Top Principal: Stop Sending Your Kids to School | Joe Liemandt

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Traditional school is time-based and coded for IQ and conscientiousness, so money alone can’t fix it.

  Liemandt argues the classroom model rewards two traits—high IQ and being a natural grinder—and doesn’t adapt for anyone else, while family income strongly predicts outcomes. Pouring in more money doesn’t raise either trait. Standards have quietly dropped: he says about 80% of Harvard grades are now A’s, and the median U.S. student gains roughly one point on the 300-point NWEA MAP scale from eighth grade to senior year.

• 02

  Mastery-based AI tutoring makes learning effort-based, not IQ-based.

  Knowledge is cumulative, so a seventh grader who struggles usually has fourth- or fifth-grade holes. Like a coach who won’t let a point guard lose the ball 20% of the time, the system only advances you once you know material cold. Bloom’s ‘two sigma’ finding showed mastery tutoring’s power but was unaffordable with human tutors. Grade-level laws in some states make it illegal for teachers to teach below grade—so the sixth-grade teacher hands sixth-grade work to kids who can’t read.

• 03

  Material takes far less time than school allots: roughly 20–30 hours per grade per subject.

  Seventh-grade science gets ~180 class hours plus homework in a normal school; with Alpha’s app, Timeback, the average student masters it in about 22 hours. Lessons target the ‘zone of proximal development’—80–85% correct—because 99% means no learning and 50% means disengagement. He estimates the teacher-in-front-of-the-class model wastes about 90% of kids’ time.

• 04

  Generative AI writes personalised lessons; chatbots for academics are ‘cheatbots.’

  Alpha doesn’t hand kids ChatGPT—he says 90% of academic chatbot use is cheating. Instead an LLM combines the curriculum, the child’s knowledge graph, their interest graph (baseball analogies, an Avengers choose-your-own-adventure at the right Lexile level) and, from 2026, cognitive-load theory. A frontier model also watches the screen and coaches behaviour, with a ‘waste meter’ flagging skipped videos or scroll-to-the-questions habits. It currently costs about $10,000 per child, which he aims to cut below $1,000, then $100.

• 05

  Motivation is 90% of the problem, and time back is the motivator.

  His first week as principal, fifth graders said they’d love school with ‘less school’—ideally none. They negotiated two focused hours in exchange for four hours of ‘awesome stuff.’ Ed tech mostly fails, he argues, because dropped into a six-hour day kids have no reason to engage. At the sports academy, kids play once the meter turns green, and coaches tell them to stop messing around so everyone can play.

• 06

  The rule: kids must love school—more than vacation.

  When 96% of students said they loved school the metric stopped being useful, so Alpha now asks whether they’d rather be at school than on vacation; 40–60% say yes. In May, two-thirds of high schoolers asked him to keep school open over summer. He challenges executives who say school should be ‘spinach’: would they say that about their employees’ jobs?

• 07

  High standards with high support is what makes kids happy.

  Kindergartners climb a 40-foot rock wall, harnessed, and come down beaming. Child development is a cycle of struggling, failing, sometimes crying and succeeding with a caring adult—a cycle families expect from sports but schools rarely provide. He links middle-school disengagement and mental-health problems to low standards and dopamine loops, not to pressure.

• 08

  Redefine teachers as guides who only connect and motivate.

  A standard teacher needs five hard skills: subject expertise, teaching technique, motivating kids, handling parents and administration—then gets underpaid. Alpha removes subject matter and pedagogy (AI handles them), hires a dean of parents, and hires the top 1% of teachers purely to coach. Parents of teens are asked: do you trust your guide to hold high standards so you can provide unconditional love?

• 09

  The school owns the outcome: if a child isn’t learning, it’s the system’s fault.

  About 50% of educators leave when told they’re accountable for every kid learning. Lesson designers get on calls with kids stuck on their lessons. He traces this to Jack Welch telling him that even an award-winning product sucks if the customer gets no ROI.

• 10

  Parents are being misled by grade inflation.

  Among hundreds of transfers from $40–75K private schools, some A students were ahead a grade, but many more were three years behind; B students were three to seven years behind. Parents also resist having kids fill gaps below grade level, which is why many schools fear assessments that would reveal holes.