort of need that for like legitimacy. But it strikes me that in a not very distant future, it's at least plausible to think that all this stuff might dissolve and that, you know, you, at the end of a day, week, month, year, whatever, you might not even need a test, right? Or you might not even need like a highly structured, you know, segmentation between subjects, right? Is there an, is there a more organic future form factor to all this that you can envision? Or does that seem too fanciful?

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Um, you know, I, I don't know if I'm gonna get the answer to the question that you're asking, but one of the things I think has happened in alt ed is there's been this, this movement away from traditional academics and academic knowledge. And often where you'll hear that is like, hey, it's all about project-based learning, right? Kids could, kids should learn math by running a business and being able to understand that. And I have, I have not had that same philosophy. I actually believe that core academic knowledge and direct instruction is something that, again, we should have in kids' brains. And I believe we have the ability to really download it into, into our kids' brains so much more efficiently and quickly.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  I think in order to be a great critical thinker, the more information you have upon which to draw from, the better it is. So I definitely don't fall in that camp of like, hey, we're gonna get a little more just kind of, I don't know, loosey-goosey on, you know, the acquisition of knowledge and kind of raise, I think, especially given how easy it is in this new world to get information into a kid's head, why aren't we doing that? First of all, it makes your brain a more interesting place to hang out. That's one of the things I, I really believe. And then, again, getting back to like, being able to use analogies, when you are then building that business and using math for that, you have that basic math knowledge, right?

• 47:56Speaker 01

  And, um, and I think in general, um, one of the criticisms I've had of probably traditional education where standards continue to be lowered and people say, hey, let's not worry about things like fast math. Like, we think it's really important and we even, we even do some amount of drilling kiln, right? Like, I was walking into our second grade classroom a few weeks ago and in the morning, we do the morning launch and the kids were doing, you know, basically calisthenic exercise and they were, they were shouting out multiplication table answers, right? Cause we want kids to be so fluent in their, in their, in math and reading and all of that stuff. It just allows you to do so much more with your brain when you've got that base knowledge. So I guess my answer to your question is-

• 48:39Speaker 01

  I don't know that I think it's going to be so organic. I do have thoughts that, you know, we currently call this two-hour learning. I think in the near future, we could get this to one-hour learning, right, where kids are spending 15 minutes per subject instead of 25. In fact, our students generally are spending less than two hours, you know, a day on, on time. Our kindergarten, first, second grade students, it's more like 90 minutes. And, you know, those students are coming out of their experience at Alpha at the end of the school year, 99th percentile, right? And so you can absolutely deliver great knowledge. And again, the beauty of this, and what's going to ultimately make this more scalable and accessible, is that it works for all, all students, wherever they're at, not just your

• 49:21Speaker 01

  advanced students, or just your remedial students. It can really meet students where they are. So, the other reason that I, I am very transparent about results and measurement of results is because this is something different. Every parent thinks about the way that they were educated, and we were all educated pretty much in a traditional classroom setting. So we think, well, that's the way it's done, right? You, we all had that great teacher that we felt like was really instrumental in us having a great learning experience. And so I think we need to show, like, these results are working. We are getting the academic excellence and rigor that we need, you know, and, and that's what we very much are. We provide rigorous academics. And we believe that every kid

• 50:02Speaker 01

  has the ability to be 90th percentile or above in K through 8 Common Core. And we also believe that it's a function of putting in the effort and the work, not about IQ, you know, or just how smart you are. Again, there are two things needed to learn. You have to have that, the knowledge given to you at the right pace and level for what you need. And then 90% is you have to be a motivated student. And that's what we've really, I think the insight that has made us successful, is putting so much focus on motivating our students to do well in their academics.

• 50:38Nathan Labenz?

  What about modalities? So another big trend, obviously, in AI has been toward multimodal. The AIs can now see, they can hear, they can talk, they can generate images. How multimodal is the experience today? And where do you think that is going? Because I sort of, it's one thing to sit through forced corporate training. I've done, that's been my most recent ed tech experience. And you're just kind of clicking, you know, I can relate to the kids who are just trying to click through and get to the end of the thing as fast as possible. There's schools of thought that like, it is actually important to write by hand and something is lost if you're on a keyboard. I'm not sure if I fully buy that. You might have a stronger point of view. Is voice, are the kids talking to the AI? Is the AI talking back? Are you actually like reading their handwriting off of the pages?

• 51:21Nathan Labenz?

  So, yeah, I mean, what does the multimodal component look like today?

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's one of the things that I think is really cool about this model of learning. There are so many different ways that kids can engage in, you know, in this learning. And so, yes, they are able to use voice. And one of the places we think about that is reading as an example, right? It is so important when you're reading and learning to read that you're reading out loud. So we use voice reading techniques where kids are reading back. And then the AI is able to analyze, like, how are they doing on this reading? You know, how quickly are they reading? Where are they at? Are they at the right level, you know, what they're doing? And so that's everything from, you know, we built an app called Fluency Coach that we use. There's another app called Literably that's, you know, available. It's a third-party app that's used.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  We use these regularly for reading intervention, you know, especially, you know, our pre-K, kinder, first, second grade. And again, when you think about how important those fundamentals are, you know, in third grade, you go from learning to read to reading to learn. And if you're not a good reader by third grade, your success from an academic perspective for the rest of your career is not going to be as high. And so we're making sure we get those fundamentals. And so that's one of the things that's so cool about, you know, being able to take something like reading and have kids not only be able to practice writing their letters and typing their letters and recognizing them and going on the Screen and being able to match things, but then being able to speak out and listen as well

• 52:53Speaker 01

  for pronunciation and you know, we're, we do phonics based, you know, reading as learning. So that's one of the things that's cool. We have video and auditory support. Uh, it's where we're seeing success with kids who have learning differences, you know, dyslexia or dysgraphia. Now, to be clear, we are not going in and like changing the neural pathways of a child with dyslexia. There are schools that specialize in helping kids, you know, uh, build tools up and, and rewire their brains to be able to work with that. We generally see that kids who are kind of bottom 50th percentile of severity of that learning difference can do very well in our model. And that is because again, they're going at the pace that they need. They're getting that auditory and visual support, uh, where they need it.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Uh, but that's what we do. Handwriting, that's another example of something that parents come in, especially young and they want that. And I actually, I do believe tactile function is important, right? You have to have kids doing that. And so our, if you walk into one of our kindergarten, first grade class classrooms, you'll see the manipulables, you know, that they're able to use as they're doing math. They're getting, you know, these little pegs and they're able to count and lay those out and see that visual representation and feel that and do that same thing with being able to practice their handwriting. You know, our second grade classroom, I was, I was in one of the classrooms earlier this fall. And, uh, the kids were talking about some of the independent, uh, checks that they have to work on in addition to just their academics.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  And when someone asked, well, what's the hardest check? In unison, they all said cursive, you know, is so hard. And so, yeah, we're still doing that now. Are they going to be cursive that much in this new world? Who knows? Maybe not, but there's certain things that I think, you know, we hold on to and add that. So, you know, things like writing, our students are doing writing through, um, apps that we have online. We also use independent time for kids to practice real handwriting and doing, doing that writing. And so I think it's important to kind of combine a lot of those different efforts. And I think one of the things that's great about these apps and, and AI tools is we are able to use a lot of different modalities,

• 55:00Speaker 01

  uh, in order to really meet kids where they're at. And again, there are sometimes some things don't work for certain kids and others work really well. And that's the other thing of it's truly personalized learning. What works for this kid? And then how can we build our lesson plan around it?

• 55:18Nathan Labenz?

  Cool. Well, thank you for spending so much time and going so deep on the technology. Let's talk about the afternoon and the role of the teachers. I think you call them guides in general, right?

• 55:29Speaker 01

  We do. We call them guides, coaches, teachers. We kind of use those words interchangeably. One of the reasons that we focused on, you know, the name of a guide, and actually, our guides do prefer that as what they're called, is because they are not teaching academic subjects, right? They are not subject matter experts, you know, in terms of saying, I'm a science teacher, or I'm the, you know, language teacher. And so what they are, instead of the sage on the stage, they are the guide on the side. Their job and function is to provide motivational and emotional support and mentorship to these students. We are a very high standard environment. We believe kids are limitless. We believe they can be very successful academically.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  We believe they can do impossible things, but we also provide the high support that is needed, the mentorship that is needed to help kids be able to do that. So our teachers are focused on, you know, helping kids develop growth mindsets and being able to understand, you know, their connection to putting work in and effort and getting results. And so that is kind of the function. I believe what we have done is transformed the role of the adult in the classroom to be able to focus what only humans are really great at, which is that personal connection. And, you know, one of the things that we often say, and we actually ask our students this, as they get into older grades, we'll say, you know, every

• 56:54Speaker 01

  adult would say they have one or two teachers who changed their lives. Do you believe that your guide is that person for you? And, you know, I'd ask you that question, Nathan. Do you have a teacher or two that changed your life?

• 57:07Nathan Labenz?

  I can certainly think of a couple, yes.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  Of a couple, you know, and that's generally the answer. Most people will say, you know, too, I had my junior and senior year of high school, my business teacher, Mr. Blood, greatest teacher in the world. And my sixth grade teacher, Mr. Mr. L, they were fantastic. But then I think about how many teachers I had in my career. And some of them were not good, right? Some of them were not. And what we're doing is, is we literally hold our teachers accountable to delivering our three commitments that we have for our students, which is that they'll love school. They'll learn twice as fast in two hours and that they will develop life skills. And so, for example, when we think about that learning 2X in two hours, we are handling the part of

• 57:50Speaker 01

  giving them the correct lesson plans that they go at their pace for. So the other key aspect is motivation. And so if a kid isn't motivated to learn, we're going to really struggle. And what our teachers do is they spend their time getting to know every single kid and having the time to understand, okay, this is the thing that motivates this child. And that can be everything from external rewards, like, for example, we pay our kids, they earn school currency for getting their work done. To, you know, privileges, being able to kind of sit where they want when they hit their goals, they're able to, you know, have more autonomy over their space to, you know, getting to bring in Chick-fil-A lunch,

• 58:31Speaker 01

  to being able to earn a trip to to the zoo or whatever it is. We do all kinds of different things to motivate our kids. An example that I love, we had a student who would often find himself distracted. You know, he was quite often staring out the window when he maybe should have been working on his, you know, his different apps. And his teacher had enough experience with him and knowledge to know that a lot of times when he was out looking out the window, it's because he loves birds. He's super obsessed with ornithology. And so she and the student spent some time coming up with basically a big poster board of all the different birds that are in our Austin area green belt. And then when he would hit his goals on a weekly base, that would earn him

• 59:14Speaker 01

  15 minutes of time with his guide to go out into our green belt and do bird watching and go find all these birds. And that right there was the connection that child needed to say, hey, I want to focus on getting my goals done because I get to go earn time to birdwatch, right? And, you know, we do a lot of different things in our world, but I think if you were telling me, hey, Mackenzie, you're in charge of K through 12 public education starting tomorrow, what would you do for motivation? I think one of the things that you could do is, you know, have kids say, okay, you can focus on your academics in the morning and then you get your afternoons back to go do the things you love to do. And often the things those kids like to do are the things they usually start doing at about three o'clock, which is football, or basketball, or theater, or robotics class,

• 59:59Speaker 01

  or speech and debate club, you know, or, you know, dance, whatever it is. You can figure out the thing that a kid enjoys spending their time on and give them that time back to go spend there. And I think what we generally find is that there are a lot of kids who say, gosh, I'll take that focus time in the two hours to get time to go do these really fun, interesting things. And unfortunately, again, in the traditional model, kids who do well in the traditional model, it's usually based on two things, intelligence, IQ, and are they willing to be conscientious and do the work, right? Are they willing to turn in their homework? Are they willing to study for the tests? And so if a kid's not doing well in a traditional school experience, it's usually considered the kid's fault.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  It's like, well, he's not the smartest kid in the world, or he's lazy, or he's disengaged, or he just doesn't want to do it. In our school world, if a kid's not thriving, then it's our fault. In fact, we just got out of our staff days at the end of the school year on Monday and Tuesday, where we went through every single student that we have and we said, are we delivering these three commitments? And if we're not, what are we doing to fix it? What is the thing that we have to change in the input in order to get that motivation connected? And I think it's what, it turns the model on its own. And then, you know, I think for our teachers, it's just a much more fulfilling job because they really do have the time and the ability to be able to spend getting to know that

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  kid and understanding what makes them tick, as opposed to trying to figure out how they're going to teach curriculum to 20-plus kids.

• 1:01:32Nathan Labenz?

  Speaking of jobs, how do you hire differently? Do you care about like education degrees? What advice would you give to people if they want to be a guide at one of your schools? Or even just more broadly, there's this notion that like we've gone from physical labor to intellectual labor. And maybe the next big thing could be sort of caring or the caring economy. Is that the kind of vibe that you're going for? What do people need to know?

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  So, you know, when we think about the people who are working in our classrooms, our guides, our teachers, I would say about probably 15% of our teachers come from a traditional teaching background, especially at the younger grade levels. You know, there are, there, I really believe teachers who are working in classrooms today, they're absolute heroes. And so people have said, hey, I want to go and spend my time with five and six and seven and eight year olds. Like that's who I want in class. So we do find we get a lot of traditional teachers coming to those lower levels. But a much greater majority of people that we seem to have attracted are people who love the idea of education and helping people, but they maybe were not willing to go into a traditional school experience

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  because they're like, that doesn't work or it's just not, it's not where they want to spend their time. They don't see it as being fruitful. And so they're really drawn to this idea of being able to provide expertise and motivation and connecting with students and helping students figure out that thing that they're interested in and saying, hey, let's go learn about that together. Let's, you know, go figure out how to do that. And so what we're looking for, one is we want really smart adults who are sharp and quick. You know, kids are so underrated in our society today. And, you know, we want adults who really understand like, wow, kids are so capable and they are, they are really amazing and given that support and resources, they can do really incredible things.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  So we're looking for, for people who buy into that and people who've shown excellence in some sort of motivation. We get people who come from entrepreneurial backgrounds. We get people who were ex-professional and college level athletes. And coaches, that's a place that we found a lot of success with people who come in and know how to, how to create that motivation that often sports does. We get people who've come in from, you know, executive jobs, you know, doing different work in the, in the, in the real world. And we find that that creates something. We are hiring like crazy. That's on our guide side. And then we're also hiring people on our tech side. We need people who are continuing to build these apps out, continuing to learn how we can incorporate learning science

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  principles to develop even better learning results. We do all of that through something called crossover.com. And the other thing is, we're big fans of paying people well. I really believe that people who choose to dedicate their lives to helping young people in education deserve to be well compensated for that. So, you know, our guides start at a hundred grand a year and go, go from there. And, and I think as a result, we attract people that are excited about coming in and making a big difference. One thing that is different for us is, we do judge our teachers on how they are delivering these commitments to our students. And if they're not motivating students well, then they're not going to be long for this job. So, someone was

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  telling me the other day, they said, I don't think there's a guide union in your guys' schools. You're never going to have that old battle axe teacher that nobody likes, but still around. If the teacher is not doing a good job connecting with students, then they're not going to be long for this world. So, we're really looking for people who are willing to get in it with kids and really engage. It's very common that you'll hear our kids talk about during breaks they have and recess and stuff. They love that their guides are out playing football with them, you know, and playing basketball and running around on the playground. They are very much roll up their sleeves and kind of get in it with the kids. And that's what makes them so fun, right? And

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  again, to be clear, it is all attributed to our teachers, our guides, that we're seeing the success in this model. I think we finally equipped them to be extremely impactful by providing the learning platform, you know, that allows them to deliver academics in a shorter period of time and much better. But, you know, we are by no means the school with no adults, you know, in the classroom. Our adults are just able to spend their time in a really impactful way.

• 1:06:09Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, that's cool. Certainly running around on the playground is what I like to do most with my kids. Let's talk about like economics, ratios and sort of scalability, you know, and maybe kind of your theory of change. I mean, obviously you can only start so many schools. I did notice that the, there's kind of a default price point of a $40,000 a year tuition, but there's also a $10,000 a year price point in Brownsville, Texas. I don't know if that reflects like a cross subsidy or whatever, but you maybe just kind of give us a little bit of a sense for the economics, how you can see this, you know, like what is the vision, you know, maybe you do want to start a million schools, but

• 1:06:52Nathan Labenz?

  more likely, you know, there's got to be some mechanism for kind of transfer, right? From the learning that you're doing, the evolution of education that you're pioneering to the public schools that most kids are presumably going to continue to go to.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Well, most people have heard of our flagship school, which is Alpha School. And at Alpha, we are really redefining what parents expect from a kid's private school experience. We are a high-end private school. And so, yeah, our tuition generally is anywhere between 40 and $65,000 a year, depending on the city. Brownsville's an interesting example. We really wanted to come to that community. Brownsville's got one of the poorest school districts in the country. It's challenging educational options. They're, they needed a lot of help and we wanted to be a resource for the community. It was also an interesting place for us to kind of cut our teeth because about half of the students in our school in Brownsville are children of SpaceX employees and about

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  half are kids from local community. We had a lot of diversity, both socio-economically, racially, English is a second language. And what we've shown is that those students, in fact, our campus in Brownsville consistently Outperforms our other campuses when it comes to their learning rates. So I think it's been a great example of being able to show why, you know, a personalized learning platform can deliver such phenomenal results, no matter where a kid comes to us or what their socioeconomic, you know, demographics are on there. It really is kind of the great equalizer. When we talk about being able to meet every student where they need to be. But in general, Alpha is spending a lot of its resources and money

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  on the life skills experiences on the afternoons. So kids do pretty insanely cool things as part of their life skills workshops. But we have other schools that are at lower price points. So for example, we have a gifted and talented school and a sports academy and a middle school that actually focuses on esports and gaming as a motivation model. Those schools are at about $25,000 a year. And then we're rolling out schools at a $15,000 a year price point. Again, they're all getting the same academic experience in that two-hour personalized learning platform. But what we're doing around the life skills component is, you know, a little bit different on there. We've also recently been kind of trying to make a foray

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  into the into the public world through charter schools. It's been interesting because we've had more mixed reactions. A lot of states who've just said, no, we're not interested in letting you take your model of education in the public sphere. But we were fortunate to be approved for a virtual charter school in Arizona. And we're in the process of application for a physical charter school in Texas. And that will be really exciting to be able to give that kind of education option to as many students as possible. So I do believe, especially as our cost of AI comes down, we can get this to where it is a very financially reasonable option from an academic perspective.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  I also believe we're still committed to paying teachers well in that in this new model. And so it's really in the afternoons how we're putting stuff into the life skills workshops. And so that means, you know, in our charter schools, kids may not be traveling to Poland to train Ukrainian refugee students on two-hour learning, but they can be doing. Sports workshops and entrepreneurial workshops and vocational workshops as well. So that's the big difference, you know, on where this is. And then, you know, I'd also like to serve as an inspiration. I've been able to have conversations with the Department of Education and with the White House around how to make this style of learning something that can be more available in the public sphere.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  Now, again, Nathan, the thing is, it just takes the public getting really clear and understanding that this is something that adds to education and not something scary. Everybody thinks, oh, my gosh, when you talk about AI in education, you're thinking about a robot standing in front of a classroom, or you're thinking about kids cheating. And neither of those things are true. So actually, that's been my advice to people in the public sphere is don't put a chatbot on a computer and call it a day and help teachers and parents understand that the role of the teacher is not to be replaced. It's that that role is going to be transformed to focus on kind of the the social and emotional

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  motivation side as opposed to the academic part of it. So I do believe that we're going to get to a point where, you know, a billion kids around the world are going to be able to take this type of education. As far as what I'm trying to do, I'm I'm doing that by trying to build out, you know, private schools, starting in the US and eventually, you know, internationally, allowing other people to adopt our learning platform in their schools or go start schools where they can have the academics there. We're doing some intervention services in the public setting for kids that are needing basically out of class support, you know, remedial or, you know, advanced help. And then I think that there's going to be an influx of other innovators that come in

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  and build things like what we're doing. That are going to help that. So I spend a lot of my time and energy trying to raise awareness and be a platform for kind of understanding of what's possible. If you really understand that your kid doesn't need to spend six hours sitting in class to do the core academics, that they really can crush their academics in a couple hours a day. And then the other thing that I think is really spreading like wildfire is how much value parents are seeing in being able to spend a significant portion of the school day, working on life skills, financial literacy and entrepreneurship and storytelling and public speaking and leadership and teamwork, socialization, grit, learning how to deal

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  with failure. Those skills, I think, are what so many parents say, that's what I really want. And the traditional education environment doesn't really lend itself to spending time developing those skills. And so hopefully, you know, we can get more of that out. I do a lot on future of education on, on social media, showing people what's possible. And again, helping them understand this isn't scary. And then, of course, the other component that we haven't really gotten into is teaching our students how to use AI tools to be successful. So, you know, we can have our kindergarten and first grade students who are able to, you know, create books and graphic art and, you know, movies and things like that. They're

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  able to code drones and robots and self-driving cars, build video games, right? Like, there's so many different things kids can do when they have AI and they're learning how to use it as a tool. It gets us back to kind of the beginning of this podcast when we said the half-life of knowledge, you know, is going to be so much shorter. And so what kids need to be successful at is knowing how to use AI tools to, you know, further their abilities. It's no longer about the three Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic. Now it's about critical thinking and collaboration and communication and creativity. And that's where if we can give kids the knowledge they need to use these AI tools, that's going to be a huge thing. And so it's helping people understand that AI doesn't just mean cheating.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  It means, you know, really growing capabilities.

• 1:14:23Nathan Labenz?

  I'd love to see you come to Detroit where I live at some point. But for those who are not in a spot where they can go to one of your schools and enroll today, what advice would you give me if I just want to like DIY it to the best of my ability until you or somebody else, you know, has such a program?

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  Well, you know, first of all, we have a homeschool program. It's called Alpha Anywhere. We've spent a lot of time working on that to make sure the motivation model is built into that program since we don't have kids in a physical building with our guides working with them. And we've, we've started seeing the results that we want to roll that on a grander scale. But the other thing is, I think that taking time with your kids to try out these tools, you know, a great one as an example, and for your kids at the age they are, inspiring a love of reading and getting better at reading by being able to do something like use our TeachTales app that you can literally go on a website and you can, you can try where suddenly you've got your little boy as the main character in a choose your own adventure

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  that happens to talk about his favorite movie with his best friends from his little league team, you know, and it's being delivered at the, at the proper reading level. Suddenly your son is going to be like, let's read more. Let me, let me do more reading and, you know, using those AI tools to do this. I also think there's a lot of great tools on the internet with regard to, you know, for example, I've always been a fan of public speaking. It's something that with my kids, I wanted them to be great public speakers. There's all these great AI tools that help kids get better at public speaking in a really unintimidating way, right? Where they can get feedback on a talk they give. And so for your six-year-old, you can say, hey, let's, let's create a story and present this at dinner tonight.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  And then we'll use AI tools to give feedback on your intonation and how to, how to make it more engaging and your pacing and did you use filler words? There's a lot of things to do. One of our students who's a graduate of Alpha and she's now just finished her freshman year at Stanford, her name is Austin Scholar, and she writes a Substack newsletter for parents that gives them information on basically how to do education in this, in this new world. What are some of the great AI apps? Of projects that your kids can do during the summer, you know, with regard to AI. Now, one thing I will say, Nathan, and you know, you're a perfect example of this because the age of your kids. And this is where I was when they were about the same way. I was kind of trying to build all the scaffolding alongside their traditional school experience to say, okay,

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  after school, we'll do a science club and we'll have you work on that and we'll work on writing a book and doing all those things. And eventually what happens is kids get busy, right? And parents are busy. It's like, oh, my gosh, how much time do we have to go do an after school science club and throw in piano lessons and do all that? So I really do want the resource of the time during the day to be something that's more accessible. I'm launching futureofeducation.net. It'll be live in the month of June where parents can go and get, you know, free resources for using AI tools and different apps that they can try. And I think the biggest thing is as a parent, and I'm sure you're doing this, is get familiar with those AI tools.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  You know, one of the conversations that I've been having with people in the public domain, you know, in the administration, who are trying to figure out how to become AI driven education is so many teachers aren't familiar with AI. So they don't know how to use it themselves and therefore are wary of it. And so I think as a parent, like, start using AI in your daily life to help you with your job, help you with everything from figuring out what you're going to cook for dinner. You know, there's so many different ways. And then there's a lot of creative outlets that can get kids really excited about building. And that's something we really want our students to do is be creators and contributors, not just consumers. And so AI tools allow us to really be great super builders of things.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  And there's plenty of projects that parents and kids can do together to get them excited about that.

• 1:18:22Nathan Labenz?

  Cool. There's multiple pointers there that I will definitely be sure to follow. And I'll look out for the seem to be launched website as well. Outstanding work. I love the vision and yes, it is time for the future of education. So I'm glad to learn that the future is now at Alpha School and with two hour learning. Mackenzie Price, thank you for being part of the cognitive revolution.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:18:46Nathan Labenz?

  It is both energizing and enlightening to hear why people listen and learn what they value about the show. So please, don't hesitate to reach out via email at [email protected], or you can DM me on the social media platform of your choice.