Assertion Supported
Liemandt: Alpha 3rd and 4th Graders Outscore 50% of US High School Grads
“We have third and fourth graders who outscore 50% of the high school graduates in this country.”
Assertion Contradicted
Liemandt: Paying students directly is the most effective educational incentive
“Yeah. No, paying the kids is by far the most effective way to do it. And you can get, you know, big effect size on, on doing this. It really works.”
Opinion
Liemandt: Two decades of VC-backed EdTech have completely failed
“Lots of VCs has funded lots of ed tech. None of it works. Right? There's our ed tech investment goes like this, test scores keep going down.”
Insight
Liemandt: Core academics are the easiest part of schooling to fix
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liemandt: Alpha students learn twice as much in just two hours
“In our model, right, we have built a learning engine that teaches kids 10 times faster. And so how that reacts or how you see it in our school is our kids come in, our students come in two hours a day. They're at an AI tutor. It's not Teacher in front of the c…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liemandt: Alpha School Ranks in Top 1% Nationally Across All Classes
“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.”
Opinion
Liemandt: 90% of Students Use ChatGPT to Cheat
“If you deploy ChatGPT to students,
90% of them use it to cheat.”
Disclosure
Liemandt: Withdrawing $1 billion in cash to fund education reform
“Well, I'm taking a billion dollars cash out of the company so I can fund.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liemandt: Alpha Moves Bottom-Quartile Students to Top 25% in Two Years
“We can take kids from the bottom 25% and get them to the top 25% in two years.”
Insight
Liemandt: Giving students their time back is the strongest academic motivator
“The name of our product is called Time Back. Time Back. Give kids their time back. That's cool. And that is by far the most motivation.”
Disclosure
Liemandt: Alpha School pays middle schoolers $1,000 for top 1% performance
“We pay every kid in middle school at Alpha a thousand dollars if they get to top one percent. And, but it funds their Robin Hood for Kids account to teach them how to earn, save, invest spend, and donate.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Oct 2045
Liemandt: Alpha School will reduce global per-student education costs below $1,000
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liemandt: 1,000+ Ukrainian refugees learn as fast as $40k private school kids
“We have over a thousand Ukrainian refugees right on this system. And you're learning as fast as our 40,000 dollar private school.”
Disclosure
Liemandt: Education reform requires a sub-$1,000 on-device AI tablet
“Sometime in the next three to five years, we need a tablet that's less than a thousand dollars, so on-device AI to, you know, hit the cost target, on-device AI that teaches every kid on this planet everything they need to know in two hours a day or less.”
Opinion
Liemandt: TikTok brainwashes youth to favor socialism and restrict free speech
“The two things that, you know, TikTok that your generation believes that a bunch of people don't is that socialism is better than capitalism and the rights of the listener are better than free speech. And those, that is what's on TikTok, right? Those are the t…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Liemandt: Trilogy was the first AI enterprise product to hit $1B
“Our claim to fame was we were the first AI product to sell a billion dollars”
Insight
Liemandt: Elite college graduates want grueling challenges, not corporate pampering
“They want to be challenged. And I remember just having discussions with other companies. I'm like, you're trying to babysit them and make it nice. And they don't want to, you know, do a gas cap, you know, if they literally want to come down here, work hard, sh…”
Insight
Liemandt: EdTech is 10% matching difficulty, 90% student motivation
“Every educator will tell you the two things you need to educate a kid. You need a motivated student, and we'll talk about when we get to motivation. The second is, you have to put them in material of the correct difficulty. And AI tutors, and EdTech, not even …”
Insight
Liemandt: Kids retreat to TikTok because schools offer no better options
“Kids don't want to be consumers. They don't want to scroll TikTok and play video games all day. They only do it because our current system basically doesn't give them options.”
Assertion Supported
Liemandt: Trilogy University required 100-hour work weeks for new recruits
“Trilogy University in the nineties was the hardest bootcamp that any company in the world had. Harvard Business Review wrote articles on it. And, you know it was the hardest one available, which was, they came down and they worked a hundred hours a week, you k…”
Insight
Liemandt: Education incentives must reward daily habits over final outcomes
“No, and it's what you're teaching kids daily habits is actually what you're trying to incent, not just outstanding outcomes, because that's part of education.”
Insight
Liemandt: Parents inherently want their children educated exactly how they were
“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.”
Disclosure
Liemandt: Alpha is launching schools at half the price with top results
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liemandt: 96% of Alpha Students Report Loving School
“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.”
