Joe Liemandt
Founder of Trilogy Software and principal of Alpha School, the private school network built around two hours a day of AI-delivered mastery learning.
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Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 26 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
The world has achieved universal access to school and nowhere near universal learning, and closing that second gap is the whole problem left in education.
We have universal access. What we are trying to do is bring universal learning. So there's a vast disparity in how much kids learn during that 12 years that while they may have access to it, learning is very different.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
How children are educated will change more in the next five to ten years than it has in the last hundred.
And so what we think is because of new things that have become available and things like AI and technology for the first time in 50 and 100 years you can revisit and change education. How we educate kids is going to be radically different in 5 years and 10 years than the last 50 and 100 years.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
Motivation, not curriculum or method, is ninety percent of the problem in education and ninety percent of the solution.
And that's why we say motivation is 90% of the problem or the solution because you have to be able to motivate the person to engage with these personalized lessons to learn it.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
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High standards are the key to a child's happiness, and a school with low standards cannot be a school children love.
And we explained to them, which is the key to your child's happiness is high standards. And I can't run a school that they love more than vacation if I have low standards.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
Applying the ethos America already applies to school sports to academics instead would fix every academic problem in the country.
We have sort of how you treat academics and how you treat sports. And if we took the sports ethos and the athletic ethos in America and we applied it to academics, we would fix every academic problem in this country.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
Children develop by struggling and failing on the road to success while a caring adult supports them, and school should be running that loop all day instead of leaving it to after-school sports.
The key to developing a child is that they struggle and fail on their road to success supported by a caring adult. And you just want to run that loop.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
One-to-one tutoring has always been the best way to teach anybody anything; the only reason schooling was never built that way is that it was not affordable.
Individualized tutoring is the best model. A one-on-one model is the best model. A mentorship model, an apprentice mentor, that is the best model. It's not cost-effective.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
Homeschooling outcomes are bimodal: families who care about academics beat conventional school outright, and families who reject standards leave their children knowing very little.
The level of academics that those students know is very low because the parents have basically abandoned that and said, "I care all about the life skills." For parents who really care about academics, those kids crush it.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
Half of Bloom's two-sigma effect comes from mastery rather than from the tutor, and mastery is exactly the half that education explicitly rejects.
Mastery is actually the part everybody forgets about on that. If you have a tutor that's not mastery based, you won't get the top 2%. One sigma came from the tutor. One sigma comes from mastery, which once again we'll talk about we all accept mastery in in athletics, but we reject it explicitly reject it in education.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
Two hours a day on lessons pitched at a child's actual level teaches them more than six hours of class plus homework.
Our average student does not sit in class for six and do homework. They sit at an AI app and they spend two hours a day. The average kid spent 121 minutes last year in the apps and learned more than 2x they what they would have in sitting in class for six and doing homework.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
Putting a chatbot into an ordinary school makes children learn less, because nine in ten of them use it to cheat.
If you take a chatbot and put it into a standard school, 90% of the kids use it to cheat. Doesn't matter what grade level you're at.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
The central defect of American schooling is that an eighth grader is delivered eighth-grade content by law, whatever he actually knows.
And that's the problem in our current education system today is we are taking eighth graders and we are delivering them eighth grade content because that's what an eighth grade teacher does by law. They need to stand up and deliver the eighth grade content.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
AI is education's microscope: the first instrument that gives learning science a closed measurement loop at the level of one child.
AI because it's on a onetoone basis is giving us a data loop that nobody in learning science no one in education has ever had and we have it. It's a closed loop and that magical data loop is what's allowing us to get the five to 10 times improvements in education because it's our microscope.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
A worked example whose scaffolding is progressively removed teaches faster than making a child figure the problem out unaided.
The better way to learn, the faster way to learn is to give you them a worked example where you show them and then you progressively remove the parts of the example where they're having to progressively go up and then by the end they can solve the problem with no scaffolding.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
When a child starts struggling with algebra the problem is almost never algebra; it is the third-grade math facts they never learned, and more algebra will not fix it.
And that's why when kids get to algebra and they start to struggle, the issue is not the algebra. The issue is the third grade math facts they didn't learn. And the way to fix the problem is not pound them with more algebra. It's to go fix the third grade problem.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
Gifted children are the ones school damages most: never challenged, they spend twelve years learning the worst possible habits and their ability cannot make up for it.
and we're teaching them the worst habits in the world. And so we're giving them 12 years of the worst habits and then even their capability can't overcome that. That it's the super gifted athlete who literally has every bad habit in the book
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
A school should be judged on how fast its students are learning, not on how much they already know when measured.
And you should measure a school based on the rate of learning and the slope of the line, the growth rate, not its achievement.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
The median American student learns essentially nothing between eighth grade and twelfth grade.
There's a test, there's a bunch of them, but you can use this one, which is NWA MAP test. It's a 300point scale. The average eighth grader to 12th grader goes up one point from a you know it depends on the subject but 233 to 234 four years later they don't learn anything.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
The single best thing AI could do for American education is not a chatbot but an individualized lesson plan that catches a child up to grade level.
The most positive use case if you said, you know, what's the number one thing we could use AI for? It's not giving kids chatbots that's going to work. It's giving them an individualized lesson plan based on their level to catch them up to grade level. And that would be the single best thing we could do to fix education in America.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
Being years behind is only demoralising because it is stated in years: told the gap is twenty-two hours of work, a child will close it.
And the first step that we do on that is we show them it's tractable. When you're like, I'm three years behind, you're like, I'm out. It's too far. I'm a year behind. I'm too It's too much work. When you're like, you're 22 hours behind. It's 22 hours a day. Totally different message.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
Paying a child cash to break a belief that they cannot do something is legitimate, and it creates intrinsic motivation rather than destroying it.
these kids have a block that they can't do it. You do whatever you can including paying them to break through the block. they then see themselves as a different person
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
The strongest thing that convinces a child they can do something is not an adult telling them, it is watching a classmate do it.
the number one motivator to get rid of a block. It's actually not the guy as the the biggest one. The number one thing that convinces kids they can do something is watching their classmate do it.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
Family income, not IQ, is the single biggest predictor of a child's academic performance in America.
The single biggest indicator of your performance is your family income. You can predict somebody's test scores basically.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
The insistence that any education innovation must serve everybody at once and for free is the poison that stops education innovating at all.
in education there's a concept that I think is really poison and why we have trouble innovating in education which is there's a view that you must serve everybody all at once for free like just anything you do in education no matter who it's for they're like I'm going to come up with a counter example where it doesn't work for everybody all at once for free and that's not how products are developed
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
The teachers people remember changed them by removing a belief that they could not do something, not by teaching the material well.
the best teacher you had, like everybody remembers the one or two teachers who changed their life. It wasn't because they marked up your paper really well. That wasn't what did it for them. It was because you had some block. They saw you and they convinced you you could do so much more.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
Dropping educational software into an existing school changes nothing; the whole school day has to be redesigned around it or it fails.
I want to be clear, you can't throw edtech in. You can't take our time back and throw it into a school. It's not going to work cuz you haven't solved any of the other problems. And so edtech is not a magic, you know, it's not a silver bullet.
How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt Said 31 Aug 2026
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