A.J. | Lifelong educator | Founding Principal @ The Greater Dayton School | Following education, edtech, value investing, crypto & other.
Joined April 2019
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SpeedTrapp retweeted
The industrial revolution gave us industrial education: same curriculum, same pace, same test for every child. One size fits all, by design, to churn out millions of punctual, obedient workers.
Tall poppies get cut down to the middle.
The intelligence revolution requires us to rebuild education from first principles to prepare kids for the future. Personalized education that is adaptive, grounded in learning science, generative and self-improving based on real-time data from each student.
Every student receiving exactly what they need at exactly the right time so progress compounds.
I’m proud to be part of this movement!
SpeedTrapp retweeted
I have a ton of empathy for @Alphaschool skeptics, because I doubted it myself when I joined 10 months ago.
I was also one of the louder skeptics about EdTech, all along.
My recent piece could have been titled "How I Was Humbled by AI and Learned That Does Can, in Fact, Change the Potential of EdTech."
I don't expect everyone to see it that way, because you haven't gone on my journey, nor @C_Hendrick's, nor our team's.
But it is my conclusion. And I suspect I've done more time developing AI-enabled software this year than you have.
SpeedTrapp retweeted
Dodgers player Alex Call is calling out MLB and broadcasters over the ads during postseason games.
"Can we please get the soft porn ads off playoff broadcasts? My son wants to watch baseball with Dada, but how do I justify that when a half-naked woman could come on screen anytime?? This is America’s Pastime. Parents shouldn’t have to worry about this."
SpeedTrapp retweeted
Today, Modern Classrooms Project is announcing that we have raised $12 million to build a free Tier 1 math curriculum for middle and high school, grounded in cognitive science.
The more time I spend in math education, the more concerned I get. Outcomes have been falling for more than a decade, and the steepest declines are among the lowest-performing students.
Meanwhile, many of the leading cognitive scientists and learning scientists have been sounding the alarm that their research is not being applied at scale in math classrooms. We think they might be right.
So we are building a curriculum that treats cognitive science as its north star. We plan to launch middle school in summer 2027 and high school in summer 2028.
Three things to know about what we are building:
1. It will be free. All lessons and materials, teacher-facing and student-facing, will be publicly available online, printable, and modifiable.
2. It will be built with the researchers. In the coming weeks, we will announce a research advisory committee of leading learning scientists. We will work as hard as we can to make sure the structure, design, and underlying content align with what cognitive science tells us about how students, especially struggling learners, master math.
3. It will work with or without technology. Modern Classrooms Project has spent years at the intersection of technology and classroom instruction. This curriculum will have two clear implementation pathways. One that is completely paper-based, built around whole-group, teacher-facilitated instruction. The other will be designed to leverage technology to enable flexible pacing, mastery-based progressions, and increased 1-1 and small-group support from educators.
Perhaps most importantly, we want to understand what works. While we have conviction that following cognitive science is the right path, we are deeply committed to trying to move the field forward so that students can achieve their full potential in math, particularly students farthest from opportunity.
To learn more about what we are building and explore ways to get involved, go to modernclassrooms.org/curricu….
SpeedTrapp retweeted
A dedicated AI tutor like those at @Alphaschool have transformed education allowing each child to learn at their own pace. Check out the outcomes at Alpha School and compare with NYC public schools.
AI offers the potential to fix NYC education, but sadly NYC’s failing schools would rather protect teachers at the expense of students by prohibiting AI in the schools.
Just because technology is everywhere doesn’t mean it belongs everywhere.
The tech industry wants us to believe that AI in early education is not only inevitable, but necessary. We don't see it that way.
This week, we announced a moratorium on all generative AI for public school students in 2K through 8th grade.
Because New Yorkers deserve to know that their kids will receive a high-quality education. They deserve to know that their children’s data won’t be mined by Big Tech. And they deserve to know that their children’s growth won’t be compromised for a corporation’s bottom line.
SpeedTrapp retweeted
A strange paradox I've with noticed with the new models:
1.) AI has dramatically improved in the evaluation of writing.
2.) AI has dramatically deteriorated in the production of writing.
SpeedTrapp retweeted
Claude for Teachers is now available to schools and districts as a free enterprise offering.
Last month we launched for individual educators. Now districts can also get one centrally managed org with SSO, role-based access controls, domain claiming.
I continue to think one of the most important things we can do with AI in education is empower teachers. Excited to see what districts do with this.
SpeedTrapp retweeted
The problem with America’s education system is that we’ve given up on 50% of our kids by 3rd grade.
SpeedTrapp retweeted
who can help me integrate aspects of @smorrisey's word mapping program into my tutoring program!? I'm out of depth but want the best stuff for our kids!
SpeedTrapp retweeted
We're introducing Claude for Teachers: free access to premium Claude capabilities for verified K-12 educators in the US, with a library of teaching skills and a direct connection to evidence-based curricula, mapped to academic standards in all 50 states.
claude.com/solutions/teacher…
SpeedTrapp retweeted
FOR THE FIRST TIME, THE US GOVERNMENT PULLED A PUBLICLY DEPLOYED AI MODEL OFFLINE.
THE MARKET SHOULD PAY ATTENTION.
🇺🇸 On June 12, the Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to block access to its newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for any foreign national.
Anthropic had to disable them for everyone to comply.
The stated reason was a security concern.
Anthropic disputes it, calling the flagged technique a narrow jailbreak available in other models too.
Whatever the truth, here's the macro takeaway:
Frontier AI now sits close enough to national security that a government can switch it off overnight.
If you don't control your own models and compute, you're one directive away from losing access.
That's the case for open and local models, in one headline.
SpeedTrapp retweeted
Here, AI is finally making it possible to solve Bloom's 2Sigma Problem
If this student continues on the product/trajectory for one full school year
she'll go from 35th percentile to the 92nd percentile
Next year, we'll have data agreements in place to publish all test scores
SpeedTrapp retweeted
Two weeks ago we launched Spelling Mode in the Project Read Tutor, and the response from classrooms has been incredible.
Spelling Mode is the first digital tool to analyze student spelling via touchscreen down to the letter-sound correspondence, built in collaboration with the @UFLiteracy team and aligned to the UFLI scope and sequence.
Encoding has a symbiotic relationship with decoding, and is where so many students struggle.
We think this is a fundamentally shift in how digital tools can support emerging readers and spellers.
Demo here:
projectread.ai/tools/spellin…
SpeedTrapp retweeted
Alpha School critics: "This model devalues the role of the teacher."
Public school teacher after spending a day at Alpha:
"Every teacher should spend a day on an Alpha campus."
SpeedTrapp retweeted
Google's AI tutor just beat human tutors in a randomized controlled trial in real UK classrooms.
Not a demo. Not a benchmark. A randomized controlled trial in five secondary schools with 165 real students doing real mathematics.
The number that matters: 5.5 percentage points.
That is how much better AI-tutored students performed when tested on topics they had never studied before. 66.2% versus 60.7% for the human tutor group.
That gap is on knowledge transfer. The hardest thing education is supposed to do. Not can you repeat what you just practiced. Can you take what you learned and apply it to something genuinely new.
The AI won on that.
Here is the study design detail everyone is glossing over, and it is the most interesting part.
This was not a fully autonomous AI running unsupervised. Expert human tutors supervised every message LearnLM drafted. They could revise anything before it hit the student.
They left 76.4% completely unchanged.
The AI was generating the pedagogical moves. The human was the quality filter. And even with that setup, the supervised AI condition outperformed human tutoring alone on the outcome that matters most.
It gets more interesting.
Multiple tutors reported learning new teaching techniques from watching the model work. Specifically, Socratic questioning strategies that pushed students to reason through problems rather than just receive corrections.
The tutors started using those strategies in their own classrooms.
The AI tutoring tool made the human teachers who ran it better at their jobs.
Now the honest part.
165 students is promising, not conclusive. Google funded and built the model, which means you want independent replication before betting a national education policy on it. A larger US trial is underway.
And the 0.1% factual error rate is low. Not zero.
But none of that changes what happened.
Benjamin Bloom proved in 1984 that one-on-one expert tutoring produces two standard deviation gains over classroom instruction. That finding has held up for forty years. It is probably the most replicated result in education research.
It has also been completely unscalable.
A private tutor for every student is not a policy. It is a privilege available to families who can afford it and inaccessible to everyone else.
Google just published randomized controlled trial evidence that an AI can match it. And on the hardest outcome measure, exceed it.
Not in a lab. Not with ideal conditions. In five ordinary secondary schools in the UK with ordinary students who came in not knowing which condition they were in.
The most expensive privilege in education just ran on a server.
SpeedTrapp retweeted
Going to start spending time on this personally - seems like we all need to solve it sooner rather than later.
The latest quantum papers from Google and Caltech are an important signal for the industry. Timelines are still debated, but the time to act is now.
The good news: post-quantum cryptography exists. This is a solvable problem, and many chains already have roadmaps. Bitcoin needs to catch up though.
The bad news: post-quantum cryptography is relatively new and it would be fairly easy to create new security risks if implementation is rushed. The industry needs to align on what happens to wallets that fail to migrate before a CRQC appears.
At Coinbase, we’ve been working on this for a while, auditing and upgrading our internal infrastructure, researching post-quantum cryptography and establishing a Quantum Advisory Council. It’s clear Bitcoin needs to make some fast progress here, so Coinbase is taking the role of rallying the troops and getting the right people in the room - Bitcoin core devs and the broader community - so they can start tackling this.
But no one developer or company can do this alone. Real progress will require coordinated action across the ecosystem.
If you’re working on post-quantum approaches for Bitcoin, we want to support you, and connect you with others that are working on it too. Please DM me directly and I’ll get you added to the working group.
Bitcoin can and will upgrade, but it will take the entire community working together.
SpeedTrapp retweeted
Don’t be fooled by the fact they’re called Trump accounts
This is undisputably an excellent thing for America, and you should sign your kids up now
SpeedTrapp retweeted
Marc Andreessen: There are two ways to think about education. One is at the national level — how do you educate all kids? But the real question is N = 1: what do you do for one individual kid? And for centuries, the answer has been obvious.
If your goal is to maximize a single child, the best method by far is one-on-one tutoring. Every royal family knew this. Every aristocratic class knew this. It’s why Alexander the Great was tutored by Aristotle — and then took over the world.
There’s actually statistical proof of this. The Bloom’s 2-sigma effect shows one-on-one tutoring can move a kid from the 50th percentile to the 99th percentile. No other educational method comes close.
AI changes that. For the first time in history, every kid can have access to infinite questions, instant feedback, personalized explanations, and real-time quizzes — all at N = 1 scale.
This is the most powerful shift in education we’ve seen in centuries. One-on-one tutoring was always the gold standard. AI is what finally makes it available to everyone.
SpeedTrapp retweeted
$HIMS continues to look like an outlier on fundamentals.
Healthcare hasn’t structurally changed in decades. Peak innovation is still a doctor typing up a diagnosis and prescription while you sit there for 20 minutes.
The real inflection is when AI is paired with years of longitudinal patient data, turning care into something continuous and personal, with minimal doctor visits.
$HIMS is moving the pieces into place for that moment, one biomarker at a time.
