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
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….
Draft you can post:
The 8 teams still in the 2026 MLB postseason, ranked by payroll:
1-Dodgers — $338.0M
2-Yankees — $304.6M
3_Braves — $263.9M
4-Padres — $223.9M
5-Brewers — $143.5M
6-Rays — $98.3M
7-White Sox — $98.0M
8-Guardians — $74.2M
The two best records in baseball (Brewers, Rays) are outside the top 15 in payroll. Cleveland is the cheapest team left.
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…
This is true, and it needs to stop. We're recreating the opportunity gap in education with the opportunity gap in youth sports.
Let me explain exactly why parents pay $25,000 a year for youth sports their kid will never play professionally, because the math is more interesting than the headlines suggest.
The $25K is buying admissions arbitrage at elite colleges. Run it both ways.
Scholarship math first. The US has 8 million high school athletes. Roughly 7% play in college, 2% at D1. Total NCAA athletic scholarship spend is $3.6 billion across about 175,000 D1 athletes, mostly partial aid in the low teens per year. A family putting in $25K annually from age 6 to 18 spends $300K chasing a maximum return of about $80K. The expected value is a lottery ticket.
Admissions math second.
The SFFA v. Harvard trial disclosed that recruited athletes get admitted at 86%. The non-athlete rate sits around 5%. Even academically weak applicants jump to a 98% admit probability if recruited. A non-athlete with a 1397 SAT has roughly 0.08% odds at Harvard. The same kid recruited for crew has 70%+. The athletic hook is the largest single advantage in elite admissions, bigger than legacy or dean's list. Ivies don't even offer athletic scholarships. The value is purely the admissions ticket.
This is what $25K buys. Year-round travel ball is the qualifier round for an admissions process operating on different rules than the one your kid's classmates compete in. The "country club sports" pipeline (squash, lacrosse, crew, fencing, golf) is a feature. Barrier to entry is the product. 90% of Ivy League squash players come from $30K-a-year private high schools. The math works because the alternative pool is small.
PE arrived after the demand existed. Unrivaled Sports, Perfect Game, regional travel-ball roll-ups. Upper-middle-class parents had already turned youth sports into a class transmission mechanism. PE consolidated the supply chain and raised prices because the buyers were already there at $25K.
$300K to convert a 4% admit rate at an Ivy into an 86% one. Plus the alumni network and pre-professional sorting that follows. That's the actual equation.
The trade is rational at the top of the income distribution. Brutal everywhere else.
Don’t listen to the critics. Keep innovating.
In some ways, a teachers role is more valuable in the ai classroom of the future. Instead of having to focus primarily on content knowledge, teachers can focus on building character in kids. This is arguably a more important skill for society than math, reading, and writing content knowledge.
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.
