Alpha School's Joe Liemandt on Redesigning the School Day Around AI and Ambition

The conversation opens with a question put to schools: are they willing to redesign the school day so that kids love it more than vacation? Liemandt says instructional design has not changed in a hundred years, with a teacher at the front of a classroom. He argues that cognitive science and learning science, combined with LLMs, now allow a learning engine that teaches kids about ten times faster.

Asked what he is building, Liemandt says the question is what to do with the time that this speed creates. His answer, as laid out in the discussion, is to make kids learn about twice as much in two hours a day and to use the remaining hours for life skills.

The hosts describe a survey result that Liemandt cites: over 90 percent of kids say they love school, and about half say they would rather go to school than on vacation, with one campus reaching 65 percent. The hosts say the model's credibility is what has changed, and that the approach is becoming hard to dismiss.

One host says they visited Alpha about six years ago, before Liemandt was working on it full time, and immediately understood the approach because of their own years in learning science. The host says the shift Liemandt has achieved is believability: showing that the model works, to the point that people will soon ask why anyone would do it another way.

Liemandt says he became principal four years ago. His background is in product and entrepreneurship, and he describes the main task of his first years as packaging the model into something understandable and scalable. He says it is hard to scale schools while keeping quality, and that AI helps with that. He summarizes the approach as getting better as it gets bigger.

He says Alpha has grown from Austin to 50 campuses, with 12 added last year. He adds that test scores, student happiness and workshop quality have improved each year as the system has grown.

Liemandt argues that kids love hard things most when they do them with friends, and that video games at home offer no such challenge. He says teamwork and leadership are taught in after-school sports in America but generally not in schools, where group projects are often poor: one person does the work while the others sit around.

He cites a Wharton MBA simulation in which climbing Mount Everest is the task, and says 50 percent of MBA students fail the teamwork part, which he attributes to never having been taught teamwork in school. At Alpha, third graders wear microphones during an escape room, and AI analyzes their language. Liemandt says fewer than 20 percent of the language was uplifting or helpful, and much was fighting and pushing.

Alpha runs an eight-week workshop on this. To pass, students must reach 85 percent on team behavior, and they repeatedly return to teamwork. The school also shows that students finish the escape room three times faster when working as a team.

The speakers say students enjoy Alpha because they can feel themselves learning faster and growing faster, and because they build deeper relationships, which they cannot get on vacation. Liemandt argues that the reason is the speed, which lets younger kids learn things that were not previously teachable at their age, since they were sitting in class all day.

On academics, Liemandt says kids do not like things they fail at, and that American schools are time-based, so students who fall behind have a hard time catching up. At Alpha, the learning engine gives each student a personalized lesson regardless of age grade. An eighth grader who needs a fifth grade lesson gets one, and can then pass and move forward. He says the system aims for students to be in the zone of roughly 80 to 85 percent correct, so that work is neither too easy nor too hard.

Liemandt says Alpha had over 70 students from MIT, Stanford and UT intern at the school this summer. When he asked how many expected that their university was preparing them for the world after graduation, almost none raised their hands. Liemandt says he believes university needs reinvention, not elimination, and that no one wants to attend a bad school.

The conversation also notes that university leaders spend much of their time on the adults around them. Liemandt says his focus is K-12, but he welcomed the other participants' involvement with the reinvention of universities.

He also describes the students' fear about entry-level work. In the discussion, the interns worried that the jobs they had planned for would disappear as AI took over those tasks. The interns built an educational LLM that Alpha plans to offer as a free resource for every country, working 80 hours a week on it.

Asked whether the interns studied textbooks during their 80-hour week in Austin, Liemandt says no. To build an LLM, they had to research learning science themselves. He refers to a data structure called the brain lift, which they used to organize that research. The work covered material that would be considered classical university content, but the students applied it by building.

Liemandt argues that motivation drives learning, and that an 18-year-old is motivated by building things people will use, by revenue and by getting a job. He says the learning experience could be built around that motivation. He recalls not learning much in college because he disliked the format, and says that now lectures are much less full than they were twenty years ago.

Liemandt says a university is a bundle of products, and that students liked the bundle but wanted the large lecture classes to go away. He notes that the academic part is the only thing the university formally provides, so the rest of the bundle is driven by students. He says academics take about 50 percent of university time.

He describes his own time at Stanford, where he dropped out. He says the academic part did not take up half his time, and that the rest was valuable: meeting people, seeing the real world, and building things with friends, which he says eventually became his company. He recalls that Steve Jobs gave a talk at Stanford, that a friend worked at NeXT, and that Bill Joy and Scott McNealy visited and could be met afterward for lunch.

The conversation then turns to parents, whom Liemandt says are even more important than students in deciding where kids go to school. He says he has talked with tens of thousands of parents in the K-12 range, and describes a shift in how families think.

Liemandt says parents once had to see the world differently to prepare their children, which led to the school system that has served the last hundred years. He says it is now time for the next change, and that families will have to be convinced, much as rural farmers in 1910 were convinced that their children needed something new.

On a parent who says they are sending their child to an Ivy League school and asks why they should take a risk, Liemandt says the lucky part is that not everyone needs to join. He describes an adoption curve in which some families already see that the current system is not working, while others feel it but need to be moved. He says both of his daughters were told they would not get into college, and that they would not have had a chance at a traditional school.

Liemandt says that when he compares families who sent children to Alpha four years ago with those who did not, many of the latter say they should have sent their child to Alpha. He describes them as having taken what they thought was the safe path, which turned out not to be safe.

He says parents have to get through the first year, because there is no data before then, but that once families see students thriving, the comparison becomes clear. He describes his own experience: his children attended Catholic school, and a co-founder invited him to a new school, which he initially thought was strange. He says he was right that it looked odd, but it took him two years to move his children over.

The speakers discuss enrollment risk. Liemandt notes that the first year is free of tuition, which makes it somewhat less risky. He compares it to a one-year detour from college: students can always go back, and in that sense it is no different.

One speaker says there is no downside to trying it, and that families can always defer at another college or reapply, so other options are not closed. Liemandt says that when a kid loves school, the learning is about motivation, and he advises parents, if their child really wants to go, to let them go, even if it does not work out.

They also note that the stakes differ between college and high school, and that a high school decision is in some ways riskier, as the hosts see it.

Liemandt argues that school is about 90 percent motivation. He says parents report that their kid changed within a month, and that this follows from having students do hard things they want to do. A speaker describes realizing late that they should have gotten things done earlier once they were doing what they loved.

Liemandt says that a school kids want to attend, because they expect it to be hard, is a good sign. He points to Alpha's World School, where high school students spend a year in Africa on service, signing a contract acknowledging it will be the hardest year of their life. He says they all sign it and are excited. One speaker notes that a comparable program in India or Sri Lanka would be much harder, and Liemandt says the program is named World School so students can go to different places.

One speaker argues that students who succeed under structure may not have cultivated an inner desire or the ability to find what they love. When they reach the working world, where the skills are remarkably different, they cannot operate in the same way. The speaker suggests that creating space at a much earlier age, where people can get in touch with what they care about, would make them more self-driven.

Liemandt agrees that a holistic person is not defined by GPA alone, and that parents realize students need to be more well-rounded but lack a path to get there. He says that one of the things a reinvented university could show is a curriculum that includes these elements as core parts, not optional clubs.

On employers, Liemandt says they are generally on board with the criticism that graduates lack the skills to do the work. He compares his own early readiness for a job to the point at which, after an outside project, he felt he would be a reasonable employee to hire.

Asked about choosing a field, Liemandt says the question 'what field should I study so that I can be sure I am resilient to the future' is not the right one. He says the question is what field one is interested in. He argues that an AI-native person can succeed in any field, and predicts that a new kind of AI-native math and coding will emerge, while those who still work at a chalkboard with pen and paper are at risk.

He says Alpha screens for applicants who want to be on offense rather than defensive about the future. He notes that education has not been the most lucrative founder field in the last fifteen to twenty years and that he built one of about four education wins in that period, calling it a historically terrible market, which he says he intends to change.

Liemandt says he is happy and proud of his work, and that he still operates at the level and quality of someone working in AI or SaaS. He says he has a healthy and fulfilling life and is not a billionaire, but is doing well. He argues that anyone in the top one percent of their field will be fine.

He argues against a passive view of the future and says students should see themselves as building the world. He says he wants the next generation coming out of university to look at the future optimistically and as builders, and cites the book The Rational Optimist as something his students read.

Liemandt describes students who are already running businesses. He says that an Alpha student earned a million dollars in the first year, and that students are building skills and relationships early. He says networking and relationship-building are things he thinks the university level also needs.

He tells the story of a 14-year-old Alpha student who cold-called Jensen Huang as part of a call exercise. Huang returned the call, realized the caller was a kid, and gave him 90 seconds for his pitch. Huang's feedback was that the student's qualification questions could have been answered through research or by asking others in Huang's organization. Liemandt says the student was praised for aggressiveness but got an F on call preparation.

One speaker says that access to successful people who speak or invest time at a school is valuable for high school and college students. The other host says the speaker's point, that this is the most valuable thing, is central to what the school does, and that the approach is intentional in its design and culture.

A speaker recalls Max Levkin, who had said that working with Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and David Sacks inspired him to think big, because he saw they went through ups and downs just like him. The hosts hope that visits from Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Satya Nadella and others will similarly raise students' ambitions.

One host quotes Tyler Cowen as saying that the number one thing a teacher can do is raise a student's ambition for themselves. The conversation closes with the hosts observing that there has been little disruption in the school model over the last hundred years, and that what the guests are doing from K-12 through college is elevating ambition.