How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt

We keep trying to move kids on at eighty percent, like a coach saying, “Forget ballhandling, let’s practice dunks.” No. If you’re losing the ball twenty percent of the time, that compounds. Fix the basic skill first.

I’m joined by Joe Liemandt, principal of Alpha School, where students cover academics in roughly two hours daily, then work on businesses, communication, finance, and practical skills. I wanted to start with how schooling got built in the first place.

A century ago, universal access was the huge achievement: get kids off the farm, put a teacher before a room, teach reading and writing. That model spread everywhere. We have access now; what we don’t have is universal learning. AI and technology finally let us rebuild around what each child knows, and eventually take that to a billion kids.

We still use milestones constantly—reading, writing, math by a certain grade—but some may be outdated. What should kids do because they love it, and what do they need to grind through whether they like it or not?

Parents know the milestones they grew up with: tables, cursive, book lists. Standards have slipped while the future looks radically different. And YouTube alone won’t educate a child. The material has always been in libraries; motivation, structure, peers, and adults are the hard part. Most parents will still drop their kids at a real building.

I was skeptical of Alpha at first—this weird, janky place where kids learned on apps and did vocabulary upside down. Then my daughters tried one summer week and came home saying they’d rather return than go to camp. That was bananas. Kids need to love school, and they have more potential than even high-expectation parents imagine.

Loving school does not mean low standards. It’s the opposite. Kids want hard things with friends, like the demanding team with the great coach. High standards and high support: let them struggle, fail, even cry, but keep a caring adult right there. A kindergartner stuck on a rock wall can ring the bell, absolutely beaming. That loop develops people.

Support is the piece people struggle to define. It’s not “figure it out,” and it’s not climbing the wall for your kid. In sports, we accept different bodies and aptitudes and give athletes tailored coaching. How does that translate academically?

Nobody says, “Here’s YouTube, go become elite.” We coach each position step by step. But one classroom teacher has twenty-five or thirty kids and gives the middle-of-the-pack lesson. One-on-one tutoring is the gold standard; it was just too expensive. AI can deliver individual instruction, but it must be mastery-based. Personalized lessons plus mastery is the breakthrough.

This isn’t kids chatting with a bot. Chatbots dropped into ordinary school become cheating machines. First identify the foundation a student has. If I hand you an MCAT before introductory biology, grit won’t save you. An eighth grader may need fifth- or third-grade pieces first. We build them up privately, without the humiliation of putting them in a younger class.

We use worked examples: show the problem, gradually remove supports, then let the student solve it alone. Add review just before they forget. Fluency matters because working memory is limited. If seven times eight is instant, it costs nothing; if you’re calculating it during algebra, you burn slots needed for the multistep problem. What looks like an algebra problem is often an elementary foundation problem.

That fits neuroplasticity beautifully. Errors and attention matter, but a student needs enough cognitive space to see the higher-order solution. And public failure at the board can convince somebody for decades that they’re “not a math person.”

We measure growth rate, not just where somebody starts. “You’re twenty-two hours from closing this gap” feels different from “You’re three years behind.” A guide finds the block—“I can’t do this, I’m not that person”—and blows it up. Sometimes we use cash incentives. I’ll pay a kid a thousand dollars to reach the top one percent if that helps them discover they can. The money isn’t the endpoint; changing self-perception is.

So suffering isn’t the point. The useful version is challenge with meaning, a realistic path, and a goal the child owns. You can’t simply ram parental values down a teenager’s throat; they’ll push back harder.

Make learning painless and efficient where you can. The struggle kids embrace is tied to something they care about. For a student who loves basketball, two focused academic hours are the fair trade for getting on the court. We set requirements, including no phones for younger kids, but align work with a future they want.

That’s why afternoons matter. We teach leadership, teamwork, financial literacy, relationships, public speaking, and building. Younger students learn earning, saving, spending, investing, and giving; older kids run food trucks, vending operations, and projects. Founder School promises a path toward a million dollars in profit or tuition back, but it’s not crypto-bro school. We’re philosopher-builders: rigorous academics plus people who can make things.

AI should free humans for human work, not replace them. Guides and coaches shouldn’t be stuck grading seventh-grade science quizzes; they motivate, create culture, and support kids through hard parts. We want kids building music festivals, robots, science experiments, businesses—whatever pulls them from scrolling into creating.

This needs to reach beyond expensive private schools. We’re using Texas vouchers for lower-income families through sports academies, testing results with MIT researchers, working toward public-school versions, and developing a free learning game. It won’t transform education tomorrow, but we’re building toward it. I think this is the best time ever to be five years old.

I love that optimism. This isn’t just higher scores; it’s the moment the gears turn on and a young person realizes, “I can learn, I can build, and I can become more capable.” Thanks for bringing that excitement and concrete vision to this conversation.

Thank you. Watching kids thrive has been the best part of my life. If you want to help change education, wherever you are in your career, come do it. It’s awesome.