alexsouthmayd

This is a very thoughtful response! Thank you. I'd love to chat with you further, if you'd like to reach out directly to me (just use the demo form on the site). We are launching Bloomy this fall with Prenda and Apogee microschools (and in discussions with 1 other large microschool network). Your perspective would be valuable.

Quickly, on meaning: academics are a necessary but insufficient condition for a meaningful school experience. Thus Bloomy is not aiming to solve the meaning question. At the same time, meaning and purpose should (hopefully) create richer outcomes on academics, whether those are pursued using Bloomy or something else.

Meaning is also subjective. You could ask each of our schools using Bloomy what their meaning is -- I'm sure they'd all have an answer, and each answer would be at least a little different.

But I'm sure they'd all say they infuse meaning into their school days.

I'll check out your blog as well.

Great points! Agreed on the distinctions. With enough data we should be able to identify lots of cool things about mastery.

These are really thoughtful points. Thanks for sharing them. I'd love to check out your code.

The percentage mastery threshold on Summit may indeed be quite high, but the Summit also comes after the student has proven they are ready for the it by satisfying the BKT threshold on Climb. Still, though, it is worth testing out mastery percentage thresholds to see if lowering it makes any positive difference (e.g., maybe we are not letting students progress fast enough because the bar for quasi-perfection is so high).

On students asking AI outside of Bloomy: that is always likely to be a challenge. One way we mitigate this is by protecting the clipboard so students cannot copy/paste in or out of the platform. This is especially helpful in our Writing Studio tool, where students write long form essays (although clipboard protection is optional and can be disabled by the teacher/parent if they wish -- e.g., if the student typically drafts in Google Docs or Word and wants to easily paste).

Thanks for engaging! Let me clear up some inaccuracies lest others misunderstand.

First, those are all verbatim quotes from the educators. They were taken directly from letters of reference (which I recently had to compile for a quite intense Technical Due Diligence for a district). They're real school leaders. They're listed plainly on the website. You can look them up online. Whether they used AI in the creation or editing of their letters, I do not know.

The platform has been designed to minimize PII required. We have a very standard third-party vendor stack. Basically just OpenAI and Anthropic as frontier labs for the models, but neither is permitted to train on our data (we have Zero Data Retention agreements with those organizations). The other vendors are standard for operating the app (e.g., Supabase, Vercel). Nothing crazy here.

Not only can users request deletion of their data -- it's standard for any user who cancels their relationship, within 30 days. You can read it right in our privacy policy.

Thanks, that's very helpful feedback! We'll improve this.

Thanks for engaging! Our passages are a mix of public domain passages and in-house authored material which are specced to a long list of requirements. This allows us to create passages spanning a rich variety of characteristics, including genres, contexts, settings, cultures, socioeconomic backgrounds, household family set-ups (e.g., single-parent households, grandparent-led households), etc. We also rigorously vet our content using AI evaluators from Learning Commons, which were created using a golden set of inputs from a panel of experienced educators.

I also have several years' experience writing standardized test preparatory materials. Ultimately the reading comprehension modules serve the end goal of teaching students discrete skills, which roll up into standards. Those standards are (as you point out) the main focus of standardized, summative tests.

We encourage students to read real books! We have an AI writing tool that integrates with schools' novel studies curricula to generate a wide variety of prompts so that students can engage in long form writing about the books they are reading.

Thank you! It's an interesting time for sure. In the face of all the headwinds, there are also some interesting tailwinds and opportunities:

-Shrinking budgets forcing reevaluation of longstanding contracts, especially those that provide single-subject or limited grade band solutions -A general awareness that, despite the uncertainty around AI, schools need to "figure out this AI thing" -School choice driving demand for mastery-based curricula among alternative educational options

I love a good regional conference.

I'll check them out, thank you for your suggestions!

I agree that how we approach the market will be the difference between being successful and failing. At this stage, we’re focused on finding early adopters who have the autonomy to try a different curriculum and already believe mastery learning and AI tutoring are where education is headed. Based on that point, we are validating several B2B & B2C hypotheses over the next few months to truly understand where we should position ourselves in the industry.

As you stated, our primary focus is charter schools, but we’re also working with microschools, homeschool co-ops, and families directly. To make this as accessible as possible for families, we are an approved vendor in over 15 states, which allows homeschool families to use their ESA funds for Bloomy.

Our goal is to work with people who are excited to build this future with us and prove the model from there!

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. We’ve actually had a few school districts ask about paper workbooks, so this is already on our radar. Right now, students can move at their own pace and use a notebook alongside Bloomy, but we haven’t figured out how much paper or e-ink should be part of the product itself.

The VLM idea is especially interesting. It could let Bloomy see how a student worked through a problem, not just whether the final answer was right. We’ll definitely take a closer look at this, so I appreciate your recommendation!

We ran a pilot with roughly 150 students in grades 6–8. Students who used Bloomy for one hour per week averaged 1.8x their expected winter-to-spring growth on NWEA MAP.

Our team was understandably energized by these results, and we plan to run several more pilots this fall to see whether we can produce similar gains across other student populations and assessments, including the PSAT.

Thanks! I’ll have a read. Appreciate your taking the time to source and share these.

There are many problems to solve within education! To say there’s only 1 aspect would be a massive disservice to the ~2 decades the average person spends going through a school system. Some studies estimate the average American is at a middle school reading level. That’s one problem (of many) we can aim to solve with something like Bloomy.