America's Top Principal: AI and The Future of Education

**Joe Liemandt** (0:00)
This AI world is coming, and we're all terrified of what it means.

**Shane Parrish** (0:08)
Why does education seem fundamentally broken today when it didn't 30 years ago?

**Joe Liemandt** (0:14)
The biggest picture, I think, if you talk to parents of like why there's agitation for change is this AI world is coming, and we're all terrified of what it means. But what we do know, and we don't know exactly what it means, but what we do know is the education system that we all went through isn't going to prepare the kids for that world. And I feel that as a catalyst for people to say the old system wasn't working or the old system needs to change, that's just a huge driver. Like if, you know, I talked to lots of kindergarten parents, you know, and they're just looking and saying in a dozen years, you know, if I put my kid in standard school that I went through, is that going to prepare them for this AI world? And they're like, no, that's not. So there's a drive that we need something different.

**Shane Parrish** (1:07)
But even 10 years ago, it was different, like your daughter, right? Before AI even hit the scene, I felt it, you felt it. Like something is not working with the school system.

**Joe Liemandt** (1:17)
Yeah, well, and schools are failing, you know, that if you look at, you know, just pure academic results, just take academic results, independent of AI, you're right. Test scores keep going down every year.

**Shane Parrish** (1:30)
How is that possible? We keep spending more and more money.

**Joe Liemandt** (1:32)
It's, you know, there's a lot of reasons around it. It's a comp- a school is a complicated bundle. And academic performance is only one element. And it's one fundamentally that schools have basically say, it doesn't matter that much anymore. And so everybody's willing to let- everybody involved in the ecosystem has been willing to let the standards drop. And I believe part of it is because the way our system is built today, you know, there's basically a couple truisms about, you know, the standard school system. The first is the way it's structured is a time-based system where you move up every year and you have a teacher in front of a classroom. There's basically- you have two attributes for people who do well in that system. One, it's IQ coded, which is higher IQ better- is better. And second, it's big five conscientiousness coded. are you a natural grinder, you know, sort of. And if you have those two attributes, you do really well in our existing school system. But if you don't, you don't do well, right? And so- and the system doesn't adapt for anybody who doesn't do well in those two- those two elements. And so you have that as sort of one dimension of why the system's not working because it's- if you're not one of those two. And then the second dimension over here is fundamentally about resources and factually, independent of any, you know, political or anything, is just factually, you know, one of the strongest determinations of whether you learn, your educational outcome and how much you know is based on your family's income. And the whole system is just geared that way, sort of just look at the results. And so you sort of have these just two systems like this, and that's why there's like, okay, we'll spend more money and all these things, but fundamentally it's just broken and because those elements aren't being changed. If you have a time-based system that's based on IQ and conscientious, you can pour all the money you want into it and it doesn't change those. It doesn't make kids more, I can give them a higher IQ, give them more conscientiousness. And so it doesn't fix the problem.
And so that's a lot of the issues that you have.

**Shane Parrish** (3:43)
Do we admit as a society that there is a problem or is it just sort of like-

**Joe Liemandt** (3:47)
Yeah, this is, I think, where it gets complicated. At least in the US versus globe is a little different, which is as a society, everybody in America is like, wow, our schools suck. There's every article, right? Just constant stream of, and there's an unending stream of, look at how bad all these school scores and grades go down, and everything in the COVID was even worse, but just everything's bad. Eighty percent of the grade inflation, everybody knows, you're like, 80 percent of people at Harvard get A's now. It's like, oh, just give A's out to everybody.
We all know that the standards have been dropped. But the thing in the US that's different, especially if you look globally, is in the US, there's a big disconnect between educational outcomes and your earning potential, which is they're not as tightly correlated as they are in the rest of the world. They're very tightly correlated in the rest of the world and not in the US. There's a big thing among parents who are just like, look, the academics don't matter that much. There's all these other things, the life skills and all these other skills that matter more than the academics. And so I don't really care as much. And I guess a good story about this was when I became principal three years ago and our first product, the way I positioned it was 2X learning. Your kid will learn twice as much. And fundamentally, I got incredible push back from parents about that, like surprising amounts of push back. And I was so surprised. I mean, I was doing hundreds of parent teacher meetings, right, with, you know, and explaining it. And I'd be in a meeting, you know, and I'd be like, you know, mom, dad, and Johnny, and I'd just be like, look, Johnny's not learning 2X because, you know, when he misses the question, the video that comes up that explains why he missed it and how he can do the next one right, he skips it. He just skips it, you know? And, but he could learn 2X twice as much if he just watched the video.