Amelia Hollis is an educator and former education technology executive who grew up in Las Vegas, moved away only to come back.
Born in Las Vegas, she was raised in Henderson attending a religious private school until fourth grade, but finished school through CCSD including elementary school at Sue Morrow Elementary, B. Mahlon Brown Junior High School. In 2009 she graduated from Basic High School. She attended the University of Missouri and graduated with bachelor’s degrees in English literature and linguistics with a philosophy minor.
She held a post-undergrad appointment in the department of sociology at Mizzou hired for her innovative approaches to mixed-methods (qualitative/quantitative) methods and helped design and implement large scale study on student behavior and outcomes for students using an automated early-AI essay grading system.
In 2012 she became the research director at the software company made the learning program. She previously researched and she would go onto lead the company and establish a sister company that was for education, consulting, and technical publishing. She often traveled throughout the Midwest representing the companies at various academic conferences, including most of the Midwest Sociological Society conferences as a vendor in the 2010s.
As an executive working in early artificial intelligence including government, defense and education applications, she was invited in 2016 to give a lecture at St. Louis University and in 2017 at the St. Louis Pearl Mongers on the structural opportunities and limitations of artificial intelligence research and commercialization.
She came back to Las Vegas in 2018 to be closer to family and decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a teacher to find out for herself what really was going on as the world wondered why students struggled to achieve. Having taught before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, she has some ideas about what went wrong.
Considering that test scores, achievement, and general well-being invariably began nose-diving towards oblivion in 2014,123 the problem isn’t that schools are failing—it’s that they were designed for something else entirely. She’s drafting a book to make the case for real public education reform and in defense of liberal arts education.
In her free time, Amelia writes, edits, genealogy, photography, and occasionally going out with friends. You can take the girl out of Vegas, but you can’t get glitter out of anything.
- Wiggins, Ovetta, and Donna St. George. “Md. Student Test Scores Drop Significantly as State Shifts to Common Core.” The Washington Post, July 11, 2014.
↩︎ - Turner, Cory. “Kids’ Test Scores Began Declining Way Before COVID. These Schools Are Making Gains.” Morning Edition. National Public Radio, May 13, 2026. 3 minutes, 48 seconds.
↩︎ - Whitehurst, Grover J. “Why Did NAEP Scores Drop?” Brookings Institution, 2015. ↩︎