How to Accelerate Learning with 'AI Schools'

Are you willing to redesign your school day so kids love it more than vacation? With cognitive science and learning science, plus the advent of LLMs, you can build a learning engine that teaches kids 10 times faster.

I want this next generation to be the ones who are optimistically capable with AI and saying, we're going to build an awesome future. That's what our job as educators are, is to go build that world.

Thank you very much.

Sure. So, we're reinventing how K-12 school is — you know, the school day, right? How kids spend their six or seven hours that they're in class or in a school building. What is that like? And sort of the first part that you have to understand and buy into is that instructional design and delivery hasn't changed for a hundred years, right? You throw a teacher in front of the classroom, and what's the right way to do this? And now if you look over the last couple decades, with cognitive science and learning science, plus the advent of LLMs, you can build a learning engine that teaches kids 10 times faster, right? And so as soon as you have that ability where kids can learn 10 times faster than they could the last hundred years with a teacher in front of a classroom model, the question is what do you do with it?

And so that's what we're doing at Alpha, which is how do you reinvent the school day? And so, you know, in our model, we make three commitments to the kids, which the first is they love school. And I just got the surveys back last week. 90-some percent of our kids say, "I love school." 50% of the kids at the school said, "I would rather go to school than go on vacation." I actually have one campus where it's at 65% of the kids are like, you know, I'd rather go to school than vacation. And so, you know, build a school where kids love it if you're going to be there for 12 years. But then the second part with this engine, what we do is the kids learn twice as much in 2 hours a day as sitting in class for six and doing homework. And so, you know, it's two hours a day, right, of the academics, and they learn more, which, you know, if you're compounding and learning twice as much as you would at your other school, right, you're going to get to top 1%, you know, sort of no matter where you start given time.

And so, the kids crush it and all, you know, the best on standardized tests, we're the best academic performing school.

And then the second and the sort of the third commitment is, well, what would you do the rest of the day? And I think that's a whole thing of what we're talking about now.

And as a principal, I can definitely tell you the one thing parents would hate is if I sent the kids home after 2 hours.

Right, you got them all day, you six, six, seven hours a day, right? And the kids want to be there, right? And they love it. And you make it so it's — what we do is it's what are all the life skills that we consider critical to thriving in the world that's coming, right? The world's changing, right? What do we do? And so we have five categories of life skills: leadership and teamwork, entrepreneurship and financial literacy, socialization, relationship building, storytelling, public speaking, grit, hard work, right? And so then you're doing projects, you know, in a group with all your friends with an adult, right, who's writing them. And that's how you spend your afternoons, right? The rest of the day.

And so we've, you know, so Alpha, you know, we started, we had, we were just in Austin, then, you know, we added 12 campuses last year. We're up to 50. You know, demand's insane. That, you know, people want this new thing. But I think it's, you know, we're sort of first, but everybody's going to have to look at this. That is, you know, today no one believes, oh, does a 2-hour work, and we have to get scale and more proof points. But once you realize, wow, kids could learn, you know, everything they need to in 2 hours.

Yeah, every family, you know, every head of school, everybody, every, you know, education minister around the world is going to say, "How do we rebuild the school day, right, for the next hundred years, because we don't need to do it like we did the last hundred?"

Yeah. I think I, you know, I became principal four years ago, and my background is product, right, and entrepreneurship, and this just needed sort of product packaging, right, which is how do you productize this into something that is understandable and scalable, right? That's the other part is it's really hard to scale schools. How do you scale them to quality? And so that's for my first three years, right, it was how to do that. And that's actually one of the big benefits of, you know, bringing AI is it helps you scale at high quality. You know, our phrase is we get better as we get bigger. And if you look at anything over the last four years, our test scores, customer, you know, student happiness, the quality of the workshops, all of those get better every year because the system gets better as it gets bigger.

Yeah, I think the biggest thing is, you know, edtech historically hasn't done well in schools, you know, hasn't had the impact that people wanted. And if you look at this learning engine and say, "Oh, this is like edtech and I'm just going to put it into a normal school day," it'll fail, right? It'll be just like everything else. And, you know, when I talk to somebody who hears about Alpha and they hear all this learning engine, I have one question, and this is the core of everything, which is: are you willing to redesign your school day so kids love it more than vacation? And if you have a head of school who says that, right, then you're all set, right? But that leap, right, and that motivation falls under that obviously, which is if you are waking up and saying, how am I going to make kids love this, right, that is the core of what allows us to do everything else. And people are worried, you know, when they hear that, of, oh, it's Disneyland and they're just running around and they're not learning, or it's not rigorous, video games or TV.

Yeah. And all these things, and it's literally just the opposite, which is, you know, one of the things we talk about is, you know, the key to your child's happiness is high standards. Kids want to go do hard things, right? They love to do hard things, and they love to do hard things with their friends, right? If it was just playing video games all day, they can go do that at home, right? And but to sit there and say, "I want to do this instead of vacation," it's because they're doing challenging things with their friends that they love.

And it's just not hard. Like an example, like an easy example is, you know, so like teamwork, right, and you know, uplifting your classmates as a team. You know, in traditional school they don't teach this, right? After school sports, absolutely, in America, teamwork, leadership. But in schools they don't. Actually most team projects in school, group projects are terrible. One person does it, everybody else just sits around, right? You always remember those. They were terrible, right? And so you learn the opposite of teamwork. You learn like the anti-pattern. And you know, in our school,

Actually a good indication of that is, you know, the Wharton has an MBA challenge where they have a simulation that you take and it's go up Mount Everest. 50% of MBAs fail the teamwork because they never were taught teamwork sort of their whole, you know, stack through school.

We take every third grader, right, and we mike them up and we throw them into an escape room, right? And they're all getting through the escape room, and at the end of it, we have AI analyze the transcript: what percent of your language, right, were you team-oriented, were you helping, or were you — and the answer, I can give you the answer: less than 20% of the language is uplifted, fighting and pushing in my idea, right, all these different things. And so we have an eight-week, right, or eight-week, you know, workshop for this, and they go through it and they keep going back to the teamwork, and to graduate, right, to pass the class, they have to get up to 85%.

Right. Of right. Team behavior. And you know, we also show them that they finish the escape room three times faster.

Right. When you're doing team environment. And that's just a great fun way. Kids love it. It's a life skill that every parent's like, "Oh, that's the stuff I want my kids to learn."

And because they don't have to sit in class all day, they can do that. And then fourth and fifth grade, right? Our life skills curriculum is as rigorous as our — yeah, you know, core, you know, passing a physics test or a math test is, you know, you have to pass, you know, the escape room test. You know, in fourth and fifth grade, we actually make them pass the Wharton MBA challenge that 50% of the MBAs can't. And you take a fourth and fifth grader and they pass it, right? That back to being proud and excited and wanting to do it, right? You can engage them and teach these skills much younger. And I believe as we look at the world, you know, we haven't had the capability to teach kids, you know, all this at a much younger age, because you're sitting in class all day, but now that we can, of course, you know, we must.

Yeah. Well, and it's like that — that escape room, like it's a high bar for your parents. The second is to your point of what else — kids, you know, kids don't like school. A lot of — let's talk academics versus life skills. There's sort of two different — different. On the academic side, kids don't like to do things they fail at. That's true on academics, that's true on anything. That's why in America we hold kids back on sports, right? Because you want to give them — they're bigger, right? Then all of a sudden they're playing better and they win and then they get the accolades and okay, right? And you get them on that path. And in academics in America, because we're a time-based system, right? Once you fall behind, right? Then it's just now it's torture the rest of the time, right? Wherever you fall behind, right? And it's just — you're — and in our system, because our learning engine will give you a personalized lesson.

Right. It doesn't matter what your age grade is. You can be in eighth grade and if you need a fifth grade lesson because whatever before you came to Alpha, you missed it. It's going to give you the fifth grade lesson, right? And you're going to be able to do it. You're going to be able to get it, you're going to be able to pass it and then move forward. And so, you know, we engineer wins for the kids in the academics that, you know, if you had to say the core value of what the engine does is, you know, for the kids, you basically want kids in this 80 to 85% correct zone, right? Like just what percent of the time if you're engaging with something, is it too easy or too hard? If it's 100% correct, it's too easy. You're not even learning anything, and you're just regurgitating what you know. And any video game developer will tell you if you drop below two-thirds and you're failing more than two-thirds of the time, you're going to disengage.

So, one of the things that, you know, a learning engine can do that a teacher in front of a classroom with 30 people can't do is make sure the kid gets an unending stream of lessons and questions that's 80 to 85% accurate, right? And we can just do it. And if it gets too hard, right, we can give them scaffolding lessons to catch up, right? Too easy, you progress them faster through the material. And if you keep kids engaged because you're giving them work they can do, right, then they like that. And when kids actually do well, right, and you hold them to high standards, right, they get very excited, you know, and just they see themselves crushing their academics instead of struggling with it. And when they're doing well, right, they love that.

Incredibly inspired. I think that I've been inspired by Alpha School since I first visited, and it proves, I think, the thesis that we have at the Horowitz and Academy that if you redesign the system for the modern era with modern tools, that you can have everything that you want in terms of outcomes. You can have more network. A lot of people say you go to school for network. We're going to take your network and make it 10x better. Everyone says you're going to go to school to become a better person. Like Horowitz and Dre Academy absolutely wants you to become a better person. We're going to engineer the system so that you're more likely to become a positive human. You want to have high agency and you want to do hard things. Like Alpha has given me a lot of inspiration on how to ensure that students get that. I think the one difference is that at every age range you have to do something very different. So if you actually listen to Joe talk, K-8, high school, very different. When you go from high school to college era, very different. And so now all of a sudden you have to make the right changes. You can't just copy everything over. That is — and so ultimately if you have a student-centric mindset, you know, if you just told the leaders of any major university in the country that their number one job and no other job was to make sure that the students were like succeeding, I'm sure that there would be many great schools in the United States. Unfortunately, there aren't many, because most university leaders are required to spend 90% of their time focused on all the adults around them and not enough on the students. And one of the things you see with Joe is he's always talking about the kids.

So, I'm super excited because I absolutely believe that university needs to be reinvented just like we have in K-12, right? And so, I'm focused on K-12, but I'm very excited that you guys jumped in and said, "Let's do this." So, anything I could do to help, I want it. One, I need places for Alpha kids to go.

Right. That there's, you know, there's going to be a whole set of kids who are like, I want to go there. And, you know, and so what have we done, you know, what have we thought about? To your point, it's completely different, right? Each — our high school is very different than our K-8. And I believe university needs to be different. And I don't believe the whole concept of, you know, is university — is everybody just going to come out of high school and not go to university anymore? I actually don't think that's true. I believe there's a huge opportunity to reinvent university and make it awesome. No one wants to go to a bad school, right? And where it's terrible and it's not getting the kids ready.

You know, as an example, we had over 70 MIT and Stanford kids and UT came to Alpha this summer as interns, and part of what we were saying is, tell us about university. How's it going? You know, what do you think? And I was like, "How many of you guys expect that, you know, this university is getting you ready — whatever one you're going to, is getting you ready for the world when you graduate?" And one kid raised his hand. Like, it was just like I was like, "Seriously? Like, none of you?" And they're like, "We're terrified. We do not feel, you know, we worked, you know, our 12 years really hard to get into these great universities. And now we're terrified that, you know, when it comes time to graduate, there's not going to be those jobs that you used to get coming out of it. You know, those first one- and two-year jobs aren't there, you know, and AI is going to be doing it. So, what do we do?"

And so they spent a lot of time this summer as interns, you know, coming up with what they thought, you know, would be, you know, reinvention of university and what they would want. And, you know, and back to kids wanting to do hard things, right? You know, these — they were interns and they came in and they came up, you know, we're going to build this educational LLM, you know, so we can make it free for everybody in the world because every sovereign is going to need its own, you know, LLM, educational LLM, small language model that sits, you know, so a small language model that sits on a device.

And those kids worked 80 hours a week, right, figuring out, doing research, figuring out the concepts of learning, right? They're going to be published, right? And you know, at the end of it, they're like, this is what we would love the university to be, where we're all working together on this super hard thing, right, that has meaningful impact to the world, right, that could really help change the world. Like, I wish these could be classes at, you know, MIT and Stanford and UT, but they're not, right? And that's when I think about what you guys are doing of reinventing it and letting kids really build, right? It's not just about the classes, it's about getting ready for the real world and all those skills you need. I believe those are different at university, but I'm very excited about what you're building around that.

No, they — and back to this, they had to go do all the research to build an LLM. So they literally are researching learning science, researching it. The, you know, we have this data structure called the brain lift, you know, that they — and they were working hard, right, on what would be considered classical, you know, stuff you need to do at a university, but it wasn't just the studying part. It was how do you apply it and be a builder, right? And I think your point of getting ready is — it's both.

No, I think another example is, you know, our first graduating class from Alpha High was three years ago. And so at Christmas after they'd all been, you know, at university, I, you know, I got them together. I was like, "How's it going? Like, how do you do in real?" Because that's right. How do you do in university after you come out? And they're like, "Okay, we love it." They all had 4.0s. They were crushing it. And but they were like, these hundred-series lecture classes are a complete waste of time. Five of them had written editorials to their school paper about how it's just a charade. How the kids come in are like scrolling TikTok or, you know, on their computers not paying attention or not showing up, and the teachers aren't, you know, teaching, and they're just like that — those don't need to exist anymore. Right? Now I was like, well, what do you like? And they're like, oh, there's all these great small-group seminars. We're working on, you know, clubs and all the activities around it. The, you know, a university is a bundle of products, right? And they liked, you know, the bundle, but the actual academic part of like these big lecture classes and stuff, they're like that needs to go away.

So, it's actually the rest of the bundle is student-driven.

Well, so I just — right, I dropped out of Stanford, right? And I was this kid, which was — it didn't take up 50% of my time because of me, but if you go to the classes, it takes what you said. But back to my experience there, and you know, for the couple years I was there, it was great because of all the other things, the people I met. You know, Steve Jobs came down, right, was giving a talk, and one of my friends went and was working at NeXT, and you know, Bill Joy and Scott McNealy would come and talk, and you'd go spend time with him afterward or have lunch. All of those experiences that you had of who you met and, you know, seeing the real world, plus building stuff with my friends, right? That eventually became our company, right? That was what was great about the product to me, and sitting in these lecture classes were, you know, the opposite of that.