The History of Lexandria: Why Lexandria Exists
Truth has a distribution problem.
The seed of Lexandria was planted when Richard Lorenc became President & CEO at Certell, a nonprofit that developed high school curriculum and maintained the Poptential platform.
Certell had recently acquired a community college and its focus began to shift, with most of Certell’s staff migrating to the higher education project. The demands of in-person, accredited college courses are radically distinct from those of an online, high school education platform, and over time the workflow grew ever more divided. Rather than split time between two fundamentally different projects, Richard and the team at Certell considered if it would be better to spin off a new organization instead.
The transition came together quickly. In early 2025, Richard brought in Sean Malone to consult on Certell's branding, and Josh Sanders joined shortly thereafter. Once all three were on board, they collectively decided a fresh start was the right move — and on July 1, 2025, Lexandria was launched.
Richard, Josh, and Sean had previously worked together at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), where they built the familiarity and trust that made a fast-moving transition like this possible. Josh came on as Chief Operations Officer, drawing on a background spanning strategy, analytics, and fundraising. Sean, who had served as Creative Director at FEE and later led content production at a private media firm, stepped in as Chief Creative Officer, bringing the creative vision and brand consistency Lexandria needed from day one.
The team had a decision to make: Would our new organization continue merely maintaining Certell’s curriculum, or was there even more value we could add to educators? Lexandria took the opportunity to start fresh, to re-examine what educators needed, and in the process realized that we could do more than just add content, and got to work transforming the social studies educator experience with a new platform that can go beyond anything that’s been seen before.
Why Lexandria Is Different
Educators today have access to more resources than ever—in theory.
In practice, the explosion of options online has created more and more work for teachers trying to put together high-quality, standards-aligned lessons. If you’re a social studies teacher, you know it all too well. There are a million pieces of content out there—but they’re hard to find, probably not well aligned with state standards, and they require you to hold open hundreds of tabs to dozens of sites to see it all in one place.
A teacher preparing a lesson on the Declaration of Independence this fall will find videos, articles, primary sources, lesson plans, podcasts, ebooks, and classroom activities within seconds of a quick search online.
Then she has to triage. Which of those videos are age-appropriate for her class? Which of those primary sources can be added to the reading without stretching the students too thin? Are those lesson plans relevant at all? It’s not always obvious at a glance. And most of what’s out there isn’t designed to land in a classroom. It’s out there to generate views, not to educate. By the time one lesson about the nation’s first founding document is done and delivered during forty minutes in the classroom, a teacher might have actually worked five, six, or even ten hours hunched over a computer, clicking through tabs and pulling together resources.
The unnecessary workload doesn’t only show up in teacher stress. Only 13 percent of eighth-graders in the United States demonstrate proficiency in U.S. history. Just 22 percent meet basic civics standards—the first recorded decline since those assessments began in 1998. At the same time, a generation of students is forming its views about markets, government, and liberty largely through what it encounters online, often before any of those ideas have been seriously examined in a classroom.
Imagine having a trusted, standards-aligned source that lets you pull together a variety of quality, classroom-ready content. Imagine having a platform that lets you search by your standards, bookmark resources, generate quick-share links for students, and even deliver assessments. Lexandria is doing all that—and more, since we aren’t going to get complacent. As teacher feedback keeps coming in, we are developing more plans to expand the platform.
The sky is the limit for what Lexandria can do, but right now we’re laser-focused on step one: connecting the world of high-quality, social studies content that champions American principles to the teacher through a powerful, user-friendly platform.
As a society, we can’t expect teachers to do their jobs if we’re giving them massive amounts of busywork. It’s already hard enough to contend with administration needs, student attention in the age of social media, and the work of actually teaching without adding on another layer of difficulty just curating content for the classroom. Lexandria exists to lessen that layer.
The Gap Between “Good” and “Classroom-Ready”
Teachers don’t simply need more material that is intellectually sound—they need material that fits state standards, fits their course structure, and fits reading-level expectations. A brilliant, hour-long lecture video is useless to a teacher with forty minutes on a Tuesday and sixteen more state standards to address before the end of the semester. The simple reality is that the system forces teachers into this structure. Lexandria exists to come alongside teachers and provide resources that are actually tailored to classroom needs.
We’re partnering with the kind of organizations who have done tremendous work in identifying, studying, and developing great content. The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), Marginal Revolution University, and more partners serve as a deep well of specialized knowledge. Richard, Josh, and Sean’s time at FEE showed them the challenge organizations face getting their hard work in front of teachers: After shipping out boxes full of materials like I, Pencil, the team was left unsure how, or how often, those resources were actually being used in the classroom.
Adam Smith
The father of modern economics, whose work will soon be available on Lexandria at a variety of grade levels.
Take a historical figure like Adam Smith: It’s easy enough for any organization to adapt public domain texts that are widely available online, but Lexandria has partnered with the Adam Smith Institute (UK) and Liberty Fund to provide far more depth of educational materials on the father of modern economics. Lexandria will soon publish an expanded package of resources at a variety of grade levels — from a simple graphic novel, to an “abridged” version of his major works, to the full unabridged text of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments in the original prose — all supported by lesson guides, bellringers, classroom activity recommendations, discussion questions, and assessments.
We aren’t reinventing the study of Adam Smith. Instead, we’re making it possible for the teacher trying to talk about Adam Smith on a Tuesday afternoon to find and build a lesson around the work that’s already done.
And these are just a few examples in economics alone. Across social studies, there are dozens of organizations whose effort has gone into creating content that students should be able to learn about—but their teachers have no way to quickly access and build lessons around it.
Many organizations have written at length about everything from the American Founding to the Cold War, all with careful scholarship and a firm commitment to the principles of the American experiment. That work doesn’t deserve to languish, hidden away on Google’s third or fourth results page. And teachers deserve to have it at their fingertips.
This is why the platform exists.
We do two things that no other resource can:
Pull in the huge wealth of content that already exists but isn’t always easy to find; and
Map that content onto the standards that teachers are actually required to use.
This summer, Lexandria has already debuted standards maps for Florida state standards, the Council for Economic Education’s (CEE) national economic standards, and the C3 national social studies standards. By the end of this year, we plan to have all 50 states covered.
Standards mapping is more than a few tags on a document, never to be seen again except by backend developers. The state standards mapping will allow a teacher in Indiana or Arizona or Mississippi to look up resources and materials with the standards not just in mind, but guiding that research. Content that has lain dormant because it’s been too hard to find, not perfectly calibrated for SEOs, will leap to the top of Lexandria’s platform because our system already knows that it fulfills the relevant standards you’re searching for.
Ethical AI in Standards Mapping
Large language models, guided by human review, accelerate this work and make it possible to operate at scale without millions of dollars in costs. We’re not using AI to generate educational content for the classroom. Instead, we’re leveraging the abilities of large language models to ingest state standards at scale, then compare materials to them. It would take humans hundreds of hours to accomplish what an LLM can do in minutes.
The tool is like a calculator, crunching words instead of numbers, and on both ends there are human reviewers checking it. From top to bottom, the process is driven by the real national and state standards that teachers are required to address. Then each piece of content on our library is vetted: Not just a title search, but a full lexical match, subject similarity, and standards similarity comparison.
After our process is complete, every single piece of written content on Lexandria’s site—from full ebooks down to bellringers—will be searchable with a robust standards-driven system. On the inputs end, a real member of Lexandria’s team is making sure everything is well-sourced. And once the LLM has done its work, we have a human academic review, looking over everything to confirm that there are no AI flaws. We’ll have future blog posts that dive deeper into the way all of this works, since it would take too long to detail here. It’s a rigorous process that uses the tool to expand, not replace, human capacity.
This is our approach: innovation without neglecting the valuable human element. Nothing will ever replace the teacher in the classroom. But we can help that teacher be more effective, more efficient, saving dozens of hours of busy work and being able to focus on what really matters.
