#229 AI in Education with Joe Liemandt

Craig Barton
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Episode details

Craig speaks to Joe Liemandt, principal of Alpha School and founder of Trilogy Software, about the model behind the school’s two-hour academic day. They cover selection effects, what does and does not scale, the data the apps generate, the future of the teaching profession, and Alpha’s plans for the UK.

Talking points

  1. Joe’s route into education: an AI paper written in the 1980s, expert systems at Stanford, dropping out to build Trilogy, and why he went in as principal rather than working his way up — he wanted control, because no experienced principal would have signed up to the pitch he had to make to parents.
  2. Why he thinks Alpha works: not equal weighting across the apps, the guides, the culture and the incentives, but a whole ecosystem designed to deliver three commitments — kids love school, they learn twice as much in two hours, and they pick up life skills in afternoon workshops.
  3. Selection effects seen through a product lens: every school selects, so you choose your customers and design for them. Hence a sports academy, a GT school, a Montessori kindergarten and an entrepreneurial high school, all running different products on the same principles. The 2x claim is relative to a student’s own percentile, which leads to Joe’s F1 analogy for benchmarking against the best students at the best schools rather than proving the model on a test track.
  4. Adapting up and down: a fourth grader reading at eleventh-grade level raises maturity problems as much as academic ones, while children arriving behind need catch-up material and a growth-rate framing rather than an achievement one.
  5. Craig presses on scalability using Unbound Academy as the test case. Joe won’t speak for a school he doesn’t own, but walks through his own voucher-funded hybrid sports academy: two hours at home in the morning, a QR code that unlocks afternoon athletics, and the harder problems of remote cheating and the parents who help with it.
  6. Comparing against the real alternative rather than an idealised one — Craig’s account of a Key Stage 3 maths lesson taught by a non-specialist, and Joe on assigned book lists, ChatGPT summaries and Stanford bringing back proctors.
  7. Scaling to the Global South at fifty dollars per child per year: an on-device small language model to avoid token costs, Starlink and solar, and whether paying children to learn can replace the income they earn harvesting cocoa.
  8. Why you cannot lift the app out and drop it into a normal school day — the five per cent rule, Joe’s alternative design of eleven minutes in the app followed by forty-five minutes of practical science, and his line that the answer is and, not or. Plus the hundred-for-a-hundred programme, which pays students for full marks on lower-grade tests as a way of filling gaps that neither seventh graders nor their parents will accept as remedial work.
  9. Data from the apps: Craig frames Carl Hendrick’s optimism against Dylan Wiliam’s warning about found data, and Joe argues AI is to learning science what the microscope was to biology. Worked examples inflecting at algebra, and eleven hours spent on maths facts fluency in third grade saving thirty hours in fourth.
  10. The future of the teaching profession: why Alpha renamed teachers as guides and coaches, why marketing keeps telling him to change it back, and Joe’s view that in twenty years there will be more teachers rather than fewer. Craig closes with his hardest question — being told you cannot step in and explain fractions to a stuck child — and a UK exclusive about international expansion from January.

Links from the show:

  1. Alpha School: https://alpha.school
  2. 2 Hour Learning: https://2hourlearning.com
  3. Unbound Academy: https://unbound.school
  4. #218 AI in Education with Carl Hendrick: https://podcast.mrbartonmaths.com/218-ai-in-education-with-carl-hendrick
  5. #222 AI in Education with Becky Allen: https://podcast.mrbartonmaths.com/222-ai-in-education-with-becky-allen
  6. #224 AI in Education with Kris Boulton: https://podcast.mrbartonmaths.com/224-ai-in-education-with-kris-boulton
  7. #225 AI in Education with Dylan Wiliam: https://podcast.mrbartonmaths.com/225-ai-in-education-with-dylan-wiliam
  8. #226 AI in Education with Zach Groshell: https://podcast.mrbartonmaths.com/226-ai-in-education-with-zach-groshell

My usual plugs

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