The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Liemandt: Alpha's K-6 gets more perfect STAAR scores than a 100,000-student district
“One of our building, our K through six building down in Austin gets more hundreds on the Texas star than a school district of a 100,000 kids.”
Liemandt: Alpha School's academic performance is top of any US school
“So our academic performance is the top of any school in the country, and we do it in dramatically less time.”
Liemandt: A student can learn a grade-level subject in 20 to 30 hours
“That you can teach an entire grade level Of material for one subject in about 20 to 30 hours.”
Liemandt: Traditional classroom lecturing is the worst instructional method for children
“The teacher in front of the classroom is like the worst way to teach kids. And there's all these ways where kids can learn two, five, 10 times faster. But it doesn't work in the teacher in front of the classroom.”
Liemandt: MAP Tests Show Alpha Students Learn 2x in Two-Hour Days
“And then the January maps test come back and it shows they're learning twice as much in two hours a day. So our standard is. In two hours a day, you'll learn twice as much as sitting in class for six.”
Liemandt: Alpha will launch a homeschool product delivering 2x learning next year
“And so I believe next year we will have a homeschool version that somebody will be able to buy. The kids can be able to sit down and deliver two X in two hours for sure.”
Liemandt: Alpha raised a 740 math SAT by drilling third-grade multiplication
“We have one student who was, you know, and this is sort of a unique, an extreme example, and I hesitate to say it, but, you know, we had a student who was 7:40 on the math SAT. And in looking, right they were making careless errors, right? They were basically,…”
Liemandt: Alpha School is alone in running a closed-loop learning engine
“We're basically the only place that has that closed loop, which is why we're able to get these crazy awesome outcomes”
Liemandt: Generative AI will scale high-speed personalized learning to 1B kids
“Three years ago with Gen AI, I was like, ah, this is finally the technology that is going to allow education to scale, and we can take all this awesomeness where kids can learn two, five, 10 times better, faster, and get it out to a billion kids.”
Liemandt: A sub-$1,000 tablet will replace K-12 education within five years
“Sometime in the next five years, I don't know exactly when, but there's going to be a tablet that's less than a thousand dollars that is going to teach every kid on this planet, everything they need to know in two hours a day, right? That's coming, right? It's…”
Liemandt: Diluting an extreme operating model to 85% inevitably fails
“If it, if 85% worked, I'd do that, but it doesn't. I'm pushing it to where it needs to be for it to work, and if all of a sudden you back off those, it's gonna fail for some reason, right? If you don't believe your school needs to have kids love school, they'l…”
Liemandt: Mainstream learning apps have mastery standards that are far too low
“If you use existing apps and use them at the mastery standard they have, You'll struggle to get the results we get at alpha. Because the mastery standard that's embedded in all the apps and used is just too low.”
Liemandt: Alpha students scored 5s on AP World History in under 75 hours
“Our AP kids, like, they'll do AP, you know, world history, where our kids all got fives, because the test came back a couple weeks ago. They all get fives and they spend 75 hours max to do AP.”
Liemandt: Alpha School pays guides a minimum salary of $100,000
“Our minimum pay for a teacher is a 100,000 dollars. And so like in the Austin market, you know, that's basically double the pay of it.”
Liemandt: Personalized question streams produce 10x more learning than passive classes
“And I just give you an unending stream of questions that you're engaged with that you really like, right? The amount of that you are going to learn is 10 times more than you would passively sitting in class, you know, disengaged.”
Liemandt: Gifted Students Learn 3x to 5x Faster in Two Hours
“Those kids aren't learning two X and two hours. They're learning three X, four X, five X. I mean, they're just crushing it because they love it.”
Liemandt: Alpha School AI has no chat functionality enabled
“We literally don't have chat functionality activated in our AI. Like, it is not a chatbot. It's terrible. And that's not what people need, right?”
Liemandt: Alpha School burns $10,000 per student annually on AI computing
“And you know, we are AI burn is like 10,000 bucks a kid right now, but it's going to be down.”
Liemandt: Alpha School eliminated adult academic teaching entirely
“My first day, I literally sat in front of the parents. It was actually first day of school, which was two weeks after I started. And I was like, you know, we, we're not going to have any adult do academic teaching in this school.”
Liemandt: Alpha invested over $100 million in AAA video game designers
“We've invested over a hundred million dollars in getting some of the best video game designers in the world. They're down in Austin, and they are building a video game on top of the two hour learning engine that they believe will rival Any video game on the pl…”
Liemandt: Adopting Alpha's model requires completely rebuilding schools from the ground up
“You got to rebuild your whole school from the ground up, right? You can't just sort of tack it on, right? This is a full rebuild.”
Liemandt: Alpha School kindergartners climb a 40-foot rock wall
“Well, we have kindergartners who climb a 40 foot rock wall.”
Liemandt: Alpha School used overnight human teams annotating screen recordings
“So three years ago we would just sit there and have teams of people all night, you know, the kids would finish and then all night you would just sit and watch the videos. And annotate them of, okay, that's what's going wrong here. This is what the kid's doing.…”
Liemandt: Alpha trained second graders to run 5K in under 35 minutes
“And they incrementally do it so that by December, right. These kids are able to run the five K in 35 minutes.”
Liemandt: US spends $20K per student, Alpha costs over $40K
“We spend 20 grand a kid in this country across, you know, alphas, 40,000 plus”
Liemandt: Alpha School fifth-graders ran an Airbnb for life skills
“Our fifth
Graders last year or two years ago ran an Airbnb.”
Liemandt: Alpha tests fail to hit 2x learning in 2 hours for homeschoolers
“So our tests, we're not getting two X and two hours with the homeschool kids.”
Liemandt acknowledges Alpha School has not proven its model at scale
“Well, I mean, your best example right now is just, we haven't done this at scale.”
Liemandt: Alpha School students practice public speaking at Austin FC press conferences
“These kids all practice their public speaking, and then they go up to Austin FC, the stadium, and get to go, you know, once they pass, they get to see the game, and they get to go then sit and see the postgame press conference, you know, with their favorite st…”
Liemandt: Alpha evaluates new software by whether it boosts knowledge or cuts time
“Fundamentally the design goal that, you know, our team uses is when we put in new software or new anything, does it increase their academic knowledge or reduce the time that it takes to learn it.”
Liemandt: Partnering with top streamers on tutoring-and-tournament gaming
“We're actually working with some of the big streamers and video game players who are going to host these big events.”
Liemandt: Alpha School pivoted from 2X Learning to Two-Hour Learning
“And it took me hundreds of parent meetings to sort of, I was slow on the, listen to the customer side. And then we switched it to two hour learning.”