What really fixes schools: money, family, standards or technology?

The Short Version

Ask five sets of podcast voices what would actually fix schools and you get five different levers: money and basic resources, family structure, standards and mastery, technology, and a set of cheap classroom habits taken from neuroscience. Ben Shapiro argues that two-parent households matter far more than funding, pointing to Los Angeles schools that spend "tens of thousands of dollars very often per student" without better results [1]. Destiny counters that government can still help at the margins [1], and Francis Foster, a former teacher, describes what happened to deprived kids when mental health services were cut [5]. Joe Liemandt of Alpha School says the real breakthrough is AI tutoring to mastery, and that schools should be judged on growth, not raw scores [3]. Warren Smith's point from Roland Fryer's research is to judge a system by whether it hits its goal [2], and Andrew Huberman offers low-cost additions: sleep, a few minutes of meditation, micro gaps and movement [4]. None of these theories fully disproves the others. They rely on different kinds of evidence, and they are aimed at different parts of the problem.

Table of contents

What They Said

Ben Shapiro: family first, money at the margins

In his debate with Destiny, Shapiro sets out the family-structure case most forcefully [1]. When Destiny asked whether kids in underfunded schools would do better with more funding or technology, Shapiro answered that "on the list of priorities, when it comes to education, the availability of technology is actually fairly low on the list of priorities." The biggest factor "in terms of education itself, not just the physical facilities," is "two parent, family, households, communities that have fathers in them" [1].

His main evidence on money is his own old school district: "They pour an enormous amount of money into LAUSD. We're talking about tens of thousands of dollars very often per student and it does not result in better schooling outcomes" [1]. His argument is about priorities, not that spending does nothing: "every resource is limited and you have to prioritize what are the outcomes that you seek in terms of the means with which you are seeking them" [1]. On school meals and basic facilities, he grants that "pouring money onto anything will create change in a marginal way. The question is how large is the margin and how big is the movement? Right? So the Delta is what I'm looking at" [1].

He names what he sees as the primary questions: "family structure, value of education at home, how much you have parents who are capable or willing to help with homework," the incentive structures a society sets up, and "how local communities take ownership of their schools" [1]. Air conditioning and lunch programs "sounds great in a vacuum," but he doesn't think they'll "move the needle in a major way," and he says many "end up being disproportionate wastes of money," citing how much school lunch food is thrown away. He adds that he's "perfectly willing to hear about that better way to do it" [1].

Shapiro makes the level of government matter. "I'm fine with my local community voting for school lunches or air conditioning, or whatever it is that we all agreed to do because the more local you get, the more homogeneity you get in terms of interest" [1]. What he objects to is national politics "arguing on top of the iceberg about how we can move the needle 0.5 percentage points. As opposed to the entire iceberg melting beneath them" [1]. He also argues that people are richer and more educated than 50 years ago yet have more children out of wedlock, which he attributes to the changed moral status of marriage, and says the cycle breaks only when people form stable marriages [1].

On higher education he goes further: "I think the entire educational system at the upper levels, if you're not in STEM, is a complete scam... all it is is a formalized, very expensive sorting mechanism for people of IQ" [1]. He says he "could have gone directly from high school to law school with maybe one year of training" [1], and he blames rising degree requirements and federal subsidies for rising costs [1].

Destiny: family matters, but government can still help

Destiny, a liberal streamer, frames his view with his own story. He says he became less libertarian after choosing a Nebraska district with excellent public schools for his son [1]. He asked whether some children, "if they just had better funding or more access to technologies... would become more productive members of society" [1], and pressed for baseline standards, such as every school having "a non-leaky gym" and food for children who can't afford lunch or breakfast [1].

He calls Shapiro's move "the conservative merry-go-round": every proposal gets redirected to family structure, which in turn depends on economic opportunity, birth control and whether people can afford to marry [1]. He then grants a lot of Shapiro's point. Government can't fix broken families, and "there's only so much you can do in a school when the children coming in are so beyond destroyed because of the family life and everything prior to them even getting to school that day" [1]. His criticism of conservatives is that they ignore places where government helps at the margins: "sometimes having after school programs is nice" to prevent teenagers "producing other children out of wedlock" [1]. He notes that he was kept busy with football, cross country and band [1]. Both men end up agreeing that much of this is a practical question rather than a moral one [1].

Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin: what cuts cost deprived kids

On Joe Rogan's show, Francis Foster, co-host of Triggernometry, speaks from years of teaching in deprived London schools [5]. He describes some of those schools as resembling badly run prisons, where kids from violent homes have little chance unless they're exceptional [5]. His strongest story is about services outside the classroom. "I was teaching in schools that were super deprived... a lot of them would come to school They didn't have food in their bellies" [5]. Many had psychological problems from seeing horrible things, like "a brother who got involved in gangs Is now in prison a father who was never there," and "conditions which were undiagnosed" [5]. A UK agency, Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, brought in counsellors, psychologists and psychiatrists, and "because of austerity You know, this agency got cut after cut after cut after cut" [5].

He doesn't reject cutting spending in general: "I understand we need to cut I understand we're running at a deficit But there needs to be balance as well." His argument is about return on investment: "if you invest that money and you're able to support those kids They're far more likely when they leave school To be a healthy, happier member of society That's going to contribute tax" [5]. He also proposes teaching practical skills like carpentry, so kids who aren't athletic or academic can still feel they're worth something, and mentions a friend teaching stoicism in primary schools [5]. Rogan's version is "if you want to make America great again make less losers," and he suggests paying companies to rebuild struggling neighborhoods the way contractors were paid to rebuild Iraq [5]. Konstantin Kisin adds that Western countries are running debt over 100% of GDP and will eventually have to stop funding some things they genuinely want [5].

Joe Liemandt: standards, mastery and AI tutoring

Liemandt, principal of Alpha School, says the century-old model of one teacher in front of a class delivered universal access to education but not universal learning [3]. His fix combines standards, mastery and technology.

On standards, he uses sports as the model: "if you lose the ball 20% of the time going down the court, the coach is not saying, let's work on the dunks... They're like ball handling... You can't be 85, 80% accurate. In America, we're like, you get in a B, man, move on... You just finished fourth grade at 80%. Let's get you into that fifth grade stuff. And the answer is no, no, because then all those problems compound" [3]. He draws on Dr. Yeager's "high standards, high support" framework and sums up child development as "The key to developing a child is that they struggle and fail on their road to success supported by a caring adult" [3].

On mastery and technology, he cites Bloom's 2 Sigma finding that one-on-one tutoring to mastery can bring students to roughly top-2% performance, and says AI finally makes that affordable [3]. He is firm that this means structured tutors, not chatbots: "If you take a chat bot and put it into standard school, 90% of the kids use it to cheat" [3]. His reported result: "The average kid spent 121 minutes last year in the apps and learned more than 2x what they would have in sitting in class for six and doing homework" [3]. He also says fluency in basics frees up working memory, citing a student who went from the low 700s to 790 on SAT math after she memorized her multiplication tables [3]. He cites NWEA MAP data showing the average student barely improves between grades 8 and 12 (roughly 233 to 234 on a 300-point scale). Students transferring to Alpha from expensive private schools averaged 2.2 grade levels behind, and since a grade level in one subject takes 20 to 30 hours for K–8 students, he says gaps of years can close in months [3].

Liemandt also speaks to the family-income issue directly: "the American educational system today, because of how it's built and how it's structured, the single biggest indicator of your performance is your family income. You can predict somebody's test scores, basically." After that come IQ and Big Five conscientiousness, and "our educational system isn't a mastery-based system" [3]. He argues schools should be measured on growth rate, the slope of the line, rather than raw achievement, which mostly reflects selection [3]. He responds to the selection-effect criticism by benchmarking against peers at the same percentile: "our top one percentile kids are learning twice as much in only two hours a day as other top one percentile kids are learning all day" [3].

He treats motivation as central, calling it "90%" of learning. He favors aligning school with what kids care about: at Alpha's Texas Sports Academy, students who were far behind finish their academics so they can get to practice [3]. He also defends a controversial practice, paying kids for breakthroughs, as cheap compared with the roughly $20,000 per year American public schools spend per student [3]. His expansion plans include over 1,000 voucher students from Texas families earning under $65,000, public-school pilots, and randomized controlled trials with MIT's Blueprint Labs [3]. The summary notes that his reported results are Alpha's own, with independent trials still underway, and he says changing the whole system will take about 20 years [3]. On homeschooling, he calls outcomes bimodal: kids of parents focused on academics excel, while those whose parents reject standardized academics tend to do poorly [3].

Warren Smith and Roland Fryer: judge by the goal

Warren Smith, a former special education multimedia teacher who was fired after his classroom conversations went viral, contributes a way of evaluating, not a program [2]. He describes what Harvard economist Roland Fryer's research on policing taught him about statistics. Colleagues warned Fryer not to publish findings that contradicted popular narratives [2]. Using a loan-officer analogy, Smith says the right question is whether you achieve your goal, like a low default rate, not whether outcomes differ by group [2]. His example: if about 40% of police stops recover contraband across all demographics, the stops are being done correctly, even if the raw numbers differ by race [2]. Fryer's work Smith describes is about policing, not schools, but the principle carries over: define what a school is supposed to accomplish, then check whether it does. Rogan's response is that the real fix for unequal outcomes is rehabilitating crime- and gang-ridden neighborhoods, including poor white areas of Appalachia, rather than equity band-aids [2].

Smith's classroom stories show what a system misses when it measures the wrong things. His favorite student came from a hard background and could draw like no one he'd seen. They got him a digital drawing tablet and he spent whole days in Smith's room, but the school dismissed his samurai drawings as irrelevant, and he was expelled two months before graduation after an offhand comment about bringing a gun to avoid a field trip [2]. Smith also says students are genuinely curious about big questions, and that when he debated a colleague with different politics, normally noisy kids went silent and paid attention [2]. Rogan adds that sports and art are the two best ways out of poverty, and that teachers who tell kids you can't make money on YouTube are saying something objectively untrue [2].

Andrew Huberman: cheap changes from neuroscience

Answering a listener question about what schools could do, Huberman offers changes that cost almost nothing [4]. He starts with sleep, because learning is triggered by focused attention but the actual rewiring happens during deep and REM sleep. That means getting kids off devices at night and, ideally, later school start times [4].

His three main recommendations [4]:

• Brief meditation before learning. He cites work from Wendy Suzuki's lab at NYU showing that about 13 minutes of daily meditation can improve working memory, other forms of memory and focus, and lower stress. He would start every class with three to five minutes of focused breathing, bringing attention back whenever it drifts, framed as a perceptual exercise rather than anything mystical.
• Micro gaps. Pauses of about 10 seconds, inserted at random during instruction, let the hippocampus and neocortex replay the material at 20 to 30 times normal speed, giving learners extra repetitions for free, similar to what happens in REM sleep. He suggests one to five, or up to ten, per hour.
• Physical activity. Movement, especially cardiovascular exercise, helps learning, particularly when learning comes right after, likely through catecholamines like dopamine, epinephrine and norepinephrine. He makes a case for physical education.

He adds that students and teachers could talk about attention thresholds, caffeine and nutrition, noting how attention drops after a big lunch [4]. In the Liemandt conversation he also mentions research showing that a phone nearby, even face down, reduces cognitive performance [3]. In his writing routine he locks his phone away and has promised lab members $1,000 each if he asked for it back before 5 p.m. [4].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

Money versus family. This is the sharpest split. Shapiro's evidence is high LAUSD spending without better outcomes and his reading of studies that rank family structure first [1]. Destiny's is his own district choice, practical baselines like food and working facilities, and after-school programs [1]. Foster adds a firsthand case where cutting targeted services hurt traumatized kids [5]. Both sides in the debate end up closer than their openings suggest. Shapiro grants marginal gains and local choice [1], and Destiny grants that schools can't undo what children bring in from home [1]. The real disagreement is about how big those marginal gains are and which level of government should pay for them.

Family income as the driver. Shapiro and Liemandt agree that background explains much of the outcome gap, but they draw different conclusions. Shapiro concludes that family formation is the primary lever [1]. Liemandt accepts that family income is "the single biggest indicator" of test scores in the current system, and argues that a different instructional model can change the result, pointing to students who arrive years behind and catch up quickly [3]. Rogan's neighborhood-rebuilding idea sits between the two: fix the environment around the family [2][5].

Technology. Shapiro ranks technology "fairly low on the list of priorities" [1]. Liemandt says technology is the breakthrough, but only in a specific form: AI tutors that assess what a child knows and teach to mastery, not devices or chatbots, which he says 90% of kids use to cheat [3]. These positions are less opposed than they look. Shapiro is rejecting "give every kid an iPad" [1], and Liemandt would agree that hardware alone does nothing [3]. Huberman's advice on phones points the same way: devices can hurt learning when they aren't doing specific work [3][4].

Standards. Liemandt's insistence on mastery before moving on [3] and Shapiro's emphasis on "value of education at home" [1] both call for higher expectations, placed with different people: Liemandt puts them on the school and its guides, and Shapiro puts them on the family. Huberman's framing, "you have to learn stuff because you have to learn it," fits with Liemandt's view that high standards and high support together make kids happier [3].

What counts as success. Liemandt wants growth rate instead of raw achievement [3]. Smith's Fryer-inspired rule is to judge by whether the goal is met, not by raw disparities [2]. Shapiro judges by outcomes per dollar [1]. Foster judges by whether kids become healthy, tax-paying adults [5]. These are all results-based standards, but they would score the same school differently.

Evidence quality. Each position rests on a different kind of evidence. Shapiro cites district spending and "many studies" on family structure, without naming them in the passages [1]. Destiny relies on personal experience and reasoning about what schools can and can't do [1]. Foster relies on firsthand teaching experience [5]. Liemandt relies on Bloom's 2 Sigma, NWEA MAP data and Alpha's internal results, with randomized trials still in progress [3]. Huberman cites specific lab findings, such as the 13-minute meditation study and replay research [4]. Smith applies a statistical principle borrowed from policing research [2].

Why It Works

The sources give several reasons why their preferred lever should matter.

Why family structure matters. Shapiro says what happens at home, including parents who value education and can help with homework, shapes what a child brings to school [1]. Destiny agrees that children can arrive "so beyond destroyed" that a school can do only so much [1]. Foster describes that damage: hunger, trauma, absent fathers and undiagnosed conditions [5].

Why targeted support can still matter. Foster's argument is that supporting traumatized kids produces healthier adults who contribute more [5]. Destiny adds that after-school programs fill time that might otherwise lead to risky behavior [1]. Neither claims to fix families. They are trying to reduce the damage.

Why mastery works. Knowledge builds in layers: chemistry depends on algebra, algebra on fractions, fractions on math facts [3]. Moving on at 80% lets the gaps compound [3]. Working memory has limited slots, and anything memorized to fluency doesn't take one, which is why the SAT student's score jumped after she learned her multiplication tables [3].

Why one-on-one works. Individualized instruction meets each child at their level. Bloom's finding puts tutoring to mastery at roughly top-2% performance [3]. It also removes shame, since nobody knows an eighth grader is working on third-grade material [3].

Why motivation works. Liemandt calls motivation "90%" and says people willingly struggle toward goals they care about [3]. At the Texas Sports Academy, a boy who used to skip a quarter of school days started waking his mother so he wouldn't keep his coach waiting [3].

Why Huberman's tools work. Sleep is when learning gets consolidated [4]. Short breathing practice improves working memory and focus [4]. Ten-second pauses allow fast neural replay [4]. Exercise raises catecholamines that help learning [4].

Why judging by goals helps. Smith's point is that raw disparities can mislead. Checking whether a process achieves its stated goal tells you whether it's working [2]. Liemandt's growth-rate measure does something similar by removing the effect of who a school admits [3].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

Family structure. This argument explains broad patterns across communities [1], but it doesn't tell a teacher what to do on Monday morning. Shapiro offers local ownership and incentives, not classroom methods [1]. It also has limited reach inside a school, as Destiny notes [1].

Funding. Shapiro's LAUSD example shows that total spending alone doesn't guarantee results [1]. Foster's example shows that cutting targeted services can hurt specific kids [5]. The lesson from the sources is that what money buys matters more than how much is spent. Shapiro is open to local lunch and air-conditioning programs and to "a better way" of running them [1].

AI tutoring. Alpha's reported gains come from its own model: structured apps, two-hour blocks, mastery requirements, trained guides, and afternoons of motivating projects [3]. The results are self-reported, with independent trials still underway [3]. They don't support handing students general chatbots, which Liemandt says most use to cheat [3]. Selection effects are a fair question, and he answers it by comparing students at the same percentile [3].

Neuroscience tweaks. Huberman's suggestions are cheap and can be added to any school model [4]. They aren't presented as fixes for deep inequality. Their value is in improving the learning time a school already has.

Higher education. Shapiro's "scam" critique applies to non-STEM degrees used as sorting mechanisms [1]. The K–12 debate over family, money and methods is a separate question.

The Fryer principle. The research Smith cites is about policing [2]. Applying "judge by the goal" to schools is a reasonable extension, but schools have many goals, including academics, character, safety and pathways for kids like Smith's gifted artist [2]. Picking which goal to measure is itself a judgment call.

What To Do With It

1. Define the goal before judging a school. Decide what success means, such as mastery, growth or healthy adult outcomes, and measure that instead of raw disparities or spending alone [2][3][5].

2. Measure growth, not just level. When comparing schools or programs, look at how much students improve over time, not their starting scores, which mostly reflect selection and family income [3].

3. Close gaps before moving on. Whether as a parent or a teacher, don't let an 80% grasp of fundamentals roll into the next grade. Find missing prerequisites and drill them, starting with math facts and vocabulary [3].

4. Pair high standards with high support. Expect a lot and stay close by as a caring adult while a child struggles and fails on the way to success [3].

5. Strengthen the home side. Parents can show that education matters at home and help with homework, the factors Shapiro ranks above funding [1]. Communities can take local ownership of their schools [1].

6. Fund targeted help, not general spending. At the local level, back specific programs with visible effects, like food for hungry kids, after-school activities and mental health support for traumatized students, and demand evidence that the money reaches them [1][5].

7. Use technology narrowly. Choose structured, mastery-based learning software over open chatbots or devices for their own sake [3]. Keep phones out of study time and out of bedrooms at night [3][4].

8. Add Huberman's classroom habits. Start lessons with three to five minutes of focused breathing, insert a few 10-second pauses per hour, and schedule physical activity just before demanding learning [4]. Protect students' sleep [4].

9. Build real pathways for different kids. Give non-academic students practical skills like carpentry, and treat art and sports as legitimate paths, not distractions [2][5].

10. Tie learning to motivation. Connect academics to what students care about, such as a sport, a project or a creative goal, so they choose to put in the effort [3].

Sources

1. Ben Shapiro Vs Destiny Debate: Politics: Jan 6: Israel: Ukraine : Wokeism · Lex Fridman Podcast
2. Warren Smith · The Joe Rogan Experience
3. Joe Liemandt on Alpha School, AI Tutoring, and Learning Faster Through Mastery and Motivation · Huberman Lab
4. AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More · Huberman Lab
5. 2297 - Francis Foster & Konstantin Kisin · The Joe Rogan Experience