State of Choice: Revolutionizing Education with AI

Ed Tarnowski: Welcome back to the State of Choice podcast. I’m your host, Ed Tarnowski, also known as Ed with EdChoice. Joining me today, Adam Mangana, who’s going to tell us a lot about how AI and tech are so relevant to the education choice movement and what he’s doing over at his company.

Adam, I give you the floor to introduce yourself and a little bit about what you guys do.

Adam Mangana: And first of all, thank you so much for having me. I am honored to be on the podcast and to talk with your incredible audience. So Optima is a virtual instruction provider, but what makes us unique is we’re the first of our kind in the world where we’re deploying, instead of the checkerboard of faces that so many families are familiar with in Zoom school, we’re actually in a social VR platform leveraging spatial computing and AI to make learning more efficient.

So what does that mean? Optima’s delivering courses that are hyper-personalized that can allow students to learn things twice as fast, retain things twice as long, and we have the results to prove it. Certainly, there are two major innovations taking place, I think that your listeners are very aware of, the AI revolution, and of course, the policy revolution around parent-directed funding.

And I think you find Optima at the intersection of those two opportunities or tailwinds, and we’re excited about sharing what we’re up to.

Ed Tarnowski: Well, as they say, the future is now and part of universal education choices is that supply side where we’re seeing providers get entrepreneurial and come up with new, exciting ideas, and I think you guys are doing exactly that. Spatial computing, can you tell us a little bit about what that looks like generally and how it applies to a classroom? I know we chatted offline about how you guys have live teachers there.

It’s a good mix of things and it sounds like there’s some really interesting things you can do. I remember you mentioned Ms. Frizzle, so I really like that, I had to put that out there, so I’ll let you get into it.

Adam Mangana: No, that’s right. I mean, look, I think to your point about the future is now, so much of online education has been a series of recordings. It’s not been very interactive and it’s been very passive learning as opposed to active learning.

How do you actually engage students? The era of spatial computing, which combines VR, AR, this kind of immersive computing world with AI, artificial intelligence, that allows for so much capability in terms of hyper-personalization, that is going to transform the way we learn, the way we live, the way we engage in commerce. It’s already changing so much of what we do.

I’m imagining right now, the vast majority of your listeners have some kind of subscription to some kind of frontier model, if it’s ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, but how do you take the power of these models, which your listeners are very familiar with, and how do you build the guardrails appropriate? How do you build the use cases in education? That’s really where Optima is focused.

For example, when we think about turning every teacher into Ms. Frizzle, to be able to take students back to the founding of our country and have an AI-powered Benjamin Franklin that that child doesn’t have to watch a video about or even read a book per se, but they can actually interact with that AI-powered avatar and ask questions to extend their own thinking about how our country was founded. These are very powerful tools and they require the kind of responsibility that we take at Optima to make sure that Benjamin Franklin isn’t talking about the latest Cardi B rap, that it has the proper guardrails, so that ultimately they’re getting the kind of information that encourages them to want to participate in civic virtue and not just be a passive learner.

Ed Tarnowski: Oh, absolutely. Well, that’s exciting stuff. And I think one of the most important things here is, and I’d love for you to expand on this, coming out of the pandemic, a lot of families understandably associated just online schooling with what we saw out of COVID, just kind of like quickly switching things online and just kind of trying to do, not so much a program tailored to online schooling, but just kind of trying to do what they do in school, but put it on computers.

So it sounds like this is really a differentiation from what we saw. It’s not just trying to do school on a Zoom class. It seems much more integrated and active for students and families, if I’m getting that right.

Adam Mangana: Such a great insight. I mean, you know, businesses are often based on secrets or insights that people have that others don’t see. For me, one of the things that was so clear was the world during COVID pivoted to Zoom, right?

And Zoom is engineered as a conference call. And why would we ever think about doing eight hours of school on a conference call? That would be the exact opposite way you would want to engage learners.

But yet everybody did this, right? And so I had been working in spatial computing, primarily working in game engines for about 10 years. And I thought to myself, you know, it would be much better to have a social VR platform.

When you think about this generation of learner, they’re already socializing on roadblocks and on Fortnite. What if you could build the proper guardrails and, you know, make sure that you had an academically serious type of content? You can marry those things, right?

You could change student engagement. Ultimately, student engagement is what leads to better outcomes and stickier learning. And so what we did during COVID when the world pivoted to Zoom is we began to pilot what I call kind of ready teacher one school, where we were actually having our students show up together as avatars in the same way they would in roadblocks or Fortnite, but with the proper guardrails so that they weren’t having some of the negative externalities that you see from these kinds of social VR platforms. And then we would marry that with serious academic content. You know, how do you learn about the parts of a cell or about photosynthesis?

Or, you know, I referenced earlier, you know, the trip to Independence Hall to see the signing of the Declaration of Independence. These are ways that students can really fall in love with learning, right? And the idea here on the policy front, right, is to be able to now decouple where you’re able to buy a house with access to this world-class content.

And so now students anywhere in Florida, for example, with our US, you know, with the ability to access universal ESAs can access Optima tuition-free using ESA dollars and not having to come out of pocket.

Ed Tarnowski: That’s awesome. And here at EdChoice, we talk a lot about how each kid has different needs. And that’s one of the reasons that choice, access to universal education choice is so important.

So you guys have a big focus on classical learning, you mentioned. So can you tell our listeners a little bit about how your system is kind of an intersection of classical learning and meeting the unique needs, learning needs of each kid?

Adam Mangana: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it kind of mirrors from my own background. I was a classics major computer science minor in undergrad.

And so, you know, you think about, you know, any of these technologies, you know, the smartest folks among us have always had some skepticism. Socrates, for example, was skeptical of books. He thought men would lose their memories.

They no longer be great orators. You’ve read Phaedrus, right? But at the same time, you know, we wouldn’t know that unless Plato had written and documented these conversations between Socrates and of course, Phaedrus.

And so, you know, my point in this is that, you know, these technologies, even though we want to deploy them in a way that’s very responsible, they are inevitable. And so my idea was if we could preserve what was best about our content and our culture and Western civilization, and we could bring that into a delivery mechanism that met students where they currently were. So the real idea is marrying 21st century technology with first century wisdom.

So when we say classical, we’re going to read the great books. We’re going to wrestle with the greatest thinkers that have ever lived in the West. We’re going to, you know, read the Inca Iridian of Epictetus, and we’re going to, you know, explore Socrates and Plato.

But we’re going to have the kind of Socratic discussions instead of on Zoom in this kind of social VR platform that allows us to leverage the actual environment as an additional teacher. And so I often joke with my team, we’re making ambulatory learning great again. You know, our greatest teachers in the first century would walk next to us, and they would ask us questions to extend our thinking.

And we’ve kind of moved to this kind of passive state where everything we think we should be knowing we can ask in AI, and that’s actually not at all what Optimist Vision is. Optimist Vision is one that is much more active where students are immersed, fully present. And we think focus is the new IQ, and the ability to be off your phone but in this technology that allows for focus is very powerful.

And building the proper guardrails is part of the way that we execute on this in a way that makes the technology safe.

Ed Tarnowski: Absolutely, that makes sense to me. Now shifting gears a little bit, so offline again, we talked a little bit about, my understanding is that people are already using education savings accounts to be able to participate and have their kids use this technology and this new way of schooling. Could you tell us a little bit about how that’s, what that looks like in the states so far, like how, and how students are using this through ESAs?

Adam Mangana: I know that your audience is very savvy around these policies, but it’s very exciting, right? Because for the first time in history, you’re beginning to see states adopt universal ESAs or universal educational savings accounts where no matter what your income is, no matter what your background is, no matter what your child’s learning exceptionality might be, you can direct funding based on what your child’s needs are. And I think that’s really powerful because for so long, we’ve had a monopoly in education where wherever you bought your home is where you had those services provided.

And those who could buy more expensive homes typically had better educational opportunities. And that for me always felt fundamentally un-American. I think part of bringing back the American dream where you are able to, based on how hard you work and how ambitious you are, you’re able to access this ladder that can mean just incredible opportunity, that really needs to be at the forefront of our educational system.

And I think everyone can agree on that if you’re blue, red, whatever, right? And so the exciting thing about educational savings accounts is we’re now back at a place where based on what your child needs, based on your ability to have agency, right? You can select the kind of model that works best or the kind of solution that works best.

And that is an empowerment tool as opposed to an entitlement tool, which is where I think we’ve been stuck, right? We want education to be an empowerment tool. We want children to walk away from the school building or the metaverse school and think they can conquer the world, just like Alexander.

But Alexander doesn’t become great without Aristotle coming into his home. So rooted in what I think is so important is that we create solutions that are still involving human relationships. And so even in the era of AI and spatial computing and educational savings accounts where you can now parent direct funding for whatever solution works best, there still needs to be a human in the loop.

And I think that’s the blend that Optima brings to the table. We are helping families who have these educational savings accounts hyper-personalize what their child needs, but we’re intentionally placing a human in the loop where those relationships can be optimized.

Ed Tarnowski: Absolutely. Let’s turn toward policy headwinds now. It sounds like you’re active in about 13 states now and you’re looking to expand.

Could you tell us a little bit about, let’s say, which states are you operating in so far? I mean, you don’t have to give me the whole list, but maybe some examples, who you’re looking to expand into, and then we can get into where we’re seeing the potential for rollbacks.

Adam Mangana: Yeah, and I’m so grateful that you kind of framed that out. I mean, I am really, really excited about Florida and Texas. Those are folks who’ve taken big bets on educational savings accounts.

$4 billion right now of parent-directed funding in Florida, and you’re seeing just more engagement for families, which is leading to better outcomes. And so I think overall, Florida is a great success story. Texas has come out of the gate with the largest program.

Homeschool family get $2,000. If you’re going to access a private school, whether that be online or in person, $10,000. If you have a student with learning exceptionalities or special needs, you can get up to $30,000 of parent-directed funding.

That’s a game changer, right? And so for those two states to kind of come out of the gate with those kinds of statements and allocating those kinds of resources, you’re already seeing huge responses from the marketplace, which is really exciting. And ultimately the vision of this, just to remind the listeners, right, is you want families to become the CEO of their own child’s education.

You want them to take ownership, right? You want them to be able to be empowered. And these are great tools for that.

We are also seeing really great traction in other states. So right now, besides Florida, North Carolina is a great state for us in terms of traction. Arizona is a great state for us in terms of traction.

We’ve seen some early traction in Arkansas. We’ve also seen some great traction in Utah. Tennessee is right underneath that in terms of tier.

So, you know, I would say for the most part, you’re seeing it, what we describe as kind of SEC country from, you know, all of the SEC teams, you know, the kind of the red states there in the Southeast, but you have some great outliers in the Mountain West and in Arizona and in Utah that are performing well as well. I do think when we get to 2027 and we’re looking at, you know, a national expansion, I think you’ll also begin to see some blue states begin to kind of stake their claim on these opportunities as well. I think my bet is on Colorado and Pennsylvania.

And those are, you know, to your point about like where Optima is kind of thinking and looking, you know, those are states we’re monitoring closely. But I would encourage all of the providers that are listening, nail it before you scale it, right? Make sure you have a solution that really works for these families.

Make sure we’re just maniacal and obsessive about making sure that the families are thrilled with their options and that we’re delivering. And so Optima’s real mission is to deliver. And so we’ve taken a stance that we’re going to nail it before we scale it.

And so Florida and Texas are our focal points for 2026.

Ed Tarnowski: That’s great to hear. And yeah, Colorado is exciting. I mean, Governor Jared Polis did decide to opt into the federal tax credit.

That is hopefully a new opportunity for you guys there. We want to see this expanding as much as we can. So that is awesome to hear.

Adam Mangana: I know you normally don’t take questions, but I am curious, you have your ear to the grindstone. Are there some blue states that, you know, maybe youth are more bullish on that some of your counterparts would disagree with you on? I’m asking a little bit of a contrarian question.

Just curious your insight there.

Ed Tarnowski: I liked it. Well, we’re keeping a close eye on Pennsylvania. I mean, it’s still very much up in the air.

There has not been an official decision yet. So we had to remain cautiously optimistic because it’s still, we haven’t really gotten much messaging. But we hear things all the time here and there about maybe some reason for optimism.

Again, it’s still too early, but we’re hoping for the best there. We just want as many families as possible to have access to a new opportunity like this. So we’re holding all eyes on Pennsylvania, I would say as the next one, as a potential state with the blue state governor.

And at the end of the day, now by not opting in here, there are money that’s going to other states that will not be coming to your state. So it’s hard for me to fathom why governors would decide against opting in.

Adam Mangana: Wouldn’t it be incredible, right? Just the symbolism of Pennsylvania where our country declared independence. We could also have educational independence.

Wouldn’t that be just amazing? So I actually agree with you, Ed. I think, you know, those are the two states we’re looking at on the blue state side that we think could be very interesting.

But, you know, the idea that a national ESA is on the table for the first time in our country’s history, that is a huge accomplishment for everybody in our stratosphere, in our world. And it’s only going to benefit the end user, right? It’s only going to benefit our families, which is the most important piece to this puzzle.

Ed Tarnowski: Right. We’re hoping it can fill in those gaps in a lot of states. I mean, some states giving them choice for the first time.

I mean, others giving them, getting them closer to those tuition amounts allowing them to access, have a wider access because it can build upon the, some of the choice programs that already exist in those states.

Adam Mangana: One of the big risks I see is that we’re creating a zero sum game between the public system and what these opportunities will provide. And I actually think in a perfect world and what we’ll evolve to is where even public schools will access these kinds of platforms that are parent-directed funding. And you’ll see really strong public schools find ways to create real value on these platforms.

So I’m actually bullish that this model is going to kind of rise, bring the kind of quality across the board. So, you know, rising tide lifts all boats. I think that is where we’re headed with the successful execution of a national ESA program.

Ed Tarnowski: No, that’s really great to hear. That’s great insight, especially hearing from like, cause we love to hear how it’s impacting that supply side in real time. And just to shift gears one last time here, I want to shift our subject to, we talked a lot about how this is especially helpful for special needs students.

Can you dive in a little bit about how this is really helping special needs? Again, we talk about unique needs. These are some of the kids that have, that really need a different type of schooling than the average kid.

Can you elaborate a little bit on how your program is helping special needs kids?

Adam Mangana: Thank you again, Ed, that’s great. I think, you know, so many of these ESA programs started serving students with exceptionalities because the normal standard model wasn’t working. And so families were desperate.

And so these initial innovations were ways of acknowledging the pain that families were in trying to find a solution. When we think about this, the value of something that’s hyper-personalized and something that works for, you know, the learners who are, you know, exceptional, we want something that is going to meet individual educational plans. And what makes Optima in particular unique is that we deliver our content in a very concept-based way.

So, you know, where a lot of schools are trying to teach very abstract concepts, they’re teaching it in one or two learning modalities, meaning, you know, they’re only really helping learners that learn visually, for example. Because of the nature of the way we deploy and the way we teach in a concept-based way, we can help learners who are kinesthetic. We can help learners who are visual.

We can help learners who are auditory. We have the kind of educational approach that is very hyper-personalized. So if somebody needs extended time or if they need a concept broken down, we can provide interventions.

And so those students who are exceptional have really, really benefited from us. The other population that we, I don’t think intentionally built for, but that has been really well-served is our twice-exceptional population. These are kids who are typically on the autism spectrum.

So they’re very high-functioning and just absolutely brilliant in so many ways. But socially, they may need some support, right? And so the ability to show up to class in an avatar form has been a way that we’ve seen young people who are on the autism spectrum, who are absolutely brilliant, and some of our highest test takers and performers come into their own and own the experience of their education.

And so, yes, we are turning teachers into Ms. Frizzle, but we’re turning these learners, right, into Alexander the Great. And so I’m more proud of what we’ve been able to do with those learners because I didn’t, when we built this, that wasn’t the group I was actually anticipating would have thrived. And so that was a surprise, a pleasant surprise.

And so, you know, if you look at our kind of Google reviews and you look at some of the feedback from parents, that population in particular has really, really soared at Optima.

Ed Tarnowski: Oh, that really warms your heart. And it really reminds us of what this is all about. Well, those are pretty much all the questions I have for you today, but I want to give you the last word.

Is there anything else that we didn’t cover today that you would like our listeners to take away?

Adam Mangana: Well, just standing on what I just said, I mean, I’m eating my own cooking. I have two children, 14 and 12, both very different learners. And my son, who’s very gifted, has benefited greatly from Optima, has learned a ton, has also built his own experiences.

So he’s, you know, on a track to be kind of like his dad, really interested in programming and building. My daughter, who was a couple of grade levels behind when she started at Optima, she started in our elementary school. Because she was a product of that kind of COVID learning loss really didn’t hit her first full year of school until third grade, right?

And so she started two grade levels behind in third grade. She’s now in sixth grade and she’s reading at a ninth grade level. And she’s only been at Optima.

And so it’s one thing to promote something that you’re not also benefiting from or fully engaged in. But my two kids attend school this way and it’s been a blessing for my family. And it’s been a blessing for so many families, which is why we’ve doubled every year for four years and we’re one of the fastest growing educational models out there.

And so I would just say thank you and thank you to your audience. And if you guys want to learn more, check us out at www.optimacademy.online.

Ed Tarnowski: Adam, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for joining the show today.

Adam Mangana: And thank you so much.

Ed Tarnowski: And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in today. For more information about EdChoice and our research, feel free to visit edchoice.org and feel free to follow me on Exp at Ed Tarnowski. I’m your host, Ed Tarnowski, also known as Ed with EdChoice.

See you next time.