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

Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today I'm speaking with Mackenzie Price, founder of Alpha School and 2 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 2 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 demand focused effort and expect students to master all of the usual Common Core subjects. The results speak for themselves. Despite spending just 2 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 McKinsey does not recommend that schools give students access to chatbots, and what they do instead, 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. 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: Mr. Francis and Mr. Rogers in 6th grade, Mrs. McBain for biology, Mr. Vance and Ms. Kohut for high school English, Mrs. Voss for AP history, Mr. Andriasko for chemistry and physics, and Mr. Madorsky 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. 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.

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

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

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

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 6-year-old just finished his Montessori kindergarten. My 4-year-old is excited because the next time his big brother goes to school, he gets to go too.

He's gone to school. Very fun.

Now I'm most going to be worried about the 2-year-old who's going to be home by himself. And that's going to be quite an adjustment come fall. But we all have these seasons in life.

You know, one of the things I've been saying, Nathan, there has never been a more exciting time to be a 5-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, uh, 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.

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.

It totally is. Well, and you think about higher ed and the state of higher ed. I've, I've had a lot of university presidents, uh, 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, 6 months, you know, in the age of AI? What is it that we're doing to equip these people? And I talked 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. 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.

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 2 sigma for all. era in education. Can you unpack that 2 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?

Absolutely. Well, I, I'm gonna start by answering that question by going way back. I'm gonna go back like 1,000 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 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. 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 2, 5, 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 2 sigma, Bloom had his taxonomy 2 sigma thing, which is basically showing you could get 2 sigma improvement in learning when you had this one-to-one mastery-based level. 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 5th 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 5th grade curriculum to kids who, some of whom already know the material and sit there bored and Others who don't even know their 4th or 3rd or 2nd 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 been possible, 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? 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 gonna 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 that 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. It's just like, this is finally the chance that we have to truly bring education and great outcomes For all students.

I love that you brought up the Alexander the Great thing. I was going to bring it up, but you didn't actually. And I wondered if you could maybe just unpack a little bit what exactly 2 sigma means. I mean, I understand that it's sort of 2 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%.

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, uh, 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 1-to-1 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 2 Sigma problem is one that a lot of people who get into learning research and stuff, 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 '24-'25 academic school year. We're at 2.3 times 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 a 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. 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 4 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 4 points, In a traditional world, we're going to deliver an 8-point increase. And where we found what works is we can take a kid, no matter where they show up to us, 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 5th 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 5th grade math. What we found is that you can complete 5th grade math in about 20 to 30 hours. Isn't that insane? And so this really points to 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, is people are incredulous and they're like, that can't be possible, and you're only doing it in 2 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 they have to do, plus even possibly fill holes or challenge the kids who need more advanced information. You know, it's a, a very sad state of affairs when you look at the way the current education system is done. And, um, 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 gonna be throw 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.

Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. 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 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. We can almost never do enough of that. We would 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 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.

Yeah. Well, it's something that I think homeschool parents have known this for a long time. It doesn't take 6 hours of sitting in class a day 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 going to do. We're going to spend 2 hours of what we call productive struggle. 2 hours of focused 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. 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 focused energy, and then that frees up my afternoons to go work on these interesting projects. There's a whole other There's components of 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 going to 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.

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 very obvious that AI can teach me extremely well in a lot of cases. I've been using it mostly for biology lately. 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, like, 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. 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. 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 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?

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 of our schools and say, hey, tell me about your AI tutor, they're not gonna 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 gonna 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 8 Common Core, and then at the high school level, Advanced Placement curriculum. 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 were there, we're using adaptive apps. Things like ALEKS or IXL or Grammarly or eGump, or a lot of apps that we've built ourselves, Alpha Math, Alpha Read, Alpha Write. We have another reading thing called Teach Tales 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. 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 or 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 as an example, if you hand a kid IXL on a tablet, they could maybe say, hey, I want to go play on this lesson. I'm going to do a little bit of this lesson and then I'm going to back out of it when it starts getting hard and 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, 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. We're noticing that your accuracy level is a little bit low here. You're taking time to read it, you're challenged. 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 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, 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. 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, 5 reps of a concept for you to understand that concept. You shouldn't have to sit through 10 reps if you got it after 5. 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 going to see a kid tell you if you said, okay, tell me about your AI tutor, they're going to 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 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 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 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 who 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. 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 can 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 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.

I guess maybe one 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 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 of pinged a friend who's in the education tech and education science space, and he said one huge challenge generally has been any assessment sort of begs the question of relative to what. And we kind of landed on the idea that longitudinal helps a lot, because if you can compare a kid to their past self, 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 2 months perhaps, and say, here's everything that this kid has done over the last 2 months, 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 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, are starting to change how you're doing these?

Absolutely. Huge difference in how what we're doing has evolved and especially over the last, you know, 3 years. But when I started the first school in 2014, I started it when my girls were going into 3rd grade and 1st 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. And that was just a hard time. Now, again, this is not the teacher's fault. This is a model issue, right? You've got a classroom of have 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. ALEKS 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 3rd grade daughter started at the school, she didn't have to sit and do 3rd grade content. She could work her way up and do 4th, 5th, 6th grade content. Now, here was the problem with those apps. Kids could really bounce around a lot in the apps. You could, you could be doing, uh, 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 not even engaging in that. A kid could certainly just sit on a computer 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 moments when we realized, okay, we need to put some guardrails up, we had a first-grade student. He loved math. He was obsessed with math, and he just wanted to do math all the time. But he got to the the point where he was doing 8th 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's 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 wanna go deep in math or something else, that's fine. Uh, 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. But there was frankly quite a bit of inefficiency and kids could mess around. Now in '22, uh, 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 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, or basically the school year of like '21-'22 to '22-'23, when we incorporated this AI tutor and personalized learning system and made a couple of other changes that I can get into. That's when we saw our learning rates go from 1.5 to 2+. That has been a huge difference. And if you look at our, you know, I can show you graphs 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 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 like crazy. And so that's been kind of the big change that happened in the last 3 years. And I think the other key thing that we'll get into in more detail, but for 15 years, edtech has been touted as this great solution that's gonna make all the difference, and it's never really worked. And there's 2 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 7th grade math in a school year, and then 3 times a week you have them go spend 15 minutes at a 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.

Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. So in the '22 timeframe, that would've 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?

Yeah, so we 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. Um, I do believe when we get into scaling and how to make this more affordable, there's probably gonna be answers where you're able to, you know, again, take LLMs that have gotten less expensive. We, we burn a lot of money on just 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 long, 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 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, it's expensive right now. We're burning a lot of AI. Uh, I think over time, and I really believe in the next 5 years, we're gonna get to the point where every kid can have a tablet for $1,000 a year that's gonna allow them to learn all of their information and kind of go. And, 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, and what AI is doing for that and allowing us to, again, collect so much information on how students learn that we're gonna be able to continue building that into our system.

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 ChatGPT 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, uh, their forecast is 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 cost will definitely—

The other thing that's going to happen, yeah, the cost 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 TeachTales. 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 decile level of a child, like their reading level, and it incorporates their interests. And so that's one of the other things that's gonna 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 gonna 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 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. 'Cause 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 5th grade math curriculum, them, 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 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. 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 MAP report come out because our students take MAP assessments 3 times a year. And in January, we saw our classes were 99th percentile across the board.

Wow.

in every grade, every subject except 5th 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 5th 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, was it a bad teacher? Was it bad curriculum? Were the kids 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.

Can you share the big reveal? Like, what did you ultimately find when you got into that 5th grade math?

That's a good question. I think we realized, well, there were a couple 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 5th 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 IXL, you know, as, as a lesson. And so sometimes it's everything from, okay, this app isn't right. 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 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 edtech is, you know, and I think why a lot of these app companies really like Alpha, because they're getting so much data 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, I've now 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, and AI in general is gonna get so much better at, again, delivering customized content, you know, that hits a student where they're at. also, you know, can start providing things that help them with engagement. 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 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. 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. And 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.

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 I'm not clear right now on whether you are sort of sticking to Common Core and doing these sort of standard assessments because you think that's like a good true north, or because you sort of need that for 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 at the end of a day, week, month, year, whatever, you may 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?

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 should learn math by running a business and being able to understand that. And 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 our kids' brains. So much more efficiently and quickly. 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 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? And I think in general, 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. We think it's really important and we even do some amount of drill and kill. I was walking into our 2nd grade classroom a few weeks ago, and in the morning we do the morning launch and the kids were doing basically calisthenic exercise and they were shouting out multiplication table answers because we want kids to be so fluent in their math. in math, in 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, 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 2-hour learning. I think in the near future we could get this to 1-hour learning, right, where kids are spending 15 minutes per subject instead of 25. In fact, our students generally are spending less than 2 hours, you know, a day on, on time. Our kindergarten and 1st, 2nd 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 advanced students or just your remedial students. It can really meet students where they are. So, the other reason that 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? 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 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 2 things needed to learn. You have to have the, the knowledge given to you at the right pace and level for what you need. 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.

What about modalities? So another big, you know, 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, It's one thing to sit through forced corporate training. I've done— that's been my most recent edtech experience, and you're just kind of clicking. 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 it is actually important to write by hand and something's 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 reading their handwriting off of the pages? So yeah, I mean, what does the multimodal component look like today?

So that's one of the things that I think is really cool about this model of learning. There's so many different ways that kids can engage in this learning. And so yes, they're 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 reading back, and then the AI is able to analyze, like, how are they doing on this reading? Um, you know, how quickly are they reading? Where are they at? Are they at the right level? Uh, 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. 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, in 3rd grade, you go from learning to read to reading to learn. And if you're not a good reader by 3rd 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 being able to take something like reading and have kids 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 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. 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, 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 where they need it. 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 2nd grade classroom, I was in one of the classrooms earlier this fall and the kids were talking about some of the independent checks that they have to work on in addition to just their academics. 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 gonna need cursive that much in this new world? Who knows? Maybe not. But there's certain things that I think You know, we hold onto 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, 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?

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?

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, 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. 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 adult would say they have 1 or 2 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?

I can certainly think of a couple, yes.

Of a couple, you know, and that's generally the answer. Most people will say, you know, two. I had my junior and senior year of high school, my business teacher, Mr. Blood, greatest teacher in the world, and my 6th grade teacher, 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 3 commitments that we have for our students, which is that they'll love school, they'll learn twice as fast in 2 hours, and that they will develop life skills. And so, for example, when we think about that learning 2x in 2 hours, we are handling the part of of 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, to being able to earn a trip 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 greenbelt. And then when he would hit his goals on a weekly basis, That would earn him 15 minutes of time with his guide to go out into our greenbelt and do birdwatching 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 3 o'clock, which is football or basketball or theater or robotics class 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 focused time in the 2 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 2 things: intelligence, IQ, and are they willing to be conscientious and do the work. 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. 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 Are we delivering these 3 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 kid and understanding what makes them tick. as opposed to trying to figure out how they're going to teach curriculum to 20+ kids.

Speaking of jobs, how do you hire differently? Do you care about 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 we've gone from physical labour to intellectual labour, and maybe the next big thing could be sort of of caring or the caring economy. Is that the kind of vibe that you're going for? What do people need to know?

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, I, I really believe teachers who are working in classrooms today, they're absolute heroes. And so people who've said, hey, I want to go and spend my time with 5 and 6 and 7 and 8-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 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.

Yeah.

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. 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've found a lot of success with people who come in and know how 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 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 $100,000 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 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 again, And 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.

Yeah, that's cool. Certainly running around on the playground is what I like to do most with my kids. Let's talk about economics ratios and sort of scalability and maybe kind of your theory of change. I mean, obviously you can only start so many schools. I did notice that 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 maybe just kind of give us a little bit of a sense for the economics, how you can see this. What is the vision? Maybe you do want to start a million schools, but more likely 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?

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 $40,000 and $65,000 a year depending on the city. Brownsville is an interesting example. We really wanted to come to that community. Brownsville's got, um, one of the poorest school districts in the country. It's challenging educational options there. 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, uh, and about half are kids from local community. We had a lot of diversity both socioeconomically, racially, English as 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 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 low— 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 the 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 2-hour learning, personalized learning platform. But what we're doing around the life skills component is, you know, a little bit different. different on there. We've also recently been kind of trying to make a foray 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. I also believe we're still committed to paying teachers well 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 2-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. 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 gonna be transformed to focus on kind of the, the social and emotional motivation side as opposed to the academic part of it. So I do believe that we're gonna get to a point where, you know, a billion kids around the world are gonna 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 about private schools starting in the US and eventually 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, remedial or advanced help. And then I think that there's going to be an influx of other innovators that come in 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 6 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 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 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 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 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 3 Rs of read and write 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 gonna be a huge thing. And so it's helping people understand that AI doesn't just mean cheating. It means, you know, really growing capabilities.

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?

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 started seeing the results that we want to roll that out on a grander scale. But, the other thing is I think that taking time with your kids to try out these tools, 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 Teach Tales app that you can literally go on a website and you can try where suddenly Suddenly you've got your little boy as the main character in a choose-your-own-adventure 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 proper reading level. Suddenly your son is gonna be like, let's read more. 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 6-year-old, you can say, hey, let's create a story and present this at dinner tonight. And then we'll use AI tools to give feedback on your intonation and how to make it more engaging and your pacing. And did you use filler words? Uh, there's a lot of things to do. One of our students, um, who's a, 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, um, that gives them information on basically how to do education in this, in this new world. What are some of the great AI apps? What are 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 of 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 this scaffolding alongside their traditional school experience to say, okay, 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, 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 a few 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. Uh, you know, one of the conversations that I've been having with people in the public, uh, 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, to really be great super builders of things. And there's plenty of projects that parents and kids can do together to get them excited about that.

Cool. There's multiple pointers there that I will definitely be sure to follow, and I'll look out for the soon-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, uh, with 2-hour learning. Mackenzie Price, thank you for being part of the Cognitive Revolution.

Thank you for having me.

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