Alpha School

“So I think this is the future framework for education. I think there's still, like, rough around the edges.”

“Our second graders gotta run a five K. Our eighth graders have to do a tough mudder, or they also all have to cross the finish line at the same time.”

“Like there is nothing that motivates a student more and a kid more than them being able to go head to head with their parent and winning like fair, not where the parent tanked it.”

“And, you know, we have a building with a few hundred people in Austin, Who get more hundreds on the Texas car than a school district of a 100,000.”

“The books, once you get to middle school at Alpha, you have to read 10 to 25. There's another book, Self-Driven Child, that we do not allow kindergarten moms to read, because it talks about your kid being independent, and at kindergarten is the last thing you …”

“Four weeks ago when we surveyed all our kids, 46% of our students said, I would rather go to school than go on vacation.”

“I put in a billion dollars for my software company as the first payment.”

“We have some of the world's best video game developers, right? Building and they're spending two years building a video game on this, these concepts. And it will be free to learn, you know, think free to play free to learn for five hundred million kids and it'…”

“Before I did this and put my billion dollars in, I talked to a dozen billionaires who'd all spent over, had all spent over a billion dollars on education. And to a person, every single person said, don't do it.”

“That is the skill we think is critical. We start teaching it in high school.”

“We have a student who's going to be published in nature. She will be the first school student as a lead researcher published in nature.”

“He's taking kids that are failing students to top of the class in three months.”

“How are we going to apply AI in education? The answer is we're not because it's a literal government monopoly. It is never going to change the end, and there is nothing to do. By the way, you can create an entirely new school system. Like that's the one thing …”

“Now, 10% of the market does. 10% of the market totally cares about great academics, right? And so those guys, they demand it. Like, they don't like two hour learning because it's not enough learning.”

“We survey our kids every eight weeks, and it was, you know, 96% of our kids said yes. But we actually raised, it got too high. It's not a good metric when everybody says yes. So we added a second question, which was, do you love school more than vacation? Righ…”

“Every single class, yes, every grade, every subject, top one percent.”

“We also, our kids, fundamentally, in the two hours, are learning twice as fast as if they sat in school for six and did homework.”

“I have third and fourth graders who outscore 50% of the high school graduates of this country.”

“And so we get more hundreds on state standardized tests in a building of 200 people than a school district of a 100,000.”

“Kids can learn 10 times faster. So if you take, like, just here's a metric for you. Our subjects, like take seventh grade science. In a normal standard school, you have a 180 school days. So an hour a day, maybe some homework, couple hundred hours, right? The …”

“This is actually the most expensive part of our AI, and one of our limitations right now is we burn a lot of AI. 10,000 bucks a kid right now, and we'll get it down to Less than a thousand, and then a hundred, we're driving it down”

“In 20 years, you know, predict the future, what's going to be the same in 20 years? Parents are going to drop their kids off at a building. In the building are gonna be other kids and adults, right? There's, we're not, you're not getting rid of school. School …”

“That's Time Back, our Time Back engine, that's 10, and today it's at Alpha, you know, in 20, 26, everybody in the world's gonna be able to access it. And so everybody who wants to build a school based on Time Back is gonna be able to next year.”

“Every third grader in our school can do a Rubik's cube. Every kindergartner can do a hundred piece puzzle.”

“If you put this in a standard school day of six hours, it's not going to work. Like, ed tech generally has failed. And it's generally failed because the kids aren't motivated to engage with it. If you don't give them their time back, They're not going to engag…”

“If you're on our honor, our high school program, non-honors is 13 50 minimum. Honors is 1550. And the difference is, it's three hours a day to do honors, which is 15 50 plus fives on your APs. 13 50 and a four or five on your AP, that only takes two hours.”

“Our first class was, we had 12 graduates 11 of them went to college. The 12th is one of the world's best water skiers. And so he's building his media empire while he water skis. It was like, I'm not going to college. The other ones all got into their first cho…”

“No high school student has ever been the lead researcher on something published in nature. And we have an alpha kid who's submitted.”

“We have a high school. She's doing a Broadway musical. Right? Launch, all team produced Broadway musical. She sourced all the singers off TikTok. Million streams the first week when they went. They can fill, they filled, like, four times they filled a venue.”

“When we designed our educational system, I think we're the only school in the world who, if a kid's not learning, it's our fault. It's the system's fault. It's not the kid's.”

“We lose about 50% of our educators when we tell them they're accountable for the kid learning.”

“We have quantified all the metrics on the life skills, right? So I know it's not just, oh yeah, our kids have grit, or oh, they're good public speakers. I'm like, no, everybody in our class scored 95% on RI, and every fifth grader beat a Wharton MBA in teamwor…”

“So in our middle school, we'll pay any kid a thousand dollars to become top one percent.”

“Our kids at college aren't getting paid, they're all four-oh students.”

“I mean, we're 20 hours, not 200. Right? We're 10 times faster.”

“And when I kind of heard about what alpha school was thinking of doing with high school and this new, like high school for founders, where you make a million dollars or you get all your tuition back.”

“His schools across the US are top one percent students in every single course and category that they have.”

“The students learn in two hours a day, AI guided, and the rest of the day is self-discovery plus outings, et cetera.”

“In, in our schools, we start teaching about money in kindergarten. Right. And so we have a whole financial literacy program that starts in kindergarten all the way up through 12th grade to teach all the good habits that people need to have.”

“We say, do you love school more than vacation, right? And 40 to 60% of our kids each eight weeks, depends on the workshops and whether they're really cool or what their vacation choice is”

“A few months ago in the spring, two thirds of the high school students sent me a note and said, can we keep the school open this summer? We don't want summer break.”

“And we are the best performing academic school in the country on any, every single class we have is top one percent. And so in every grade, every subject, no school can say that.”

“So in two hours a day, they sit down for two hours. They learn more than twice as much as if they sat in class. And so they're learning so fast. It doesn't matter where they come in. They can come in, you know, top 25%, bottom 25%. They are going to get to top…”

“We will take any middle schooler, girls or boys, and we will pay them a thousand dollars if they get to top one percent.”

“The number one motivator and the name of our product is time back. Give kids their time back. There is nothing, more than money, more than anything, time back is the biggest motivator.”

“We had 80,000 people apply for our jobs. They want to be an alpha guide because they get to spend their entire day connecting with kids and helping them transform their lives into who they want to be.”

“So alpha school is expensive. So our tuition is 40 to 75,000 dollars.”

“Like I've put in a billion dollars as to kickstart this.”

“One of the things I've learned as a principal now, and I've been principal for three years, is parents want their kids to be educated the way they were.”

“Well, I'm taking a billion dollars cash out of the company so I can fund.”

“Now, we're coming out with schools at half the price, and we're hitting, we're- Even at half the price, you're getting kids to like the very top results.”

“Academically, it's actually funny, because school's a bundle, and actually the easiest and cheapest things to fix is actually the academics, right? Because that's tech-driven. Versus the rest of the day is all very human driven.”

“At Alpha, we're up to, 96% of kids say they love school. 40 to 60% say, I'd rather go to school than go on vacation.”

“And so our academic performance, we're the best performing academic school in the country. We're, you know, all our classes now are, you know, are top one percent.”

“We can take kids from the bottom 25% and get them to the top 25% in two years.”

“We have third and fourth graders who outscore 50% of the high school graduates in this country.”

“What they do is motivational and emotional support, right? They are either motivating this kid, they are getting to know this kid so well, so that they know what does matter. And then second, how do I support them through that struggle loop we talked about ear…”

“And so, and that is our target goal. We're absolutely going to get there. It's not going to be tomorrow, but I, I'm in this for the next 20 years.”

“We have over a thousand Ukrainian refugees right on this system. And you're learning as fast as our 40,000 dollar private school.”

“For example, New York State right now currently bans any use of AI and these things, so your apps actually are not allowed there as far as I understand.”