Making Time for Passion: The 2hr Learning Model

Mackenzie Price, the founder of Alpha, an innovative private school network in Texas, and 2hr Learning, an educational technology that has sprung from the curricular model at her schools, joined me for this latest conversation. In it, she explains how Alpha leveraged technology and redesigned traditional school structures to more effectively and efficiently teach core competencies. 2hr Learning is now packaging that model so its benefits can be realized by educators everywhere.

We talked about how schools can use the time freed up to better support students in pursuing their passions and building life skills—something that homeschoolers, Summit Public Schools, and Acton Academy (just to name a few) have long known. But Alpha and 2hr Learning come at this question from a different angle—not just with its branding, but also with its acceptance of traditional measures like test scores. I learned a lot from the conversation, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts as well.

Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horne, and you are at the show where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And to help us think about that today, I'm tremendously excited because I've been hearing, I think everywhere, reading everywhere about the school and then school network and now app and a whole bunch of things called alpha schools. And we have the co founder herself, Mackenzie Price, and we're going to get to hear all about it and get a picture of it firsthand. So, Mackenzie, thank you so much for joining me. I can't wait for this conversation.

Mackenzie Price:

Well, Michael, I'm so thrilled to be here. I was really excited when I got this invitation. 

Mackenzie’s Journey to Founding Alpha Schools

Michael Horn:

So I can't wait for us to have a great conversation about where the future of education is headed, because I think you're helping shape it. And so I want to hear more about that. So let's dive into it. What is Alpha schools? What's the story behind it?

Mackenzie Price:

Yeah, well, I will start at a little bit of the beginning, which is in 2014. I had some background in working on some education initiatives, but I don't think there's anything like being a mom to really bring those bear claws out and say, we need something better. So I have two daughters that are now 18 and 16 years old. But when it was time for them to go to school, we sent them down the street to our local public school. My husband and I are both products of public school education. So for us, that was kind of what we were going to do. But very quickly, I found myself getting frustrated with the lack of ability for much personalization or adaptation to happen for where my kids were. And I would say, after about two and a half years, my oldest daughter and I were having a conversation one day, and she said, mom, I don't want to go to school tomorrow.

And I looked at her and I was like, what do you mean? You love school. And she looked at me and she goes, school is so boring. And I just had this light bulb moment of like, this is a kid who was one of those tailor made, goody two shoe good little girls who was, like, meant to go to school and love school. And in two and a half years, the system had kind of taken this kid and just wiped away that passion. And I'd been really involved in the school district that my kids were at. And I talked to administration. And they said, mackenzie, I understand your issues and your frustrations, but this is like trying to steer the Titanic, and it's just too hard. And that was my cue that we got to do something else.

For me, it wasn't about going to private school over public. It was about, we need a new model of education. And I looked around and I didn't really see anything that was going to address the concerns I had. So I kind of said, I guess we need to start this ourselves. I found a couple other partners who were willing to go forge ahead with this. And we started in a house with 16 kids. And from the beginning, we used adaptive apps for doing learning so that kids could receive kind of a personalized, go at your own pace education. And then that was opening up the afternoon.

And at that point, we focused on public speaking and entrepreneurship. Fast forward ten years, and we have alpha schools. We've got campuses in Austin, Texas, Brownsville, Texas. We've just announced that we're opening a campus in Miami, and then we're launching multiple other schools that are all based on the idea of what I call two hour learning, which is really the thought that, you know, parents, your kids don't need to spend 6 hours sitting in class in order to crush academics. They can learn very efficiently and to mastery in 2 hours. And of course, that opens up the question of, like, what do you spend the rest of the day doing? Because I can tell you one thing, Michael. Parents don't want their kids coming home after 2 hours. Right? They want more than that.

And so what we've done is we've created an environment where kids get to spend the rest of the day focusing on life skill development. And it's been great. And I've got a senior in high school now. So when she finally found out she got into her first-choice college, she looked at me and said, okay, Mom, I can officially say thank you for putting me in your weird school, because it's paid off. You know, it's.

Michael Horn:

That's amazing. I love an entrepreneur solving their own problem and by extension, so many other problems. I'm laughing as you're telling the story for two reasons. One, I feel like I'm living a mirror existence in some ways. I had written, obviously, about all this stuff for years, and then I thought, well, I'll, you know, I'll help turn my school district. We met with a similar set of answers, and, we found an existing school for my daughters. But it's so interesting to hear the coin of entrepreneurship there. I'm also laughing because during the pandemic, Diane Tavner and I have this Class Disrupted podcast, and we said, homeschool families have figured this out in two hours.

What do you use the rest of the time for? And we had the exact same answer. She calls it habits of success. You call it life skills development. So I just love that we all sort of reach the same conclusion as you start to put this stuff into action. I'd love to hear a little bit more, because are you based in Austin, Texas? Like, there are Acton Academies that have similar philosophies? I think so. I'd love to hear more about why start something as opposed to maybe go to other existing options.

Mackenzie Price:

Yeah, we are based in Austin, and Acton Academy has been a really phenomenal model. Jeff and Laura Sandifur have been really true pioneers in the alt ed space. So they were very inspirational. And actually, when I was first looking around, their school was so full that, you know, there was no hope of getting in. They had a long waitlist, and we ended up working with a guide that had been trained out of Acton Academy for the school that we started. So a lot of similarities, and I think it's an interesting point you bring up, Michael, which is some of these ideas that we toss around, like the idea of personalized learning, the idea of, you know, kids being able to develop life skills. They're not crazy novels, you know, oh, my gosh, what is this? What are these people talking about? However, when we think about our education system, nothing has been done to address those concerns. Right? And we try these little, tiny, you know, take a bucket of water and try to empty the ocean, you know, solving problems, theories for this.

But it's time for us to really change. And COVID was very helpful in helping wake people up to realize, gosh, the way my kid is spending their day in school is not all that great. And then, of course, the results we've seen post-COVID have been so atrocious. And, of course, instead of catching up, kids are falling further behind, which has been a great thing for understanding that there is so much room for disruption in education, and it's time for us to make that happen. So that's one of the things I focus a lot of my attention on, is getting parents to understand that they can and should expect a better and different experience than the one they had.

Communicating Alpha School’s Benefits

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Michael Horn:

So tell me more about that, because that seems like COVID, as you said, was a catalyzing event for a lot of families and kids realizing we don't have to settle for this. We're seeing a lot more choices out there in the landscape, and yet we're also seeing families slip back sort of into the status quo and so forth. How are you catalyzing people to find alpha schools? How are you getting them excited about 2-hour learning and then all of the rich work that you can do with the rest of the time as your point is making, is that why you're opening so many schools, because the demand is just there or what does that look like as more people find out and you convince them you can do this?

Mackenzie Price:

Yeah, I think COVID provided an opportunity where again, parents got to to see inside what their school was doing and they often weren't happy about it. Then on top of it, there was so much politicization of whatever that is. There was a lot of politics that went with going back to school. And we were pretty fortunate because our school philosophy is very much, hey, we're here to do two things. We're here to teach your kid great academics and learn twice as fast in only 2 hours. We're here to teach life skills. And by the way, your kid's going to love school, which should be expected, right? I love talking to kids that I meet and I'll ask them, do you like school? And most of the time they say, not really. Or if they say, yeah, I like school, I'll say, what's, what do you like best about school? And you know, 95% of the time the answer is pe, lunch, recess, my friends.

Michael Horn:

Right.

Mackenzie Price:

And to me I'm like, that is such a bummer. We want kids to love the process of learning and becoming critical thinkers and gaining new skills and being challenged. And so what we tend to attract are parents who are also willing to be a little bit more innovative. And they're able to say, yeah, I think my kids should expect a different experience than what we all grew up doing. Right. And the experience we've had. And one of the things that's really interesting about what I love about our model, we don't test kids and admit them based on if they're doing a certain level, we'll take a kid wherever they're at because we know that by providing this AI tutor and adaptive learning, we can raise a kid. So we commit that within two years we'll have kids 90th percentile or above, which I wholeheartedly believe that by 8th grade every kid should be able to be 90th percentile or above in their core subjects.

Unlike so many traditional school experiences where kids kind of get put in a trajectory, and it's like, oh, my kid's kind of an average student, and that's just what they're going to be. And so we get great results. But like in Brownsville, for example, our Brownsville campus, about half of our students come from families with median incomes of less than $40,000 a year. We have about two-thirds of our students are neurodivergent. Generally, a lot of those kids come in under the 25th percentile. For example, our second-grade math class in January 2023 was at the 31st percentile. One year later, on January 24, they were at 84th percentile. And that's the power of providing this one-to-one learning experience.

We can raise the floor of what's possible for kids and explode the ceiling off of what's possible, so that those kids who are able to move at a quicker pace are, you know, the sky's the limit, right? And they do that all so much more efficiently and in less time that then we get to focus on the things that we as parents really want our kids to be able to have. Right? Developing empathy, learning how to communicate, you know, expanding those critical thinking skills. I think that's what we want for our future citizens.

EdTech, AI, and the 2-Hour Learning Model

Michael Horn:

Okay, so this is amazing because you basically, by having a mastery based, personalized approach, you're making sure kids hit those marks. And to your point, everyone can be successful. Unbelievable results. Talk to us about, what is that like? Where is that AI tutor from? What are the apps you're using? What does that two-hour block look like? And how are kids engaging in it?

Mackenzie Price:

Yeah, well, as far as the 2-hour learning program goes, it is a mix of a few things. We use some third-party adaptive apps that everyone's got access to. Alex, edit that one, please. We use a few different apps that people would know of things like Alex Khan Academy, Ixl, Grammarly, Newsela, you know, a lot of apps that are out there in the world. We've also created some of our own apps, particularly for our younger students, kindergarten, and first grade, where the math and reading apps haven't been quite as strong. And, one of the things we found in the last ten years is that not all apps are equal, and not all apps are equal in every subject, at every level.

Michael Horn:

Right?

Mackenzie Price:

And so part of what we've been able to figure out is at what stage in a kid's k through twelve educational journey is this app really good at teaching this particular subject? And then it's time to move to a different app, or this app works really well, for students who are learning this type of way, and then what we've done and where I'd say AI innovation has come from is we built an AI tutorial that guides kids through this process because unfortunately, edtech has not been that holy grail solution that everyone hoped it would be when it was introduced about ten years ago. You unfortunately can't hand a kid an iPad and, you know, an app and say, let me know when you graduated high school. Right? They'll do all kinds of things. They'll do everything from not even looking at the app to what we call anti-patterns. They'll topic shop, or as soon as something starts getting hard, they'll back out of it, right? Or they won't read the explanations when they get a question wrong. And so what our AI tutor has done is really guide kids to be able to learn how to efficiently use the apps. We also have up the mastery level so that kids are truly, truly doing that. And then we're using constant data in order to find out, like, is this kid taking too long to answer these questions? And if so, is it because they're struggling with this particular concept, or is there a hole from maybe previous, you know, knowledge that they need to get? The other beauty of AI is that what we're able to kind of combine is three things.

The curriculum that we need to teach, the knowledge tree of that specific individual student, and their interests. So you might have a kid who is needing to learn fractions, and he's struggling, and he loves Dungeons and Dragons, and he can now roll a dice game to learn fractions with a Dungeons and Dragons theme, right? And so we're able to kind of cater the learning experience to a kid's interests. You know, we'll see this with some of our young readers. You know, if you're a first-grade student reading at an 8th-grade level, that doesn't necessarily mean you need to be reading 8th-grade content. These kids still want to be, you know, reading about butterflies and, you know, fairies. And so how do we up the Lexile level but keep the content the right way? And that's one of the places where AI has just done an incredible job for that. But the other key to this, and again, the reason that edtech hasn't been this, this magic solution is that it's only 10% of what creates a great learner. 90% of it, in my opinion, is you have to have a motivated student.

Right? And that's part of the reason that when you're putting Ed tech in a classroom and said, hey, go spend 15 minutes a few times a week working on this app. You know, it doesn't really help. We're still dealing with the fundamental teacher in front of a classroom model where kids are all put in the same kind of pace. You have certainly heard that story a million times, and your audience has, too. But we got to find that motivational model that works. And for us, it's that time that opens up for the rest of the day to go do really fun activities. And we have schools, you know, alpha school was the first school that was started, and that school, we do general life skills workshops that are just really fun and exciting. But we're also launching schools.

We have a sports academy that's launching this fall. Where would you guess it? Kids get to do athletics and PE and sports all afternoon. We have an esports academy for middle school students where we use esports and gaming to teach life skills. And then we also have a GT school that's launching this fall where kids will be doing more academically rigorous workshops in the afternoon as well. So you can imagine a world. And this is always a question I'll ask you, Michael. If you were able to do all of your academics in 2 hours a day, what would you have done with the rest of your day? Right. And that's always an interesting question.

Ask adults, like, what would you have done with that time? And that's what I think we need to be building on in the future is, what are those core skills that we teach kids in order to be great critical thinkers? And then what opportunities does that open up for?

Metrics for Mastery and the Role of Adults

Michael Horn:

The rest of this is so cool. And I want to get more into that second block in a moment before we leave that first block, that 2 hours, one quick geek out question, then one slightly deeper one. I think the geek out question is, how do you measure mastery? Like, when you say they're, you know, 25th percentile, they grew to 84th percentile. What's the instrument you're using to measure?

Mackenzie Price:

Yeah, we're big fans of standardized testing, so we use map testing, and I think that's different from a lot of alternative models. It's so important to have data and understanding. And part of the reason standardized testing has gotten such a bad rap is that schools don't do anything with the results of their tests other than just get a report card. Right. But what you can do is when we take our map tests and we're able to say, okay, here are the many pages of information about what our student knows and what they don't know, and we plug that into our AI system, and then go fill those holes. That's where we can get mastery. And so, like at Alpha school this year, across the board, our kids are learning 2.6 times faster than the rest of the country according to map tests. Our top two-thirds are learning 3.6 times faster, and our top 20% are learning six and a half times faster.

And that's part of the reason that I don't care if a student comes in and they're in the 10th percentile. I know I can get them up, you know, and they can. They can get to where they're above the 90th percentile, you know, in the period of a couple of years. This is truly, I think, what's going to be the great equalizer for education, and it's scalable. You know, one thing that I didn't mention, we don't have academic teachers. We have no teachers teaching. Our kids are fully learning via this AI tutor. Now, what we do have, and it is absolutely critical to our model, is we have adults in the building that we call guides, and their sole job is to provide motivational and emotional support to these students, to help them get connected with their why and get excited about what they're doing, help them overcome challenges when they reach them.And that's what a lot of the rest of the day is.

Creating Coherence Across Subjects

Michael Horn:

It's interesting because I think you do a great job as you explain this. Yes, the knowledge of a student, their background, and experiences that matter. So that sort of checks off the core knowledge camp of the world, if you will. Then you say, and the teacher doesn't have to be the sage on the stage. There's still the guide on the side. Right? So, we can have both of these philosophies in the same camp, if you will, as long as we do it in this mastery-based, personalized way that you've constructed. I guess that gets to the one other question. I'd love you just to sort of think through with me, which is one of the critiques I sometimes hear about.

I don't know if I'd call it a playlist approach what you're doing, but sort of, you know, piecing together. Right. This app is best at teaching this. This one is teaching that we might lose connective tissue or coherence between the ways we teach history or social studies or science or things like that. How do you all get these things to sort of speak the same language, for lack of a better phrase, and create that coherence?

Mackenzie Price:

Well, one of the things that we do is, again, when we're asking kids to get to mastery level on each app, and we have them run through a couple of apps, right? So if they, if they do a first app and they're doing, you know, the math here, you know, 5th-grade math in one app, and then they go to another app and they're doing 5th-grade math, first of all, anything that they've mastered, they'll immediately test out of, right? And so we're understanding that they've got complete completion there, and then anything that they've missed, you know, they're able to learn back. One of the things that's really interesting, is we'll have students come in who are new to our school. You know, we had a, we had a girl who came in as an 8th grader, and she'd been a straight student at her old school, and her parents said she's a fabulous math student and she's great. And, you know, she should be ahead. And so we want her going into, you know, into algebra and 8th grade, you know, she should be a year ahead. And we said, well, we want to just help her understand, like, see where she's really at. And they're like, no, no, we know where she's at. She got straight a's in her last class, and she should be in algebra.

And so we do something called a hundred for 100. And we'll say to kids, all right, here's what we're gonna do. You can get 100% on a Texas star test. We'll give you dollar 100, right? And these kids are like, whoa, a $100 is great. And we said, and here's what it is. You can pick whatever grade you want on the SAR test. And suddenly that kid who's like, I'm in 8th grade student was like, well, you know, can I take a 2nd grade test? It's like, well, not second grade. Let's go to fourth grade.

And what's interesting is they'll go and they'll take that 4th grade test, and lo and behold, they won't have gotten 100% on it, right? And suddenly it helps the parents and the student go, oh, maybe I'm missing some, like, 4th grade concepts. But then we go and we fill in those holes, and that's done really quickly, right? It's easy to go, you know, to catch up pretty soon. Let's go to fifth grade, 6th grade, 7th grade, 8th grade, and you can get a really complete picture of what a student knows. And then when we're using these different apps and testing to understand what a kid has. Where we see this at the high school level is our students are still taking the AP curriculum that traditional high schools are offering. They're scoring well on those AP exams. They're getting, I think 94% of our students got fours or fives, which is pretty unheard of sats. You know, the average SAT score of our senior class this year is 1476, which is insane, because, again, you know, shocker of all shockers, when you learn a mastery, you actually, you know.

Michael Horn:

I was gonna say, it doesn't matter the modality so much at the point in which you're demonstrating it, you just demonstrate whatever's in front of you.

Mackenzie Price:

Exactly. And then, you know, our guides are able to jump in and work with the kids to start talking about the project-based side of workshops, which is where you really get that great experience. You know, I believe that, you know, again, you have to have k through eight. Common core knowledge is essential in order to be a critical thinker. But, you know, in today's world, it's no longer just about reading and writing and arithmetic. It's about the four c's, communication, creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking. And that's when our guides come around with our students, and they can make a lot of what they've learned really come alive through this life skill development. You know, an example of that with one of our high school students.

He is great at physics, and he's learned all of his physics via apps, but he's also a nationally-ranked water skier, he and his guide sit down and they talk about how they can think about physics and use physics to improve his water skiing time. And that's the kind of magic that really comes alive for a student when they're. They're using their physics two knowledge, you know, to figure out how to get a, you know, a better angle on their. On their water ski time. Right. And. And that's when I think we develop a more holistic. You know, I hate using buzzwords like holistic, but it's. It's a great time for bringing all of that knowledge together.

Following Passions and Developing Grit

Michael Horn:

Well, and you build, transfer, obviously, from... We've just done it in the academic setting to a real-world setting, which almost never happens, as, you know, in schools. So let's dig into that second big, for lack of a phrase block where you're really doing those life skills. You're developing them through projects. What does that look like for the community, for an individual student, and for the guides?

Mackenzie Price:

Yeah. So the guide's job again… What I would say, you know, teachers in general when they get into the teaching industry, they do it so they can positively impact, you know, young people. They don't necessarily do it so that they can, you know, create lesson plans and grade homework. So our guides are really spending that time getting connected with kids to understand what they like and what they're excited about. And so I'll give you an example of that. We have a student who loves birds, you know, super into ornithology and loves bird watching. And so he has become an expert on that.

He's built a second brain in order to know everything about birds. He's reached out to experts in the field. So he's learning communication skills. He's been able to interview some really amazing people. And one thing we find is that adults are always really excited to help ambitious kids, right? So this kid's eleven years old and he reaches out and says, hey, I'd love to have a conversation about some of the research you're doing based on what I've read. And, you know, the professor, you know, says, sure, I'd love to have that, that conversation. For our youngest kids in, you know, kindergarten, first grade, they're doing everything from learning to swim in the deep ends, you know, and getting that kind of a workshop to starting to code. Doing this, we have a great program where kids are doing self driving cars.

So they're learning coding, they're doing it as a team and, you know, they're getting things. Another one that our second and third graders do, they do a Harvard business school simulation with a sneaker factory.

How to do this. And I always love when these parents will call me and they'll say, it is so funny to see my eight year old come home from school and be like, I gotta figure out how to get my shipping costs down. You know, my profit margins are just not, not high enough. And I think I'm going to have to start using shipping containers instead of airplane freight. But then that's going to cause a problem with my time for inventory. And you're like, that's when an eight year old learning, you know, a Harvard business school simulation is so awesome. The other thing we do in these workshops is we have what we call a test to pass. So it's the idea of like if you're trying to teach a life skill, like, for example, grit, you know, this idea of sticking to something even when it's hard, you know, you don't just hand the kids the book by Angela Duckworth and say, read this book and write a report on it, and that will show you no grit.

So what we do is we hold a triathlon, and at the end of the six week session, what the kids have to be able to do is they have to be able to solve a Rubik's cube. They have to be able to juggle three items for 30 seconds, and then they have to run a half mile. And what's interesting is at the beginning of this session, when we introduce this triathlon, you know, you'll have kids go, oh, I can't do x, y or z. I'm never going to be able to run a half mile or I'm not going to be able to do this. And so we teach them growth mindset, like the magical power of yet you may not be able to do it yet, but if you practice and learn how to learn and get back up and fail and all that stuff, then at the end of six weeks, when these kids are doing their triathlon and they're succeeding, that shows like, hey, these kids have grit, right? They've spent time becoming experts, learning how to learn, you know, again, doing all of those life skills. And so a lot of our guides time is spent implementing and working with these kids on these really fun workshops.

Day in the Life at Alpha Schools

Michael Horn:

Wow. So help us break down in terms of, like, how much of that you know. So you've done your 2-hour learning. You're getting to dive into these projects of interest. How long do you do that daily? Do you see kids staying afterward because they're so excited that they want to keep going? Is this something that's more permeable than that? Like, what does that, what does it look like? It sounds like you might even have professionals coming into the environment to help create these projects and so forth. So that's pretty cool. Absolutely.

Mackenzie Price:

We do.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. Give us a story, a day in the life, if you will, of one kid doing this.

Mackenzie Price:

So, yeah, in the morning, our students come in and they do a limitless launch. It's kind of like think Tony Robbins for kids, where the group comes together and they're getting excited. They're planning their goals that they have for the day and how those align with their goals for the week and for the session. And then they go into their two hour learning block. We basically do it in kind of Pomodoro sessions of 25 minutes. They get breaks in between sometimes those breaks for our youngest learners, they might be do ten minutes of work and then you do a 32nd Taylor Swift dance party with your guide and get back into it and the guides, again, are able to work with these kids to help create these self driven learners. They're learning how to use the apps effectively. They're learning how to manage their time and their attention.

They get to have lunch, and then in the afternoon is when we dive in all these workshops. So, you know, they're basically getting, you know, two and a half to 3 hours worth of workshop time each day. And then at the high school level, what this turns into is kids have the time to go work on what we call kind of an ambitious masterpiece project. So that could be anything from. We had a student who raised $350,000 and built a mountain bike park in Texas. He's done great job. We have a student who got really interested in cancer and epigenetics. She just released a documentary called Cancer Foodborne Illness on X.

It's last I looked, has 4.2 million views, and she's been getting national press as a result of it. And this is what you think about. One of our fundamental beliefs is that kids are limitless, and they're constantly being underrated about what's possible for them to do. Kids can do incredible things when they're given the mentorship and, you know, the guidance and the time to go go work on that.

So we see that with our high school students get to do really big projects. But, you know, even our middle school students.One of the checks that we have. We call it a check as part of a check chart, but they've got to be able to raise $10,000 in capital for a business. And we had, you know, a few students this past year who were able to raise money to create a self-help kind of mental health book that they used expert advice, but written for teen girls by teen girls. And, you know, these are the things that are exciting. K through eight, we don't have homework. And so what we do find, though, is a lot of times, kids want to work ahead of time, right? They want to do more, and they're excited about the things they're doing. Fundamentally, again, our first commitment is love of school. We survey our students to find out, do you love school, and would you rather go to school or go on vacation. And that second one isn't quite as high as the love of school, but it is really crazy high. I think it was, like 63% the last time we measured it. They would rather go to school than go on vacation.

Cost of Attending

Michael Horn:

Well, you've created an environment where they can be successful and they can have fun with friends while being successful. So it seems like you have the twin ingredients to motivation. There's just as we start to wrap up here, like, what's the tuition to go to a school like this? What does that look like?

Mackenzie Price:

Yeah. So we've been working on figuring out how we can best scale this and get this out to as many kids as possible. So we sort of started with the Tesla business model. Alpha school is sort of the very, very high end Rolls Royce version of private schools. Our tuition is about $40,000 a year. We have financial aid and about 75% of our students are on some sort of financial aid, but they are getting that super high end experience. The schools that we're rolling out this fall are going to be at about a $25,000 price point. And then we're working on getting some charter options. And if we can get charter access, of course that will become free for students.

We're also launching a homeschool program and that's going to get a lower point. So, you know, our goal right now is, you know, we believe in the next five years we're going to be able to get our two hour learning academic program down to like $1,000 a year per kid, which would be amazing. It's not there yet. It's about $10,000 currently per year per student. However, what we're seeing, and two hour learning can also be implemented in other schools.

You know, if someone wanted to start a school off two hour learning or convert, you know, to that, it can be done. There's a way to do that. You are, of course, fundamentally, though, transforming the model of the day, and you're also fundamentally transforming the role of the teacher.

Transforming the Traditional High School Experience

Michael Horn:

So, Mackenzie, one of the questions I often get, or pushbacks, is, this sounds great. Maybe I'll do it for, I mean, it's why Montessori is pretty popular, you know, in early years, but gets less so as you go into high school is, gee, there's prom and sports and band and all these things that my kid sort of wants to be a part of. I get it. On the one hand, like, when I think about my high school experience, the classes were, eh. But I really love the spirit of being involved in all those other things. It sounds to me, though, like you're perhaps more than other schools positioned to tackle this because as you said, you can take that core and then have a sports focused school. You can have a music focused school. You could have, like, these different flavors, if you will, and tackle this.

So I just love you to comment on that and tell you know, am I off base here? Am I miss reading, or how do. How do high school families, I mean, you're in Texas, after all, where this is sort of like, you know, this is a big part of the thinking for high school. How do they react to that and how are you all positioned to handle it?

Mackenzie Price:

Yeah, I think everyone has an idea of what they believe the school experience should be like, and often it's based on what their experience was like. And even the parts that they didn't like, they'll. They'll kind of say, well, I turned out okay. So, you know, what. What we did was good. And I remember when I first got ready to start the school back in 2014, I was doing a lot of reading, and one of the books I read was unschooling rules. And one of the things it said was, we get so used to, like, well, there's certain things that you just got to go through, the rite of passage that you have to go through.

And I it helped me rethink about, like, well, is everything we do really, you know, you have to do it. So what I've figured out in the schools that we run now is, let's take the best of those things. So our school does have a prom, you know, but our school also gets to do these really crazy experiences that, you know, a lot of schools don't get, right. So we've added other things there for you. Take the idea of music. We don't have a marching band, but what we do have is kids who are really phenomenal musicians, who are able to go in and record their own album.

And have the experience of getting to do that. We have one student who's a high school sophomore, and she is passionate about music and singing Broadway musicals. And when you ask her, what do you like to do? She's like, I love Broadway musicals. I like to listen to that. And she is building the first musical that she's trying to get on Broadway that is going to be entirely created and made by teens for teens. And so some of the experiences that she's getting and the mentorship that she's getting from people on Broadway and also negotiating contracts and dealing with attorneys, she's getting a lot of that social experience that we like. We also have a lot of kids who are athletes, who are, you know, able to go focus on their horseback riding or their swimming outside of school. I will absolutely say, though, if you want to be the quarterback on the local, you know, Texas football team, Alpha High School is not going to be the right school for you.

Michael Horn:

Right.

Mackenzie Price:

But if you want to be able to have, you know, a k through eight experience where you're not an over scheduled kid who's having to, you know, you know, go to school all day, then do homework and go to, go to the baseball practice and instead have afternoons to focus on athletics, you know, that's a great thing to get to do. So when I think about a lot of those traditional experiences that we believe kids should have, some of them, I would argue, are not worth as much weight as we think they really were. And some of them can be transformed into really amazing experiences that are, that our students have. So we find also, you know, socialization, this word socialization is something that always comes up and says, well, what about kids who they need socialization? And I look at it and I say, how much socialization is a kid really getting by, sitting in class all day, mostly being quiet? And again, I understand that there's a lot of classrooms and a lot of teachers who are trying to have more engagement in their classrooms. But still, the bottom line is you are sitting in class and there's, you know, 20 plus kids and one teacher, whereas these kids are having to, you know, work in teams and connect with people and, you know, they're having a lot more interaction with, with adults.

Michael Horn:

Right.

Mackenzie Price:

And other kids. That, I think, is where a lot of the really rich socialization comes from. So we find that, you know, very few of our students, you know, miss that traditional experience, with the exception of sports, is a big one.

Michael Horn:

Got it. Well, amen to so much of what you're doing. And I have this diagram now written on my notes, academics plus life skills. And then I have a big heart around it because of the love that you have built in your school communities among the students you serve. Mackenzie, thank you so much for being with us and for all of you following keep posted on the expansion of alpha schools two-hour learning. I am certainly hoping you all come to Massachusetts in the somewhat near future. Hint, hint.

Mackenzie Price:

We're working on it. Thank you so much for having me, Michael. It's been a pleasure. And I love getting to hear all of the topics that you present on your podcast on a regular basis.

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