Dr. Stef

Building a team of guides who are the world's best at high standards + high support - changing kids' lives. Follow me if you want to see the future of schools.

[Dr. Stef @Athlete2EdD]

89% of Alpha guides believe they are growing personally and professional at our org.
81% report loving their job on the mid-year survey.

I'm accountable to:
1. Delivering Alpha's 3 commitments to every. single. kid.
2. Making sure guides love their job as much as we want kids to love school.

Here's how our guides react to our high standards, high support environment...

[Nat Eliason @nateliason]

The best teaching job in the world.

Come be a guide!

[Dr. Stef @Athlete2EdD]

I ranked #24 out of all Perplexity Computer users.

My principal @jliemandt - #31.

I'm ex-D1 athlete turned school builder for @LAGalaxy Now AI-native player-coach, operator @AlphaSchoolATX - building the systems that make our guides 10x and change every Alpha kid's life.

Some stats from the report card our students give us 5 times a year:

91% of kids love school.
45% of kids pick Alpha over vacation.
94% of kids believe their guide is changing their life.
91% of kids are proud to be part of their school community.

AI didn't produce these numbers. Our guides did. AI just made it possible to coach 180+ of them like I'm sitting in every room.

Thanks, @perplexity_ai for the Mac mini.

[Perplexity @perplexity_ai]

Today we're releasing Personal Computer.

Personal Computer integrates with the Perplexity Mac App for secure orchestration across your local files, native apps, and browser.

We’re rolling this out to all Perplexity Max subscribers and everyone on the waitlist starting today.

[Dr. Stef @Athlete2EdD]

If you're the one who lives for turning around the "unreachable" kids -- come do it full time.

Every kid. All yours. All year. All life-changing impact.

We're hiring everywhere.

[Dr. Stef @Athlete2EdD]

The messy part of education is the part that matters most, that the teacher certification covers the least...

Are you the teacher at your school who is the "difficult kid whisperer"?

When other teachers talk about "that one kid" who makes their life so hard, you say, "put that kid in my class."

You spend time with them before school, after school, during lunch. You figure out what's actually going on. And you change their trajectory.

[Steve Magness @stevemagness]

A harsh truth: Coaching humbles you.

It forces you to see that the nice and neat world of research based guidelines or exacting training recommendations just doesn't work.

The real world is messy. So when it comes to training advice, look for those who have coached.

[Dr. Stef @Athlete2EdD]

We call it 180ing a kid.

At Alpha this isn't something that happens to one lucky kid because you made extra time. It's not a textbook behavior plan. It's the real, messy, daily work and every guide does it for every kid on their roster.

And we measure it. 5 times a year we ask every student:

"Every adult has had 1 or 2 teachers who changed their life. Is your guide that for you?"

[Dr. Stef @Athlete2EdD]

Token burns aren't the wrong metric. They're the wrong metric when the system isn't designed to align them with outcomes.

Our guides burn through AI tokens daily. The difference: the tools are designed so that using them IS the outcome we want.

A guide uploads a student interaction, AI surfaces the pattern she missed, and 10 minutes later she's running a targeted intervention.

Usage = better coaching = kids learning and loving school.

Meta built a leaderboard. We built a feedback loop.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

Everyone should read "On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B” at least once.

https://t.co/tF4HGbrweX

[Dr. Stef @Athlete2EdD]

That's not grit. That's not a poster on the wall.

That's a system that builds kids who refuse to quit — and guides who know how to coach them through the moment it matters most.

[Dr. Stef @Athlete2EdD]

At Alpha, every life skills workshop ends with a Test2Pass event. Guides engineer it to feel like a championship game.

Kids pass or fail. Sometimes, kids cry.

Our first-ever Test2Pass: 5th and 6th graders independently coding self-driving cars to navigate a track with zero errors.

Parents in the bleachers. Guides commentating. Kids on the track, casting their code on the big screen, cheering their cars on...

[Steve Magness @stevemagness]

If you’ve never cried after giving everything you had to something that mattered, you’ve probably never given everything you had to something that mattered.

The UCONN women’s basketball team was undefeated, 38-0 for the season. But with a little over a minute left in their final four matchup against South Carolina, Kayleigh Heckel went up for a lay-up to cut the score to 9 and keep alive a tiny bit of hope. She missed. The camera zooms in on Heckel as she drops her head and tears began to flow. It was a harsh moment of realizing that the dream was over.

In 2024, Keisei Tominaga was captured crying on the sidelines with a minute left when his Nebraska team lost to Texas A&M in the tournament. Back in 2006, Adam Morrison had a similar reaction with a few seconds left, after Gonzaga had blown a 17 point lead in the sweet sixteen.

Will all due respect to Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own, there is crying in sport. A lot of it. And contrary to some of the talk on social media, it’s the opposite of weakness. It’s a clear signal of a genuine competitor.

We cry because we care. Tears are proof of our investment.

Psychologist Ad Vingerhoets at Tilburg University has spend decades studying crying. He found that humans are the only species that cries emotionally. And the primary reason we do it is it acts s a kind of communicative device. Tears signal to others that something matters deeply to us and we need support. It’s as if the tears are saying, “this thing matters to me more than I can say.”

As a coach, I’ve seen the toughest of competitors, athletes who are among the best in the country or even the world, break down from time to time. It’s one of the beautiful things about sport. For many reasons, it’s one of the few areas where we let the guard down, show what we really feel, and express genuine emotion. Sometimes, that means tears of joy, other times a crushing bitter disappointment that we can’t quite process. This is especially true for men, who often try to be stoic, thanks to a combination of culture and biology.

Yet, in the days before memes Morrison might as well have become one, as he “got murdered for it” and was “kind of shocked by how much negative feedback” he received. Heckel’s been met with a mixture of support and the sadly expected condemnation.

Those people are clueless.

From the sidelines, it may look like a weakness because you’ve never been in those moments. You’ve never given your all to something, risked greatness, and saw that dream get ripped away. When you step into the arena, you put it all on the line. And in sport, music, and performance arts, one of the few places that are the last bastions of reality. You can’t fake it, it’s all there to see, and there’s a clearly defined success or failure.

You have to care deeply to even be in that spot in the first place. No one made it anywhere close to fulfilling their potential, let alone the pinnacle of their endeavor by not caring. That kind of nonchalance is reserved for the sideline. It’s the cool kid in high school who tries to convince others not trying is the cool thing to do. All so they can protect their ego and say, “I would have gotten an A, made the team, won the tournament, if I had tried…”

Caring is cool. It’s also the only way you see how good you can be. Our brain has a kind of internal safety mechanism that prevents us from ever truly pushing to our limit. And for good reason. If a marathoner really ran out of glycogen or let their core body temperature keep rising, then serious illness or death awaits. Instead, we run a kind of inner calculation that says: is the juice worth the squeeze? Caring deeply is what allows us to push just a bit harder. It tells that safety mechanism, “Ya, we’re in a lot of discomfort right now, but this means a lot, so give us a little bit longer of a leash.”

So if I ever saw someone crying after a tough race, I knew that was an athlete I wanted on my team. It meant they cared. It meant the moment meant so much to them, that they could no longer put on a face, or hold things back. It meant more to them than they could verbally communicate.

We need more people with passion, who are willing to risk it all, to be have the emotions of the moment overwhelm them. It’s only by stepping into the arena and taking that risk that we find out how good we can be, and more importantly, who we are. The potential for tears is the price of admission.

Morrison got murdered for crying in 2006. Tominaga said it should be celebrated in 2024. He was right.

-Steve

[Dr. Stef @Athlete2EdD]

Every guide calmly walked to their kid. 1-on-1 coaching through the upset. No panic. No lowering the bar.

Every single kid wiped their tears, walked back to the track, and demanded to try again.

The event ran until 10pm because no kid would leave campus until they passed.

[Dr. Stef @Athlete2EdD]

What we do select for: coachability.

We want kids who are coachable in four core life skills:

- Independence
- Receive Feedback
- Uphold Community Standards
- Uplift Others

We'll admit a 5th grader who hasn't yet reached multiplication fact fluency — if he's willing to master these four skills.

Over a 2nd grader reading at a 5th grade level who constantly wants the guide to solve their problems rather than support them.

We don't select kids who come in with these skills. We select for kids who are excited to learn them.

[Nat Eliason @nateliason]

“Alpha School selects for the top 1%” is a common myth.

My daughter starts in the fall, her application involved zero academic / intellectual challenges.

We have kids join the high school all the time who need to go back to elementary or middle school math / reading etc.

[Dr. Stef @Athlete2EdD]

This is what our entire Alpha system optimizes for: the relationship between the guide and the kid.

That's the foundation.

The academic rigor, the real-world projects, the high expectations — all built on top of it.

[Dr. Stef @Athlete2EdD]

"You can't have the tough conversations without the relationship." - @BrendaFrese in the post-game press conference.

You can only hold high standards if the relationship is there first.

This is backed by research:

[Bleacher Report @BleacherReport]

Coach told her "I believe in you." 🥹

Love to see this energy from Maryland HC Brenda Frese 🙌

[Dr. Stef @Athlete2EdD]

@john_hattie's Visible Learning: 1,800+ meta-analyses, puts teacher-student relationships at a 0.52 effect size. Above the threshold for meaningful impact.

Roorda et al. (2011): 99 studies, 129,000+ students, found that the emotional quality of the teacher-student relationship is one of the strongest drivers of student engagement, which in turn drives achievement.

[Dr. Stef @Athlete2EdD]

These days, if you're putting in more hours, your output better be 10x.

If it's not, you're not on the rocket.

Our guides burn AI tokens the way engineers burn compute. Every student interaction, every intervention, every workshop - optimized by AI.

https://t.co/4om3sgK0En

[Austen Allred @Austen]

My thinking around how to best respond to AI has changed from, “Just get to the cutting edge of AI and ride that wave” to, “Do anything you can to get on this rocket before it leaves.”

[Dr. Stef @Athlete2EdD]

This is why we don't measure guide performance by hours in the building.

We measure it by student outcomes on the data wall.

Do your students pick school over vacation? Are they learning 2x? Are they accomplishing impossible things in their life skills workshops?

If the answer is no - our guides run through walls to find the root issue and the solution.

And...

[Steve Magness @stevemagness]

Talking about how many hours you work is the same as boasting about how many miles you run per week. Neither are great indicators of actual performance.

[Dr. Stef @Athlete2EdD]

Come be their coach. Create workshops that build life skills. Join the most important profession in the world.

[Dr. Stef @Athlete2EdD]

Ditch learning how to do business.

Come teach 10-year-olds to run one.

Our guides left the NFL, Cirque du Soleil, McKinsey, Hollywood, and the traditional classroom to inspire kids to do wildly ambitious things, like:

[Nat Eliason @nateliason]

Honestly if you're in an MBA program right now you should drop out and do this instead.

Learn more, better network, get paid.

[Dr. Stef @Athlete2EdD]

5-year-olds biking the Golden Gate Bridge.
8-year-olds coding self-driving cars.
10-year-olds running food trucks.
12-year-olds using @OpenClaw to build their businesses.