Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Why AI Alone Won’t Fix Education—MacKenzie Price Explains the Missing Ingredient
MacKenzie Price is a Stanford grad, mom of two, and the Co-Founder of 2 Hour Learning - a revolutionary learning platform that harnesses the power of AI to give kids a 1:1 personalized learning experience. Her students excel in academics while spending most of their day learning life skills that set them up for future success. She founded the first Alpha School ten years ago in Austin, Texas and now has eight schools, with others opening in the fall.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why motivation is the missing key in EdTech.
- How AI enables personalized, mastery-based learning.
- The new role of teachers as motivational guides.
- How to build life skills alongside academics.
- What’s next for AI in education—and why it’s exciting.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:03:19] MacKenzie on Founding Alpha Schools to create a better model for her own children.
[00:06:36] Why tech alone can’t drive student success without human connection.
[00:12:54] How Alpha Schools deliver two hours of academics and a full day of life skills.
[00:21:56] Teachers become motivational coaches, not just content experts.
[00:28:11] The power of AI to connect learning with students’ passions.
[00:38:05] Rethinking assessments: AI makes feedback immediate and actionable.
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🎉 Presenting Sponsor/s:
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[00:00:00] MacKenzie Price: You know, to create a great learner, there's two ingredients that are required. One of them is the right level and pace of material delivered at the right time, and EdTech is great at that, especially now that we have AI to be able to really make sure that kids are effectively and efficiently learning.
We're not doing the anti-patterns and we're able to really. See how kids are going. But 90% of what creates a great learner is they've gotta be a motivated student, and that's the thing that's always been ignored.
[00:00:32] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12
[00:00:43] Ben Kornell: higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at Ed Tech Insiders. Remember. Subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar.
And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoy today's pod.
[00:01:11] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to our interview with mackenzie. Price. A Mackenzie Price is a Stanford grad. She's a mother of two, and she's the co-founder of Two Hour Learning, a revolutionary learning platform that harnesses the power of AI to give kids a one-to-one personalized learning experience. Her students excel in academics while spending most of their day learning life skills that set them up for future success.
She also founded the First Alpha School 10 years ago in Austin, Texas, and now has eight schools with others opening in. To the fall. Welcome to EdTech Insiders Mackenzie. Price.
[00:01:47] MacKenzie Price: Thanks for having me, Alex. I'm super excited to talk all things education and tech. You name it, let's go.
[00:01:53] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. And you're a podcaster as well?
[00:01:55] MacKenzie Price: I am. I have a future of education podcast and kind of social media that we do because what we found is people are really craving. Innovation and education. They wanna see a change. They wanna see schools that are doing things differently. So it's been a really fun ride to be able to kind of open up the windows of what we're doing at our schools and help teachers and students and parents all see that there's this really bright future ahead of them.
In fact, I don't think there's been a more exciting time to be a five-year-old. And I also think it's a really exciting time to be a teacher, despite, of course, what everyone would think about it. I think we're gonna see such a change in education in the next five to 10 years that we're transforming the role of the teacher in the classroom.
And I think it's really bright, and again, I think students are in for a way, way better experience than they have been for the last. A hundred years.
[00:02:49] Alex Sarlin: I agree. And I think we're all trying to get our head around what that experience exactly looks like. And I think some are further along in envisioning it.
We're actually putting it into practice than others, but I think we're all heading towards that brighter, more sort of creative free flowing future. It's really exciting. I mean, you've been doing AI. In education for a while now, and I understand that part of why you wanted to do innovation in education actually came from your own family.
Tell us a little bit about your dissatisfaction with the existing system and what led you to start Alpha.
[00:03:19] MacKenzie Price: Yeah. I will admit it was a very selfish motive, which is I wanted something better for my children. I wanted my kids to spend the 13 years that they were gonna spend in education, not bored, not just going through the motions, not just learning how to check the boxes and do what they were told to do.
I was one of those students growing up. I was a really good student. I knew how to get an A, but I hated school. And I was always that kid who would raise my hand and be like, I'm sorry, why do I need to know this? Like this is not something I'm interested in. And so when I had my two daughters head off to school, they were both pretty bright students, not like crazy.
I didn't have like little man Tate, they were like above average kids. But very quickly, what I found was that that. Teacher in front of the classroom model that is time-based, where everyone's gotta move at the same pace. And I think about these poor teachers would have to spend time trying to figure out, okay, we've got some kids who are already reading and some kids who've never seen the alphabet.
How in the world are. They supposed to get everyone there. I believe teachers have been given a bucket with holes in it and told to empty the ocean. And no wonder it's such a hard job and more than half of teachers say that they would like to quit the business. And we're seeing that leave because the model is set up for failure.
It's set up to not work for anybody. And so I saw that with my own two daughters, and I knew that it wasn't about going to a private school or a different public school. It was about. Changing that model. And so in 2014, when my girls were in third grade and first grade, I decided let's reimagine education.
And sort of the question I asked was, how high is high? What can kids do when given great resources, in terms of support and high standards, what can they do? And so that really fundamentally comes down to personalized learning. Personalized learning, which is totally made available via. Ed tech and then allowing our teachers to focus on what only humans can do well, which is motivational connection and motivational support, and getting to know students and figuring out what they like, what do they enjoy, exploring and doing, and then helping them figure that out.
And so that's kind of been, I think the secret to our success 10 years later is. We've created this environment where we really want kids to be able to unlock their potential, get connected and motivated, have incredible mentorship from our teachers, and be able to get the level and pace of academic material that's right for them.
I. Which is what enables us to end up with classes that are top 1% in the country.
[00:05:58] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, and that's a great vision. And you mentioned personalization on a pace personalization, on level personalization and differentiation on prior knowledge. Like some kids come in not knowing the alphabet. Others kids are reading fluently.
I think the ed tech world has seen a few different attempts in different places in different. Eras to sort of try to make school more personalized, try to offer students a differentiated experience using technology. And sometimes it's worked really well and sometimes it's like not so clear, but you've made a model that really has outcomes.
Tell us about what a day in the life of a alpha school or two hour learning student looks like.
[00:06:36] MacKenzie Price: Yeah. Well, fundamentally, the reason EdTech has not been the Holy Grail solution that everyone's hoped it would be is a couple things. First of all, I believe that it doesn't really work that great in a hybrid system when you're still trying to rely on the fundamental teacher in front of the classroom.
In a time-based class, you can have a kid go do three times a week, 20 minutes of Khan Academy, but then they get plopped back into. Their math class, right? And it's like, it doesn't matter how much progress they made in Khan Academy, they're still gonna be sitting and doing the lesson that the teacher has planned for that day or that week.
The other thing is that unfortunately, apps can be easily misused, right? We call it anti-patterns. A kid can be. Deciding to just topic shop and like, oh, I'm gonna do a little of this and a little of that. Or as soon as it starts getting hard, they're like, oh, I'm gonna back out and do something else. Or I'm gonna just randomly click D-D-D-D-D and hope that eventually I get something right.
And so that's one of the issues. But the other thing is that, you know, to create a great learner, there's two ingredients that are required. One of them is the right level and pace of material delivered at the right time, and ed tech. Is great at that, especially now that we have AI to be able to really make sure that kids are effectively and efficiently learning.
We're not doing the anti-patterns and we're able to really see how kids are going. But 90% of what creates a great learner is they've gotta be a motivated student, and that's the thing that's always been ignored. So I will tell you, Alex. We get parents all the time who come into our schools and they're like, we wanna play with your AI tutor.
Like, let's see the AI tutor. And I'm like, okay. There's nothing that special to see about that. It's like IXL or Grammarly or E Gump or Alpha Math or Alpha Read program. I. It's an app, right? It's doing that. But here's what is special is that our teachers are completely focused on how to help that kid that maybe doesn't like to read but is excited about building a little business, right?
Or whatever it is. Those types of things that our guides work on. So that's, I think the big key differentiator that's allowed us to really be successful is we know that central to the success of our model is you've gotta have a motivated student. And one of the things I think is really cool about.
Artificial intelligence, it's allowing us to raise human intelligence, both for the students because our kids can crush academics when they're given that right level and pace of material, but also from a emotional, social perspective. Our teachers get to spend time on that personal one-to-one connection.
I just read a survey statistic. The other day that said that the average K through eight teacher is getting about 22 seconds of one-on-one time with their students each day. Like that's nothing. And what we've done is allowed our teachers to be able to spend their entire day focused on understanding like.
Alex, what makes you tick when you get frustrated? What do you say? So it's kind of a long intro to the fact that if you walk into one of our schools, the first thing you're gonna see is we always start our days with what we call a limitless launch. Think Tony Robbins for kids, right? It's a time where the students get together with the teachers and they usually do some sort of like impossible activity.
Try and figure out how to cut a piece of paper such that you could walk through it, create a hole in a piece of paper that allows you to walk through it, which actually is pretty hard. It's. But it is hard and do something that really gets kids both excited and motivated for the day, and also teaches some sort of growth mindset strategy that later on in the day when they might be having a challenge, getting through that pre-algebra problem, they can say, Hey, I remember when I was working on this group activity, and it was like, that was frustrating.
Here's what I can do. So it gets 'em excited. Then our students go into the part of the day where. They're working on their core skills, so K through eight, that's math and reading and language and science and social studies. And then in high school it becomes AP courses, everything from AP bio to calculus to literature to US history, you name it.
And so the kids during that time are all working on their own devices, doing the pace and level of work that they need in that state. We generally use the Pomodoro technique, which means about. 25 minutes of focus time and then they can take breaks. For our younger kids, that's even less time. In fact, we just saw in January we got some results that kids are spending about 1.8 hours a day on their academics, so it's even less than two hours.
And then by lunchtime. They're done with their academics. But one thing I know for sure, Alex, is that parents don't really want their kids to come home at lunchtime. School is a full day activity, right? And so then what we do is we've given kids back their most valuable resource, which is time to go pursue interests and passions they have.
And so all afternoon at our schools. We're doing life skills workshops that are really fun, engaging workshops that the kids get to pick and are excited about doing, and we're teaching life skills, things like financial literacy and public speaking and communication and socialization, and they get to do this in this really fun way, super interactive group-based often.
The teachers are super engaged in it, and they get home from school at the end of the day and they're fired up, right? They've had a great time. They've gotten better at their academics, which we really believe that competence leads to confidence. In fact, I was just talking to a parent who said that their daughter said, you know what?
Turns out I'm warming up to this whole math thing, and they're like, she used to hate. Math, but you know what? When you understand math, you kind of like it. It's when you don't understand it that you're like, I hate this. Right? And so that's one of the things that we kind of do, and really what we're trying to do is we're trying to create self-driven learners who learn how to learn and are going to be prepared to be successful in this crazy world that we're gonna be in.
Where more than half of the people growing up are gonna do jobs that don't even exist yet. And that's where we kind of are. One of the things I really think is what we say now is. In this new world, it's no longer about the three R's of read and write and arithmetic. It's now the four C's. It's critical thinking and communication and collaboration and creativity.
Those are skills that we want our kids to be ready to go out and do. And while they're at it, let's make sure they love school. I.
[00:12:54] Alex Sarlin: One thing that strikes me and it's I think is really interesting about your model is that you mentioned motivation is the key. Motivation being engagement and motivation and understanding why and what's exciting about what you're learning is absolutely core, and I totally agree and lots of research supports that.
We talked to Satya Netta, who ran IBM Watson's AI tutoring capacity a number of years ago, and he actually gave up on it for exactly that reason. He said, we can make an app that. Can answer your questions or quiz you or all these things, but we can make an AI app at the time at least, that can motivate students.
They were like, that's really the core and that's the missing piece. So you've realized the same thing and you have very distinctly split the role of the guides to motivate and contextualize and inspire and empower and all these great things from the actual academic. Support, which you can sort of use technology for.
How did you get to that model? And then the secondary question, how do you get these guides? How do you recruit them? How do you train them so that they can actually do that really different type of teaching work?
[00:13:57] MacKenzie Price: Well, I will tell you, it's been a really. Steep mountain to climb to get people to understand that a teacher teaching an academic subject is not the best way to learn.
And even though learning science leading universities, Harvard and Oxford and Stanford for 40 years since I was in elementary school, they have written papers about how students can learn 2, 5, 10 times faster. But they all say it's gotta be in a one-to-one mastery-based environment. They all start or end with, unfortunately, these results are not possible in a teacher in front of the classroom model.
And yet, if you go and ask anybody on the street what makes for great learning, they will say, well, a great teacher, you gotta have a great teacher. You do this. And unfortunately, it's just wrong. Right? And there's nothing wrong with teachers. It's the model that's a problem, right? It's the model that doesn't work.
And so it took us quite a while. We went through. Hills and valleys of getting parents on board and even getting staff on board with the idea. One of the common things that people would say, well sure you're using apps to teach, but you eventually you need to have a teacher who's really sitting down and like making math come alive for that student or whatever.
And actually, we've always been really big fans of measuring our results and there were a few years in there. Where we were not getting our two x learning goal, which is one of the commitments we have now. We were always learning faster than a traditional school because we were doing this. But again, that hybrid model does not work.
And the idea of holding kids to a standard of you're gonna get the work done because as the Watson inventor said, A kid who wants to screw around is not going to be learning way faster. So we have to focus on that. So what happened, and this really, I would say about three years ago. We got just really fanatical about our commitment that kids are gonna learn two X and they're gonna love school and we're gonna do it with app-based learning.
And then with AI coming really hard in the picture during that time, it just made it so much easier for us to make sure to monitor how students are progressing through the system, as well as be able to take the assessment information we have on a student, feed it back into our AI tutor, and then go and fill holes.
And one of the reasons that I. Have a super high bar for academics is because it's actually not that hard, right? It's actually pretty easy. We can take a kid who's in the 10th percentile, we can get 'em up to the 50th percentile within one year, and to the 90th percentile within two. By providing that academic structure.
But as far as the motivation piece goes, you know, I'll give you an example of a challenge we're facing right now. We have a homeschool program, it's called Alpha Anywhere, and we have tons of people who are interested in signing up for it, but we have a wait list and we haven't released it on a wider audience yet.
Because we are not getting the same learning results that we get in our in-person schools. And the reason is because we don't have our teachers in those kids' homes doing motivation. And what happens is a lot of parents will say, oh no, I'm homeschooling my kid and I know how to motivate them. Well, nah, maybe, maybe not.
Right? Right. And so the thing that we've done is we've found our teachers and our guides at our schools, they have to have a proven track record of being able to motivate young people. So we often find that we get people who had a background in sports, they were professional athletes, they were coaches.
'cause you learn so much around motivation and life skills development through that attitude. We also see, we get people who are really successful in other areas of life, like in business or entrepreneurship or something like that. And they wouldn't wanna be a teacher in a traditional school, but here they're like, oh, this is what I get to focus on.
Yes. So an example of that, one of my daughter's favorite guides currently was a woman who went to Harvard Law School and practiced law for five years and. She's super smart. She's so cool. She would never be caught dead in a traditional school teaching freshman English, right? But here she's like, okay, wait.
I get to focus on just helping a kid go make whatever big project they wanna do, a reality and connecting with them, they're into that. So as a result, we've got this very attractive role. Here's another thing, teachers should be paid well. Right. Like people who wanna spend their careers in a classroom with kids should absolutely be well compensated for it.
It's a huge travesty in our country right now. And I will tell you one of the reasons I started this school was because I knew I didn't wanna homeschool my kids. I'm not equipped to do that, so we pay them well. They have to pass a C catt, which is a cognitive test, they've gotta be in the top 15%. So we wanna make sure they're smart and sharp with these kids, and then they have to be just super experts at motivation.
And one thing that's a little different in our model than a lot of schools, we actually hold our teachers accountable for delivering the three commitments to our students that they'll love school. That they'll learn two x in two hours and that they will learn life skills. And so we lose people in our hiring process when they find out like, wait, that's my job to make sure that happens.
And Alex, it's really interesting if you think about it, in traditional school, a kid who wants to do well is usually based on two things. Their iq, it's like they gotta be a little smarter. If they're not as smart, that's hard to do well in school. And their level of conscientiousness, like are they willing to.
Dot the i's and cross the T's and do the things you have to do to be good at school. Like I was good at school, even though I hated it. I was good at it. So if a kid's not doing well in school, it's usually considered the kid's fault. It's like, oh, that kid's not that smart, or he's lazy, or he doesn't play the game, he doesn't do whatever.
And at our schools, we believe if a kid's not doing well, it's. Our fault. It's the school's fault. It means that there's some sort of motivation issue or that they're not in the right level of material. Right. And they need to go back and revisit some things and fill some knowledge gaps. And I just think, obviously, I think if I went out on the streets and said, it's the school's fault.
Kids aren't doing well in our country. There'd be a lot of unhappy administrators and teachers who would say, gimme a break. It's about parents and this and this, but. I hold our schools to a higher standard, which is really, if a kid is not successful, it's something with our system that's wrong. And that's the cool part about technology.
If you're a tech guy, you understand usually there's something wrong with the tech, what's going on. Right? And for us it's the tech and the motivation connection. That we've combined together. And I won't let another school come in and license my two hour learning program until they show me that they know what they're gonna do around motivation.
Because again, our tech platform, it's awesome, but it's not that awesome. It can't just be handed to a kid. Yeah. And say, here, go for it. Let us know when you graduate high school. And so we really have to be. Clear in that bundle. And the other reason is I think it's also important because so many people are scared of technology and they're scared of ai.
Teachers are scared that it's gonna take their jobs. And here's the thing, it's absolutely not. You're never gonna walk into a school where it's all kids just sitting on computers by themselves, and there's no adults. But it is going to transform the role and teachers are gonna need to be willing. To change and think of it.
And I will say, you know, I met a teacher, I was out at Stanford a couple weeks ago speaking at a conference and a teacher had come up to me and said, I'm scared to death. I'm gonna lose my job because of ai. And I said, oh no, let me tell you how beautiful the future is for you. And I gave like my little 32nd elevator pitch about this.
And he looked at me and he said, well, I have no idea how I would motivate a. Student. And then he said, I guess maybe I'd like show him an unemployment report and say, don't end up like this. And I was like, oh, okay. Well yeah, you're gonna have to work on that a little bit, you know? So that's a bummer. But I think there are a lot of people in the world who would love to pour into our young people if they knew like, Hey, I could actually be successful at this because I'm not fighting a system that's.
Broken.
[00:21:56] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. I think one thing you're honing in on here is something that I think in the ed tech world, it has been trying to get its head around for a while, which is that a teacher plays multiple roles in a classroom. And traditionally what I'm hearing you say, I don't wanna put words in your mouth, is, but traditionally people feel like the sage on the stage model though.
Like you have to be a subject matter expert who can walk people through the material, answer questions, assess on this exact material, has been the one that's been around for hundreds of years. Technology can take some of the aspects of that, but not all, because that's not the only thing teachers do.
They play the role of, of a therapist and counselor and motivator and group inspire and all sorts of things and trying to make things relevant to the student. There's like so many different hats that teacher has to wear in any given day and they spend so much time doing it. So it sounds like you've.
Gone quite far into this concept and really cracked the code in a lot of ways about when people say a guide on the side. That's what a teacher should be, a facilitator that can really help students and really make them love school and do well. But you don't have to necessarily be a chemistry person who teaches chemistry because chemistry is your passion.
It's just a really different view of teaching. Am I on the right track? Does it You're, you're absolutely on the right track.
[00:23:14] MacKenzie Price: Yeah, and I mean, you're not gonna see students at our school sitting with our teachers where the teacher's teaching someone how to carry the one, right, or how to change the formula.
They're not gonna do that. They are going to though be there with the kids to say, Hey, what are the things we can focus on? And I'll give you examples of that. We had a student who was easily distracted, right? He was constantly just looking out the window. This, well, his guide knows that one of the things he was doing when he was looking out the window, he's obsessed with birds, like super obsessed with birds, loves ornithology.
And he was a fourth grade student at this point. And so she, and he sat down and said, okay, we're gonna create this little project. And they made this. Bulletin board of all the different kinds of birds that are located here in Austin, Texas. And our school happens to be right in front of this big green belt.
And so they made a list and pictures of all the birds. So he built this thing out and then when he would hit his academic goals each week, it would earn him. Time with his guide out in the green belt with binoculars looking for birds. And suddenly that kid was like, I am in right. I will lock in and get my math done, and get my language done, and get my science done.
And then I get to go spend time with my guide and find the warbler and the grackle and the whatever, right? And look for this stuff. And she took an interest that he had. And turned it into a way to give him superpowers and be successful. That kid, the next year in fifth grade, one of the life skills checks that we have is that you've gotta reach out to experts in a field of interest.
And he reached out to like 60 different ornithology experts and learned how to write a professional email and asked for a meeting, and he got responses from like 28 of the 60 people that reached out that said, sure, here's a book that I just wrote on this, or let's have a Zoom conversation about it. And was finding that interest.
Interest that the kid wants. But to be clear, his guide was never once saying, let me teach you about how to, you can tell how into education I am. I really do let AI do it. I'm like, I can't even say like diagram a sentence, whatever that is. Right? Let's let tech do that. And I think the problem that we have is when teachers think, okay, I'll use AI for a little bit of.
Help me with my lesson plan or whatever. But fundamentally, what we gotta do is we gotta figure out how do we give every single kid that one-to-one tutoring experience that they need? And that's where the magic happens of learning, right? And that's where EdTech needs to go. And so what I wanna do is, I'm kind of beating the drum, and part of the reason I have my future of education, podcasts and social media is I want people to see that there's this world where, wait, you can have.
AI providing this, and then teachers providing what only they can do well versus just this little, let's slowly maybe think about using a little technology here or there, and that's why we're getting the results that we're getting and we're getting 'em, by the way, across the board. We're getting 'em with kids who are struggling.
We get 'em with kids who are super advanced and would be bored in normal class. We get 'em with kids from. Lower socioeconomic status. We get 'em with kids who are English as a second language. We get 'em with kids who are neurodiverse and have learning differences. When we say personalized learning, we actually mean personalized for that kid.
And then here's the cool thing, Alex. As generative AI just keeps getting better and better. We're gonna be able to not only take the knowledge graph that a student has 'cause we know exactly what they know, but we'll overlap that with their interest graph and we'll be able to say, okay, you need to learn math.
And you love fashion, let's combine that. Or baseball stats, or you're needing to read, you're a second grader that's reading at an eighth grade level and you need to read at that appropriate level, but you can't read content that's an eighth grade content. Or how about on the other hand, the sixth grader who's reading at a second grade level but doesn't wanna be reading?
The cat crossed the road, right? Let's make it at least seem a little more interesting. And that's what's so cool is generative AI is gonna allow us to do so much of that. And then you also think of it from learning science theory. You know, there's such a thing as like cognitive load theory, which is basically says, Alex, if you only need five.
Reps of a concept in order to learn that concept, then you should just get five reps. And if it takes me 15 reps to learn that same concept, then I should get 15. You shouldn't have to do 15 just 'cause I need 15 and I shouldn't only get five because you only need five. And when we can actually say, okay, for every student we know what their cognitive load is and we know what keeps them in the learning zone.
Like the correct learning zone. And we know that if they get overwhelmed, they're not gonna learn. Or if they're bored and not engaged, they're not gonna learn. Let's keep 'em in that. And by the way, that might be different. I might be able to crush my English language, but I need a little more time on math.
Right. And I can do that. That's what's so cool about technology and that's why it's such a cool time to be a kid in this new education future.
[00:28:11] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I agree. And I was gonna ask you about exactly that. I think your ornithology example is such a great one. We talk to EdTech founders all the time on this podcast, and there are people doing some of the exact things you were saying, right?
To be able to level text, but keep it, you know, high interest text for students reading behind grade level. Biliteracy is doing exactly that and a couple of others as well. You're speaking our language. My language. I totally agree. The question I have for you is ai. Can do a lot of things. You've been doing AI in the classroom since almost 10 years now.
AI can translate that same teacher in the Ornithology example who says, oh, you love ornithology, you love birds. They can together with an AI intelligence, literally connect ornithology to every subject that student is studying. There's ways to connect. The knowledge graph and the interest graph in ways that I don't think anybody's ever had the time or ability to do, even in a super high touch model like yours, where the motivation is baked in and where the teachers are accountable for results, which is like, you know, so unusual for school.
Even with that, there's still not enough time in the day always to do it all, and now there is. So tell me more about your vision of how AI is going to enhance this type of learning even further.
[00:29:24] MacKenzie Price: Well, I mean, the other thing that AI enables us to do is get completely up to date, like minute by minute feedback on a kid.
And so again, even if you were to say, let's, let's say you found the world's greatest teacher and you gave one student to that teacher, think Plato and Socrates, right? Like you're back in that one-to-one tutoring environment. You and I are having a, a conversation, Alex, and I'm teaching you about World War II history, and I'm explaining something, but if every five seconds I'm like, are you getting it, Alex, did you get it?
Do you repeat what you got? You know, it's like we, we still don't know. Whereas what's cool about AI is we can literally tell, does this kid have it? We can incorporate all these different learning science principles, and that's been true of adaptive apps. It's rapid feedback, it's regular quizzing spaced, repetition, assess in real time, all those things, you know, assess through
[00:30:13] Alex Sarlin: natural interaction.
[00:30:14] MacKenzie Price: Exactly. It's incredible. And then you take things like again, you know, standardized tests, which are so brutal in the traditional system. And the reason they're so brutal is because nothing changes for that student as a result of the. What happens on that test, right? There's no change for that student.
Whereas in our system, you can take that standardized assessment, you plug it back into the AI, and it goes and says, okay, let's feed in all of these concepts that a student doesn't know. And also when you're assessing too, you can understand, like AI is able to look and say, okay, this student is struggling with this concept.
They need to watch a video instead, or they just need to reread the explanation. They need to slow down. Or it can say, you know what? The reason the student is struggling with this concept is because they need to go back and revisit a concept from a month, a year, three years ago that they don't have. And you know, once you have that, like, I don't know about you Alex, but I will tell you, I.
Literally flew off a math cliff in about ninth grade because I'd always been like, got the A's did this, and then in ninth grade, I don't know if I was in algebra two or whatever, but all of a sudden I was like, I have no idea what's going on. Absolutely no idea. Well, the reason is 'cause I didn't really have mastery of the more fundamental concepts, and so I was one of those kids who grew up hating math and also saying, I'm bad at math, I'm not a math person.
All of those things. Well, really, I. What I would've had, if I'd had strong, fundamental fast math things, then my fractions would've been making more sense, which means algebra makes more sense, which eventually means chemistry makes more sense, right? Because I actually know algebra, right? And physics would make more sense because I know my calculus, right?
Like I. Those types of things that are so important. So I think, you know, we're gonna be able to see a lot more connection to interest with AI adoption. We're gonna see much faster rates of learning because it's going to be even more intelligent about meeting students where they're at. It's gonna help students that, again, have special needs and can work through that way.
It's gonna allow students to. Go so much faster. And one of the things that we tell our students too, is often the fastest way forward is to go backwards, go in and fill some holes. And then again, suddenly algebra makes more sense when you remember your multiplication table like that. And so those are some things that we can do.
I think that's gonna be a great thing. And then. The other thing that AI does when we think of education, that's just on the academic side, but how about we do a workshop for our middle school students where kids go out and they get to be the leaders of a team in some sort of sport. You know, like they're out, they play a volleyball game and a kid will be the captain or a soccer game or whatever, and we mic them up and then we use AI to transcribe what they've communicated during the game.
To understand their leadership skills, their teamwork skills, were they, you know, positive. We do one for our fifth and sixth grade students, where it's a communication, teamwork workshop and leadership, and then we mic them up when they go to an escape room, and then we look at that public speaking. We actually take our kindergarten and first grade students and they'll have, you know, a thing of like, they're gonna do a show and tell in front of an audience, and they start by using AI apps.
To practice their speech. And it does everything from, gives them feedback on their intonation, their filler words, their, how fast they speak, how loud are they speaking, right? And that's why we had our kindergarten and first grade students this year. By December, they gave speeches in front of a hundred people.
These are five and six year olds who were able to get up and confidently speak in front of a hundred people because they got to start with an AI tool, which is pretty unintimidating, right? And so there's so many ways you use that. My daughter. Was using AI to create song lyrics in the style and melody of Taylor Swift songs to be able to study her a p.
Art History Cannons. They use AI to give feedback on business plans, and our third and fourth graders are doing that. Like there are so many places where they can use AI to give them superpowers. And that's the thing. We're not teaching our students how to use AI to cheat. We're teaching them how to use AI to elevate and go from there.
It helps with writing skills in terms of, again, not writing your paper for you, but giving feedback. What would make this more compelling? What would be the right thing? What's a better title for this? Those are things that, there's just so much. How about. Presentation, quality, you know, all of that. Suddenly I can actually be a great graphic designer that I wouldn't have had that natural talent for.
And by the way, the other thing is it actually gives me more interest for that, right? Like I'm doing this. And the other thing that I think is really cool about ai, you know, everyone's very scared of artificial intelligence. It's gonna make humans obsolete. But here's what I believe AI is really good at knowing the black and white of what.
Is known on the internet, right? So I'll give you an example. If you went into chat GPT and said, create the best K through 12 school in the country, what does it consist of? They would say, well, the teachers are very low student teacher ratio and they're very well trained. They're subject matter experts, and kids are doing this.
And then you say. Look up Mackenzie Price and two hour Learning and create a school that uses AI to do all of its academic teaching where the teachers then focus on motivation. Suddenly it's a whole different thing. Well, we had to think that up. AI didn't think that up. We did. And so what it's gonna allow humans to do is spend time on the frontier.
Of exploration and learning, and it's kind of saying like, here's how humans are gonna be smarter than ai. 'cause we're gonna be the ones who are out exploring the gray. And then as we build that knowledge, we throw it back into the known that AI does.
[00:35:57] Alex Sarlin: There are so many things in your answer here that I just think are so compelling for sort of painting of.
Future vision of what AI can do. You mentioned safe spaces for practicing things like public speaking and at a younger age, or at a more frequent cadence and being able to get feedback in real time from a neutral third party and a bot that is very powerful and could be done in many different arenas, including music, for example, but lots of different arenas.
I've never heard anybody do what you just said about you record people talking during sports events and. Think about how that transfers to leadership, but it ties into a trend we've been thinking about, which is basically turning things into data that weren't data in the past, right? Teach Effect is a startup that basically, you know, records classrooms, and then gives a teacher feedback about who was speaking, how much were they speaking?
Were you speaking too much? Did you use open-ended questions? All of these things that. In the past. They've happened for many years, but they were never captured and they were never synthesized and analyzed and fed back, and AI can now do that. I love your example of doing it for students in non-traditional assessment settings like sports.
That is fascinating and I love that. Obviously personalization is core to your model. One thing that strikes me as so interesting about what you're doing here is that. By taking the engagement and motivation piece and really putting that squarely on the humans in the school, then you don't have to worry about it in any of the AI roles that you're just saying.
I mean, it would be nice if the AI could make something more interest-based and therefore let slightly more engaging or motivating, but you're not relying on. It. And I think that's a really interesting model that I haven't heard others do. I, a lot of people think about AI can do this amazing stuff, but then I have to get kids excited about it.
And so what do I do there? Do I make it into a game? Do I make it into songs like Taylor Swift songs like you mentioned before? But I think the way you're splitting it saying the motivation, the life skills, building the motivation in this guide model, that's what makes kids love coming to school in the morning.
Then all the academics and all the technologies and the interplay and the data analysis just makes everything work better. It makes, it builds the outcomes. I don't feel like I've ever heard that split made that cleanly.
[00:38:05] MacKenzie Price: Well, the reason we've seen that, yeah. Is because, unfortunately, oftentimes the more fun and engaging an academic app is.
The less it actually is teaching, it starts turning into more of a video game. And that's one of the things over the last 10 years, we've really curated which apps are best for which subjects and which levels. 'cause not all apps are equal, not all apps are equal across all subjects or across all ages or even across all learners.
Like there's certain apps that are. Really great for those kids who are super motivated, naturally like intrinsically motivated or really advanced. And then that app is not great for the average kid. Right. The other thing is we call the two hours of learning that our students do in the morning, it's kind of two hours of what we call productive struggle.
So for example, our first commitment is that kids will love school. Our commitment is not, kids will love learning, it's they'll love school. Sometimes learning is challenging. Sometimes kids have a hard time, and you know what? Sometimes my job is challenging, right? And that's okay. Like not every day is a day at Disneyland when you're out trying to become 99th percentile in math and science and reading.
But what is cool is that kids, again, they can develop confidence as they become more competent. The other thing that EdTech is doing a really good job for us with and, and the AI tutor, it's giving kids a sense of ownership and agency over their learning journey. So instead of being trained to just be passive, hey, I show up to class and I sit back and the teacher teaches me whatever they're gonna teach me.
And if I didn't do well on the test, it's 'cause the teacher didn't cover that
[00:39:43] Alex Sarlin: or the teacher hates me. That's,
[00:39:45] MacKenzie Price: yeah. The teacher hates me. Or the teacher didn't cover that or the teacher wasn't good. Right. And instead our kids, and this is literally starting at kindergarten, our kids can go onto their dashboard and they can see like, okay.
These are the goals that I'm working on for today. These are the goals that I wanna hit over a week or a month, or here's how I'm gonna finish first grade math by the end of, you know, December. Right? Whatever it is. And they have so much more control over their learning experience, and they become self-driven learners because of that.
If you think about in the traditional school world, the only feedback that kids really get or parents is a report card, right? Every. However many weeks they get a report card and that's based on a teacher just saying, oh, I'll give you a satisfactory or an A or a C or whatever it is. Like who knows what that is?
And you know, is the math test that your fifth grade teacher giving as hard as the math test that my fifth grade teacher was giving and what, what is that? Whereas this is very like objective and. As a result, it comes back as data that kids are like, oh, this is just something I don't know. So like our weeks, when we do our standardized assessments, it's just like any other week where kids are going, all this is doing is giving me feedback on what I know and what I don't know, and the things I don't know now I'll be able to learn as opposed to like, oh my gosh, I, I have to do, well.
The other thing that I think is beautiful about the system, and I will say I was such a victim of this growing up because I really wanted to go to Stanford. I knew I had to get good grades, so I was scared of doing anything that might sacrifice that grade. So I wouldn't take a class in something that I didn't think I'd be good at, even if I was interested in it.
'cause I'm like, I can't afford to not get an A. I gotta stick with what I'm good at and what I know. And so it really teaches kids to avoid failure. It's like, don't do anything where you might not be good 'cause it's gonna hurt your grade. And when we instead create this environment where kids are learning the mastery, they understand that like, hey, failure is just, it's like a necessary stop on any road to success, right?
And that's what we were able to do. And so it just turns the whole culture upside down in terms of. Creating an environment where kids are calling themselves and each other to a higher standard, where they're able to be supportive of each other and be like, wow, I saw you doing this hard thing. And it made me realize like, I can do it.
And then the other thing is you can have two kids sitting right next to each other that are the same age. Same grade, but one of 'em might be working three years ahead and one of 'em is working one year behind and yet they're right next to each other. So you no longer have this world where your third grader has to go up to the fifth grade classroom and sit in math class.
Or even worse. And I can't tell you how often this happens, my best friend from college just called me the other day and she lives in Atlanta and she said her sixth grade son is already done with eighth grade math. And her private school said he's just gotta chill for a while. 'cause we don't have. A better option for him.
Like he just needs to stop doing math for a while. Like, 'cause he's too advanced. Right? And you're this, and then of course I give the example of the kid who's advanced, but think about all those kids who are so struggling and how in the world is a kid gonna be successful in high school when they don't have command over elementary grade level math?
Right? Like it's just brutal. And so that's the other thing is that. Ai, it doesn't care if a student is white, black or brown. It doesn't care if a student is rich or poor. It doesn't care if a student is in the fifth percentile or the 95th percentile. It's infinitely patient and it really allows us to raise the floor and blow the ceiling off of what's possible.
It is the most accessible, scalable. Equitable solution that we could have. And then again, it allows our humans to go do what they can do, which is that social and emotional connection.
[00:43:30] Alex Sarlin: And I think there's a full circle to it because you know, you've mentioned grit, you've mentioned growth mindset. I think elements of belonging, productive struggle, and these are all the life skills.
This is all the stuff that they're learning in the afternoon with a really encouraging and motivating adult teacher. So I think there's something really neat about that full circle work. You're supporting students in getting over math anxiety or public speaking anxiety, which are like super common, and helping them see themselves as mathematicians or, you know, as able to do really hard work and succeed at it with a lot of effort.
It's a fascinating model. I really admire your passion for it. I mean, clearly the way you talk about it, I talk to a lot of founders on this show, and you speak a lot like a. Founder in that you just are like clearly absolutely in love with the ideas, with how the ideas come together and with the results and with the outcomes that you see for the students.
[00:44:20] MacKenzie Price: I'm in love with walking into the school buildings and seeing these kids who are on fire, right? That's what I'm in love with. It's awesome. I love the fact that, again, like I said, I started out with a very selfish ambition, which was to provide a better experience for my girls, and I've seen that and now I'm excited to provide that experience for.
Hopefully millions of kids around the world.
[00:44:40] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. That was gonna be my last question, which is that you have scaled up, obviously in 10 years, there are eight alpha schools. You've mentioned that there are more coming right now and you've been taking this two hour learning and the Alpha Anywhere concept and starting to think about different ways of scaling the model of scaling the school system.
I'm curious if there are a lot of entrepreneurs, there are a lot of school leaders who listen to this podcast. What are a couple of lessons that you have learned about scaling without diluting the magic? And the quality of your product.
[00:45:09] MacKenzie Price: I think you have to build in front of an audience. You can't build a product in isolation.
But for me, we are super fanatical about making sure our product is phenomenal. We wouldn't allow scaling until we knew consistently how to deliver our three commitments that we measure. You know, we survey our students about love of school, we measure our academic outcomes, and we have literally tests to passes for our life skills.
You know, workshops to see if a kid actually has learned what they've been doing, and we've created that. So the product is phenomenal, and once we got that, it's like, okay, now we can start taking it out. We've done it in a private model just because it was, and I don't run the government, and so it's like, let's try this here.
Then we've been able to kind of say, okay, there's a lot of different types of schools. You know, I've created a sports academy and a gifted and talented school, a gaming school. You could do a theater school, you could do any interest that a kid has. Go spend their afternoons on that. So private schools can license our two hour learning program.
And you know, run that in their schools. So if there's someone who wants to get into the school business, but was like, gosh, the academic thing seems a little tricky. That's an option for them. We are working on with public schools in a couple different ways. I've been applying for charter status. It's really hard and I don't know how that's gonna go.
It's challenging. We've had one approval so far in several states. Then we're also looking at at least trying to do intervention services for students that that really need it. So hopefully that'll be something that will work. We're growing our alpha schools as kind of my current priority. We plan to open about, my goal is 25 and 25, so we're trying to open 25 schools across the country this year, and we've currently got schools in Austin, Brownsville, Texas, Miami, Florida.
We're opening in New York and Santa Barbara and Phoenix and Orlando and Tampa and. Lots of different places. So yeah, that's a way to kind of stay up. And then, like I said, I'm trying to just spread the word and I do that through future of education on social media and through a podcast and just trying to show people that like, again, I think it's a bright future and I think education is that last industry that just hasn't been disrupted and it needs to be.
But I also understand when I say that statement, it's such a general lofty thing. Here's what I wanna really say is. Your kid deserves better. Your kid deserves a personalized learning experience and your kid deserves phenomenal mentorship. And that's what I think parents listening to this, you know, or founders or whatever, like, let's deliver on that because that human potential is so critical.
And the way we get human potential is by working with every single kid, right? And do that.
[00:47:52] Alex Sarlin: They deserve to have a school they love. I feel like that's exactly a core to your model as well. It's fascinating, super ambitious and really exciting goals. If people want to look up where, if there's a an Alpha school coming to a town near them, where should they go Online?
[00:48:07] MacKenzie Price: Go to Alpha Do School is one place that you can go to Alpha School, um, future of education on Instagram or YouTube that shows a lot of these pieces of information and that's the story.
[00:48:19] Alex Sarlin: Phenomenal. I would personally love to come on and talk to you on your podcast as well and bring some of the other side just 'cause I do so many interviews, but it's really fun to also be able to share the passion.
[00:48:29] MacKenzie Price: Well, thanks for having me on yours.
[00:48:31] Alex Sarlin: Oh my gosh, my pleasure. This is somebody I followed various. Models that have some shared DNA of this, the original school of one and summit schools. And you know, people have been trying to get to what you're doing for quite a long time and it feels like you've really crossed a threshold and now as you say, or you're scaling it, it's really, really exciting to see.
And I think you create room for the continued AI evolution to feed right into the school system, which is really exciting. That's not always true in school models. Mackenzie Price from Two Hour Learning and Alpha Schools. Thanks for being here.
[00:49:02] MacKenzie Price: Thank you. Take care.
[00:49:04] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders.
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