Could this be the future of K-12 education?

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RANA EL KALIOUBY: Hey, listeners!

Today, we are featuring another on-stage interview from the recent Masters of Scale Summit. It was two days of deeply human and thought-provoking conversation centered on what kind of future we want to build.

My chat with Joe Liemandt (LEE-mont) explores the future of K through 12 education. After a long career in software development and investing, Joe is now the Principal of Alpha School. It’s a private school founded in Austin, Texas. Students complete their core subjects – like math and English – in about two-hours a day –– with no teacher –– thanks to AI. For the rest of the school day they focus on social-emotional, project-based learning and life skills, with adult guides.

On stage, Joe and I were also joined by Alex Matthew, a high schooler at Alpha School, who shared his experience.

It’s an approach that ignites a lot of debate – to be sure. Take a listen to my conversation with Joe and Alex, and see what you think about the Alpha School model.

EL KALIOUBY: Hi, Joe. Welcome to Summit.

JOE LIEMANDT: Thank you very much.

Copy LinkHow Alpha School is reimagining the school day with AI

EL KALIOUBY: So you are the principal of Alpha School, a bold and somewhat controversial model of education, re-imagining K through 12 through mastery-based learning and AI. How did that all come about?

LIEMANDT: The background on it: I became principal three years ago, but the school was founded by McKinsey Price over a decade ago. One of the things when Gen AI came out — the problem, stepping back — the problem with most education is it’s not scalable. Sort of appropriate to this lots of points. But how do you get it out?

When Gen AI came out, my thought was, we can use this and we can get this out to a billion kids. I’m a product guy, so I was like, I need to go be a principal, ’cause I gotta see what happens when fifth graders get into a fight and parents yell at you. And how do we get this out to everybody?

EL KALIOUBY: Can you paint a typical day at Alpha School? Where does the AI come in, and how does this all shift the role of the educator or the teacher in this model?

LIEMANDT: Sure. To step back on the core values and our commitments to the kids — we make three commitments to the kids. The first is you will love school, right? If we are re-envisioning school for the next decade, the core value should be, if we’re gonna subject our kids to a dozen years of this, they should love it.

And actually, we ask the kids every eight weeks, would you rather go to school or go on vacation? So we want a really high bar. We just finished our first session for this year. 96% of the kids said they love school. And 40% of the kids said, I’d rather go to school than go on vacation.

That ranges between 40 and 60, depending on what the vacation is and how good their workshop is.

So the second core value is we need to teach kids 10 times faster. You can’t have kids love school if it’s six hours a day and homework, and we subject them to that for a dozen years.

So back to Gen AI and learning science, we’ve known for 40 years how to teach kids how to learn 2, 5, 10 times faster. It just couldn’t be implemented in a teacher-in-front-of-a-classroom model. So we took all those 10,000 learning science papers, embedded it in this AI tutor where kids come into the school and they spend two hours a day.

With the AI tutor, and during that two hours, they learn more than twice as much as students who live in classrooms for six hours with homework. Our schools are the best academic schools in the country on basically any measure.

Copy LinkWhy faster learning creates more time for life skills

EL KALIOUBY: And then what happens after these two hours? I don’t want my son back home after the two hours. I don’t know about you all.

LIEMANDT: No. The name of the product is actually “time back” — give kids their time back. Which actually motivates them to do the two hours engaged in the apps. And then during the four hours—

EL KALIOUBY: TikTok, the rest? No TikTok. Okay.

LIEMANDT: We can talk about that.

It is how do we engage them in project-based workshops, right, run by adults, that teach the life skills that we think are critical. When we think of the future world that’s coming, what are those skills that matter? So our current set of workshops and life skills are teamwork and leadership, entrepreneurship and financial literacy, storytelling and public speaking, relationship building.

And socialization, grit, and hard work. So they’re in these great, super fun project-based workshops all afternoon, ’cause we have to fill the four hours up.

Copy LinkHow mindset training helps students become creators

EL KALIOUBY: I do wanna double click on that. A lot of the attention that goes to Alpha School is basically the fact that you’re doing these couple of hours of AI tutoring. But arguably, one of the most powerful things about this model is your focus on the mindset and specifically how to help kids reshape and rethink their connection to learning and how to unlock their potential.

And this really resonates with me in my own family. We’re very passionate about our passions, if you like. We’re lifelong learners. We’ve been doing goal setting since my kids were really little. We vision board every year. Please don’t judge us. I’m curious, how do you engage students and have them think about their agency and their love of learning and all these really awesome curiosity?

LIEMANDT: That’s a critical part when you think about developing a child. So even in kindergarten, we literally start with growth mindset as a core value of what we teach about when their days start. They actually come in for limitless launches. You could think of it as Tony Robbins for kids — you guys can do anything, right?

We wanna get them thinking that from the start. When we talk about TikTok, by the time you get to middle school, kids are awesome — they wanna do awesome things. And our school system today sort of drives them to dysfunctional behavior where they do scroll.

TikTok. How we solve it in high school is we do have them do vision boards. The first workshop, if you transfer into Alpha Middle School, is you do a vision board, right? What are your values? Who do you see yourself as? Then second, you do a Japanese Ikigai, right? What are you great at? What do you love to do? What does the world need? What do you get paid for? And they do those two projects — here are my passions — but then we make them do the 168-hour project. This is where they track every hour of the week, right? You are what you do. And this is where that TikTok reality comes in.

Because they come up to me and they’re like, Mr. Mont, I guess I’m gonna be the world’s best TikTok scroller.

And they don’t wanna be that. Kids, when they wake up, don’t wanna sit and be consumers all day and addicted to TikTok or just playing video games. They wanna be creators. And what the school has to do is help them there.

And that is what our projects do all afternoon — we’re gonna transition you from wherever you are here, and we’re gonna show you how you can be a builder and a creator. They want to build video games. They want to be able to create things.

EL KALIOUBY: We’ll be back after a short break.

[AD BREAK]

Copy LinkWhy teachers become guides instead of lecturers

EL KALIOUBY: Talk a little bit about this changing role of the teacher in the room, or the educator in the room. Because you don’t even call them teachers. You call them—

Talk a little bit about this changing role of the teacher in the room, or the educator in the room. Because you don’t even call them teachers. You call them—

LIEMANDT: We call them guides and coaches, because they don’t do academic teaching. Of all the sacred cows in education, a teacher in front of a classroom is the anchor of everything and we are breaking that. But we view — and if you talk to the, call them the teachers at our school, they are adults.

Some are ex-teachers and they love it, because teachers didn’t become teachers to grade seventh-grade science quizzes. They became teachers to transform kids’ lives. Everybody has one or two teachers who transformed your life, and it wasn’t the test markup that did it. It’s because they saw you.

They convinced you you could do so much more and inspired you toward greatness. That’s what our guides and coaches do all day. The AI actually teaches the seventh-grade science quiz faster and better than the teacher does. Instead, the teachers spend their days connecting with kids during the two hours. When the kids are on the apps, the teachers take the kids out one by one to do one-on-ones with them. How was your weekend? How’d the softball tournament go? Are you really excited about this project? How do we engage you? So they build those relationships and spend their whole days doing that.

EL KALIOUBY: Amazing. So you actually have one of your students here, and I’m so excited to welcome to our stage, Alex Matthew, who is a senior at Alpha School. Come on in. We need to find you a seat though. It’s coming up. Okay, great. Amazing. Welcome, Alex.

ALEX MATTHEW: Good to see you guys.

Copy LinkWhat student-led building looks like in practice

EL KALIOUBY: So, tell us a little bit about what you’ve built.

MATTHEW: Yeah. So by the way, hey everyone, I’m Alex. I am a 17-year-old senior at Alpha High School, and I only transferred into Alpha High School last year. So I used to go to a public magnet school. It was ranked top 30 in the nation, and I had eight-hour school days. I would do homework from three to four hours after school.

So that’s 12 hours of schoolwork. And then I try to cram in all the things I really love doing after that period of time. That led to, first of all, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I also was getting very little sleep. It was a pretty bad lifestyle. And I knew I needed to change.

So when I entered Alpha High School, we did the Ikigai project, the 168-hour week. And what I really found was that my passion was the combination of artificial intelligence — super big, really cool technology — but also mental health. Because when I was eight, I used to go to therapy when my parents got divorced.

I was an 8-year-old and my therapist was 50 years older than me. I don’t know if you know eight-year-olds, but we don’t really get along with old people. I had a hard time connecting with her. She would give me advice that was very disconnected from me. And on the opportunity she would give me good advice, it was only once every couple of weeks and I had a hard time staying accountable to that advice. So I saw the struggles of my friends and myself at my old school. I came in knowing I wanted to solve this crisis, so I interviewed probably close to 500 teens and psychologists, and I came up with Barry, which is an AI-powered stuffed animal you can talk to about your mental health problems.

EL KALIOUBY: I love it. That’s awesome. So tell us a little bit about what the process was like to build.

MATTHEW: To build Barry. Yeah, it’s really interesting ’cause I came in and I told my teachers I wanna build an AI stuffed animal. And they were like, what? And I was like, yeah, I wanna build an AI stuffed animal. My goal is to be the next Build-A-Bear. They were talking about Labubu earlier.

I’m trying to be the next Labubu. And it’s pretty hard ’cause it’s a hardware product, right? It’s not just an app that you have to make. So I learned coding. We did a hackathon one weekend, and I coded up a little prototype, the app — I’m still working on it myself.

I got the first version up. I went through probably 10 different iterations of the prototype, and I’m now testing with a hundred teens, and I’m on my way to figuring out distribution. My distribution strategy is really cool, guys. In Alpha School, we have to come up with this super big ambitious goal.

My goal is to reach a hundred million people by 2035. And most people would look at you — I tell my teacher this and they’d be like, what does this kid think he’s doing? But I tell my guide and they’re like, okay, how do we do this? My goal right now is to partner with influencers, make Barry have their own voice, have their own personality.

There can be different versions of Barry. And then in the future, everyone will be able to customize their own Barry so it has their own voice, or their parents’ voice, or whatever voice they want. Their own personality. My therapist was much older than me. I wanted someone that I resonated with more.

And so that’s the intention. We want to make someone that’s relatable, but will also be real with you and give you the advice that you need.

EL KALIOUBY: Are you raising money?

MATTHEW: I am!

EL KALIOUBY: Okay. There’s a lot of investors in the audience.

MATTHEW: I’ve raised around $40,000 in grant funding, so non-diluted funding, but I’m now raising up to a $400,000 pre-seed round and just had my first investor meeting, and he’s gonna sign a term sheet soon.

Copy LinkWhy feedback and rejection are core entrepreneurial skills

EL KALIOUBY: I love it. Woo. I imagine you had to learn a lot of skills and just acquire a lot of background knowledge to make this happen. What was the hardest or most intimidating thing you had to learn to get Barry off the ground?

MATTHEW: Oh, that’s a hard question. I think the most important life skill in high school is receiving feedback. We have a series of workshops on receiving feedback. Level one is, can you receive critical feedback maybe from Joe without crying? And we’re kind of scared of him and some of us didn’t pass that. But the next level — don’t worry, I did — the next level is called rejection training. And our campus is in the middle—

EL KALIOUBY: I think we all need to do that as adults.

MATTHEW: This one’s really fun, guys. Our campus is in the middle of downtown Austin. We have to go out into different stores or whatever, and we have to ask to get free pizza or a sandwich named after us.

My friend’s named Ruben, we had to get a Ruben sandwich named after him, and jump on the mattresses to see what the spring ability is like. So that’s the next level of receiving feedback — can you get rejected? But then the final tier is, do you have a series of experts who are giving you feedback on your product?

What are your users saying about your product? I love my Barry. I love the format, whatever it is. But when I got feedback, I used to get super defensive. I was like, what do you mean? I have the best product out there. You have to really understand you need to lower your ego and get critical feedback or else you’re not gonna make progress.

EL KALIOUBY: Is that cool or what? So cool.

LIEMANDT: Rather than sitting in class and just learning sort of the core curriculum that we all learned, having these workshops where you’re learning the life skills — those are gonna be really valuable outside of the classroom. That’s what we get to spend four hours a day on.

Giving the kids the time back to work on this. When you talk about scaling, there’s been lots—

Copy LinkHow the model could scale beyond a private school

EL KALIOUBY: How do you scale?

LIEMANDT: The problem with educational reform is if you keep it where the kid has to sit in class for six hours with homework, there’s no time to do anything else.

There’s just no time. You always try to say, when we read those life skills, there’s lots of schools that are like, oh, how do I put that in? But there’s just no time. So that’s the core part. When we look at scaling this, we have a few different ones, but one is by making it tech-enabled. This software is gonna go out to a billion kids and it is going to be able to teach them 10 times faster than what you’d learn in class. If they engage and are motivated — which is a different topic we can talk about — it will educate them much faster.

EL KALIOUBY: But I wanna challenge you a little bit because in a way, the AI piece is the easiest to scale, a hundred percent. The rest of it — the one-on-one mentoring and the guide — that’s really hard to scale. And for now, I know you’re expanding very rapidly as a model, but for now it’s a private school system.

How do you make this more accessible?

LIEMANDT: Yeah. One of the things — and if we want to be spicy in the talk, I’ll say one—

EL KALIOUBY: We can be spicy.

LIEMANDT: Great. One of the things back to scale: when we look at education, what are some of the beliefs of education that you need to break if you wanna scale? The first is teacher in front of a classroom.

Teachers are great. Teacher in front of the classroom is the worst way to teach kids. The second one is selection effects. In education, selection effects are considered an insult — it’s bad. There’s a view that if you can’t serve all kids on day one, you should serve nobody.

And if you talk about Alpha — we’re a high-end private school — the number one criticism is selection effects. We look at the world completely differently, which is that we believe selection effects are the power to get to scale. Our motto is select, but don’t fail the kids. For example, we’re opening next year a Sports Academy.

It’s gonna be $15,000 — so dramatically cheaper — and with vouchers in Texas it’ll be Texas Sports Academy at a $400 parent pay, $400 a month. So dramatically cheaper. But it will only select for kids who love sports, and because they love sports, we can design the day where they’re gonna love the day.

As part of that, they will engage in the two hours in the apps, and then play sports in the afternoon.

EL KALIOUBY: More after a quick break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Copy LinkWhat education can learn from product market fit

EL KALIOUBY: What I love about this is you’re bringing a very business mindset to how we’re building this because, as you know, there are a lot of founders in the room. We always apply this product-market fit — we’re not gonna be a product for everybody in the world. But being clear on your audience and your target market, correct.

What I love about this is you’re bringing a very business mindset to how we’re building this because, as you know, there are a lot of founders in the room. We always apply this product-market fit — we’re not gonna be a product for everybody in the world. But being clear on your audience and your target market, correct.

LIEMANDT: Nobody would get funded if you said, I will not ship until it works for everybody at every price point globally. But that is usually a requirement if you’re in education. It also goes — if you want another spicy one — that a lot of that comes because most of education is driven by non-profit.

And we have another phrase, which is that non-profit is non-scalable. If you’re trying to scale, you have to break that. The problem with non-profit is the better and more successful you are, the faster you run out of your donations. The number of very successful charter schools — when you talk to them — have great academic outcomes.

Kids love it. They have a 3,000-person wait list, and you’re like, well, why don’t you open a new campus? They’re like, I’m waiting for a $40 million donation. Capitalism actually solves that. If a for-profit company has a 3,000-person wait list and everybody loving it, you’re gonna be able to open as many locations as you want.

Copy LinkWhen AI helps learning and when it enables cheating

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Many schools are struggling with how to embrace AI very quickly. What’s your advice?

LIEMANDT: Two things, really clear: chatbots are cheat bots. They’re terrible. If we roll out ChatGPT in a normal, today’s academic setting, 90% of kids will use it to cheat. There is five to 10% Socratic tutor usage that’s really great, but 90% — it’s terrible. And so we have a counter to that.

During our two hours, we have no chat functionality enabled. We’ve tried it, and even our good students, they all hack it and cheat.

MATTHEW: That’s not cheating. Well, maybe it is.

EL KALIOUBY: That’s a whole conversation. Yeah.

LIEMANDT: Our view is what we tell all our students: if you are using ChatGPT in the morning during your academics, you are probably cheating. If you are not using it in your afternoon life skills workshop, you are probably failing.

There is no teacher who knows how to build a mental health app and get distribution via Build-A-Bear and influencers. But ChatGPT is what gives kids superpowers in that world. So it’s important to segment those two things. Teachers are great. Teacher in front of the classroom — bad. Using chat functionality during academic learning — bad. Using it in the afternoon — great.

Copy LinkThe mindset kids need to thrive in an AI future

EL KALIOUBY: Very cool. Alright, final question. Kids today are stepping into a future marked by rapid change in AI and also a ton of uncertainty. What skills do they truly need to be prepared for life? Joe, we’re gonna start with you and then Alex, you’re getting the final word.

LIEMANDT: We believe the key is that we create self-driven, motivated creators who have an optimistic view on the world. If you go in and talk to the Alexes in our high school and middle school, these kids look at this world where you hear about doom and gloom — where is AI, what’s gonna happen?

And they wake up and they say, AI gives us superpowers. We’re going to crush it. McKinsey, the founder of Alpha, wakes up and says, this is the best time in history to be a 5-year-old. And we very much believe that.

EL KALIOUBY: Alex?

MATTHEW: I agree. When you look up mental health on TikTok, you’ll see people crying. And so that’s how they’re viewing the world right now — this kind of doom, this like, oh, this next big problem is gonna end the world. But that rational optimism where it’s like, we understand how the world’s gonna be better, and we’re the ones building that, we’re the ones creating that, and we have the agency — nothing is better than the freedom to do that. We’re gonna be living our best.

EL KALIOUBY: So inspiring. Thank you both. Thank you Alex.

What I appreciated most about this conversation is how Joe and Alpha School are doubling down on students’ interests, helping them find projects, endeavors, and causes that motivate them to learn and DO. And I have to say, Alex captivated the audience – and me – with his enthusiasm, drive and creativity.

To make room for this type of spark, Alpha School is leaning into AI tutoring. I personally like that, since our kids are going to be living and working with AI every day. Personalized AI tutoring is ONE way to approach this, and it’s the most scalable part of Alpha School’s model.

After our interview, the crowd at the Masters of Scale Summit were mixed. Some wanted to enroll their kids right away. Others wondered how to make such an exclusive model more accessible and equitable. And some wanted to know more about the pedagogical results.