I liked a lot of this. But whenever I read a long thing that attempts to dig into education research and then cites Bloom's 2 sigma result without qualification, it immediately changes my confidence in the analysis.
This review of Bloom's two-sigma claims by Paul T. von Hippel would itself probably earn a top spot in the ACX review contest. Worth reading. Thanks for posting.
The claim about two-sigma tutoring effect was based on a 3-week study by Bloom's two PhD students.
"... they weren’t obtained by tutoring alone. Instead, Anania and Burke mixed a potent cocktail of interventions that included tutoring; training and coaching in effective instructional practices; extra time; and frequent testing, feedback, and retesting....Bloom’s two-sigma claim had some basis in fact, but it also contained elements of fiction."
“Tutored students received extra testing and feedback. Burke’s and Anania’s two-sigma intervention did involve tutoring, but it also had other features. Perhaps the most important was that tutored students received extra testing and feedback. At the end of each unit, all students took a quiz, but any tutored student who scored below 80 percent (in Anania’s study) or 90 percent (in Burke’s) received feedback and correction on concepts that they had missed. Then the tutored students took a second quiz with new questions—a quiz that students in the whole-class condition never received. If the tutored students still scored below 80 or 90 percent, they got more feedback and another quiz.”
In Made To Stick the authors drive home one of the most important tools for improved performance is regular testing (ie students with 9 quizzes/year outperform students with a midterm and a final on almost all metrics). It seems like Bloom’s tutoring was combined with more regular testing than the control group. I expect the impact he found was a conflation of the combination of (at least) both methods
I don't see how that really negates the point about 1-on-1 instruction accelerating educational performance, though? The point is that a single teacher focused on a single student can give rapid, tailored feedback and quizes, they can't do that for an entire class nearly as easily.
The article corb linked to did not discredit 1:1 tutoring. It just said that Blooms original research was overstated and that a 2-sigma improvement has not been replicated. The article says that stand alone 1:1 tutoring only gets you about a 0.4 or 0.7 SD improvement (still a lot!)
So it’s still very effective and possibly even more effective when combined with regular testing for comprehension.
Main takeaway stays the same, but just caveats on Blooms original claims
Are you saying that the overall cocktail of interventions that Bloom implemented has not replicated the same benefits, or that tutoring alone doesn't deliver the ~2SD increase? Does the overall cocktail of interventions require 2 PhDs per student working 15 hours a day, or something?
I don't believe that you can find me ten elementary school math teachers that would willingly teach 2's complement to a child who couldn't master arithmetic any other way. This took until "college algebra" to fix, all the while the student was winning State Physics awards, in order to graduate high school while -still failing algebra.- (Four times through the same course, failing it every time. No, this was not from lack of work).
I recommend reading the book on expertise that this review linked. Having rapid feedback on performance is an absolutely essential part of the "deliberate practice" mentioned here. It's not at all surprising that more frequent feedback works better (although I would still think of something that happens 9 times a year, which is around once per month in a standard school year, as a "unit test" rather than a "quiz").
I don’t love how qualifying Bloom’s 2 sigma has become a shibboleth for being able to talk about education research. But I agree the study has issues, has regressed, etc.
I would say that we hold it as an engineering goal, not a research goal. We believe we can get effects that large and are trying to do so. (I work for this org.)
Most of that criticism, as I read it, isn't relevant to the way the 2-sigma problem is being used here. If you are citing the 2-sigma study to promote after school tutoring, or an AI tutor, or some other tutor-specific intervention, then the details in there matter a lot.
But if you are citing it as a way of saying "we know ways of dramatically increasing performance, but they are too difficult to scale" (as it is being used here), then it mostly doesn't actually matter that they did more than just tutoring, or that it was a special kind of tutoring, etc. If anything that strengthens the point, that those results are _even_ harder and more expensive to scale.
The fact that it was on a narrow set of tests is somewhat more convincing, but, at least for me, doesn't really do much to change the larger point. I think adding those caveats, in this context specifically, would have just been extra cruft (on an already long essay) that wouldn't have changed the message at all.
Okay, but if we're applying that standard, shouldn't we also disqualify from the comments section people who complain about uncritical acceptance, without giving some outline of the key criticisms that should have been included?
Polgar falls into the midwit trap of being unable to understand intelligence, and thus just going with "everyone says this is smart." There are two types of game designers in this world, ones who love chess, and those who hate it. I know which ones create world-changing games (not those who love chess).
Polgar was used correctly. No one is claiming anything about teaching genius in this article, only teaching to a higher level of skill than typical; in that context, Polgar is a great example of what's possible.
Polgar wasn’t a grandmaster (some describe him as a mediocre player) Isn't it amazing that a very dedicated small-town chess player can raise world champions?
I would love to hear a perspective from another parent from the acx community to see if their parenting ties out. It strikes me as almost too good to be true.
Yeah… I’ve seen this. The commenters are all Reddit-flavored criticism from people who have no direct experience except for one (“dipnoob”), who said his daughter didn’t like it after going for a year. In his post history he also says he has an 18 year old trans daughter, and given the schools association with Elon musk it seems like that could easily be an area of conflict that isn’t necessarily related to education quality for the average student.
There are also two comments from actual students at the first link (ProgressPlane4465 and Relevant_Habit6774), both have no other reddit history which may or may not be suspicious (I guess it's easy to sign up just to comment on a single post and then it gives you this sort of random username? But also someone who wanted to astroturf would just do the same)
> The school environment was also a challenge. It was very cliquey, with one main group of extremely affluent students whose parents were involved in founding the school. While they were generally friendly, they were not particularly welcoming, which made it difficult to form connections. Since Alpha offers so much independence, having a strong social network is key to both feeling a sense of community and succeeding in classes. That was difficult to achieve. There was also a lot of favoritism and nepotism. This group of students had access to more opportunities, learned about them before anyone else, and received extra support from staff. And, the affluent student alumni who received extra support are shown when they are showing successful results of the school. I am not trying to discredit these students hard work because I know they worked hard, but what Alpha shows on their social media is not the full picture based on my experience.
One of my biggest issues with the school was its approach to student performance. Instead of fostering a nurturing environment, Alpha relied on public shaming and a punishment-based system for students who fell short of their goals. The culture made me feel like I needed to be a robot rather than a student. I constantly felt pressure to perform, and even now, I struggle with an unhealthy relationship with school. I find myself constantly thinking about school even when I should not be worried about it. Alpha discouraged students from doing anything outside of school and made it seem like school had to be our entire life.
__________
Makes sense to me. Individualized learning does not lead to a “corpse spirit” in a class. But almost any school has to deal with bullying or cool/popular cliques.
The problem is that the comment is 1 month old, coming late to a 1 year old post. The review we're discussing which links to the reddit post was widely discussed on X starting about a month ago when it was posted as part of the ACX review contest. So it looks plausible that "ProgressPlane4465" came to write that comment b/c of their interest in AlphaSchool and not because he/she was organically reading the Austin subreddit.
I still think it's more likely that ProgressPlane4465 is a former student who learned of the review through ACX or X, followed the reddit link (or just searched reddit for Alpha School out of curiosity) and decided to leave a comment. But because the tone of the comment, the vocabulary, the syntax all read a bit academic and stilted to me ("affluent" rather than "rich"; abounds in folk-psychology cliches like "fostering a nurturing environment", "unhealthy relationship with school", "pressure to perform"), I can't also discount the possibility of someone with an axe to grind against Alpha School trying to astroturf.
I do like the comment and it agrees with my biases! It does make sense to me.
I'm not saying these comments were necessarily astroturfed. But the city subreddits are absolutely filled with paid and farmed posts. I have seen people do it firsthand.
The fact that their only criticism is likely specific to that campus and not the methodology is actually a good sign of the methodology not being terrible.
> As someone who goes to Magellan and has gone to Magellan for 11 years there were quite a few kids that actually transferred from Alpha to Magellan (for middle and high school) and when I asked them why they all said the same thing “its too small and there aren’t even actual teachers in the room”. Magellan offered them actual student-teacher 1 on 1. Not only that but while the IB is hard for some of these ex-Alpha students they have teachers with subject, specific knowledge that can help them out anytime they need it and not have to rely on an app or “guides”. I’ve seen first hand how a little bit of help from these teachers can really make these kids excel in the IB program.
I don’t know anything about Magellan, but I want to know more if students are struggling/excelling after transferring from Alpha to an another (more normal? Differently weird?) school.
> I know a family who goes to Alpha. They don’t learn history, and the other things I’ve gathered from the family about the school make me certain I would never send my kid there.
Its from 7 months ago so I wonder if they have talked to this family since 2022.
Hi Nicholas! I have had 2 students at Alpha's flagship location here in south Austin these past 3 years and have been blown away by their experience. Not usually active in ACX comments but have been reading for years and my husband is a prominent writer in this social neighborhood broadly (Byrne Hobart of The Diff, https://x.com/ByrneHobart/ )
My 9yo daughter is quite high ability and I very much doubt that anywhere else would have let her move quickly. I never had to make a single request for accelerated material or schedule a single conference to complain that school was too easy or boring for her, I have basically no friends in Austin who have not faced these issues in various other charter and private schools for their children. She has maintained the 99th ability not just for NWEA MAP score achievement but also the top few percentiles for growth throughout these 3 years.
My 7yo daughter is also bright but a tough cookie, the label is "2e/twice exceptional" i.e. on the spectrum but also gifted. She spends very little time on the apps because the school environment is challenging for her. Her growth has also nonetheless been incredible - I am extremely confident that the academic environment Alpha provides via its 2 Hour Learning platform is the most potent available today. https://x.com/gtmom/status/1931058079745056974
I believe in the model so much I've gone to work for Alpha/GT school and am moving my daughters to the GT school this fall.
It's not gonna make the slightest difference Pamela. You and their father blessed your kids with their genetic endowment on the day of conception. Nothing will ever matter a significant percentage of how much that matters moving forward. So love you kids and accept that they will be what they will be.
It blows my mind that this argument is so popular with rationalists. There's a really large chunk of life outcomes unexplained by genetics. Even Bryan Caplan homeschools his kids! Studies aside... have you ever been a kid? Do you really think it's just irrelevant how you spend the first 12 years of your life?
I read this review and think, actually, sending your kids to this school *would* make more than the slightest difference.
Well, yeah. Here's the difference, though -- "kid drops out of school" has to mean "kid has a job lined up, or is currently bringing in cash." We hobble our children by removing their ability to create work-product and price it on the fair market.
I have paid money to a school that teaches glass blowing to 12 year olds. It's an orphanage in Mexico. They get burnt, in the process of learning. But they do graduate with life skills.
I don’t get this. Isn’t your view that effective instruction on basic competencies as measured in standard ways is a good thing for school or parent to care about?
Should one really just not give a damn about a school doing well by one’s child? Does absolute learning not matter? It’s all just relative station in The Sort, which is eternal? Hard for me to understand what prompted this reply.
This was my dads conversation with me about playing baseball:
Do you want to play baseball?
No.
Ok.
This was his conversation about guns:
Do you want to watch me clean this gun and learn how to use it?
No.
Ok. (But vaguely angry)
I can cite a few dozen examples.
I’d have fucking loved to play baseball and learn about guns. This isn’t me looking back with cherry flavored glasses on about me as a child - I would have loved doing those, and other, things.
But he didn’t know how to parent because his dad was a huge piece of shit and so he became a bad parent.
I find your post appalling - especially considering that it’s objectively incorrect about the nature of a persons being.
I think he's saying he didn't have a warm and nurturing relationship with his dad. So "Do you want to play baseball?" didn't mean, "Hey let's go to the sporting goods store and buy a glove...I wanna show you how to get one that fits just right. We're gonna oil the glove and strap a baseball in it overnight to build the pocket...I'll play catch with you on the lawn so you'll be able to throw and catch and field grounders on the first day of practice...let's watch an MLB game on TV and then go see a minor league team. Wonder if we can spot the differences?" It was more like, "Do you want me to drive you to a strange place where a strange man will yell at you and the other kids won't talk to you and you'll probably be the odd one out and then you can walk home alone afterwards?" No Dad, I don't.
Sounds about right to me. I was given every opportunity, growing up, and raised very differently than my parents were raised—but I turned out to be a big piece of shit. It's caused my folks a lot of heartache and self-blame, but I really think there's nothing they could have done; I have been roughly the same person since day one. Always myself. Unfortunately.
In a word: unsuccessful. In four words, maybe: "poor discipline; squandered potential."
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I could probably have gotten into any school I wished, with at least some portion of the costs paid by scholarship, but I didn't think it mattered so much; I got the idea from somewhere or t'other that as long as it was a sizable, accredited university, then the rest would rest upon your ability alone.
No; actually, it turns out that people do very much care if you went to Dullard State (Podunk Branch) instead of MIT or whatever. Shoulda listened. Instead of being a good studious boy with lots of extracurriculars, I goofed off & relied upon test-scores to get in to the nearest big university.
Then, /again/ instead of listening to my folks, I decided I would choose my major on stupid criteria instead of doing what I liked. I like a lot of things, but mostly non-remunerative & not-so-Impressive™ subjects like history & linguistics. I think, looking back, that I have enough ability that—esp. combined with the Internet—I probably could have had a happy & comfortable life had I pursued such a course.
No, instead I decided I'd get a PhD in chemistry. Not sure what I was thinking, except "I want money" and "my dad got a hard-science PhD so I want to too". (In my defense, I entered university pretty early—boy, did everyone have some high hopes for me at that point; whoops! heh—but... I doubt I would have been any better had I gone in at 18 or 19.)
Turns out I hated that, though. Also turns out that I am susceptible to drug abuse when depressed & unsupervised. Ended up crashing & burning & leaving with only my undergrad degree, to spend the next years living with my folks & struggling to kick heroin.
Then I got another chance! I kicked heroin & found a lovely wife! I went back to school!
...except no, my stepfather died & my mom was ill, so I quit again. But then I found a great job!
Nah, ruined that too, eventually; I eventually quit when some nepotism was rubbed in my face—I had started thinking I was worth somethin' & could easily find another, similar position. No, turns out. It was luck that it happened the first time. I shouldn't have quit.
Drugs again. Wife left. Fuck it. Drugs harder.
Been "clean" a few years now, but looking back at the succession of mistakes that is my life it's almost like...why bother—y'know? I had some ability; should have been able to do better; but it has been squandered, instead.
(Haven't /totally/ given up yet, but... think maybe it's too late—like, whence a chance at a better life now? I dunno. Makes my mother sad, sometimes... but I pretend like I don't mind. I think she almost believes me.)
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TL;DR: bad choices & drug abuse. Folks pulled themselves up from nothing to get advanced degrees, and never touched illegal drugs on their lives, and didn't quit excellent positions just because Mr. The-VP-Is-My-Daddy stepped on them. I had much more opportunity than did they—and yet I'm divorced, impoverished, and only still tryin' because my mother, ex-wife, and cat would all be sad if I left.
Went wrong /somewhere/... and it's the same way a lot of the extended family went wrong; I just got the wrong set of genes, I suppose, heh.
Please don't give up. None of this translates to POS. Your mother, ex-wife and cat are all excellent reasons to stay here. You are clean now. That is amazing--a lot of people never get there. One day at a time, right? There is so much going on in the world. Don't you want to see what happens next? I hope you keep looking for a job like the one you left.
I wonder if it would help to reframe your life story? "Smart kid. Parents took a big step up the socioeconomic scale and probably didn't have the social connections and family traditions that went along with their new socioeconomic class. Extended family with a tendency toward substance abuse; I got the bad genetics. Graduated high school early, which made everyone happy but put me in a position where I was making life decisions too young. I made life choices that were not cynical and advantage-seeking: didn't play the college admissions game and went to a large state U. Then made the OPPOSITE decision and picked a hard-science PhD, for financial reasons and to follow my father's path. It didn't work out--like many PhD students, I got stuck and floundered. Developed a drug addiction. Worked hard to resolve the addiction, found a great wife because I am a good and attractive person. Re-started at school...got some destabilizing life rolls and slipped back again. Got a good job because I am smart and personable...and made another non-cynical choice and quit. Relapsed. Lost my wife, sank down a bit farther, worked extremely hard and got clean again."
The throughline here is that you criticize yourself no matter what choice you make. What would it feel like if you STOPPED criticizing yourself? It sounds like you are still in touch with your ex. Why not ask her what she thinks of this comment? Stay off drugs and try to move forward. You are probably half my age. Believe me, there is a lot of life left.
Hey brother don't be so hard on yourself. You seem like a good dude. Also you write really well.
FWIW I never did hard drugs or partied much and I didn't have a ton of privilege growing up but I still squandered my potential somewhat. I wasted years just hanging out online, at least doing heroin would've been a more interesting story
Got some momentum about a year ago hoping to keep it going, things are much better than they used to be
This position is ludicrous – and I'm a hereditarian! Genes matter a very great deal to educational outcomes. That fact in no way implies that education environment does not also matter a great deal.
No one acquires knowledge of calculus or Latin "genetically." These things, and many other such things, must be taught, no matter one's IQ. And quite obviously, not all educational environments afford that opportunity.
Question: Out of the top 1% by IQ of the population of England in 1600, what percentage knew calculus?
Answer: 0%, because no one was teaching calculus in 1600, because it hadn't been invented yet.
QED: Acquisition of knowledge of calculus cannot be "merely genetic."
The point is that there are many educational environments in the U.S. that are relevantly analogous in that they are not affording the relevant opportunities. And this is the case regardless of the genetic basis of IQ.
Let me guess, you haven't got a dozen kids, raised in varying places? Having "good genes" isn't very predictive of geniuses. Know what is? Motivation -- "My parents are going to sell my house for a pile of beans. I know it! They're that dumb!" leads straight to getting jobs at 12 years old that most adults are not qualified for, in a rather desperate attempt to keep a roof over one's own head.
Geniuses tend to be motivated people, and they don't tend to do very well at school (particularly in the "middle range" of grades, as G isn't terribly well incentivized when you're being told to memorize arithmetic -- they take longer to wire their brains to be capable of using "general" intelligence).
I am a parent at GT School, the gifted school of Alpha. My son, Nate is reading at a 7th grade level, is in Pre-Algebra, and similarly ahead in science and language. He is 10 years old, and a young 10 with his birthday mid-April. After being bullied in two different (well-renowned) public ISDs we chose to switch to private. His first week of school he was beaming and exclaiming that kids “got him” at this school. Alpha truly does foster a love of learning and does accelerate learning. Though I agree it may not be for everyone, my son loves it and is thriving.
How has his AMC 8 score improved? That's a better measure of math achievement in gifted kids in my opinion, given that it's designed to challenge that age group. I'm not sure how well IXL can prepare a student, even a gifted one, to tackle those sorts of problems. Do you know why alpha GT doesn't use a third part math program designed for high achievers like mathacademy or Beast Academy or EMF math?
Parent of 3 kids at the Brownsville campus and there are commonalities in their success stories at the Austin campuses and they are income and background. Their model could theoretically work for everyone but they are much more focused on mass marketing and producing than in actually helping ALL kids. 85% of the students that started at the school in 2022 are no longer there, most of which were low SES students.
Is your experience that the Brownsiville campus isn't much better than a regular/public school, because the other kids tend to be from lower income households? Did you end up pulling out your kids, or staying the course (if you don't mind me asking)?
No, it's because Alpha never cared to listen to our community's specific needs. They wanted to replicate Austin and when the model didn't work for the students (due to the issues raised in this article), the students needed to adjust, not the school. Hung on for 2 years. No longer there.
:tin-foil-hat: Schools teach children to turn the tap off while brushing because its one of many little wedges they insert between children and their parents that know better
:counterpoint: Running water while brushing is pretty pointless and wasteful. If an adult can't refrain from doing it (shouldn't be too hard), how can they reasonably expect their children to do anything?
It's interesting that people do this in the first place (it's pretty common). Is it learned behavior?
My wife keeps the water running while cleaning the house / counters. It drives me crazy. I guess we all have habits we picked up from our parents or whatever. I try to be more mindful on it while brushing.
Seems like most homeschoolers are already spending way less time than they would in a traditional public school, so this piece overstates the impressiveness of Alpha's homeschool pilot results.
Second this. It’s nice that it’s preassembled, but my kids are homeschooled and advancing at 1x speed on less than 2 hours a day (for a lot less than $10k per year).
I always point out that Finland and South Korea get near-identical PISA scores despite vast differences in hours worked, and Scott already did a piece arguing that homeschooled kids who do little or no work are only about a year behind their public-school peers.
That said, learning 2-3x faster with only 2 hours a day is pretty impressive, for the full Alpha program. It's a shame the entire progressive establishment are impervious to evidence.
I haven't read the entire review (yet) but 2-3x sustained would have the kids performing at college freshman level by about grade 5. Do they? Or does the 2-3x mean something else?
I think the article mentions top-end students performing at the level of high-school graduates by grade 3, so... conceivably, yes? Maybe you hit a point of diminishing returns at some stage once you get into adolescence/adulthood- there are a lot of interventions that give impressive results in kids that don't persist into adulthood, although some socialising interventions do seem to be longer-lasting (I think Charles Murray wrote about this at some point.)
But even if the only permanent benefit is *not* squandering vast amounts of childrens' time that's well worth pursuing. Bring back child labour, unironically.
So this is mainly measured by MAP test scores, which heavily correlate to SAT/ACT scores. This is mainly going to measure reading and math proficiency. So my guess would be, yea, a fifth grader in this system would probably be able to read and understand Fagles’ Iliad (though the depth of understanding is going to be limited by emotional development). Having the reading ability would enable them to have at least a conceptual understanding of Newtonian physics if they’ve encountered it, and I would think that if the curriculum contains instruction on application of Newtonian physics there’s no reason they can’t understand that as well.
It's in the review. It's entirely MAP score based. So top level 3rd graders get the same MAP score (multiple choice testing) as median high schoolers. So they probably don't understand Newtonian physics or read the Illiad....because median high schoolers can't do those things either.
I waited till 7 to teach most of my five boys to read. In each case they were reading regular children's literature (My Side of the Mountain, Lord of the Rings, etc) within a year of learning to read. I gave them pretty much unlimited reading time. We did some math, geography, natural science, history. We were pretty unstructured.
Three graduated salutatorian, and one valedictorian of small public classical schools.
I think the point is not just that others shouldn't be allowed to waste children's time, but allowing children to waste their own time and pursue their own interests is very important.
Also, it is very important that you don't put before your little children people who are in a position of authority but who are ignorant and foolish. And I am afraid this is the case with most people working in public schools.
The 2hr claim is similar to describing your commute as "1hr on the train" without mentioning 15 min drive to the station and 15 min walk to the office.
The 2-3x was narrow measure of learning.
My impression from reading is that the author doesn't place very high value on the marketing claim.
(I work for Alpha.) We don’t think our homeschooling platform is impressive (yet). And yeah, “you can use time more efficiently than schools for learning school things” is not magic or unique to us.
It’s still true though, and I’m happy to be working on a project that elevates it to a constraint in the school system.
What is the primary reason Alpha’s homeschool program is not impressive yet in your view? Lack of incentive, culture, not strong enough teachers/guides? Curious if Alpha is considering more of a “local microschool with Alpha infra” model as well?
Yes, those things are the hypotheses. Modal at-home motivational system and culture don’t hook into the platform as well as Alpha school’s.
We are opening microschools, but in the sense of schools that start in one classroom, not in the sense of schools owned and operated by a third party community.
Long term I think open to exploring anything, but gated by quality bar; if we can’t figure out how to make it work at least as well as extant schools, the we’d rather acknowledge our limits and just not do it.
Interesting, so homeschools (or local microschools) where kids are learning at ~1x speed in 2 hours a day is not a successful enough outcome for Alpha? I would guess there is value for homeschooling parents to have standardized infra for the formal academics portion of the day. I suppose Alpha is not interested in that kind of a SaaS model / feels that it is not sufficiently differentiated there?
1x def not high enough. That’s the national average and it’s really bad. 2x is a minimum.
We’ll either get the product to a point where it works for homeschool (my prediction) or we won’t, but greatly differentiated learning outcomes are non negotiable IMO.
Agreed that it's really bad, but it still seems valuable to be able to get it done in just 2 hours compared to a full length school day. That would still free up quite a bit of time for homeschooled children. Or is the thinking that homeschooled children who would use something like Alpha already get 1x in ~2 hours through other methods?
This right here. Homeschoolers often spend way less time per day and get good results, with a wide spectrum of curriculum and approaches. That these Alpha folks did something similar and got results like that should not be news.
Small group tuition is really, really good. I strongly suspect that on average homeschooling accomplishes less per hour of pupil/teacher interaction, but in a class of 30 a pupil will get very little one-to-one attention.
If - if - AI can provide the same advantages, it will be a game changer, but the evidentiary standard claims that it can should be held to should be very, very high.
This is really interesting and will directly change my parenting from this day forward: my husband and I spend 30 minutes every morning 1-1 tutoring our kids, and I will start adding financial incentives from next week. Our 3yo can read and write (not very well! But better than most 3yo!), and the 6 yo is very good at reading but not quite at adult level fluency yet. I'll be paying him to read the Roald Dahl corpus and for completing handwriting worksheets. The 3 yo can get money for finishing each phonics book. Thank you for an informative review!
Any tips on introducing early reading and writing? I have a 2.5 year old and I’m very encouraged by these non traditional models. Big fan of 1:1 tutoring. Thanks!
There are two approaches I've used. The first is Siegfried Englemann's famous "Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons". The lessons are not easy and it took us 400 days to complete the whole book with my first son. However, it was successful and my son did learn to read. It was a painful process and the Distar orthography was somewhat frustrating and at odds with the Phonics approach taught in his reception class. Fortunately we live in England which has fully adopted evidence-based reading education. I didn't do the writing element which I regretted - my son's handwriting and writing ability was far behind his reading level which held him back somewhat. I will be teaching him "joined up" handwriting this summer before Year 2.
With my younger son we decided to use a different approach. We bought Read Write Inc flashcards (the phonics scheme his eventual school uses) and taught him the Set 1 sounds. We started "blending" very early, but this is the part that took a huge amount of time and perseverance for both my sons to be good at. This is going from c-a-t to "cat". I.e. blending "c" and "a" together to get "ca". We worked for 3 months on this before he got it - we basically did direct instruction (e.g. going "c-a, ca" now you try - the copying works!).
We then bought a different phonics scheme books, so that when he starts Reception (this September - he'll be a summer born kid - we're not holding him back - I still question our decision) he won't be bored/remembering the books so they can properly assess his level. He started reading these - exceptionally painfully - but it worked. I then introduced writing, again using RWI - first using wipe away sheets, then buying the RWI workbooks. I also make him write his name every day - he's a pro at that now. He writes something every day (i.e. The cat is is on the mat).
We've now moved onto Set 2/Set 3 sounds. And we've memorised high frequency non-decodable words, as well as working on sounding things out in your head.
It's pretty painful at times but very rewarding to see his progress.
How do you prevent them from just memorizing the phonics books, and instead actually learn to sound them out? I feel like working through sounding out with my 4 year old, she'll struggle through it to get a word, but then she just kind of knows it, and doesn't have to sound it out so much the second time and I feel like she's not actually getting good practice with reading but just partial memorization of what the word looks like.
You do both. We have "speedy green words" which we get him to sound out in his head and just "say" and harder words he has to sound out. You sound like your kid is already getting a great level of semantic knowledge where they don't need to sound i tout - lucky you - mine laboriously sounds out every word (the younger one) apart from the non decodable memorised words.
Yeah I know it's sort of a good thing, but we can't use the same texts too many times to practice sounding out so she's acquiring words but not getting that much better at sounding things out. I guess it will come, and we just have to get new books a lot.
OK have reread this. We don't have this issue as the phonics scheme we are using has a huge number of books. We reread each book twice and then move on. There are over 100 decodable books in the scheme.
When my wife and I were teaching our child to read we had "hold out" books (maybe a Clifford book or a Little Critter book) that we knew the child had never read before. When the child could read one of these, we'd score his as reading.
This did NOT prevent him from simply memorizing all the words that would appear in the book from exposure in other books, but that is what we did. The "if he can read a brand new book" metric seemed to track what we meant by reading.
IME it's mostly genetic. My first learned all his letters by 18 months. My second still didn't know them by 5y. I didn't do anything differently; in fact I did so much more with the second because I was concerned. Turns out the first one was autistic and hyperlexia is a symptom. More of a curse than a blessing, in the end. Meanwhile the second did eventually catch up.
3. Get a set of letter tiles and play around with them. Play "Can you find..." with specific letters (calling them out by sound, not by name). Make up silly games like saying "alligator" and racing to cover up the "a." Build words and read them together. Kids can learn how to "write" by using a moveable alphabet to build words at a much younger age than if they have to wait until they have the motor skills to hold a pencil. https://www.lakeshorelearning.com/products/language/phonics-word-building/word-building-tiles-student-pack/p/GG954/
4. Once your kid knows all their letter sounds pretty well and is able to read short phonetic words, get a set of phonics readers. It should be the kind that gradually introduces new phonics rules and keeps sight words to a minimum. The main set we've used is Primary Phonics. Bob books are also nice for when you're just starting out because they're super short. https://www.amazon.com/Primary-Phonics-Complete-Storybook-Package/dp/B06ZYHBY75/ref=sr_1_1
Sit with your child and have them read to you. It's okay if they only have the attention span to read a few pages at a time, just try to be consistent about reading together every day. If they make mistakes, correct them but keep it playful: "What?!? 'Hat' doesn't start with a /k/! Are you trying to trick me?" Point out new phonics rules in the context of specific words: "In this word, the two o's make an /oo/ sound."
Put the supplies where they can reach and you'll know they're into it when they bring you the book to read or the letter tiles to play with. My kids figure out pretty quickly that I'm much easier to interrupt if it's reading related. Somehow they also have a tendency to get into reading when it would otherwise be time for bed — I call it "late night literacy."
If you try something and it's really not working for your kid, take a break and try again in a few months. No need to stress, rush or push, especially when you're starting so young. Not all kids will be interested at the same time and it "clicks" for different kids at different ages.
I assume some kids will need something more structured than this, but so far my kids have done really well with our casual one-on-one reading together approach! My 8yo has been reading chapter books for several years now. The just-turned-6yo is only just now starting to read books for pleasure but he reads very capably in other contexts (e.g. navigating the computer) and is at least two years ahead in terms of overall reading level.
I was convinced by this review's defense of incentives, but I *don't* think paying a kid to read Roald Dahl books in particular is a good idea. Reading fiction is something you want kids to enjoy for its own sake, and I think there *is* convincing research supporting the view that rewards undermine that sort of intrinsic motivation. (See https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/newt-gingrichs-reading-plan/ for a brief overview.)
I think rewarding kids for completing educational modules is different, because we don't really care whether kids enjoy those things for their own sake--the educational modules are obviously just a means to the end of acquiring the necessary skills and knowledge. But if you want the kid to WANT to enjoy reading for its own sake as an adult, paying him to do it now is counterproductive.
Isn't the whole point that you give them £1 to read Roald Dahl books and it doesn't impact on their enjoyment at all - instead it may actually improve their motivation to read even without monetary incentive!
I can't see how paying my son to read a great book would make him less likely to enjoy it.
I also don't particularly care about intrinsic motivation. I don't see why anyone should - I'm familiar with Alfie Kohn and think his influence on education is malign.
I think in a perfect world, kids would read a few great children’s books and spend their free time doing other things than reading.
But my experience of kids myself included and, coincidentally, my genetically related kid - who go on to become constant readers as adolescents and adults, is the personal search for books, almost furtive and almost entirely undisturbed; a lot of which is plowing through a fair amount of garbage, or short of that at the very least, deeply unedifying books.
I spent my whole childhood reading - it was an immense source of pleasure for me. I hope it will be for my kids too. But why on earth shouldn't we try to make readers, given the links between volume of reading and educational outcomes?
I guess we need Scott A. to craft a survey question to get at: if you are a reader - someone who, at the thought of a threat to vision, as is beginning to happen at my age, of course I’m nearsighted and astigmatic but I don’t mean that - your second thought is not: to lose the sight of beautiful waterfalls, or relatives - but rather: the fear of not being able to read text many hours a day!! - if you are that …
Were you made by your parents? Would you not be so without parental involvement? Did your parents have anything to do with this at all, or was it more like a pulling away from them into a private world?
I don’t know many readers (any beyond the nuclear family?) so they may have been generated by those contests in school or parents saying, now is your 30
minutes you must spend reading.
Some of us did indeed get in trouble for reading too late; and I myself once took my son’s copies of LoTR and hid them away.
I developed no useful skills as a kid but it may not be fair to blame reading. I watched a good deal of TV as well - enough to be full up for my whole life as it turned out.
I am an hours-a-day reader and my parents absolutely caused it. My entire family loved reading, and I loved them, so why wouldn't I want to read?
The first thing you'd see on the way into my grandparents' house was a bookshelf. One of my early memories is of my father cutting up MDF boards and glueing then clamping them together because he was making a bookshelf large enough to take up an entire wall of our living room. My grandmother would always ask me to show her what I was reading; today, my parents and I trade books almost every time we meet.
I wasn't directly paid to read, but there's a big charity event in Australia and elsewhere called the MS Readathon which rewards kids for raising a certain amount using t-shirts and bookmarks. Kids sign adults up to give them $X per book, and then collect the cash at the end of August based on how many books they read. I definitely read a lot more during that month, and I also liked the validation: "hey, here's this thing you're good at, but did you know you can get a sweet dinosaur t-shirt and help people with multiple sclerosis just by reading 2x the normal amount?"
I decided to learn programming after reading my dad's copy of "The Idiot's Guide to Visual Basic". When I was a little older I bought a five-year-old copy of "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" for $2 second hand. I read both of them cover to cover multiple times, even though the latter was the size of a phone book. Those books, and by extension, reading itself, formed the basis for my entire future career.
I think we might have had very different childhoods and might feel very differently about reading because of it.
This is a very interesting take I've never seen before - what's the negative of reading? That many books are bad? What would you want kids to do instead?
It's a totally solitary activity that erodes your relationships or need for or interest in other people, as well as your physical health, when you do it obsessively, as I did. I can totally see how I could've been a physically healthier person with more and better relationships if I hadn't had my nose in a book most of my life. It trains you to just be locked in your own mind. It's not all bad and you don't want kids who NEVER read, but many of us clearly took it way too far.
I'm in the camp that probably read a bit too much as a kid. It was fine and fun and helped me get a stellar SAT score. Overall, though, I probably would have been better off reading 20-40% less and putting that time into more sleep and things like physical activity, socializing, the school play, etc.
As an adult, I also find that I spend a bit too much time reading and not quite enough time doing. I just find good writing a bit intoxicating. It's perhaps the world's least harmful thing to overindulge in, but one can overindulge.
There is the famous quote by Pessoa, "Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life."
That said, it's one of a dozen ways of performing escapism. You can make socializing easier for the bookworms without reducing reading's pleasure. There are even situations (e.g. bullying, not fitting in) where socializing can't be improved, and reading then serves as a refuge.
I can see why common-sensically it might sound silly that paying a kid to read would make them less likely to enjoy it, but there does seem to be a fair amount of evidence that it can genuinely have that effect.
For example, there are experiments that show that if you reward kids for doing a particular activity on one day, they're less likely to freely choose to do that activity if given the option on the next day. Now, admittedly, we have to take basically all psychology studies with a grain of salt, but in this case, I think this really does line up with my own experience of my own motivation. If I got paid to do something before, but then later I'm merely offered the opportunity to do it without pay, I have some tendency to now think, "Why should I do it if I'm not getting paid?" Doing it "for free" now strikes you as a waste of time. And this does seem to be born out by research.
Sending the message that reading Roald Dahl is something you need to be bribed to do, rather than a delightful thing you *get* to do, seems like a bad idea to me.
But if you don't particularly care about intrinsic motivation, I guess we might stand too far apart to have common ground for conversation. I can't imagine not caring about intrinsic motivation. To me, it seems that happiness in life absolutely depends on being able to enjoy for their own sake as many of the things you *have* to do as possible.
I think all the evidence we have shows that intrinsic motivation is one of the most heritable things there is! So to the extent my children do or don't have it, that's not something I can influence.
The research quoted in the article seems at odds with what you're saying - that actually rewards don't make kids less likely to pick that activity - they make them more likely to choose it!
There’s a big difference between an incentive to get over a hump and kickstart a process, and an incentive as a crutch to solve for an exercise that a child really and enduringly does not want to do.
If my picky toddler won’t try a donut (a real example), I can bribe them to take one bite, and then the issue is obviated. This kind of thing comes up all the time. The point is not to be an imperialist or a reductionist about incentives, it’s to have them in the toolkit.
My husband gives our kids money for household chores (which I disagreed with - I felt it should be an expectation not something to he rewarded). He's read my comments, disagreed with bribing to read books and has countered with incentives to use family Duolingo which I have agreed with.
Not sure why that should sound silly. After all it’s a pretty common observation among adults who make a beloved hobby their career is that they lose a beloved hobby.
Of course mileage can and does vary there – might also be an interesting thing to study: What about personality and activity structure makes adding material incentives to passion work or fail?
One of the risks might be that there’s no guardrail against your son rushing it and reading badly to get the money, or choosing easier books to get they money rather than something they might enjoy more. If they’re reading out loud to you, and you’re choosing the books, this is hopefully fine
I say, don't micromanage. There aren't that many Dahl books. Let them read what they want and pay up. As a kid I hated when something that sounded fun turned out to have all these terms and conditions. "Good practice for being an adult", yes. "Incentive", no.
The point of the argument here is that external incentives is the first step on the ladder to internal motivation.
The hypothetical for reading fiction would be:
Child doesn't like (or maybe just doesn't care about) reading -> incentivized to read -> finds out that some books were actually enjoyable -> decides to keep reading on their own
That, to me, is at least plausible, as a way of encouraging a child to find out whether or not they might enjoy reading. For it to work, you probably want to be incentivizing a wide range of different books until they find out what they like.
There's also the skill hump to get over. When you're not yet that good at reading, reading a whole short book is a lot of effort, and the story isn't enjoyable because the struggle of actually reading it is so hard. After a lot of practice, you get better at reading and it becomes easy, and the story is its own reward.
I'm still undecided on the idea of monetary rewards for basic tasks, though. I know my kids will do just about anything for a dollar, but I also know that if I overuse this then soon they'll be refusing to do anything without getting paid... and then they'll start negotiating for more money.
Curious: do you think *monetary* rewards are the best way to go with a 3yo? Back when I was bribing a 3yo to read, it earned him ice cream; I'm curious about the relative merits of ice cream vs cash. (That former 3yo is now 6, and I'm planning to bribe more reading with movie nights -- TBD how well that works.)
I think there is some evidence bribing with food might lead to a bad association with food = rewards = obesity. I don't know how right that is, but in any case, cash rules all and you can use cash to buy what you want, including an ice cream. I think he's probably too small to get it just yet, but we'll see.
My approach was "the 3yo should get an immediate reward; an extra dessert seems like a sustainable level of immediate rewarding". (This is presumably the mechanism behind stickers, I just never quite figured out what kids are supposed to *do* with the stickers they get, and consequently my kids don't quite seem to know either.) If cash works as an immediate reward for a 3yo (and if you actually keep cash in small denominations on hand! -- part of my problem was that I don't), then I don't disagree that it's equally good.
This is really interesting, thank you ! As a parent of similarly aged kids, do you have any advice on how to make those 30 mn a day a pleasant time ? I feel that every time I try to teach my son, I have a hard time staying calm and he is not very interested either.
Stay calm, over praise your child for tiny successes ("oh wow!!!! you're soooo clever - that's right - that sound is "oy, a toy to enjoy"!). Be very firm; the exercise/reading does not end until you say it ends. Use rewards/incentives - we already say "you can watch TV, but first, finish your reading". Be very clear at the beginning what the expectation is - i.e. "first we're going to practice your writing with the yellow sheet, then we'll do your red book, then you'll write your name, then we'll practice some sounds, then we'll do red words, then we'll read two pages of your book".
I think the home school product has become available. But my googling can’t find it. It’s been quoted at $10,000/year though and doesn’t include afternoon programming, “babysitting” or incentives
In Alpha's pilot of this program, however, it has been much harder to get the 2x+ learning results in the home environment without the wonderful guides and various tailored incentives.
Oh certainly, it's just that homeschool users (even early adopters) may not understand how critical the motivational model/incentives really are. We can probably do more in that regard to educate/support as we continue to experiment and roll it out, but ultimately Alpha cannot control whatever is happening not within its walls.
I homeschooled another child of mine for a while and it did not go well for many reasons but I did find that incentives at home felt much more manipulative to him - whereas learning alongside a bunch of other kids who are also racking up their app time and cheering each other on and sometimes going on outings together as a reward feels way more natural. At home with just me and him it felt admittedly lame : "do your work!! don't you want these stickers?? chop chop " 🥴
Perhaps the unnaturalness is that you already have a love-and-nurturing relationship with your child, and now you're imposing this weird structure with a different set of rules and behaviors.
How about a homeschool exchange program? Parents partner up and exchange kids for (home)-schooling. Now the parents can retain the parent-chile relationship. The teaching-reward relationship now might feel natural to the kids because it's the only relationship with the partner parents they've ever known, and the partner kids have the same relationship going on. The teaching parents then tell the parenting parents what rewards their kids have earned; the outings are with their own family or jointly.
This sounds like a worthwhile idea, certainly many homeschoolers are quite creative, resourceful, and committed to making it work.
I have some extenuating factors that made homeschooling only a stopgap solution for us, and it barely served even that modest purpose for a few months, so I don't mean to say any of these issues are strictly insurmountable while using the Alpha apps platform or any other curriculum at home - just that there are several dimensions of major trade off.
(Alpha parent who now works for them) There is AI behind the scenes refining our apps platform, including eye tracking and lots of interpretation of student learning behavior to determine when the material needs revision vs. when the students are choosing to waste time, etc.
But you're correct that the "AI tutor" is not like talking to an LLM/chatbot or anything of the sort, and that many people who see various media coverage are misinterpreting it as such.
I wasn't part of that strategic decision, to lean into "AI" branding but, as a parent who was considering Alpha a few years ago, the "AI" component didn't loom large in my own decision making. It has probably changed by now as AI enters the popular discourse more and more.
Given the section about their current consumer base, it might be that it's really unpopular among the general populace (although even that isn't actually obvious to me) and much more popular/less unpopular among the group of people who are considering these kinds of schools.
If that's the case, it might make sense now, but it could wind up being a poor choice down the road depending on how large their scaling ambitions are.
I believe it's for PR & virality purposes. Everyone's wondering how AI will "transform education" and journalists are hungry to write about it. Alpha Schools has existed for a while, has always used personalized apps, and only got this level of media traction when they started saying it was 'replacing teachers with AI.'
If that makes some parents and educators angry, all the better for provoking discussion.
I mean, there’s also a sense in which it’s true. The in person teachers don’t give academic instruction or do lesson planning. AI is integrated into evaluations of mastery and decisions about next steps.
But yeah, I do think that people are (naturally and understandably) misreading it as “replacing teachers with chatbots”.
Hi Matt! Definitely agree there's a sense in which it's true - though the guides give some form of instruction during afternoon workshops, yes? And their presence (paired with incentives) seems to meaningfully drive completion of the 2 hour learning, given that homeschool students achieve less impressive results. And the virtual coaches available for extra support when kids get stuck could also somewhat qualify as teachers, right?
And yes, although I'm pretty deep in this stuff (spoke to people at Alpha back in 2020 before Gen AI boom) I was surprised to read that chatbots aren't a bigger part of the 2-hour-learning model now.
I think when people hear about AI replacing teachers, they expect this to mean that education is being done cheaper and more scalably - whereas Alpha's pitch is AI = education done faster + more effectively. It's more like "AI replacing some of the typical functions of a teacher's role, while actually having a student:teacher ratio lower than typical schools and paying teachers more, leading to a counterintuitively higher tuition price." Of course this is addressed really well in the piece, but I agree there are major scaling concerns. Nonetheless I do think there are ways to make the model work to some degree at home + virtually.
Gonna try to find time to write a higher-level comment on the pedagogy since this review is so rich and fascinating. For full disclosure in this thread, I've spent the past 5 years building Prisma, a virtual school in the same innovative education space.
An enormous portion of our costs right now are paying for AI models, which will come down.
Teacher salary is actually not the bottleneck, which I think should remain high. Nor is teacher:student ratio, which will be and in some cases is higher in other models that use the platform successfully.
The system does not function without teachers and the purpose of the system is not to replace teachers. The purpose of AI is specifically perfect and automate academics, which is a process that is not complete for some of the reasons you note.
Edit: I think the reality is that we are just dipping our toes into scale. There’s a lot to figure out. That’s the attitude from this side of the project.
Love all that! And I think that messaging will resonate and not offend - most parents know and feel that the best teachers are the best at driving relationships that enhance learning, and academics can be optimized other ways.
Hi Emily! I am Alpha parent who now works with them/Matt as well. You're right that there are several sliders here, not far from the usual "good, fast, or cheap" pick two situation. Unfortunately conventional education actually picks 0.
The counterintuitively high tuition price has several causes: huge expense of the behind-the-scenes tech stuff (building and improving the apps, this is AI powered with eye tracking data etc), guides who earn 2-3x public school teachers in the same areas with dramatically higher teacher:student ratio, and some of the workshops are quite expensive (indoor climbing 3 days/week, swim lessons, field trips to a ranch...). These could be adjusted in various ways in the future , like well paid guides in different ratio, cost effective workshops, cheaper buildings in lower cost zip codes.
The guides do create and implement the afternoon workshops, and some of those have used LLM/chatbot type AI, as a kind of educational dessert and not the main course. Here is a video about the recent "AI Imagineers" workshop, my daughter is the one making animal trading cards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foGBJHdjhZg
This sounds very cool, though I neither live in Austin nor have a spouse who is open to homeschooling, so I don't think I'll ever be able to use it. Alas.
The one thing I *wouldn't* be happy with is the lack of a few things that I considered really essential to my own education: (a) significant periods of sustained silent reading for pleasure in elementary school, (b) in middle/high school, classes where everyone reads a classic work of fiction over a few weeks, discussing it as a group as they go, and (c) lots of practice writing, including creative writing, where it gets read and critiqued by a human--at least by a human teacher, but sometimes also by fellow students.
These are things that you can't (or certainly shouldn't) get AI to grade, where performance isn't going to be clearly quantifiable, but they should be included.
I had similar thoughts! I’d heard that kids in general aren’t reading full books in school these days, so if there were a way to combine that with the accelerated study in other areas, that would be ideal…
I went to a Montessori school from preschool through 6th grade, so I have a lot of appreciation for parts of this approach (I got to have a much more self-paced experience than most kids do, though obviously not to this extent).
The things I would probably not have liked:
-So, if you’re in the GT program, you have to do chess *and* quizbowl *and* public speaking? Sounds great if you’re into all of those things; not if you’re interested in some but not others. Or is the idea “some schools choose to include Latin or programming in their Official Curriculum; we’re choosing to include public speaking in ours, so everyone has to do that”?
-Similarly, I have this vision of my 7-year-old self cruising through 4th- or 5th-grade math and English while still officially not having “leveled up” from first grade due to not doing, say, the paper airplane thing (maybe due to some difficulty at first, subsequently out of something like spite).
-Not a fan of the idea of everybody learning just enough piano to play a grade 1 solo, and then not playing piano anymore. Maybe this is just my personal bias (for me, chess is the thing I would have chosen to pick up for a few weeks and then put down, but for them, it’s music).
Hi there, I am Alpha parent who's gone to work for them, my 2 daughters are moving to the GT version this fall.
Since core academic learning is so efficient when done on the Alpha apps platform, there is a ton of time for workshops, even with a relatively short school day that starts late (~8:45a-3:30pm). You're right that some kids will like some of those activities more than others, but they've got to be doing something constructive with the time, and the workshops rotate each short session (~6 weeks) so it's not like being stuck coming into school at 6am every day for quiz bowl that you hate.
I have exactly that kind of salty first grader lol (cf https://x.com/gtmom/status/1931058079745056974 ) . In practice the wonderful guides eventually get them through each of the check chart activities required to advance levels, though students do genuinely do this on different schedules and may indeed be delayed for failure/noncooperation. Students can move up at each session throughout the year so this is not disastrous like being held back an entire year.
Since GT school is about to go into only its second year, we are still experimenting with the schedule and may be moving some of those activities into an optional after school hour for more depth and continuity.
Personally I hope they/we also find a way to do piano (or music broadly) more continuously, my daughters missed that one! stay tuned!
>> -Not a fan of the idea of everybody learning just enough piano to play a grade 1 solo, and then not playing piano anymore.
Nothing to stop anybody from continuing to play piano.
It's possible that you'd get more people continuing by getting everyone to do it for a bit. (Though, one could argue that doing that isn't fair to people who really have no interest.)
I’m planning on adding literature (and history and some other things) along these lines to the Alpha system. There’s no resistance to it, and there are patchwork solutions in place in the interim. It’s just a young project.
One of my spicier takes these days is that AI absolutely can grade writing assignments with quality above the median level of a human teacher. The standard caveats about motivating kids, human connection with teachers, and so on do still apply. But I think the benefit would be worth it. Feedback on demand on writing could be as big an unlock for a kid motivated to write as the feedback described in the review for other work.
There are some ratios later in the piece with the same problem, and since they refer to normal public schools it looks like they must be all reversed. Is it in the spirit of the contest to let the author fix errors like that? It's pretty distracting.
They're reversed, as 4gravitons explains. There's only one place where it's stated correctly:
"At the five‑to‑one student‑to‑teacher ratio Alpha runs[...]"
The review also suffers from bizarre use of hyphenation, misuse of homophones and near-homophones ("skimming" vs. "skimping", "shoot" vs. "chute", etc.), and other MUGS problems.
The review is very informative and extremely thought-provoking, but I expected that a finalist of an essay contest would have better writing fundamentals.
> "When the data and anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. It’s usually not that the data is being miscollected. It’s usually that you’re not measuring the right thing."
I'd like to offer an anecdote of a recent Alpha School graduate I know that supports this review (which was great btw).
I know a guy who graduated from Alpha School in ~2023. The class size was only about 10 people, so he was either a late entry, or one of the early beta testers from back when Alpha school was a new concept (thus likely not getting the full benefits of K-12 Schooling). This guy is one of the most impressive people I've met.
In his senior year, he raised ~$3 Million dollars to build a dirt bike park outside of Austin, apparently with some competitive advantage of shuttling bikers to the top of the hill and being larger than the other parks. He successfully built the park, operates it at a profit, and is now building a national mountain bike apparel brand that seems to be doing quite well. He's 19 by the way.
He told me about Alpha school shortly after graduating when he was looking for his next cofounder for his new company, and I remember I was thoroughly impressed at the time. We were both looking for cofounders at the time, so we had some in-depth discussion on past achievements, business philosophy and whatnot, meaning I got a good look into how he had become so successful literally in high school. It didn't end up working out, since we were both guys in the "driving seat" so to speak, looking for people to join our existing venture and business idea rather than looking to join someone else's.
He obviously isn't going to college, but he doesn't need to since he owns the majority of a company that returns more money than the average American makes in a year, while also owning the majority of a $2M+ piece of land. If he wanted, he could probably not work for the rest of his life, and he's 19 mind you.
Now you might be thinking; "Ok. This guy is a rich kid. His dad or family friend probably gave him millions of dollars and he built a return-producing asset with it, big whoop. It's no big deal to build a known business model with daddy's credit card." and that's the same thing I was asking him. It's impressive to build a company, but a lot less impressive to replicate a known business model when given a large amount of money to throw at the problem. Bike parks are certainly common enough, and it's not like he was building the new "Uber for dogs" so with a few million dollars it seems like no surprise he succeeded.
How he raised the money is the interesting part. He cold-called (actually called, something people don't do so often anymore) every multi-millionaire in Austin he could identify until he found one that would listen to him. He pitched the idea; secure $1M in investment, purchase a piece of land outside of Austin that's a good fit for a bike park under a mortgage, operate the bike park (and apparently there was a lack of bike parks around Austin) according to known business principles, and return a profit. He was a competitive mountain biker, and had worked at a bike park previously (I assume one of the afternoon activities that Alpha School encourages), and that was a very attractive part of the pitch to an investors.
Anyway, to sum it up he raised money, bought a property, built his bike park, and is now building his next thing. I've met a LOT of people in the startup space, like literally 500+ founders, and his story sticks out to me as one of the most practicable (he didn't try to reinvent the internet in his first company) and successful (he actually built a profitable company on his first attempt). Now you could say, as a lot of people like to do about successful startup founders, that his success was due to his unique position. That it wasn't his individual magic that led to success, just his circumstances (Bezos raised money from his parents, Elon's Dad's Emerald Mines, Bill Gates being the 0.01% of children with regular access to a computer when that was uncommon, etc.) but... isn't that kind of the point here? If that's the critique we levy against him, then that's an accolade for Alpha School! Since they're the ones who created the circumstances for him to succeed in a major way.
I don't have kids, and probably won't for the next few years at minimum, but when I do, Alpha School has been at the top of my places to send them to school for the past couple of years. My previous plan was to do elite Aristotelean-like home schooling/tutoring, possibly in conjunction with other like-minded parents, but if there's a functional model already out there, why reinvent the wheel? This review simply increased my confidence in Alpha School.
My prediction is that this review will win. SSC readers already are really interested in alternative forms of schooling, it's very well written, extremely detailed, and probably the most "review with potential real world impact" on the list of finalists.
The only bad thing I have to say about Alpha School is the branding. A-priori, the name sounds like something Andrew Tate would come up with, and its relative unspecific "We use AI to teach kids to learn!" copy on their website makes them look like the very many AI vaporware startups and/or Web3/Crypto/NFT bs. This is completely a personal issue with their branding, not substance though, and is just my personal impression, and I don't think they should change their vibe because of the association with less savory lines of business.
Edit: Apparently he is going to college. When I last had a long conversation with him it was summer after his graduation (or maybe he was intending to take a gap year? I don't remember), but apparently that changed. It still stands that he, more than most people didn't HAVE to go to college though.
I think the kid was Rhett Jones. He didn’t want to go to university but his parents insisted he go. I think he ended up choosing University of Austin (not UT Austin) as they agreed to give him some credit for running the bike park.
(I would love to read a review on the University of Austin from a ACX reviewer…)
Also worth noting that Rhett is definitely to most successful to come out of the Alpha High program. He was in the first class and he is the one the school brags about the most (they even filmed a documentary - I think this might be it — https://youtu.be/IsUwcO61irw?si=TkObs_CY34iwD2Pj )
Ahahah I wasn't aware he was their biggest success, and that definitely qualifies my anecdote. My assumption was that while he was better than average, doing great interesting things was pretty typical in the senior year at Alpha School, although I now realize that might not be the case.
I wasn't aware he ended up going to UATX, but it makes sense. It's probably unnecessary in terms of educational outcomes, but university provides structure at a time in life when structure is quite important. Wunderkind with money, prestige and free-reign do whatever he wants is a very common backstory behind washed-up adults. Having the skills and mindset to build a business is rare, and incredibly valuable, but that isn't necessarily the same skillset for a life of flourishing. Especially if you lack some other important things like humility, genuine friendships, discipline, delayed gratification, etc, which quick success early in life might make harder to develop or retain.
From my interactions he seems like a really great person though, although I don't know him personally well enough to make any judgements. Life is long, and 3 years at a unique university won't set you back if you're already well ahead of the pack.
To be fair there were only 10-12 graduates of the first class (Rhett was in the first graduating class) so the fact he was the most successful is not like it was a super high N. And the author of Austin Scholar (who is mentioned elsewhere in the thread) was also in the class.
I heard there was someone else in the class who was apparently a national-level waterskied who also had photos published in major magazines. And someone else who published some sort of computer game that was mid-successful.
Second class just graduated. Have not heard details about them yet.
It would be interesting if Alpha School published their success stories on their website, at least the ones that have a public presence like Rhett, Austin Scholar and that national-level water skier.
That might eventually create the wrong incentive, to do flashy things that will get you noticed rather than do things students actually enjoy doing, but it would also serve to show exactly what outcomes the school produces, which is ultimately what the public will judge it on.
Either way it’s far and away where I’d send my kids (if I had any), and I’ve half convinced my cofounder to send his kid there when he’s old enough, especially since he already lives in Austin.
As someone who went to a magnet high school (TJHSST) that had a wonderful culture of kids enjoying STEM for its own sake which has gone downhill since, the point about creating the wrong incentives hits hard. It seems almost impossible to avoid though… how do you market an alternative school without highlighting outlier success stories? Kids having more time to just enjoy what they’re doing doesn’t seem to be enough of a selling point for parents to shell out that much cash.
Frankly their homeschool option seems the most promising to me in terms of something that could actually scale. Alpha School infra in local microschools around the nation would be a wonderful outcome IMO
Likes are turned off for everyone including paid subscribers (This is unique to Scott on substack). If you read on mobile you can still like comments, but that's not intentional.
Interesting. A week or so ago, I was notified that someone upvoted one of my comments on ACX. I assumed the distinction was between paid and unpaid subscribers; it's funny that it's actually because of a bug in the mobile version.
If you were remotely aware of the history of schooling, you would know exactly what it is - yet another hype-ridden gimmick that will not be remember a decade from now. The brain at the other the if the technology is what matters, and it can't be changed by software.
We have different foundational beliefs when it comes to education. An ideal school for you would be the least desirable school in my view, and vice-versa for your opinion on my ideals.
Opposing ideologies will look at the same information and come to opposing conclusions. For me, a school that promises to increase excellence while also increasing inequality, is great, since I value excellence and don’t care much about equality. For you, a school that gives further advantages to the intellectual elite, is a perpetuation of inequality and therefore undesirable.
I am forever grateful to my good friend Tracing Woodgrains's reframing of the values in modern education. It sounds so obvious once stated out loud in plain English, but nobody had been saying it.
If you're ever in the Philly area, come to an ACX meet-up! At our meet-up last week, Trace eviscerated Keeping Track, the book that was the foundational text for applying Marxist principles to public education. It outlines how an education system should create equity in all students and cut down the elite as a terminal goal. The point of this style of education is not to educate students or teach skills; it's to achieve equality of outcome.
This sounds bonkers when you actually spell it out, but every single School of Education in the US believes in this as their core value system.
I drive to DC from NYC multiple times a year and pass through Philly on my way. I have a trip scheduled for Tuesday, but in the future I’ll see if I can time a trip for the last Thursday of the month.
You made quite a few comments under this review with a similar message, and similarily without bringing up your reasoning/evidence. I do agree with you in that my prior is that "revolutionising education" is overwhelmingly likely to not work out, but that's a prior that can be overcome, and this review seems to have put in some work towards overcoming it. Could you expand on your reasoning or why you find the review unconvincing, aside from just priors?
>Caplan showed that, within the normal range, nothing you do in education or parenting matters.
If I am not mistaken, didn't Caplan argue only that nothing we do in HIGHER education matters? Has he made that same claim re K-12? The decline in test scores associated with COVID remote learning (and decline in attendance) certainly implies that K-12 is more than just signaling,
That is remarkably unconvincing, since the only "data" he cites is his n=1 personal experience. And is completely inane:
> My K-12 memories include thousands of hours studying material I knew I’d never use after the final exam. The three years in Spanish were especially traumatic, but they’re only the tip of the signaling iceberg. How many years did you study poetry, art, music, history, and civics during elementary, middle, and high school? Even math often smells of signaling; honors math students usually have jobs that don’t use advanced math.
The test of the effectiveness of three years of K-12 Spanish is not whether the student ends up happening to use it; it is how proficient the student is in Spanish.
And the trope of "I will never use it, there it is valueless" is completely inane. First, although I have not used 90 percent of what I learned in school and you have not used 90 percent, IT IS NOT NECESSARILY THE SAME 90 PERCENT. A school cannot know what each student will use in the future. Second, the idea, because I do not use historical knowledge at work, the history I have learned is useless is obvious nonsense. Eg: How do know that "the Democrats are the real racists because slavery" is a dishonest claim? Because I know who the Dixiecrats were, among other things. How did I know that the claim (which I heard on NPR at the time), "the Obama Iran nuclear deal is really about oil, because the Secretary of Energy is involved in the negotiations" is stupid? Because I know enough civics to know who the Secy of Energy was. How do I know that, no, the chance of Biden winning PA and GA was not one in a quadriilliion? Because I know enough statistics to know that what assumptions underlie that claim.
And, I note Caplan, and economist does not bemoan the hours spent teaching Economics, a graduation requirement in California and, I assume, elsewhere. How odd, since almost no high school grads use econ at work. But some economics knowledge sure comes in handy in deciding who to vote for for mayor of New York.
Honestly, Caplan's take here is no obtuse that it is hard to take anything he says without a very, very large grain of salt. He certainly should not be cited in an article re K-12 education.
On Caplan's beliefs, I believe he has said basic reading, writing & arithmetic can be learned early on in school, but after that it shifts away from building human capital.
Quick note on a minor confusing thing: This post at one point says that a "mastery test" is like a final exam, but later implies that it's something that happens every day. I assume this is just a terminological error or something.
HI Taymon, I am Alpha parent who's gone to work for them. While the mastery tests are indeed like final exams, the other mastery implication probably refers to the fact that, day to day, Alpha's apps platform enforces mastery learning on each discrete skill.
Mastery learning is a core Alpha value. Most (possibly all) commercial education apps out of the box do not insist on mastery and instead pass students along with traditional "passing" scores of ~80%, which soon leaves them with big holes in their knowledge.
To be clear, I was not making a comment on Alpha School itself, I was just making an editorial suggestion for how the author of the review could make it slightly clearer.
Our family has found that incentives work, and video games are a particularly effective carrot. Our homeschooled kids have to complete their modest IXL workload and practice piano for 30 minutes to unlock 30 minutes of game time each day. They do it pretty much automatically each day with minimal complaints.
We're pretty relaxed. We figure if we can ensure our kids are literate and numerate, they'll be able to learn whatever else they ever need to. Of course, they do more than reading, writing, and math, but that's our core focus.
We used to use Kumon workbooks, but I was manually grading them so sporadically that they didn't get meaningful feedback. That's where IXL really shines--it gives them immediate feedback when they make mistakes, and this ensures mastery.
Although I am impressed by the entire IXL curriculum, we only use it for math at this point. The other major component for us is Classical Conversations, which is a community-based classical Christian program. I think the CC experience will vary considerably depending on the quality of the local community, but ours is great.
This brings back memories. My parents did the same thing with me and piano. Worked like a charm, but I never did get around to independently loving the instrument even as I became skilled at playing it.
I think I would still trust data over anecdotes, regardless of what Jeff Bezos says. I come across WAY too many anecdotes from unreliable people on the internet (often anti-vaccine or COVID denialists).
I think you have to be looking at well-selected anecdotes whose provenance you understand. Anecdotes of random people on the internet are actually just really bad data.
I wouldn’t accept what Bezos says very literally, but there’s a clear phenomenon he’s talking about that is probably easiest to see in the context of “evidence-based medicine”. That particular movement says that basically only randomized controlled trials count as evidence. This meant that things like aspirin, whose efficacy was established before there were such studies, needed new studies in order to “count”.
As far as I know, there is no “evidence” in that sense that a sustained yoga practice “works” for anything, but anecdotally, a large number of people seem to find a benefit for their yoga practice. The big issue is that it’s hard to even precisely formulate, let alone measure, the benefits that people identify from their yoga practice, and then on top of that there are all kinds of statistical confounds (it’s hard to randomly assign people to a yoga practice and have it stick, and there are antecedent differences between the people who do and don’t stick with it, and there’s no way to blind the assignment to the subjects, and many of the benefits take years to emerge).
This is the sort of case, where there’s a well established practice, including serious people, where I wouldn’t accept trust the anecdote (particularly from my own experience but also those I know well) over the data.
It's true that you can't blind the subjects of a yoga study, but I think you can look at objective measurements for which the subject's awareness would be less relevant. Without that, I would still be skeptical.
Sweet Jesus, this article is almost 18 thousand words long.
Scott, let me strongly suggest that you put some sort of upper bound on the lengths of these reviews in the future. Three thousand or five thousand words should be ample for making a point or three about virtually anything. The authors can always link to more elaborate supporting material if they really want to go in depth.
Readers can always stop reading if they find the material isn't interesting enough to hold their attention. A word count limit would've eliminated Lars' excellent series on Georgism, among many other important posts.
The trouble is that if I don't finish one of the contest entries, I feel like I can't fairly vote on any of them.
Also if I don't finish a review I don't feel like I can engage in the discussion because it's inevitably "duh that thing was addressed at word 12,932".
This review started out very interesting but I lost interest in the "Does It Work?" section, whose content I could predict before I started:
You are not obligated to read every single review. That's explicit: Scott asked people to pick as randomly as possible, knowing that most people wouldn't read every one. If it's acceptable to rate reviews without having read every single one, then it's okay to stop reading a review which isn't holding your attention and penalize its rating accordingly.
"Not interesting enough to keep me reading all the way through" is a valid critique, though if you find yourself skimming or skipping frequently, you might want to get your content elsewhere.
You are correct that it's not good practice to engage in discussion before reading the entire review, but if it wasn't interesting enough to read all the way through, why do you want to waste your time discussing it?
> The trouble is that if I don't finish one of the contest entries, I feel like I can't fairly vote on any of them.
This is a mistake you're making IMO. A review's ability to keep you interested enough to read all of it is an important part of its quality. If it's failing to do that, you should vote in a way that reflects that or you're biasing the overall results.
I can relate to your reaction, but I don't think that's a popular position. Judging by their votes, ACX readers consistently prefer longer essays. The book review contest winner in 2023 was extremely long too. This year 5 of the 10 longest essays became finalists, including the three longest ones. Unless Scott sees some kind of utility in restricting the length of entries, I doubt that is going to happen.
My friend asked me to look over a text conversation he'd had, to get my read on the situation. He warned me in advance that it was "a lot" and that I didn't need to feel obligated to read the whole thing.
I said "I read Scott Alexander for FUN. Your text conversations do not scare me".
Granted, I've also read War and Peace a few times, but only because it's the perfect book for reading before bed: interesting enough that I won't not read it, but not interesting enough to keep me from falling asleep. Also, it's so long that it's practically a new book on every read-through.
If you don't like it, vote against it. If most of the voters disagree with you I'm not sure why Scott should feel obligated to enforce your preferences in particular?
If you're comfortable agitating for it to be banned from the contest, but not giving it a bad rating, that seems like a you problem.
If we're worried about the overly scrupulous biasing the results I guess I'd be fine with an official statement of policy that making a good faith effort to read an entry and losing interest partway through is valid grounds for a bad rating.
I strongly agree with an upper limit on word length, for at least 3 reasons:
1. This is a contest, but a 2000 word review is a different art form from a 18,000 word review. Neither is inherently better or worse, but comparing reviews to reviews instead of reviews to novellas makes the contest more meaningful and more fair for everyone. If Scott wants to open a novella contest with a minimum word count of 18,000, he can do that too.
2. Most people don't have time to read excessively long reviews, and are therefore locked out of the voting and the discussions. Yes, I know you can vote against long reviews without reading them, but doing so feels unfair to me, Melvin, and probably a substantial fraction of other would-be voters.
3. Most people who don't finish the review aren't going to vote, and the people who do finish the review will give it a high score (otherwise they wouldn't have read the whole thing). This means the voting is biased in favor of long reviews.
The point of a review is to entertain and inform you. If a review is so long you can't be bothered to read it, it has completely failed to do either and you should absolutely give it a bad rating. Although I'd encourage you to give it at least a bit of a chance to hook you in first- if you're not willing to read an extremely long post regardless of how good it is, I'm not sure why you're reading this blog in the first place.
That last sentence really is the meat of the problem (he say, having just tapped out a couple hundred words on the subject). Asking for shorter reviews on ACX makes me wonder if these people are tourists, brought to the blog because the contest got linked somewhere and now trying to make it more like the rest of the internet.
"If a review is so long you can't be bothered to read it, it has completely failed to do either and you should absolutely give it a bad rating."
I disagree. There are entertaining and informative books that are thousands of pages. That doesn't mean holding a contest where voters have to judge ten 1000-page reviews is reasonable. Not everyone has the time to read even the most interesting 1000-page reviews, and Scott has an interest in keeping community activities accessible to a reasonably large fraction of the community.
This sounds like a youse problem. As was pointed out on reply to Melvin, the readership consistently prefers longer essays, and length is not exactly a new feature for SSC/ACX content. If some people don't have enough time to read an essay in one sitting, and they're unwilling or unable to break down their reading into multiple sittings--well, first, I have to wonder how they read books or even posts by Scott himself, but also--I don't think it'd be a good thing to artificially crop content just to accommodate them. I want to see the best writing out there; I have no trouble giving a poor rating to a review which doesn't hold my attention for its entire length (the 0th Dimension review could've been two sentences and it still would've been too long to hold my attention); and while I suspect most of the core audience vote the same way, I don't think it makes much difference.
In a world flooded with TikToks, YouTube shorts, cable news soundbites, image macros delivering punchy one-liners in Impact font--where everything is chopped into easily-digested chunks free of nuance or depth--we have found one space where people are not only free to take deep dives into their preferred subjects, but are in fact encouraged to do so. You can find content of your preferred length almost literally everywhere else on the internet.
"The readership consistently prefers longer essays" partly because those who prefer shorter essays are locked out of participation, if not by official rules, then at least by personal scruples and unspoken norms. (Speaking of official rules, I think one iteration of the book review contest did say you can only vote if you've read all the entries, though I might be misremembering.)
"well, first, I have to wonder how they read books or even posts by Scott himself"
If they're here, they probably prefer posts by Scott over posts written by other good writers. Also, this review is substantially longer than most posts by Scott. Even if that wasn't true, reading one long Scott post is 1/10 the effort of reading ten long reviews.
"In a world flooded with TikToks, YouTube shorts, cable news soundbites, image macros delivering punchy one-liners in Impact font"
Do you think it's possible, even in theory, for a post to be too long? If all posts on ACX were a million words and the comments are either sparse (because nobody has the time to read the posts) or uninformed (because nobody has the time to read the posts), would that be the optimal outcome? There's clearly a happy medium in length between a soundbite and War and Peace. I'm saying that this review is longer than the happy medium, and the Georgism review definitely was.
The problem, as you state it, is that people don't vote unless they read every entry all the way through. This filters the voting population for people who, at minimum, tolerate long essays, and introduces a bias into the voting.
1. What portion of voters do you think read every entry all the way through? It would need to be a significant portion in order to have any effect. I certainly didn't. I didn't even get to the last alphabetical "Other" document, and, as previously mentioned, happily skipped most of the "0th Dimension" review, among others
2. Even if it were a real effect (which I doubt; my answer for 1. is "a few percent at most"), and even if I agreed that it's a negative effect (I think it's a feature, not a bug, to filter for people who can read longform content, but I am glad this is an organic effect of the community Scott has attracted and not the result of an official minimum word count or something), the correct solution would be to remove the source of the bias by clarifying that people can vote without reading every single entry all the way through.
You're describing a problem where the results might be shifted somewhat as the result of implicit beliefs; your proposed solution is a hard-coded restriction baked into the rules. The contest isn't inclusive enough, so we need to... exclude a significant portion of the most popular entries? The Bay Area House Party series has an example of this very thing, where one guy's parties become increasingly Inclusive as he bans more and more people; eventually, it's so Inclusive that he's the only one allowed to attend.
As to your last question: yes, it is entirely possible for an entry to be too long; the acceptable length is based on the quality of the content. I read Scott's posts because they're good, and I don't mind the length because they're good (indeed, you can see people in this thread talking about how they want MORE). I've already brought up multiple times a specific example from this very contest which I skipped after a few paragraphs because it was uninteresting to me, so clearly I am capable of NOT reading or enjoying a long post; conversely, my Keep Notes file lists several reviews which I rated highly as "Short and Sweet".
As an aside, the Georgism contest entry and the accompanying guest-post series comprise some of the most important writing Scott has ever had on his blog, and I've read War and Peace several times, so you're barking up the wrong tree with your examples (though I think I'm on the extreme end, even in this community).
Excellent piece, written ACX-style and good chances to win. I felt it could do without the complaints about their first DEI private school (but fun to read). And I wonder why you guys pay those sort of money - instead of getting a private tutor from idk Russia. Or unschool, put the school+college money in an ETF and on "graduating" your kids have enough dough for life. Numquam parum est quod satis est.
I can’t speak to author but institutional school has advantages, and a gifted school in particular has a major cohort effect. That’s part of the appeal for me, anyway.
Sure, the parents have their reasons to spend that money. I guess: *their* marginal use of spending it elsewhere may be small. - Just saying a) that sounds like insane amounts of bucks to me (and I am a teacher - who loves to work with smart learners and never met a teacher who loves teaching 'dumb' ones). Still, the marginal use of 12*40k+(elite)college= 700k? for the kids may be different. Meeting other kids from your income-cohort: why should that be hard? - An K12 education that costs half a million bucks is neither revolution nor reform, just: a non-starter.
In Germany, it costs the government 11k US-$ per year in Germany - often 13 for years. (I was aware that NYC is much costlier). Surely, I consider neither German nor US gov-schools worth the money. Hoping for an acx review of private schools in India. ;) Tracking eye-movements during screen-time is not what I would invest in. Alles Gute! Bon Chance!
Lol, this stuck out to me too! I was nodding along the whole time like "ah I would have loved this school so much as a kid", until I saw that and immediately switched to, "I would've flamed out and begged my parents to transfer me". I couldn't force myself to learn cursive back when there was some semi-coherent reason for it, but imagining trying to do it *now* with the full knowledge that it's entirely useless seems like it would've been even more impossible.
I was thinking at first that maybe they only need to complete a few of them, but the review seems to indicate they need to complete every single item on that list, which also seems a bit odd and against the personalized ethos.
Having seen it in practice at GT School, I believe that (a) cursive is a standin for “handwriting practice” and (b) the dosages of cursive instruction truly were not very high. None of the students seemed especially tortured by it (these were 6 to 8 year olds).
This might be a dumb question. But isn't homeschooling pretty similar to 1:1 tutoring? If the parent doing it is educated, motivated, and following something like The Lost Tools of Learning substack (or something else, I just mean a well-rounded curriculum), I would think that at least in the elementary years it would be pretty similar. Sure, it might not be exactly 1:1 (as I'd expect most homeschooling parents to have multiple children), and the parent is probably not going to be a subject-matter expert in every topic the kids ask questions about, but teaching them to research and find the answers is also valuable. You've still got rapid feedback and tailoring to the kids' needs and interests.
Why, then, aren't all homeschoolers Polgars, and why do the homeschoolers in Alpha do worse?
Hypothesis: the *typical* homeschooling parent does not put in anything like professional full-time attention to their child’s academic motivation or the wider motivational system in which academics occurs. Obviously there are going to be a lot of exceptions on the right tail, which is why you get Polgars and why some of the homeschoolers in Alpha do well, but it would explain the modal outcome.
I think a big aspect is also selection bias. I home ed because my son is autistic and I would say well more than half of the homeschoolers I know are doing so due to some form of disability; in some cases, cognitive disability.
The other issue for more religious families are large families. It's extremely hard to home school if you are also taking care of under 5s. And there's also some evidence they under-educate girls purposefully. There's also the unfortunate trend of classical education which leaves children with significant content gaps.
We also know the recent trend of 'unschooling' tends to result in pretty poor performance.
If think if you took a subset of families with a secular, academic educational philosophy, who were neurotypical, and there were no more than two kids in the family, the results would be better.
I suspect this actually is most of our homeschooling families but I haven’t dug into the data. Our primary homeschooling beta testing audience at the moment is people who say “I want to try this but cannot move to Austin”.
Points taken about the range of homeschooling contexts though.
Appreciate your comments throughout this thread and your passion for this project.
I kinda want to try this but cannot move to Austin? Filled out the form to check it out.
But... we already do a mix of ixl and beastmath. ChatGPT, Project Gutenberg, and the library help a lot with reading samples. I can see the appeal of monitored progress and guides, but I feel like most of the value we're missing out on is in interactions with peers to supplement parental motivations.
So I'm mostly curious about how you would keep up the value prop for homeschoolers.
We have a local homeschool coop that offers some classes similar to some of your life skills courses, so you can pay ala carte for 1-5 classes per week on subjects you're interested in. A new online curriculum would compete with all these other components we use to round things out, it's hard to make a one stop shop with all those elements.
Sounds great! I don’t think it’s impossible to get as-good-or-better effects in a homeschooling environment, just difficult. Not even difficult in the sense of “takes a ton of work”, more that a lot of judgment is involved.
For things like IXL we build that judgment into our system by setting the smartscore minimum to 100 and adding an additional layer of AI evaluation based on screen recordings.
Generally the problem with edtech apps is that their mastery standards are either non-existent or (in the case of IXL) far too low. So a lot of our value add is putting them in a platform that tortures the apps into having a high bar for mastery.
You're definitely right in general. But also my colleague Matt Bateman is correct that the latter description fits those piloting the Alpha homeschooling program thus far.
If these smallish family & low special needs users have trouble achieving good results without the in-school motivational model offered by bricks and mortar Alpha, a general (homeschooling) audience would likely find it even harder.
Maybe parents are more susceptible to accommodating their child's natural inclination to be a bit lazier than they would optimally be. "I've done so much math today, can't I go do [other thing that is also constructive but is not math]?" is easy for a teacher to say no to, but maybe not Dad.
Homeschooling varies widely but, among reasonably conscientious and educated/intelligent parents, there's little doubt that it achieves outcomes at very least comparable to conventional education and in fewer hours per day.
The Alpha apps platform stands to put this process on steroids, as each lesson in core academics is offered at the exact right time, with the appropriate number of repetitions, to full mastery. Thus you get even faster progress in usually even less time.
But the apps can only work if you do them, and I for one am a failed homeschooler. I have 2 kids at Alpha and one who needs something a bit different, homeschooled him part of his kindergarten year recently. My son is a huge extrovert and he hated being home just me and him all the time, very low mood.
At home, the incentives I put in place soon came to seem like plain manipulation, whereas at Alpha, the guides get the students working at the same time, cheering each other on before and after, the emporium feels like a proper, well-stocked store for spending one's Alpha currency (not just a lame treat mom is dangling over your head). At home it's easy to let the minimum instruction time drag on and on, or you get started late, etc. Not impossible to manage these factors but not for everyone either.
I believe the homeschool program is the closest the the real metrics. Kids at Alpha are working far more than the advertised 2hrs a day. The motivation part is to push them to complete more masteries out of their "own choice". The writer states his kids were working through a vacation. Which is common at the school. At home, I'm assuming they would only do the advertised 2 hrs. What I wonder is, what are the instructions given to the homeschooling parents. Do they encourage the parents not get involved and let the kids learn on their own (which was said to us at Alpha) or are the parents allowed to teach content and support their learning. If its the former, I would again assume the homeschool program numbers to be the most accurate.
I can assure you that kids at the Alpha flagship school do not work more than 2 hours per day, in fact many work significantly less like my first grader, see results here: https://x.com/gtmom/status/1931058079745056974
My older daughter has completed 3 years at Alpha and she spent perhaps 2 hours per week, if that, doing additional academics only the most recent year, 3rd grade.
The author sends their children to the gifted & talented version of Alpha, which does more like 3 hours of core academics during the school day. Those students are the ones who want/need even more academics in some cases.
*the chess piece pushed by his daughter who - by unpredictable and ineffable circumstance, wholly unrelated to the intensive training she received from an early age under the tutelage of a father who just happened to have the best chess genes in the world - became the best woman ever to play chess and peaked at top ten in the world.
I realize that sounds snarky, and I do think a bit of snark is warranted when you refer to Polgar's life work as "research" that is "bunk" rather than practice that produced three extraordinary players of a game nobody in the world is born knowing how to play, but I would be curious to hear how you reconcile this frame with their unambiguous demonstrated narrow-domain expertise.
Are you under the impression that learning openings is the entirety of chess?
If you want to be snarky but at least vaguely grounded in reality you'd say that chess is "just pattern recognition." But it turns out pattern recognition is pretty closely linked to intelligence!
I'm under the impression that I know a game designer who routinely beats highly ranked chess "experts" through sheer psychology (you may variously term this "acting like a horse's ass" or "trolling" but it does win games).
Pattern recognition in the general sense is navigating uncertainty, which doesn't exist in chess. There's a reason why talented game designers hate chess, and people who love chess make poor game designers (but decent puzzle designers).
One could say the same about school, which is the main point of the argument. In fact, school requires a hell of a lot less novel thinking than even CM-level chess, nevermind the world class chess. I find it highly unlikely that Polgar's method succeeding at creating world class female chess players but would have failed at creating students who learned 2.6x the speed of their peers with similar math scores.
It is honestly astonishing, isn't it, how much we value conformity over genius?
Tensei, the Japanese word for "genius", more aptly characterizes the issue... geniuses are the people with novel, disturbing ideas -- who you only talk to when you absolutely are at wits-end.
I believe that Polgar's method would have done about the same, yeah, given... most midwits as starting points. Given geniuses? That's a different matter -- they honestly tend to struggle with rote. (My friend the actual genius believed very strongly in "making the teachers work to grade his papers"... he wasn't popular among teachers, needless to say).
The academic results seem impressive, but is there any data about the effects of that amount of screen time upon developing brains, or are such concerns only made up by neo-Luddites? Or is it that screens are now ubiquitous and therefore any attempts to reduce screen time are futile? Just suck it up and accept that human brain development and eye development are potentially permanently affected? Assuming that the trade-off is that accelerated learning will mean more time for other potentially non-screen pursuits, we just might have to accept it the way we have to accept the eternal presence of microplastics in our blood and tissues.
There is no research indicating that 2 daily hours of screen time (which is not very high, and not dissimilar from typical in the majority of American public & private schools) is detrimental to elementary+ age kids.
Indications that kids under 5 should be limited to no more than one hour of screen time daily. After that age, inconclusive - some evidence pointing to higher rates of depression & anxiety in teens as daily screen time increases, but these studies (at least ones I've seen) don't typically differentiate between academic screen time and social media/gaming use. To me there's obviously a major qualitative difference between two hours of reading/science/math practice and spending your entire evening scrolling TikTok and Discord.
I think most complaints about “screen time” are really about the junk that it’s filled with, whether it’s algorithmically-curated social media or short format video, or trashy freemium games. If you could ensure that people were having live video conversations with interesting people, or watching classic movies and reading classic novels and playing deep video games, then the screen time itself doesn’t seem like it would be as big a problem (especially if there’s something making them get up and do something outside every 20-30 minutes so their eyes refocus).
Are there screen time studies that adjust for content? And speaking of breaks to let their eyes refocus(which I agree with), are there any studies that specifically look at attention span differences with regard to amount and/or content of screen time? i.e. long-form video essays vs. "shorts"?
Just my opinion, without any sources: I think that the "dangers of screens" are the following:
* If children spend most of their time inside, their eyes may not get enough sunlight. Sunlight is important for the eyes to grow healthy -- people may not realize it, because our eyes are good at adapting to light, but even in the shadow outside during the day there is 10x more light than in a brightly lit room. It may be difficult to make your kids spend a lot of time outside, if there is too much fun on the screen.
* Small screens (e.g. phones) are much worse than large screens (e.g. large monitors). In front of a large screen a child can be relaxed, and can let other children watch the same screen. In front of a small screen the child will crouch and try to get as close as possible to the screen, and if another child wants to take a look at the same screen, they will start to fight.
* It is important to sit straight in front of the screen, to prevent back injury. The risk of damage is multiplied by the time spent in front of the screen. With other activities done at table, such as reading or writing, children often vary their positions, but in front of a computer screen they often sit motionless for long periods of time, sometimes in a bad position.
* By letting your children access the internet, you expose them to all kinds of bad content, such as the stupid videos with hypnotizing music for the youngest ones, social networks and cyberbullying for the older ones, applications optimized for addictiveness, and various predators.
* Humans need moments when they have nothing to do, and can just relax and think. That's where creativity comes from, and probably a few more things. The problem with screens is that they can fill the entire day with content, often stupid, never leaving a moment for the mind to digest the information.
I think it is probably okay for children to spend a lot of time in front of a screen, as long as you make sure that the screens are large enough, the children are sitting properly, the content is reasonable, and the children also spend a lot of time without the screen, both playing outside, and doing something else at home.
I have students at Alpha and couldn't have written this better myself. Since my kids seem unwilling/unable to sit still anyways and love to play in the yard, my main concern is crowding out other valuable uses of time (sleep, socialization) rather than purity testing the ways they do spend their time.
Am I reading this right? Now, they’re collecting 40K in tuition from extremely bright children with motivated parents and teaching them in a specialized environment full of enriching externals but running at a loss. The author says the software piece is fine but basically useless without that structure. And their financial plan is to massively expand — to reach children who are not naturally bright, and do not have motivated parents, and to strip away the non-essentials, which the author says is necessary to make the program work. Doesn’t this sound like the classic tech disruption strategy, but for education? Offer a very good but financially unviable product to start, drive the competition out of business, and then offer the true, shitty, profitable product once there are no longer viable alternatives?
There are many bright children at Alpha but we don’t do an academic screen. Lots of students come in behind.
The “massive expansion” is stepwise and will occur across models with differing cost constraints and price points. I’m sure we’ll learn a lot and have to adjust a lot. The unit economics are not at all crazy. A lot of the R&D cost will *definitely* go down. The AI model costs right now outstrip almost everything else.
Screening for ability to sit quietly and follow instructions on a screen for 20 minutes, on top of high tuition (implying successful parents), seems like pretty strong filters for at least above-average academic ability though, no?
There are all sorts of optimizations involved in helping students sit in front of a screen for 20 minutes. It’s not assumed at all. The assumption is the platform/school-as-a-whole has to earn this.
But, honest question, what would Alpha actually do if they had to deal with students who did not learn the expected minimum during their 2 hours? Those are exactly the students that generate the most work and expenses in other schools.
This happens all the time. Teacher resources are deployed to help solve motivational issues and diagnose blocks immediately, but the main thing is that really that the engineers and curriculum developers are deployed. The core assumption is that the system is always at fault, not the student, and that the system needs to be fixed.
The minimum standards at Alpha are much higher than the national average, but they aren’t insane or anything. They are achievable by the vast majority of students.
The reality is that IXL set to smartscore 100 (and tortured into compliance with our platform) is quite good. MA is also extremely good.
And I definitely have intentions to explore BA/AoPS particularly for GT School.
In general the particular apps on the platform are in a very non-final state, so if you’re trying to understand the nature of the project, the trajectory is important. (If you’re a parent deciding on next year, obviously the current state is also important.)
They are screening kindergarteners now fwiw, with the Cog-AT test, which can be taken by students who don't read yet. Hope to meet you soon Katy, I am mother of Alpha students but they're moving to GT School this fall
I don't think the author ever said "bucks" are non-essentials. They don't seem so expensive that they need to be targeted when even public school teachers can often afford to fund class prize pools on their own salaries.
I'm not American so forgive me if this is a stupid question - it sounds like Alpha children complete the full curriculum in half the number of years the state expects? What do they do when they've finished the curriculum? In the UK there basically isn't any way to skip from primary to secondary school early, so if this model was expanded to the UK it seems like there would be a few years a thumb-twiddling built in. But presumably the solution to this problem is so obvious to Americans that I don't think I see a mention of it in the review.
Presumably they just start taking university-level classes? This is how it generally works in public school as well to a limited degree (e.g. AP classes).
While it is also very difficult for most bright children to 'skip ahead' in America, it *is* possible, and the main roadblocks are typically actually at the institutional rather than state level (because most institutions do class-based instruction grouped by age & ability, they do not want kids getting more than a year ahead because then the kids will be with much older children who are not at the same level of social and emotional development).
After that the hard part is basically just finding a university willing to accept a young student (though this does happen, so clearly it's not impossible) or alternatively building a post-curriculum after the state curriculum is completed.
There are universities with special programs just for gifted kids - I can't recall them, one was at a UC, one at bard, one at a private all girls school that accepted girls as young as 13. Chatgpt probably know the specifics.
(I am parent of Alpha students who's gone to work for them) Not stupid! - basically high schoolers begin to move in different directions. Some students are set on entering very competitive colleges, for them doing the minimum to have finished high school equivalent is not enough, they continue to do math/literacy to prepare for SAT (college entrance exam) and Advanced Placement coursework (college equivalency program). Others move more in an entrepreneurial direction, for instance.
The gifted and talented version of the school essentially aims to have students college ready academically by the end of 8th grade though it's new enough that I don't exactly know what the first classes of graduates (several years away) will in fact choose to do. Some probably will enter college before age 18.
I'm not sure that's the best option, at least for kids interested in science. For them, I would try to use a math program that covers post highschool material like mathacademy or something much more rigorous than IXL like Beast Academy and AoPS classes, or EMF Math.
You can actually go to college a couple years early in the US without any significant difficulty, and earlier than that with some more effort and arrangement with the school.
I've discovered, partially as a result of this thread, that if GT School students eventually wish to take some time off before college, perhaps 1-2 years and then enter around 16-17?, they will need letters written by their parents attesting to the fact that they're being homeschooled until the age when truancy laws go out of effect, 18. They would need such letters even if they immediately enrolled in college!! Thankfully homeschooling regulation in Texas is so lax that the letter basically suffices, parents need not provide lesson plans etc.
> In the UK there basically isn't any way to skip from primary to secondary school early
There is no legal or organisational impediment to anyone who can provide legal id and pay for the exams doing GCSE or A-Levels early. If a ten year old does 4 A-Levels and gets good results the step after that is probably starting a degree at the Open University, which has no entrance requirements for its bachelor degrees.
England doesn’t have much in the way of academic acceleration for the same reason the US has little of it. Schools and teachers don’t want to offer it.
Actually there is - I read of a 15 year old who went to Cambridge for maths. My understanding is that if you have the A levels, admissions test scores, and the interview goes well, you're in.
But from my reading of the article the students are spreading out the "thumb-twiddling" by only working "2" hours per day. The MAP scores are not actually measuring advanced grade level standards - rather they measure how well students can do basic math problems. In other words, you don't need to know any trig to score at the 12th grade level.
For anonymity reasons you should probably blur out the name in certain screenshots; anyone familiar with a certain educational Substack would recognize it.
I didn't read the whole thing, because it is way too long and not particularly interesting to me personally. I stopped about halfway through and skimmed the rest. However, from what I gathered, this seems like a great program for gifted kids, and not so great for other types of kids, especially ones that would struggle with the pace. But then again, gifted kids will do great in just about any type of program, especially if they are self-motivated. So what's the point in spending $40,000?
I think the point is Alpha is self-paced so they go faster with less time wasted on bureaucratic busywork. It leverages AI in a way that semi-simulates a 1-on-1 tutor experience. It's an improvement over traditional private schools which people have already demonstrated a willingness to pay 40k a year for.
It seems promising but my guess is the real secret sauce is selection effects and enthusiastic founders. Wealthy early-adopters are a highly-selected cohort, as are educators willing to take a chance on a radical new teaching model. That's unlikely to do well at public-school scale, particularly in misbehavior-prone urban districts. But it might be a viable alternative to both magnet schools and traditional private schools.
The quote is deeply ironic in that the point of teaching the child is for the child to learn, which using AI undermines. The point of the teacher teaching is for the child to learn, which using AI for that half does not undermine.
We are lucky that books were invented earlier than schools, otherwise textbooks might have been banned. ("A piece of paper could never replace an actual human teacher.")
Many cheap privates are subsidized by the Catholic Church. That's probably the case for the Austin ones, considering it's a blue island so res folk might not trust the public schools and thus support a parochial school
I thought the 5:1 teacher to student ratio was pretty crazy, then he mentioned public schools having a 25:1 ratio and I realized what went wrong. I could see some school for rich kids that has five people teaching each student, but I've certainly never been to a school with 25 times as many teachers as students.
As homeschoolers we do some of the same things; we use anki (which is free!) for spaced repetition, we do a sustainable amount of academic work daily rather than pausing for the summer, and of course we don't have to try to educate thirty kids at a time. These make learning vastly more efficient and Alpha School didn't invent them. But we also do everything we can to surround our kids with adults who are enthusiastic and open about their own lifelong learning (ourselves included) and with materials that are worth their time (a thing I wouldn't say about IXL).
Humans are very driven to learn, care what the people around us are doing, and are also mostly at least a bit demand avoidant, so it has always seemed to me that homeschooling parents can choose between spending their time explaining why kids have to do math but adults don't, doing some tricky alcumus problems themselves, or paying their kids and hoping the kids don't find a better revenue stream.
I have no issue with paying kids to do things that they are free to refuse to do, but as a kid I would have found it insulting to be required to do something and then paid just a bit for doing it. I understand that other kids are more pragmatic though, and are happy with the arrangement. I also would hesitate to pay a kid to read a book because there is no clear definition of reading a book well enough, and I'd rather read some of the same books they do and enjoy talking about them together than quiz them and incentivise the opposite of close reading while becoming the did-you-actually-read-it-though inspector.
I think your child-self's attitude is the pragmatic one. Alpha bucks seem to be worthless yet valued by kids in a similar way to Robux - realizing that they're worth very little strikes me as the pragmatic angle. To make a falsifiable prediction: you don't think you would be the type of kid to beg your mom for in game currencies if they existed at the time, do you?
The pragmatism that I refer to is in realizing that that if adults are offering to give you /something/ in payment to do a thing, and if you refuse they will probably instead take something away from you in order to get you to do the thing, you will probably maximize the goodwill of the adults toward you, the amount of stuff you have, and the amount of free time you have if you take the first offer. But if you are instead driven to maximize your autonomy you may feel a need to demonstrate to them that you cannot in fact make a person eat broccoli or do math or read.
Yes, I also found the incentives bribes piece the most surprising bit out of everything in the review. It is quite well-studied in the psychology literature that providing extrinsic rewards for an activity that children already enjoy doing “crowds out” intrinsic motivation. That makes me a bit skeptical of the Alpha School bribes approach, but then the fact that (1) what they earn with their Alpha Bux is personalized, (2) it’s over a longer period of time in the context of a presumably extended relationship with a teacher/guide, and (3) the rewards are only given upon mastery (crowds out intrinsic motivation less) make me more amenable to it. The motivation studies are almost all completed over a relatively short period of time with generic prizes (cash or equivalent).
Your homeschooling approach sounds similar to what I would consider in the future. Do you have a sense for how much more efficient your children’s learning has been compared to a traditional school?
I just realized that the review itself disregard rewards over vague thing (be succeed at X) and encourage rewards over exact thing (Do X, Y times). While the Alpha School rewards is over "vague" thing (a child can't force themselves to master things if they can't, right?). I guess we do need more data and study over what kind of rewards works (or does reward even works).
All I can say is that I continue to be surprised at how efficient it is, both in terms of time spent on academics and in terms of (complete lack of) time spent on trying to get people to do academics. And I also continue to be surprised at how fun it is, and how it just keeps getting more fun. Heartily recommend.
This is doubtless racist, sexist and homophobic, but Alpha seems to have a lot in common with schooling methods during lockdown. And Bastet knows that those methods were disastrous for educational outcomes.
The one exception I know of personally was one ant colony, and that was simply because the queen ant took homeschooling to insane levels. Before, the little ants had been begging to be homeschooled. Soon, they were begging to be able to go back to school.
Which brings me to my real point - for decades now, humans have been pushing various nostrums to address the fact of Why Can't Johnny Read? None of these nostrums and magic spells perform as advertised, although many of them do enable educational consultants to make bank.
Fact is, parental involvement, parents that ride little Johnny like they are trying to win the Preakness, combined with an environment that stresses learning, is the only thing that works. Nobody wants to hear that, because other than that queen ant, nobody wants to put in the work. Nobody wants to point the finger at the parents. Far easier to look for magic bullets.
Aristocratic tutoring worked very well without parents having to ride Johnny - the secret was to hire a ride to whip the crop (which is of course hard work). But the research mentioned in the article seems to indicate that the carrot (alphabucks) works too, hence the success.
Scientists have long since figured out Why Johnny Can't Read; whether that's the fault of the parents (it's certainly their responsibility) or the schools ostensibly paid by our taxes to teach our kids how to read is a separate issue.
There are some really obvious cases of ChatGPTese sprinkled throughout this review, yet it's also clearly thoughtful and original, with lots of concrete and specific claims. Very unusual combination in my experience.
I hope once the contest is over and things can be de-anonymized, the author would be willing to comment on how they use AI in the writing process yet produce a high-quality non-slop document. Although I do worry the answer is just "you have to be literate, and also actually care".
ChatGPT has a writing assistant mode. You can tell it what your central idea is and have it produce a rough draft. This guy probably did that and then rewrote it, leaving some of the original in.
"Elite private school attendance buys you smaller classes, brighter kids, and fancier field trips – not academic acceleration ... That prior—show me velocity, not polish—is the lens through which the rest of this review should be read."
The highly telegraphic writing style and punchy parenthetical phrases in italics (“show me velocity, not polish”) are in my experience extremely characteristic of o3.
Excellent article. I'm a bit more skeptical than you are on the magic of Alpha School compared to other schools, academically, and its ability to scale to a true mass market product. However, the tech-heavy model does seem like a way to cut expenses ($40k flat) compared to Horace Mann ($64,070 + a lot of extras + an endowment) or Harvard Westlake ($49,700 + a lot of extras + an endowment) for an elite school, and even if they have to drop some of the international travel for grade schoolers, it might be a sustainable long-term business without billionaire financial support. I hope it's still available when I have kindergarteners.
$40k/yr for 17 years to have a 95th percentile achieving kid is an incredibly good investment.
Quick story about another student who goes by Austin Scholar here on Substack.
When I first met her, she was a sophomore in high school (15 years old). I was teaching writing at the time and actually rejected her from my program because it didn’t seem right for a teenager to participate in a program designed for high-powered adults. To her credit, she pushed me to get in the program and after a short interview, I reluctantly let her in.
There were ~250 students in the program and she was a top 10th percentile writer as a high schooler. Watched her get a perfect 1600 on the SAT and get admitted into Stanford. Even as I’m writing this, she’s doing an internship with me for the summer and one reason why I’ve been eager to hire Alpha students for various projects is that they’re uniquely self-reliant because of the lack of teachers in school while also being uniquely on top of things because of the strict standards that Alpha maintains.
All this is to say that Alpha doesn’t work for every students (and it’s not designed with that in mind), but when it works, it works pretty darn well.
Isn't this totally confounded? You don't have a before and after Alpha control group. People who pay 40k for private school are top 1% and higher across many metrics, and part of that is genetic.
Though I don't doubt the spaced repetition software is way more effective.
As someone who has done casual inference professionally for a very long time, I can say with confidence that Caplan's work is an exemplar of Gelman's many-forked path, where the results were mostly determined beforehand and confirmed by choosing the right path through the data. Not work to be taken very seriously.
Basically the things he's trying to claim are very hard to identify in the statistical sense. And extrapolating even from studies where ~everyone would agree the causal inference is solid is always low confidence because of shifting context and the specifics of the outcome. This means that it's a matter of judgement for every analysis about what the results are actually telling you. This would make the kind of sweeping statements he makes suspect no matter what. (The deep dive into a specific analysis of his is what I don't have time for).
But there are a number of other clues that you shouldn't believe his judgement calls aren't always strongly biased. First, his shocking lack of technical skill. His anti education book was based on 15 months of building an opaque tangle of spreadsheets. Which he then complained no one double checked and reanalyzed 🤦♂️ This alone is near disqualifying. It's almost certain he's doing mediocre-at-best casual inference when he's limited to what's available in excel. It also makes his work opaque and pragmatically unreproduceable.
Second, he writes a mixture of opinion/ideology, data reporting, and results from his own spreadsheets. He will often try to pass off his ideological commitments as facts. Essentially I'd argue that he's revealed his commitments. Everything he does is work to bolster his ideological commitments through data mining and argumentation. He spends a lot of time on polemic and constructing logic chains that he thinks make his analysis solid. But he's never spent the time gaining the technical skills to actually do best-in-class non-experimental casual analysis. In the same way you should be skeptical of left wing academics whose work always just so happens to "prove" that whatever flavor of leftist campus activism is hot right now is true, this shouldn't give you a lot of confidence in all the methodological choices he makes in constructing his data argument.
No, I'm sorry, his thesis is correct. An absolutely overwhelming amount of data demonstrates that students gravitate to a particular performance band around five years old and remain that performance band throughout academic life, with remarkable fidelity, almost certainly because of genetic influence.
What do you make of the fact that in modern datasets, the heritability of educational attainment and IQ drops substantially in high income / high SES environments (see: Rask-Anderson et al. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33900812/ or my summary of other studies here: http://gusevlab.org/projects/hsq/#h.eujbeu4ca5ot). This would be consistent with higher resources compensating/mitigating genetic disadvantages (think: fancy schools give out free glasses and the heritability of eyesight goes down).
Many of us care about absolute performance, not merely relative performance, and expertise, not merely intelligence. The takeaway you should have had from your mountains of research is that if you put kids from across the intelligence band into Alpha School, some will progress relatively faster, some will progress relatively slower, but all could progress more in absolute terms than elsewhere.
For anyone who cares about absolute improvement and the pursuit of excellence in domains that require rigorous training, not mere equalization, there are opportunities everywhere. Alpha School is one such opportunity.
This claim is in no way equivalent to Caplan's. Supposing we take it as a given that a student's cognitive abilities--in the sense of which sorts of primitive cognitive tasks they're good or bad at and to what degree--are either locked in by genetics from the moment of conception, or shaped by unseen environmental factors that school can't influence. That *does* imply that students will gravitate towards (and remain in) performance bands, which educational interventions will not shift. It *very much does not* imply that the only things schools do is help signal the traits the students already have.
This should be staggeringly, blindingly obvious to anyone who's ever relied on any sort of hard skill, be it a second language, a mathematical technique, a specialized tool, a programming language or anything else of that nature. If Alex is gifted and Jamie is not, Alex may learn many things faster and better than Jamie. But if Jamie spends 3000 hours learning Spanish over a 5-year period and Alex spends 0 hours over the same period, there is *no level* of human-scale cognitive ability that will let Alex best Jamie at the task of communicating with a monolingual Spaniard. Maybe Alex is absolute hot shit at languages and a mere 500 hours would have closed the gap. But 0 hours won't. Neither will 10 or 20 or 50.
Now, it's very possible that many schools have a poor selection of content, technique, or learning time breakdowns that mean they're not doing a very good job teaching skills to students, or that the skills they're teaching aren't very useful. It is not just possible but near-certain that some of the practices schools institute for the *explicit purpose* of signalling and ranking interfere with their purpose of instilling skills[1]. But the idea that students who spend five days a week being taught and practicing skills will not have any more skills at the end of it than if they had spent time on activities that didn't involve that is...extraordinary, to say the least.
I can't help but suspect people who make this claim either had unusually bad school experiences, are very high-percentile autodidacts (an unconsciously model almost everyone else as the same) or have spent their whole lives relying on soft skills[2] and have simply never encountered a career situation where spending time and effort learning how to do [thing] ahead of time was preferable to plunging right into [thing] and learning as you go. Suffice to say that such situations very much exist, and many peoples' careers are full of them, which is why (at least some of) the apparatus of education exists.
[1] I have quite a lot of criticisms of contemporary educational norms, many of which boil down to "the obsession with grading and ranking interferes substantially with learning, especially in the way its implemented by most schools now."
[2] Where "soft" by no means signifies "less useful." Writing is one of the most important skills there is in many jobs and (after reaching basic proficiency) it's a soft skill. The distinction (as I'm using it) is about how much proficiency you need to usefully apply the skill at all. A low-skilled writer may bore, confuse or annoy people but will generally get some fraction of their point across: they may accomplish less than a higher-skilled writer, but they'll accomplish something. Meanwhile a low-skilled programmer or engineer can be worse than somebody with no skill at all, managing truly impressive feats of negative accomplishing, in the form of causing costly problems that other people of higher skills must spend time fixing.
Yeah this is just a weakness of your understanding of casual inference. I'm guessing my simple assertion won't convince you. But consider that the confident argument you hold is the same as the race scientists who pompously point to various contingency tables over and over to justify their just having to say that they're sorry but the science proves Africans are (genetically, insoluble) stupid. All the while, the sophisticated dismantling of their points that Sasha graciously produces over and over goes right over their heads.
Alpha's marketing is excellent - and there are many educators and parents I admire who are excited about them. I've been craving more detail and this answered many of my questions.
On the pedagogy of app-based learning & measuring using MAP:
This approach seems solid for the basics of math and reading, though this piece's point that reading and discussing longer form books is missing is key. Much has been written about the negative impacts of over-optimizing for short passage reading on the literacy skills of American young people. The short-passage only approach is usually associated with public and charter schools, while the Harvard Westlakes of the world go all-in on literature.
Science is even trickier to teach via apps and measure via standardized tests. Many schools don't take MAP Science at all, as a note. IXL works well for learning baseline science content, but I have a hard time imagining multiple-choice modules go far enough to produce mastery of science skills as written in the Next Generation Science Standards. You can read those on their website, but they are largely complex and applied skills such as 'developing models,' 'representing and graphing data,' and 'making evidence-driven arguments'. IXL teaches these skills by having learners 'fill in the blank' of a partially completed graph or argument. The MAP Science test does the same, because it's also a multiple-choice measure. Isn't this fill-in-the-blank mode of thinking much easier than asking a learner to actually demonstrate the skill (figure out how to represent and graph data) themselves? If I were an Alpha parent (especially one not at the GT school with the extra academic competitions, which sound great), I would worry the science learning isn't rich & applied enough.
Not sure how History/Social Studies learning is assessed at Alpha, since MAP doesn't have a Social Studies test. I assume just in-app and their mastery tests. Similarly to science, I would worry IXL + a sprinkling of reading passages in AlphaReads lacks the richness and depth I'd want. To learn Social Studies well, I'd want them to follow a more comprehensive trajectory that includes longer sources, group discussions, research projects, etc. I'd worry that the afternoon activities as described are too piecemeal to succeed in this area but could be wrong.
Not surprised Writing is a miss in this parent's eyes - I've never been impressed with any edtech writing app. There are a few that are nice for drilling grammar and can supplement writer's workshop style teacher-led classes.
These things feel surmountable. I wonder if Alpha has considered using a portion of afternoon time for teacher-led, Hoel-style 'aristocratic tutoring' in humanities and/or science to see how well these in-app learning gains transfer to real-world applications and open-ended conversation, while remaining hyper-personalized.
Also, I was surprised to see IXL as the app of choice. The questions in IXL are quality, but it's boring as hell - the forms of engagement are unvaried and dry, and it must feel repetitive for kids to learn in the same mode every day for up to 12 years. Last time I spoke to somebody at Alpha, they said they used several apps for each subject for variety and to ensure coverage - perhaps this has changed, or maybe just wasn't mentioned here. They'll need to find a way to make the incentive system foolproof for parents to implement in the homeschool/virtual model.
Early in building Prisma (virtual program I work for), we experimented with an app-driven morning schedule. We ended up retiring that approach for every subject except math, for some of the reasons above. This year, our kids grew 2.3x as fast as their peers nationwide in math, and 1.6x as fast in reading on MAP. We definitely could read this as evidence that apps are the best method and should be applied to the other subjects. But our parents tend to choose us for reasons other than optimizing these scores, and would hate if we abandoned our discussion and project-based Literacy curriculum for IXL. Could we supplement with apps and boost those further? Probably! Overall I'm excited Alpha exists. They're developing some cool innovations that can meaningfully improve the space.
This article was a great read, and I agree as a parent of GT School (Alpha’s school for gifted children in Georgetown). My son is 10 and taking 6th and 7th grade classes. He met and/or exceeded all of his end of year MAP goals and continues to be in the 96-99th percentile across the board (one reason we entered GT School to begin with). He also has developed a true love of school. To the point where he sometimes complains of we take him out for a day for a long weekend. He especially loves his guides, who routinely find ways to customize rewards and incentives to each child’s interests. My son won a Lego chess set and Mario stickers amongst other things with his GT bucks. Their reward system is highly effective and the personalization acts to make students feel seen and understood. Though the author is correct that I don’t think this model will work for every child, my son has ADHD and is actually doing spectacularly well even without his pervious IEP accommodations. Their low ratio and individualized learning model have been both impressive and effective. This all coming from someone who was highly uncertain and critical of the idea of AI teaching my child.
How has his AMC 8 score improved? That's a better measure of math achievement in gifted kids in my opinion, given that it's designed to challenge that age group. I'm not sure how well IXL can prepare a student, even a gifted one, to tackle those sorts of problems. Do you know why alpha GT doesn't use a third part math program designed for high achievers like mathacademy or Beast Academy or EMF math?
Cool to hear your positive experience! Would be curious to hear about the culture at the GT school, specifically around if it is competitive or not? Fostering an overly competitive culture is a common failure mode for very academically focused schools in my experience
The website has a much weaker 100% money back guarantee than the one stated here. Can anyone find a link to it? Perhaps they've walked it back as guaranteeing every child wins a national award seems like a good way to lose your shirt.
Hey there, GT School is only 1 year old so this is still a work in progress like everything else (though not a scam, real guarantee!) I received feedback from another source that "win national academic competitions" is probably the weak spot here, it's harder to specify what counts and also in its current form GT school may rotate afternoon workshops too often to get the depth needed in a single area to become nationally competitive.
Happy to tell you anything else you want to know here or privately!
I think it's the strong point - it shouldn't be too hard to find a national competition with a ton of "winners" and make it mandatory. I would be shocked if they meant each GT student would be incontrovertibly #1 in at least one winner-take-all national competition with a non-trivial number of participants
I see people are interested in hearing from the parents — I am one, and I'm NOT employed by the company. My 7-year-old is at the GT School (which, btw, is $15K/year; Alpha's specialized academies have lower price points). AMA.
To start, here is a bullet-point list of why we drive 30 minutes to the school (TL;DR: it's worth it. We will move closer now that we know it works for our son):
- Compressed academics utilizing the Pomodoro technique — work intervals followed by breaks; much more effective for high-energy kiddos who can't yet focus for extended periods of time
- Self-pacing — go as fast as you can or as slow as you need in each subject; no shaming through grades, no "B student" stigma
- Verification and accountability — tests are used in a productive way. Apart from three-times-a-year MAP testing, there are mastery tests whenever the student completes the lesson plan for each grade. I wasn't a big fan of the testing part going in, but they use the detailed data from the test report to identify gaps and then serve additional supporting lessons in those areas. My son completed 2.5 grade levels in one year, but I'm more wowed by the fact that he actually mastered that material than the speed itself.
- The guides!!! — well-paid, highly motivated individuals who are not burned out from a mountain of paperwork and can truly engage with the kids
- The group workshops and individual pursuits (check chart) — the element of real-life skills, learning how to bring a project from concept to fruition, on your own or with a team — this part was really important to us
- Growth mindset environment — "the power of yet," philosophy of high expectations with high support, finding your "why"
- Community — engaged parents who are willing to take reasonable risks to try something different for their kids
It's not the AI, it's not a magic bullet — it's not one thing; it's the whole package.
And before you say, "Your kid is already gifted, so he would do well anywhere," that is a common misconception. Gifted does not equal high-achieving. Our boy is extremely high energy, motivated mostly by his interests, with spotty attention-paying ability. We are quite certain he would not thrive in a conventional schooling setting, and we have spent countless hours researching and considering various education models. This is not perfect; it's just the best we found.
Also, just for fun — and also to address the "wealthy kids" stereotype — we fall into the "first-generation immigrant family" pool, making sacrifices to give our son the best shot. I know every parent wants that for their kids, and I'm hoping my long comment will be somehow helpful in your journey.
They take them individually at any point of the year whenever they completed the grade level lessons and need to do it with at least 90% accuracy to pass the grade.
Do you mean if they can retake it if they didn't get 90%? Not right away. They will be first served a lesson plan consisting of "Knowledge Gap" subjects focusing on the areas that they got wrong in the test, they need to complete that before trying again.
I appreciate the comment, but re yr reference to "wealthy kids"--are you not extremely high-income people? Let me know if you're not in the top 10% in terms of household income ($240k/yr). I have a feeling many people here are.
I am the parent of two Alpha students, they are moving to the GT school this fall. As for me, I've been drawn out of more than a few years of stay-at-home motherhood in order to get involved in the Alpha mission.
We initially chose Alpha just because all the other schools available schools seemed blah. My husband, Byrne Hobart (an independent finance and tech writer) is one of the non-conformist types mentioned in the piece.
But my older daughter turned out to be exceptionally bright and her results at Alpha have been way beyond expectations. With no homework at all and very little drama, she has maintained not only 99% achievement but also top several percentiles of growth for 3 entire school years.
I never heard her complain that she was bored, never had to meet with a teacher to grovel or battle for acceleration. At home we focus on reading for pleasure, arts and crafts, and exploring niche interests (she's obsessed with penguins).
Intense acceleration offered in a pleasant environment has been a priceless gift to our family. I never worried about oldest's education while I was pregnant again and caring for an infant.
If it means anything to you, this is what o3 says when offered my daughter's MAP scores: "[X] is operating at an 11th-grade academic level while still in Grade 3 and is continuing to out-grow almost all comparison groups. Alpha.school’s 2-Hour Learning model is not only keeping pace with, but in several dimensions outperforming, America’s most elite K-12 institutions—all while freeing up 60-70 % of the day for deeper projects and community-building, exactly in line with the school’s founding mission."
My second daughter joined Alpha a year ago and she's a tougher cookie (2e/on the spectrum). Even with far less than 2 hours per day on the apps (despite her wonderful guide's ceaseless efforts and encouragement), her growth has still been immense: https://x.com/gtmom/status/1931058079745056974
Very happy to answer any other questions, here or privately.
The review and school concept is quite interesting, but an important question I think is glossed over: What actually happens when your kid finishes high school requirements years ahead of schedule?
In the context of the Alpha School itself, what happens when a kid masters high school requirements after ~6 years, at age ~11, say? Do they graduate then? If not, what is done during the lesson time for the rest of their time at the school?
When graduation occurs with high school equivalent mastery, either nominally after 8th grade or even earlier, how does this work legally w.r.t. requirements to attend school? Most compulsory education laws seem to be based around time, not mastery, but that may be specific to the states I'm familiar with (and I'm not that familiar with exceptions, honestly).
What are you planning for your kids after mastering high school level so early? What is typically done by Alpha School kids/parents? Is it to send them to the Alpha High School, where they'll make a company or something? I tried looking for "Alpha School graduates" stories online to get an idea, but couldn't readily find anything, only descriptions of what the Alpha High School kids are currently doing.
At Alpha School (the non-selective version), students can choose between an honors track and regular Alpha high, with a capstone Alpha X project. https://alphahigh.school/
My 9yo (who's been at Alpha for 3 years) already gets ~10th or 11th grade 50th percentile scores on MAP tests, but I don't consider that literally college ready academically, even social/emotional issues aside. It's not true mastery of high school material, it's just a testament to how little average high schoolers in other schools typically learn.
For the GT School (selective, roughly top 10 percentile students) it's 1yo so we haven't graduated a class yet. I expect some will continue to high school anyways, at Alpha or elsewhere. Many students find that being bright at high school is not as painful as early grades when AP courses are offered and also various extracurriculars.
I wouldn't be surprised, though, if some entered college a year or several early. Just depends on the student, where they want/need to go to college, etc. I am moving my 9yo and 7yo to GT school and haven't given this a second thought.
The truancy laws here in Texas at least are dumb, you have to claim to be homeschooling the teen until 19 even if they enroll in college!! But no substantiation of home curriculum, etc is required. Just an admin matter.
And you can also "dual enroll" for free on paper while enjoying pretty much all the benefits of full time college enrollment.
One tricky hoop, if you take the unschooling route after GT, is submitting a high school transcript and teacher recommendations. Dual enrollment definitely helps with the latter. Another trick for schools that don't do dual enrollment is to enroll as a nondegree seeking student. But the easiest and cheapest option would be Dual Enrollment through Austin Community College.
I would imagine the graduating GT students would have a ready made friend group for, e.g. unschooling, doing programs like boundless, gap year(s) stuff, going deeper in academics (Olympiads, research)
I don't think the MAP does not actually test 11th grade material, does it? Does your daughter know trig, factoring quadratics, etc? What grade level is she at in IXL (if that is the program they use)?
I could easily be misunderstanding things but it looks to me like the MAP does cover trigonometry and polynomial algebra (and probability!), but not calculus or statistics.
meh, nothing about this is particularly different from other educational fads, because they all share the same commonalities:
1. cherry pick the most gifted and motivated students
2. target parents who are both rich and overinvested in their kids education.
the thing is, those two things can make any kind of system work. I see this with homeschooling; everyone glazes it the fuck up, but its horrific otherwise if the kid or parent just can't throw heroic levels of energy at it. That's when teachers help, not systems per se, because its very easy to game a system. Hence chatgpt writing papers and passing around test answers. or cheesing curriculum requirements.
and honestly you all overrate intelligence and underrate connections and money in life success, that is why your kid does well or not short of mental illness or parental tragedies. Education is probably not going to help you beyond a point, and there is some truth to Caplan.
(only at the extreme levels, though: its annoying he is so stupid and doesn't realize he needs a widely educated base of people to keep his university running, and that tenure hothouse people give far less value to life than he things)
#2 is fairer than #1. Alpha admits plenty of students who are behind academically and not especially excited by school. GT School screens for academic potential, Alpha absolutely does not.
Re: cheesing curriculum requirements, the students sometimes do try to do this, and it gets patched. It’s a fun arms race.
I don’t think the premise that “any system works with rich kids” is particularly true. A lot of very specific works goes into helping these students, and I don’t really see evidence that it’s just a wash compared to very different methods at other schools, and see plenty of evidence that the school is helping these students. (Other elite schools don’t even publish their K8 testing data.)
behind compared to who, though? parents who give kindergarteners IQ tests? other elites? i really don't think there is that strong a difference, and that's not getting into parent differences in how tiger mom they are.
the cheesing i just mean that without motivation by some one systems fail. id bet the weak point is the brazil teachers, lol at tech bros offshoring. better hope they don't fake answer calls, or exploit the system because they can.
and no those kids would be fine without that school. places like alpha bank on that, because its really hard to actually teach struggling students. little effort of maximum profit is the good way for modern business men
There are multiple comparisons of interest. I think with Alpha in particular the most helpful comparison is other elite schools, yes.
The “brazilian teachers” are software developers and academic specialists who work on the curriculum and platform. They run the coaching calls because they are the ones who need to know what’s not working and fix it on the app side. Not sure about Brazil but some of them are indeed remote.
A few, or at least a few much closer to this than they are to middle class. But that’s generally not the current population, no. None in rural poverty (a la WV) afaik.
> meh, nothing about this is particularly different from other educational fads, because they all share the same commonalities:
This seems like an oddly defeatist attitude. Everything you try will appear to work, therefore there's no point in trying to figure out how to do it better.
> and honestly you all overrate intelligence and underrate connections and money in life success
This I agree with, but it does seem like Alpha School is aware of this and trying to deal with it, with "life skills" (of the sort practiced by mid-level managers at large tech companies) being a large part of the curriculum.
they arent trying to do better, they are trying to do cheaper and get quick bucks.
like you don't need to keep reinventing a stable solution; a private school with correct teacher/student ratios and managed well is perfectly fine. But to run one is expensive and modern businesses love their mvp and getting something for nothing. They'd love it if your kids teach themselves with ai lapdogs and the occasional overseas (got to pay as little as possible!) check in.
honestly businesses are not looking out for your own good.
the life skills...eh its a skill to know the right people i guess, my point is more the kid being smart or not matters less than the dad being famous, which zip code you live in, if dad overloads you with extracurriculars, or if parents can bankroll first business or internship. or failure might be from things education cant help much with.
think the chinese dudes know with guanxi, but we kind of love our horatio alger.
> like you don't need to keep reinventing a stable solution; a private school with correct teacher/student ratios and managed well is perfectly fine
It's perfectly fine, but is it optimal? My K-12 education was perfectly fine, but could have been better.
> the life skills...eh its a skill to know the right people i guess, my point is more the kid being smart or not matters less than the dad being famous, which zip code you live in, if dad overloads you with extracurriculars, or if parents can bankroll first business or internship.
Right, that's exactly the sort of life skill I wish I'd learned at school and didn't. I emerged from school with too much faith in the idea that just "being smart" is the route to success, and ignoring all the other aspects.
Yes. Selection bias, small samples in terms of n and also time, convenience samples, no scaling data, no systematic fraud investigation - all the hallmarks.
You understand the 2.6x claim is relative to peers with similar map scores? That precludes #1. And considering no other privates school has similar results despite most having highly motivated parents, it makes #2 highly unlikely
I, too, felt some instinctive revulsion to the idea of incentivizing children to learn, and I think I know why it feels wrong: it might actually work.
No matter how you dress it up, school must involve adults compelling children to behave in certain ways. People who like freedom find this somewhat unpleasant to think about, but most agree it's for the greater good. But incentives are just a much more effective means of compulsion than other methods. At least when a teacher hits a student it's clear what's going on. Incentives are, well, seductive.
Reading this essay makes the whole school feel very creepy. Points for compliance. Eye-tracking software. When we're worried about socialization, we set up a new system to reward that too. The kids in this system don't really seem to have free will -- they are allowed to make choices, but only within the system.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing! If we're going to control how children think and behave to educate them, we might as well do it effectively. This school sounds a lot more fun to be in than the one I grew up in. But it is very much the Brave New World to the public schools' Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it's hardly a surprise that a lot of people find that scary.
I think you underestimate how much guidance and incentives were applied to people in older societies and older classrooms. Like, I went to a school that made us do chapel once a week. That's just as much of a behavioural nudge as anything Alpha might be doing. And it usually doesn't get labelled as creepy.
I went to a little Baptist school, half-day kindergarten, then first and second grade. We had "chapel" once a week and while there was of course no pretty ritual, it was a lovely space and we sang, prayed, and listened to a homily. It wasn't creepy - I would remember creepy.
I expect this would actually be supremely difficult for children nowadays, to sit just thinking their own thoughts, or trying to follow an adult human talking at length on some moral or Biblical question, whether or no they were talking about it well.
In fact in my last experience of mainstream Protestantism, many years in the rearview, they had gone so far as to have not just Sunday school but children's services and activities in parallel with all services so that children need never sit in an actual church service.
Now, locally, I see that there's not demand for more than one service, on the marquees of the many churches hereabouts. I doubt also that there is any longer an army of volunteers for the children's stuff.
Yeah, that sounds similar to my experience. I never hated the church stuff. But it's hard to deny that it was a coercive religious practice.
If Alpha's incentives are a bit coercive as well, I...think that's probably OK?
As for whether kids are capable of sitting through stuff, I dunno. I mean, my feelings are the same as yours. I just don't trust my feelings, or yours. Have you watched a kid playing a computer game? Have you tried to play one? The things that kids sit through these days are weird, but I don't have any reason to believe that they're worse than the things we sat through.
I don't think that Alpha is being more coercive. I think that it's doing the coercion in a novel way, so people actually think about it rather than just accepting it automatically. And I think that its method is much more effective, so if you're averse to the idea of that sort of behaviour modification, you'll be more averse to their methods. I'm not saying it's morally worse, I'm saying it's scarier.
The only thing I thought was disturbing was the eye tracking software. It's needlessly intrusive, probably faulty like past eye tracking software I've been forced to use, and should absolutely be an opt out. Everything else seems normal. You get positive feedback when you're not an asshole in public. You get a raise when you work more. Normal schools grade you well for following directions. These are all incentives that exists and are whatever. But the eye tracking reminds me of the guy on twitter that measures his boner lengths while he sleeps.
Fascinating read. Really appreciate the context outside the school as well as the deep dive into the entire methodology.
There is one big, conformity forced assumption here and that's competition. Absolutely everything in western society is a competition and we've been taught that is the best way and the only way to live. Our kids are measured by percentiles and only if you are the best of the best can you ever hope of being accepted into the best colleges and once you have the name of that institution on your resume then you can work for the best firm to make the most money and then you'll be happy. The problem of education is always framed as "how can I make sure my child WINS?"
For all the talk about nature vs nurture and Caplan's work, this entire post reads like signaling. “Insofar as schooling makes you healthier by raising your status, its health benefits are zero-sum: you can’t raise your rank without dragging others down” (Case Against Education, p.171). I don't believe your claim that after love and respect the best thing you can give your kids is time. Or rather I believe the claim, but I don't think you believe it. Why move your family across the country in the middle of the school year and spend $120k a year on that schooling? You didn't do it to give your kids time. You did it so they can make the same kind of money.
How do I know it isn't for time? They don't even have a free half-day. Chess competitions, quiz competitions, essay competitions, property management (I'm so curious to see how a bunch of 5th graders would decorate an Airbnb). Even if you went to the sports academy it's the same game. Parents will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on sports training to beat other kids. Beat all the other kids and they can go to those same colleges to get those same jobs. A huge percentage of Olympians in the 2024 games from around the globe were currently attending top American Universities. In that context as you mentioned over-optimization runs the show. And if they finish school before college age are you telling me they will actually spend 7 years of their life with free time to do what they love? Maybe some will, but the kind of parents enrolling in this school are likely going to push their kids to finish college early and make money earlier.
This kind of schooling may require a certain kind of non-conformist to enroll, but you are still conforming. I'm certainly not telling you how to parent and I'm not saying money doesn't matter. I'm saying is I don't experience any happiness from "keeping up with the Joneses".
At GT School, competition is opt-in. The students find it fun. It’s a culture of *friendly* competition. Really remarkable—that culture is actually the thing that sold me on the school.
I completely agree. My son enjoys the competitive aspect, but also excitedly tells me about his friends beating him. GT School is comprised of high achieving kids that like competition but the guides are very gifted at making everything friendly and cooperative at the same time.
One of the main reasons we're sending our kid to this school is because this model is not based on a zero-sum game like - I would argue- most conventional schools are. I can't comment on the author's ambitions for his kids but ours are simply that he finds an occupation that brings him joy and fulfillment and finds a way to support himself and his family doing so. Many ways to skin the cat, many ways to live a happy life and this model offers more time and freedom to explore those ways, while still maintaining accountability for the basic core skills, than others that we looked at.
Fair enough. I'd probably send my kids to this school too simply because I'd want them to learn as much about the world as they can. It seems like they really excel at that. And no matter my objections it's not like other options are going to be so drastically different for the end goal. We're all just doing the best we can with what we can.
My frustration is more about the problem we are trying to solve here. The post is focused on academic measurements, percentiles, and the marketing material feels aimed at winning the zero-sum game. Learning itself isn't. But as the author points out the natural next questions are about getting into a good college and getting a good job. The questions almost all parents inevitably ask themselves.
I recently talked to my cousin who went through an accelerated program, started college 2 years ahead. I asked what she loves about her chosen field/major, basically what drives her in school. She said she doesn't like it, but it'll make good money. Her parents and every single adult in her life talks the same way. It's always about making as much money as possible as early as possible.
It may be impossible to not play the game no matter how pure your intensions. It's just so culturally ingrained. Personally I'd want us to solve the problem of "loving to learn". In many respects I imagine this school does a great job of that. However I often think of Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. We are measuring academic performance relative to other kids. Our hyper fixation on comparison in academics or on social media can really suck the joy out of living if you let it.
I loved this essay but your comment here captures most where I land.
We humans with fairly finite lives can only serve one or two priorities at a time. If getting ahead, faster, so that one can "win" the money game is the priority, it will crowd out quite a few other good potential priorities.
In the video of the little kids each talking to their own individual AI about how to do their hobbies, one of the boys asked the AI, "And what do I do now?" The AI was instructing him step-by-step what to do to for his arts and crafts. *To what end?* What happens when we can't really guide ourselves any longer?
I really liked this essay and would also love to send my kids here if it was cheaper. But I agree there is something deeply unsettling.
I also read thezvi’s childhood roundups, and while I like those they make me bristle at times about the absolutely relentless min-maxing. I have been considering posting a comment similar to yours on Zvi blog actually.
I feel like the optimization bug has infected me and sucked the joy out of my life. I suspect it became ingrained over a million hands of online poker, or maybe it’s an OCD thing. I have to justify everything in terms of EV and I hate it. I don’t want to pass this on to my kid.
His kids clearly have a lot more free time now than before. I don't see why you don't believe he values his kids time, considering that he was willing to spend $120k and move to Austin to give his kids a few extra hours in the day. That is far, fae more than most parents would.
And even if Austin school was a zero sum game like a publci school, it would still be the superior option due to only including it for 2 hours rather than 8
I was caught off guard when the author mentioned using Duolingo to teach foreign languages. I thought it was fairly well established that Duolingo isn’t particularly effective for learning new languages, due to the lack of active recall, among other factors.
Yes. Take that insight about Duolingo, and consider that the other educational apps mentioned are similarly engineered. I wrote a lengthy comment elsewhere in this thread elaborating, but this is a real concern - does bite-sized, multiple-choice module learning transfer meaningfully to an authentic context as well as it does a similarly designed standardized test?
There's evidence that it may - SAT scores are the best predictors of college achievement, for example. But I wonder if Alpha students' test scores represent their real-world intellectual ability as accurately as a kid who spends much less time on 'test prep' style learning.
Maybe Alpha's mastery exams are designed in such a way to mitigate this, too, I don't know.
We agree that Duolingo doesn’t work. The students wanted to try it last year at GT School for various reasons, but it’s not part of the platform.
Re: transfer, overfitting to tests, and achieving deep understanding, I do think that’s a risk area for us. We have a different pedagogical risk profile than most other alternative schools. I think we’re managing it well but it’s ongoing. I definitely don’t think it *trades off against* the methodologies we use, but we have to be sure we’re achieving it.
It was made particularly worse by the fact he complained about the effectiveness of language classes in regular high schools with human teachers. And he brings up Duolingo as a better alternative????
I agree. Duolingo is useful for vocabulary memorisation, (very) basic reading comprehension, and habituating the learner to a range of native-speaker accents. But its commitment to bite-sized chunks of content prevents it from teaching grammar in the clear and explicit way that's necessary for language learning. There are many grammatical concepts that simply cannot be taught from scratch in five minutes flat.
Effective compared to what? I suspect that if you used Duolingo three times a week for an entire year, you would still learn more than during one year at school.
I suspect it depends a lot on what "mostly" means (are we talking 60% or 90%?) and what the rest is. I've spent some time both learning and teaching languages, and I expect Duolingo to be at least moderately useful as a tool, but wildly insufficient as a sole source of language learning. It seemed decent at getting you to actively engage with a nicely level-appropriate set of grammar and vocab, which I expect to be useful enough at getting those things from nonexistent to OK-ish, but not to mastery.
As far as I can tell there really isn't any secret sauce for learning foreign languages, there's just practice. More practice is better. The qualifier is that if you funnel your practice time into too narrow a range of language-use patterns, the usefulness will plateau far short of full proficiency. A while back I spent four or five months trying to very rapidly improve my German[1]. I used a fairly early version of Duolingo quite a bit during that time, but I also read stories, watched short films on YouTube, listened to music and eventually (with some effort) sought out some places where I could have live conversations with actual people. I'd go out on a limb and guess that last part is a sticking point for quite a lot of academic language learning--there's really no substitute for talking to people if talking to people is what you're trying to learn. Anyway, I'll credit the Duolingo with a pretty good job of greasing the wheels on those other things, but it certainly wouldn't have got me there on its own.
[1] Much of which was knocking rust off, especially at the beginning (I'd learned up to a low conversational level as a teen and then spent around a decade not using it much). But by a few months in I'd certainly regained and exceed my old level of proficiency.
Anything is better than shitty full immersion classes in public schools. The teacher is always an asshole and enforces a no English policy that makes it so nobody communicates with anybody else. My high school classes also mandated no technology so you couldn't even fucking look up vocab words and translate them. Just 90% of the students that aren't fluent staring blankly as the teacher asks them a question because their ability to problem solve has been artifically crippled for adherence to a retarded teaching philosophy that is the norm in the district.
This is one of the best things I have read all year. But I can’t help being just a bit upset.
As someone not involved in education, it has always seemed to me that an approach similar to this is, as kids used to say, “a no brainer”. If I had a billion dollars and wanted to design a school to optimize learning, it would look something like this. This is what I remember worked best when I was in school, and new technology would just empower it more each year.
The reason I am a bit upset is because I have heard for decades how “nothing works or scales in education”.
I am starting to think that the problem in education isn’t the children, it is the dysfunctional mindsets and frameworks of most people involved currently in education.
Obviously this won’t work for every kid, and is currently not affordable for most, but I think something like this could soon make a difference for millions of families.
> I am starting to think that the problem in education isn’t the children, it is the dysfunctional mindsets and frameworks of most people involved currently in education.
I agree. Unfortunately, a lot of those dysfunctional mindsets was made law (depending on country), so even having the right idea and finding the right teachers may not suffice.
One source of tension is that in absence of a superhuman AI, good education requires great teachers, but great teachers do not scale. The only way to scale is to make those great teachers create content (such as books, videos, or AI lessons) so that they have to spend less time teaching directly in the classroom or even individually. But that will be tricky, because the great teachers usually love to teach, and they actually need to teach in order to get the necessary experience. Perhaps we could alternate e.g. three years of teaching with one year of creating educational materials. But if you needed such materials for all topics in all subjects, for all grades, consider how many great teachers you would need for that. This makes it a very expensive and long-time project.
I could imagine an iterative process that starts as a level zero with perfectly ordinary school, and gradually introduces the improvements. That would remove the need to have all the improvements ready up front. Unfortunately, even running a perfectly ordinary school seems to be quite a lot of work. If it's a state school, you probably won't be allowed to do those changes you want. If it's a private school, it will probably need to make profit since day 1. I could imagine doing it as an independent project, maybe release everything under a free license, and let some schools use it if they want to. It would still be a lot of work.
I guess if it can't scale without exhausting resources, it "doesn't scale". The ultimate bottleneck is quality teachers, and this is always the problem for centuries. Theoretically lots of things will work if we have one teacher for every student, but we certainly won't have that.
I think an AI coach would be very scaleable (pretty much free on the margin) and will work for the top tier of students. The other 80% just need to learn the basics (and that is all they learn today).
It appears the reason Alpha School is currently losing $ despite 40k tuition is because they actually pay their teachers (“guides”) quite well. I am sure they are experimenting to see how central the guides are to their current 2x+ educational outcomes; let’s see where they land, but I would bet that it’s hard to achieve those outcomes at scale without well-paid and well-trained guides/teachers. Which is the bit that doesn’t scale economically.
"Some kids will rush into college classes. Some will choose to use the time to play sports. Some will use the time to master chess or quiz bowl or programming. Some will take time to travel the world with their families."
If we go by the South Korean case study, ~all kids (or all kids of ambitious parents) will choose to spend that extra time on more and more classes, as competition for "elite" colleges and the "elite" jobs they entail only gets tougher and tougher. In the end this just increasing the price of signalling even further, leading up to a very expensive equilibrium.
Not all kids! My son enjoys the 2 hour learning model because he is bright and that’s all he needs, but also because he finds school work boring compared to workshops. He aspires to be a gaming programmer and we won’t pressure him to attend a fancy school to do so. Wealth doesn’t always equate to elitism. I’ve found that most private school parents just want happy, thriving kids, just like any other parent.
That sounds wonderful and I don't doubt for a second that this is a great environment for a kid right now. In fact, if I was living in Austin and had that kind of money, I'd also consider this school for my son - mostly for the wide plethora of cool and exciting things the kids seem to be doing in the afternoon according to the review.
What I am skeptical about is how such a system will evolve at larger scales (if it is as effective as advertised). Consider this scenario:
You start with Alpha school with 2h learning in the morning and workshops in the afternoon. Then someone comes up with Beta school that uses the same method but ramps up the learning to 3 hours to get 40% higher test scores (let's assume some diminishing returns). Gamma school is at 4 hours, Delta at 5. The alumni of each of them crowds out the alumni of the previous one from elite institutions, providing constant selection pressure. By the time you know you have rooms full of kids glued to computer monitors for 8 hours a day doing spaced repetition pomodoros.
There is currently no market for this. Most parents, even parents shelling out for Alpha, believe that the 2x learning promised by 2HL is already possibly too much/too fast, not too little. The scattered parents who are like this satisfy their preferences with tutoring, math camps, etc added onto other private or public school educations. They do not, in the U.S. at least, form an interest group that drives whole schools into or out of the market.
Though I do wish that there were some secret cadre of academic accelerationist families ready to book out GT school and pressure us for even more right away. Would be a great problem to have, to be banging the drum that their students need life skills and not just academics, rather than explaining how little students learn at regular school over and over.
Germany is just as obsessed with education as South Korea and yet they don’t have anything resembling hagwon. If you don’t have a single universally adhered to status hierarchy based on one exam you don’t get “all cram school, all the time”. Even Japan and China aren’t as bad, and nowhere else comes close.
That's because they are afraid to fix the admissions process. Right now it's a race to the top: you need to score as high as possible on the Suneung when everyone else is trying to do the same, every single point you can earn must be earned.
If about 2% of Korean high-school graduates get into SKY, just make everyone who scores high enough on the Suneung (let's say within the top 4% last year) participate in an admission lottery to SKY instead, with the losers getting to pick any other NU10 university. The same could apply to the NU10 (but with the top 20% as the cutoff).
This way if you're comfortably in the top 4% you can't improve your chances any further and don't need to spend every free minute at the hagwon.
Phenomenal piece. It highlights a point that any rational observer of the lock-step "product" of American education might ask: why not let kids progress at their own pace, tailored to their ability, and focus on mastery instead of simply promoting them annually by default? You're not claiming to have a gold-standard study here, but honestly, it’s not hard to imagine how well that kind of model could work.
That said... I felt a real sadness reading it. The image of kids drilling on computers—even with breaks—was disheartening. My reasons are entirely anecdotal, and I can’t back them with empirical evidence, but I went to a remarkable private school from preschool through 8th grade. My cohort in the "Honors" track was made up of extraordinarily bright, talented kids who later became academic, economic, and artistic achievers. Total selection bias, no doubt—but here's the thing: we loved school.
Why? Because our teachers loved teaching. History came alive for us every year—from the Egyptians in 4th grade to post-WWII in 8th. My lifelong love of literature was sparked by our English teachers reading aloud with passion. If you've seen Dead Poets Society, it felt like that. We wrote and wrote. We adored our science teacher most of all—my closest lifelong friend, now an M.D. Ph.D. and Chief Science Officer at a biotech firm, credits that teacher with changing his life. Another close friend, a composer, points to our Head of Middle School—a master musician who packed our days with Glee Club and Orchestra—as his inspiration.
I don’t quite see that at Alpha School. There’s no shortage of engaging extracurriculars, and maybe kids just self-select into what resonates with them. Still, I don’t see love and passion. And I get it—love and passion don’t scale. They didn’t even scale within our own school. The honors track received all that energy; the median cohort—still smart, still tuition-paying—got "good, not great."
Maybe what we had was the modern equivalent of a Victorian-era tutor: personalized attention in a small enough class where everyone could thrive.
The love and passion are there. I wouldn’t be sending my daughter there next year if it wasn’t. It’s hard to capture and convey in the same breath as one is talking about the software platform, but they are there.
I get the worry about wanting inspiring teachers and role models, though. I had this worry too, before I visited. The teachers do serve this role, it just has a different specific look than it does in Dead Poets Society.
OK, that is wonderful. It would be interesting to try and quantify the "inspiration" effect. We talk about how the data says, well, it's mostly your genes, and maybe your peers. But so there is so much anecdotally about inspirational teachers and professors, that maybe "the data isn't measuring the right thing." (OK, maybe in this case not measuring "all the right things." Appreciate your response.
We have a survey question we ask to students annually: “Every adult had 1 or 2 teachers who changed their life. Is your teacher that for you?“ A crude measure, for sure. But that’s the aspiration, and we take the answers seriously.
Can you say more about how the teachers at Alpha serve this role? Are they involved with the afternoon workshops as well? It does on its face seem more difficult to achieve compared to in a traditional school
> If all of this makes your inner Bayesian flinch, you’re in good company. After twenty‑odd years of watching shiny education fixes wobble and crash—KIPP, AltSchool, Summit Learning, One-laptop-per-child, No child left behind, MOOCs, Khan‑for‑Everything—you should be skeptical.
Wait. Can someone please explain to me how KIPP failed?? AFAIK it's done great for low income minority kids.
KIPP lost its "no excuses" orientation and went a bit "woke" like many other schools but as far as I can tell the academic results are still notably good.
That said, could I pm about how to get a job at Alpha? I'm working on a school concept that will take underserved kids to do school abroad (thinking Prospera) and I think it might be strategic to learn from them and perhaps use their model as opposed to Khan World School (which is very similar, but with less focus on spaced-repetition AI)
Hey Kev, I'm inclined to agree with you on KIPP actually, though it seems some other "no excuses" type schools have fared worse. Steven Wilson just wrote a book about this, The Lost Decade
I am not familiar with the software used for other subjects, but Duolingo for foreign language instruction for $40k a year is very funny :) I hope you do not expect your children to actually learn any foreign language as you would be disappointed.
I thought that was interesting too. I've used duolingo quite a lot after having learned a few languages the old way previously. It's a really impoverished platform. I started using Pimsleur to compare and it's a much much better program, if you're doing language learning without a live person. But language is a human communication tool -- it seems very odd to me to not learn it through human communication with all the nonverbal cues and emotional involvement that come along with that. To properly learn another language is to absorb another culture and history into your bones, and to some extent to become a somewhat different person in the world.
It feels to me like there are a bunch of deeper layers of learning that happen simultaneously when solving a math problem live with a group of people or discussing history or talking about ways to interpret a piece of writing than can be taught through an algorithm and tested for with multiple choice quizzes. The affordable, scalable two-hour part of this seems much like duolingo to me, which is to say impoverished. And the afternoon enrichment looks much like any other kind of enrichment available to rich private schools.
I think you are hitting on something very important in the second paragraph. Leaving foreign language aside, it looks like Alpha appreciates the need for live intensive mentor and peer interactions and collaborative/competitive activities when it comes to behaviour (dojo points) and the afternoon time. But for the actual learning they ditched it for a solitary screen time with AI Eyed Wide Shut style controls. But why the most productive activity of the day should be sanitised from human interaction? In real life, leaving autistic programmers aside, most people are productive around other people, and not interacting with a gaze controlling AI.
When the subject of learning is human interaction (as with foreign languages) this is clearly absurd. But I think this may be almost as bad with some of the higher level mathematics learning.
The good news is that we don’t use Duolingo for foreign language instruction and we agree it doesn’t work. It’s something the students at GT School wanted to try this year.
The bad news is that we don’t have a solution for foreign language instruction at present.
You should talk to the people at baselang.com They charge $200 a month for individuals for all you can eat one on one tutoring in Spanish. Their in house curriculum is very good. I doubt you’d get too many students willing to spend 4 hours a day on learning Spanish but a year of that would definitely be worth more than the average Spanish language degree.
You should look at nativshark, at least for Japanese. And for math, at least for the GT school, look at programs meant for gifted kids like Beast Academy, mathacademy, EMF Math (even if only as options for those who wish to go deeper in math)
And Forbes lists a bunch of other apps here, though the only other one I've even heard of is Pimsleur and something tells me their app is quite different from the CDs you could buy in the 90s. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/l/language-learning-rs/
My impression of Duolingo purely secondhand on hearing my elderly mother interact with it, occasionally supplying her the answer so she can move along, is that it is just another phone game for her like wordle or bridge or Connections.
She likes the cartoon character. She even likes the "shaming", I think. Someone cares whether she is doing her lesson, like so long ago. She has learned no Spanish, and cannot, but it's a fun little activity. When we go out to a Mexican restaurant, she will as ever cringily order her customary "Chilly Ray-leen-o", impervious to correction.
Also just from a modern perspective, at $40k a year for the school, if you have three kids you could probably hire a humanities PhD full time to tutor them for less than the school tuition.
But then what about STEM? You can hire one expert, but not several of them. And they might not be willing or able or ready to create and administer a curriculum designed for 1:1 teaching
You don't need to be a top expert to teach high-school level math and science. I'm sure there are plenty of people with PhDs in history or philosophy who can manage it just fine. Remember our basis of comparison here is "Victorian Governess"- the bar isn't *that* high.
> And they might not be willing or able or ready to create and administer a curriculum designed for 1:1 teaching
Then they probably won't apply for the job and you should hire one who is instead. It's not like you're picking someone at complete random here- hire someone who's interested in the job, same as any other kind of work.
The aristocratic tutoring mentioned in the article that gave us world changing minds was the type to involve a team of subject matter experts, not just a single governess.
I think the other main benefit of Alpha School is the benefit of having a social community.of peers who can make learning peer-driven (the second stage, after learning for rewards or parental approval)
From the Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches", published in 1892:
“I have been a governess for five years,” said she, “in the family of Colonel Spence Munro, but two months ago the colonel received an appointment at Halifax, in Nova Scotia, and took his children over to America with him, so that I found myself without a situation. I advertised, and I answered advertisements, but without success. At last the little money which I had saved began to run short, and I was at my wit’s end as to what I should do.
“There is a well-known agency for governesses in the West End called Westaway’s, and there I used to call about once a week in order to see whether anything had turned up which might suit me. Westaway was the name of the founder of the business, but it is really managed by Miss Stoper. She sits in her own little office, and the ladies who are seeking employment wait in an anteroom, and are then shown in one by one, when she consults her ledgers and sees whether she has anything which would suit them.
“Well, when I called last week I was shown into the little office as usual, but I found that Miss Stoper was not alone.
“‘You are looking for a situation, miss?’ he asked.
“‘Yes, sir.’
“‘As governess?’
“‘Yes, sir.’
“‘And what salary do you ask?’
“‘I had £ 4 a month in my last place with Colonel Spence Munro.’
“‘Oh, tut, tut! sweating — rank sweating!’ he cried, throwing his fat hands out into the air like a man who is in a boiling passion. ‘How could anyone offer so pitiful a sum to a lady with such attractions and accomplishments?’
“‘My accomplishments, sir, may be less than you imagine,’ said I. ‘A little French, a little German, music, and drawing—’
“‘Tut, tut!’ he cried. ‘This is all quite beside the question. The point is, have you or have you not the bearing and deportment of a lady? There it is in a nutshell. If you have not, you are not fitted for the rearing of a child who may some day play a considerable part in the history of the country. But if you have, why, then, how could any gentleman ask you to condescend to accept anything under the three figures? Your salary with me, madam, would commence at £ 100 a year.’
“You may imagine, Mr. Holmes, that to me, destitute as I was, such an offer seemed almost too good to be true. The gentleman, however, seeing perhaps the look of incredulity upon my face, opened a pocket-book and took out a note.
“‘It is also my custom,’ said he, smiling in the most pleasant fashion until his eyes were just two little shining slits amid the white creases of his face, ‘to advance to my young ladies half their salary beforehand, so that they may meet any little expenses of their journey and their wardrobe.’
“It seemed to me that I had never met so fascinating and so thoughtful a man. As I was already in debt to my tradesmen, the advance was a great convenience, and yet there was something unnatural about the whole transaction which made me wish to know a little more before I quite committed myself.
...“‘My sole duties, then,’ I asked, ‘are to take charge of a single child?’
“‘No, no, not the sole, not the sole, my dear young lady,’ he cried. ‘Your duty would be, as I am sure your good sense would suggest, to obey any little commands my wife might give, provided always that they were such commands as a lady might with propriety obey. You see no difficulty, heh?’
“‘I should be happy to make myself useful.’
“‘Quite so. In dress now, for example. We are faddy people, you know — faddy but kind-hearted. If you were asked to wear any dress which we might give you, you would not object to our little whim. Heh?’
“‘No,’ said I, considerably astonished at his words.
“‘Or to sit here, or sit there, that would not be offensive to you?’
“‘Oh, no.’
“‘Or to cut your hair quite short before you come to us?’
“I could hardly believe my ears. As you may observe, Mr. Holmes, my hair is somewhat luxuriant, and of a rather peculiar tint of chestnut. It has been considered artistic. I could not dream of sacrificing it in this offhand fashion.
“‘I am afraid that that is quite impossible,’ said I. He had been watching me eagerly out of his small eyes, and I could see a shadow pass over his face as I spoke.
“‘I am afraid that it is quite essential,’ said he. ‘It is a little fancy of my wife’s, and ladies’ fancies, you know, madam, ladies’ fancies must be consulted. And so you won’t cut your hair?’
“‘No, sir, I really could not,’ I answered firmly.
“‘Ah, very well; then that quite settles the matter. It is a pity, because in other respects you would really have done very nicely. In that case, Miss Stoper, I had best inspect a few more of your young ladies.’
“The manageress had sat all this while busy with her papers without a word to either of us, but she glanced at me now with so much annoyance upon her face that I could not help suspecting that she had lost a handsome commission through my refusal.
“‘Do you desire your name to be kept upon the books?’ she asked.
“‘If you please, Miss Stoper.’
“‘Well, really, it seems rather useless, since you refuse the most excellent offers in this fashion,’ said she sharply. ‘You can hardly expect us to exert ourselves to find another such opening for you. Good-day to you, Miss Hunter.’ She struck a gong upon the table, and I was shown out by the page.
“Well, Mr. Holmes, when I got back to my lodgings and found little enough in the cupboard, and two or three bills upon the table, I began to ask myself whether I had not done a very foolish thing. After all, if these people had strange fads and expected obedience on the most extraordinary matters, they were at least ready to pay for their eccentricity. Very few governesses in England are getting £100 a year. Besides, what use was my hair to me? Many people are improved by wearing it short and perhaps I should be among the number. Next day I was inclined to think that I had made a mistake, and by the day after I was sure of it. I had almost overcome my pride so far as to go back to the agency and inquire whether the place was still open when I received this letter from the gentleman himself."
Well, the salary goes up to £120 per annum, she agrees to cut her hair, and the plot plays out to demonstrate that she is not being hired for her skills as a governess.
So if £48 per annum as a governess to a couple of children over five years was the average wages, you can see that Alpha is, in fact, very much more expensive. In 1892, one website gives me a value of £1 = $4.87, so £48 would have been $233.76.
Translating that into modern values gives $8,257.76 today. So for $40,000 you could have hired around five Victorian governesses for your child.
ZipRecruiter says your average California governess today earns $74k a year (not including benefits, but also probably room and board is not expected).
>Workshops in the afternoons are the “fun” part of school. They are the equivalent of the music, theater and art classes that fill in a traditional school schedule (just more focused, measurable and creative).
Am I hopelessly crunchy-granola for thinking that if Alpha is willing to dedicate a whole afternoon program to sports, it would make sense for them to have comparable humanities program? Maybe it’s not “measurable” enough, but engaging with art at a young age seems at least as valuable to me as knowing how to operate an AirBnB.
I agree. And when it comes to the literature part of the humanities, I don't see how computers can be much help. The thing about the classics is that many of them are hard to access -- hard to find your way into and like. If you can't find your way in -- if Dickens just seems slow and boring, if Shakespeare just seems like a jumble of way way too many unfamiliar words -- then you need someone who loves those writers to show you the way.
There's really no point in forcing yourself to read one of these things if it bores and vexes you from beginning to end, just so you can say you read it. These are pieces of literature that can give immense pleasure. If you can't get over the hump and don't feel any of that, then even if you read it and can answer College Bowl questions about it you haven't read it.
Computers can help by freeing up 6 hours to spend on literature (or any other humanity) vs the 40 mins if you're lucky you would get at a public school
I homeschooled my daughter through 6th grade. Based on my experience, I wanted to give people a data point when it comes to acceleration and speed of learning.
I was extremely laid back regarding book learning until one year before she was going to return to school. By age 5 or she taught herself, with a little help from me, to read and write. (But her spelling was intuitive and phonetic, and her handwriting was very messy.) She picked up a modest amount of add-and-subtract math and simple geometry from games and Montessori type toys. But that was it when it came to the 3 R’s. She did read a lot during her homeschooled years, and was involved in various activities that enriched her mind and life but probably had little effect on testable academic skills.
During the year leading up to her returning to school we worked 2 or 3 hours almost every day on the 3R’s: Spelling, grammar and punctuation, math, handwriting, and expressing ideas in paragraph length bits of writing. I used conventional textbooks and workbooks popular with homeschoolers. Neither of us enjoyed these sessions much, but they worked fine. By the end of the year she was up to speed on all these subjects. I did not attempt to teach her school curriculum science, history, geography etc., since it seemed to me like mostly she would be learning new stuff in those areas, and would not have trouble filling in any gaps in her knowledge if needed.
So she and I sort of did it backward. Instead of getting her way ahead academically, so that she could finish her formal education early and then be free to begin a career or do other things, I let her be free to do other things for 6 years, then taught her the essential skills covered in school in a tiny fraction of the time that would have taken in school. Of course she learned lots of other things during her homeschooled years, and if I wanted to explain more about why I homeschooled the way I did I would describes these. But it’s not relevant to my main point: Teaching the 3 R’s does not take anything like the amount of time schools take with the task. And if you wait til kids are older it far easier for them to learn it — in fact it is extremely easy for them. And my daughter is not one of those intellectually super-gifted kids. In fact when she was small she had some kind of low-grade spoken language disability. (I adopted her from China when she was 2 years old, and language delays and problems are very common in foreign-adopted kids.).
I understand that my entire take on child education is different from the one being described in this review, and am not here to argue about that. Just wanted people to have this data point about how rapidly a kid can master basics, especially when older. You should also know that even the homeschoolers I knew who were trying to approximate a public school curriculum and pace of learning only did a couple hours per day of work on conventional school subjects.
I would be interested to hear why you chose to do it the way you did. Your point kind of reminds me of friends I have who potty train early vs those who wait as long as possible and their kid basically trains themselves. For the former, it's a ton of work and takes a lot of time and the kid probably isn't quite ready for it, but they're done much younger. For the latter, they are in diapers longer and not being challenged past their own comfort level but when they are ready it happens fast and easy. Which is better? Depends on the kid, depends on the parents.
I don’t think I can face posting in detail about it here. But here are the beliefs that were behind my approach:
-Kids are subject to states of very deep fascinated delight. Preserving the ability to enter that state is the most important aspect of early education. It’s not possible to systematically train small kids in basic reading, writing and math in a way that has them in that state. You can make it fairly *fun* by using kid-centric computer training, but “having fun” is not the magic state, just a pleasant one kids enter easily. You can also engage kids in learning that stuff if you have a reward-laden set-up where kids get rewards for engaging in training, or where kids are motivated by a desire to win. But wanting to win stuff and wanting to beat other people out are also not the magic state.
I think the best way to preserve kids’ capacity for fascinated delight is to put then in varied environments where there are a lot of things they can mess around with, and when they discover something that delights them give them lots more chances to mess around with it. Ex: I used to go to the library with my daughter and go to the section where the coffee table books were and come home with 30 or so at a time for her to page through.
If some of the things that fascinate a kid look especially promising as the basis of careers or lifelong interests it’s fine to put extra effort into finding ways for them to develop that interest.
The aim of coming at education the way I did is to raise someone who as an adult is able to engage in projects with fascinated delight. If the projects are done as parts of their career, that will probably make them more successful, but even if it does not it will make their life much happier and more meaningful. And if instead they end up earning a living with work that’s kind of tedious, but with hobbies they adore, they will still lead happier and more meaningful lives than most.
- People undervalue empathy and other qualities that are not especially compatible with being competitive, or even just being focused on improving one’s personal excellence. Every time there’s talk on here about selecting among embryos for intelligence, I pipe up in favor of selecting for empathy as a way to make life on earth better. Nobody’s very interested.
- There are some numerical things that I just do not think are as important as most people here seem to. One is income. I can see the point of making it into at least the lower rungs of the upper middle class, because if you don’t make it that far you are too vulnerable to being rendered destitute by dark turns of fate in the form of war, natural disaster, severe health problems in the family, etc. But beyond that — ehh, of course more money enables you to do and own more things and be protected in more ways, but it seems to me you’ve passed the point of diminishing returns.
The other is age at which one reaches certain milestones. Beyond the “wow” factor, what is so great about being 20 rather than 27 when you get a degree or publish a book or have some notable career success? Whether you are 20 or 27, you have many decades of health and vitality ahead of you, many years of fertility. There is plenty of goddam time. The thing that’s in short supply these days isn’t youth, it’s joy.
Do you think your approach to encouraging that state of fascinated delight in your daughter accomplished what you hoped to accomplish? And now that she is in school, what does she think about the years she spent in homeschool?
She is now 29. She did OK academically after enrolling in public school, but was quite unhappy in high school, and extremely critical of me — not only of my homeschooling her, but of various other things I did as well. I felt quite miserable myself during that time, and was not sure how many of my decisions had been bad. I’m still not.
She had had quite a hard start in life. Almost all Chinese girls that were given up for adoption during that era were dropped off at the orphanage, or in some place where they would be found, soon after birth. She was left on the steps of the orphanage at age 14 months, so she was old enough to actively miss her parents, and probably old enough to sense that they had decided not to keep her. (My guess is that her parents chose to keep her until a second child was born, and that they had a son when my daughter was 14 mos. old.) She stayed in the orphanage until I adopted her when she was 28 mos. old. By all reports the staff of the orphanage were kind, and the place was reasonably clean and well-run, but it was a grim place with no toys and not enough staff to give kids any individual attention. I’ll never know for sure how much that start in life contributed to her teenage misery and how much was my fault.
But during college she gradually emerged from being miserable and bitter, and had a couple of boyfriends she felt helped her a lot. And since then things have gone well for her. She got a degree in the least technical branch of engineering, environmental engineering, and has had no trouble finding work. She changed jobs a couple times til she ended up in a setting where she likes the people. Her work is not especially interesting but it’s also not very demanding and she enjoys her co-workers. For the last 3 years she’s been living with a guy I like a lot, and they will probably get married. They’re an extremely compatible couple. Go on long demanding backpacking trips, sleeping in one shared sleeping bag. When I’m visiting them and leave the room for a little while I hear them continuing to talk and laugh. They just really enjoy each other’s company.
As for fascinated delight: She has that for rock climbing, which she’s been doing for the last 15 years. She is now extremely good at it, and currently has a goal in mind she is training hard to reach. Takes lots of trips to interesting climbing areas, and has a big circle of climbing buddies.
I’d say she’s one of the happier people I’ve known, actually, and has a lot of things she’s looking forward to.
About incentives (bribes). I bribe our dogs so they learn what I want. I use to bribe my kids to go on walks down to the creek. Both with food. I wish someone had given me the idea of bribing my kids to read. I did semi-bribe them by saying I'd buy any book they wanted to read/ look at. "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" got one of my kids hooked on reading that way. I love this review, and fully endorse the idea of doing a non-book review again. Every other year maybe. (I love books too.)
In dog training, there is an important difference between "bribing" and "positive reinforcement", according to the book I've read when we adopted our mutt puppy. Both involve giving the dog food for some behaviour, but they lead to different outcomes: "bribing" gets the dog to do what you want it to as long as it sees the reward in your hand. The moment the reward is gone, it's not interested in doing that any longer. But if you do "positive reinforcement" right, the dog will do the thing in expectation of getting a reward, even without seeing it.
I'm not sure how this insight might be applied to kids, though (aside from never calling it "bribery", of course, that works).
Anecdotally, my parents used to buy me sweets after going to a museum, but it was never explicitly stated, not like "if you go with us to a gallery, we will buy you a Snickers afterwards". I'm not even sure I EXPECTED the sweets, although I'm sure I formed some kind of association between museums and buying sweets. These days, I actually like going to museums, so I guess it worked. To a degree. I only like exhibitions of realistic paintings, and dislike impressionists, or, god forbid, "modern art", so I guess some things are more powerful than food-based reinforcements.
About growing up in an atmosphere that fosters competition.Please do not try to tell me this school does not foster that kind of attitude or that your kids do not partake of it.
<Afternoon programming focused on excelling in “academic competitions” like chess, go, debate, public speaking, robotics, programming and Quiz Bowl.
<This past year four kids placed in the top-8 in a global debate with more than 1000 entries, and two kids are competing at national championships in chess and an academic bee respectively, but not national champions yet.
Come on! Even if your kids don’t get involved in the afternoon “academic competitions” (why put them in quotes? I’d say they’re not “academic competitions” but academic competitions), they are swimming in water with one fat fucking packet of Competitiveness dissolved in it. They’re sucking that solution in through their gills and sending Competitiveness ions up into their brains to have a word with the neuroplasticity supervisor.
I do not doubt at all that a competitive atmosphere has upsides, but I’m here to tell you it has a very substantial downside, too. I’m a psychotherapist and have somehow ended up as one of the go-to CBT therapists in town for super-smart students and young professionals. One person I see was described by the usually down-to-earth neuropsychologist I use for testing as having intellectual powers that are “stratospheric.” There’s somebody who got a perfect score on the LSAT — that’s 99.9 percentile in a test-taking group that’s quite a bit above average intelligence. There’s somebody whose tested IQ when they were high school age was in the 160’s. Unsurprisingly, quite a few of the people are graduate and professional students at the local Ivy.
Some of the supersmarts aren’t Ivy leaguers, though, and were not raised with the expectation that they would be highly successful. And these people come across as having a pretty different take on themselves and on life. There are, for instance, 2 people each of whom had one professional parent and one without a college education. Both were erratic students until they discovered some science and math subjects they loved, then they excelled in those and went on to get degrees in them at places that are not famous, and now have careers in the field. Their point of view about work and achievement is pretty different from the Ivy people’s. They know they are very good at what they do, but they don’t find ways to *signal* that. On the other hand, if you ask them a question that taps into how good they think they are at work skills, they’re cheerfully honest: “Yeah I’m fine at X, Y and Z, but at Q I’m a *monster*! I’ve been playing around with that stuff since I was 16 and I just don’t get stumped by anything anymore. Everybody brings their Q problems to me. And then there’s W. It’s not really in my field, but I was having trouble working with the W guys who did code for some of my projects, so I ended up just learning W myself and doing my own W works out much better. Actually now I’m interested in W itself and have some ideas about a way to revamp it.”
And they don’t seem very prone to jealousy. One works for a company where a management change has brought in a bunch of people who used to work for a couple of the most prestigious tech companies in the world. And he says, “wow. They’re great. They’re some of the smartest and most talented people I’ve ever worked with.” His enthusiasm sounds quite genuine. I can’t tell whether he thinks they’re cleverer than him, but is admiring and entertained, or whether he recognizes that they’re as speedy and clever as he is and are going to be a lot of fun to work with.
Another difference: both have hobbies they love and throw themselves into.
Another difference: neither has much trouble with akrasia
.
In contrast, the Ivy Leaguers come across as much more aware, moment-to-moment, of status, whether it’s professional status in the grad program or their job, or who’s making the best quips at dinner. They are vulnerable to intense jealousy, and equally vulnerable to despising themselves for being jealous. They feel deep despair, and might even think about suicide, when forced to realize that somebody is simply more talented than they are.
They have unreasonable expectations of themselves. One became engaged to a woman whose family is mega-wealthy, and felt as though he could not live with himself unless he himself became as rich as the woman’s parents. (He is in a profession where his earnings will make him wealthy, but it will not be wealth on the order of his inlaws’.).
They are very highly motivated to excel, but have trouble with motivation to do the actual work they can excel at.
They are superb networkers, but feel bad about putting more effort into networking than into making new friends and hanging out with their old buddies.
They tend to feel tired and drained after work, and don’t exactly have hobbies — more settings and activities where they socialize and network.
This is fascinating… I wonder how much you think environmental choices by parents &/or teachers play a role vs. how much of this is mostly self-selected. I’ll say that I’m still pretty young, but mostly fall into the competitive, “procrastinates and has ugly feelings” category, even though I’ve been at public schools all my life, and my parents were generally super hands-off.
And I’ve kind of always been this way! Self-selecting into sports and academic competitions since ~3rd grade… Is it possible that the Alpha kids who are super into competition were just sorta made that way? They just sorta like it? And if the author’s kids are less into it naturally, then maybe they won’t catch as much through osmosis as you say.
I don't know, but I'm sure school environment has an effect.
I tended towards competitiveness and jealousy myself for many years, and I also was not pushed or raised with high expectations. I did not grow up with wealth, did not have highly successful parents who assumed I'd be a big fat success too. If I had chosen to be an airline stewardess my patents would have been fine with that plan so long as I sounded happy and excited about the job.
In my case I think the factor that pushed me towards the competitive end of the scale was that I'm an only child. I was not spoiled in the bratty sense of the word -- my parents did not give in to begging, nagging, whining, etc., in fact they briskly discouraged these forms of manipulation. But I was accustomed to being the apple of their eye, accustomed to having someone interested in what I was thinking and doing. And when went to school I discovered that in a group setting, you only got that level of attention if you stood out some way. Of the various ways to stand out, being the smart kid was the one that came naturally to me.
It has taken me quite a few decades to mostly get over that orientation, and even now I am not completely free of it. For instance, I felt pretty deep distress when I learned that my review did not make the finals. In most of my life, though, most of the time, other scripts dominate.
What if you were in an environment where being the (singular) smart kid wasn't feasible? Do you think that would be better for your mental health on the long run? In my opinion, that's the main benefit of gifted programs and competitions - they show kids how big and great the world is, and how they don't have to be the smartest. Much better to learn this on middle school than try to learn it as an adult.
Just curious, if it was Chess or a sport they were competing in, would you be clutching your pearls as hard? It seems like these kids have discovered some of these activities to be their Q or W. What's the issue with them doing so before 16? What's the evidence that public school would somehow fix these issues which seems suspiciously closely linked to their intelligence?
I have put in a lot of time and done a lot of self-disclosure in an effort to get across my accumulated info and opinions about schooling, and am open to follow-up questions. However, I’m not going to respond to yours, because you’re rude (“clutching your pearls”). You sound to me like you have a case of undergraduate arrogance. Fuck off.
-Why I sent her back to school when I did: She really wanted to go to school, I think mostly because she had hit the age when the preteen and teen stuff starts up, and a kid’s peers and social group become very important to them. It’s also the age when kids generally make a best friend for the first time. I thought it was unfortunate that there wasn’t a way for her to have that social stuff without going to school, but I couldn’t think of one, so I did not protest.
<What if you were in an environment where being the (singular) smart kid wasn't feasible?
I don’t think it would have made any difference in my yearning for individual attention, which was I think the result of being an only child. it just would have foreclosed on one possible way of getting the attention. I would probably have hunted around for another way to feel special.
<Just curious, if it was Chess or a sport they were competing in, would you be clutching your pearls as hard? It seems like these kids have discovered some of these activities to be their Q or W.
This is my primary concern about the GT School (Alpha doesn’t do any academic screening & afternoons seem to be spent on non-academic things as well, so less concerned there). Even if the early culture isn’t yet very competitive, it seems inevitable that it will become so over time as awareness spreads. I saw that happen over time at the magnet school I attended as people started moving across the country to go there. It’s also part of why I wouldn’t want my kids to grow up in a hyper-competitive academic environment like parts of the south bay area & where I went to school. It’s just clearly not healthy as kids so quickly tie their self-worth to academics.
That being said, the Alpha School concept of get formal academics done in a couple hours a day and then spend the rest of the day doing workshops/ideally discovering & working on things you enjoy.. seems incredible. Self-directed time like that is invaluable in childhood.
> On Friday the kids are presented with a bunch of locked boxes. One of the boxes has a prize in it. The kids with keys check the boxes to see if their key opens the box with a prize.
Loot boxes. They added loot boxes to kindergarten.
…Okay, fine, that’s not a fair comparison. It’s not a true gambling system because the kids aren’t choosing to spend a resource they could otherwise save up.
But as symbolism goes, it feels like an unflattering metaphor for the system as a whole.
It's a fair comparison at least for games without microtransactions. Loot boxes weren't invented by EA.
And gambling is a fair comparison in that random rewards (in psychology, a variable-ratio schedule) has been shown to be incredibly addictive. Slot machines target the exact ratios that will keep people invested. Abusers are able to keep their victims around because they're only randomly abusive, not 24/7. Higher drug use makes the output more random as tolerance increases, leading to people "chasing the high".
But those have a negative connotation because money-wasting, subjection to abuse, and illicit drugs are bad. Addiction is pathological, and pathology is defined by disorder and disruption to life.
If this *truly* works (I'm as skeptical as anyone), then it's intentionally addicting kids to learning and prosocial behavior.
It feels icky by association. But... these results aren't a bad thing. And addiction frequently leads to people continuing even past the point of reasonable reward. If it keeps people learning and behaving morally in the long run, what more is there to say?
"Once you have freed up half a day for 6-years and a full day for the other seven, you open up a limitless number of possibilities.
Some kids will rush into college classes. Some will choose to use the time to play sports. Some will use the time to master chess or quiz bowl or programming. Some will take time to travel the world with their families."
Sorry to be all grumpy and critical, but I gotta say, that is a *wildly* optimistic and most likely unrepresentative take.
OK, so these kids are limited to those whose parents are both able and willing to spend $40k/year on Alpha, which means. most likely dual-earner couples where both parents have fairly demanding careers. Their kid graduates from Alpha at age 12 instead of 18. Yay! Now what?
"Some kids will rush into college classes." At age 12? Seriously? Are they going to live on campus (in a dorm with a bunch of 18+ year olds? In a frat house?) or are they going to live in their parents' house and commute to and from campus daily, in which case you'd better hope there's good public transit or have a parent who can take you to and from campus daily, because at age 12 you're four years away from being able to get a drivers' license.
Ok, sure, you can do college 100% remotely, but then you miss out on the formative experience of socializing, making friends in person, maybe finding a girlfriend/boyfriend/future spouse.
Some will choose sports! Chess! Programming! Excitement?
Again, how is this going to work *logistically*? Both parents are likely working long hours, probably outside the house. A 12-year-old can be legally left home alone, but cannot drive. Assuming this family lives in the suburbs (= crappy or nonexistent public transit), the kid is stuck home all day. They're not hanging out with other kids their age, because guess what, those kids are at school (Alpha students being a tiny % of the population).
How likely are they to teach themselves chess/programming/other intellectually rewarding pursuits 9 h/day as opposed to, you know, spending the majority of their time on TikTok/video games/p0rn? We're talking *adolescents*, who are not famously known for stellar impulse control, and "intelligent" != "highly motivated autodidact."
Traveling with their family? Sure, that works for maybe 2 weeks/year, i.e., the amount of vacation time the parents have. If you're super lucky, maybe you can send your kid off to travel with a willing grandparent/aunt/uncle for, say, another two weeks, so that covers 1 month out of 12. Also, this works once all your children have graduated from Alpha. If your youngest is still in Alpha or regular school, you can't just leave them behind while you and your firstborn go gallivanting off on a world tour.
TL;DR: This plan has problems, lots and lots of logistical problems.
I think the assumption here is that this is for a family which this *would* work for. I'm a single earner providing for my family. My wife currently home schools our kids, but after reading this I'm very interested in alpha school. We live in Austin and would be able to afford this on my income.
> Their kid graduates from Alpha at age 12 instead of 18. Yay! Now what?
One option is to work on their own projects. A child good at programming can make computer games and publish them on various platforms. An artistically gifted child can publish their art on a blog, and maybe sell it. (Both of these may be soon outcompeted by AIs, but the same is true for people with standard education.)
Another option is to study university lectures at home. Many lectures are online, you can buy or download textbooks, etc. Then maybe at 16 enter college and excel there.
> They're not hanging out with other kids their age, because guess what, those kids are at school
They can work on their projects in the morning, hang out with other kids in the afternoon. And sometimes hang out in the morning with homeschoolers. You can hire university students as tutors for them (probably not a problem for someone who could pay $40000 a year for school).
Both "good at programming" and "publishing your art" have problems. You're not allowed to do too much work as a child, particularly at age 12 (that's far more of a problem for programming, to be honest, as you can use most of your sketching time as "practice"). Far safer to pretend to be older, and then you can get "normal person critiques" (as opposed to "child prodigy" critiques).
> You're not allowed to do too much work as a child, particularly at age 12
Work done at home can for legal purposes be declared as "an older relative did it".
This can be adapted as necessary. If a relative has a contract that prevents a side job, choose a different relative. If the child wants some bragging rights, the story could be adapted as "the older relative did it, but the child helped" without being specific about details -- which allows the kid to say "actually, I did it all", and the adult to say "you know, kids exaggerate".
Then at 18, the easiest way is just to create a new account under the child's name, and publish new things there. (Transferring the existing assets is probably not worth the effort; soon the best pieces will be published under the new account.)
> Far safer to pretend to be older, and then you can get "normal person critiques"
According to federal law, 14- and 15-year-olds cannot work more than 3 hours on a school day, including Friday, and more than 18 hours per week when school is in session.
I'm pretty sure this refers to employment outside of school - someone programming who is homeschooled and getting class credit doesn't seem to count. If it did, every school would be breaking the law due to requiring upwards of 8 hours per school day
Yep. I'm saying that kids getting paid for work product is a good incentive to get better. Getting paid as a professional is a good way to develop professional habits.
> Their kid graduates from Alpha at age 12 instead of 18. Yay! Now what?
This really depends on the kid. I plan on doing accelerated education like this for my kids, because it's what I wished I had (I did skip grades and CLEP / AP about half of undergrad, but wish I'd had more acceleration). What is right for your kid is largely going to be a function of their personality. More school? Get through undergrad faster - it's at least a ~50% waste of time, too, and you don't actually do any real learning until grad school, anyways.
I think you're also assuming essentially a "middle class, dual career" background, where money and time are both constrained, and I just don't think that's the modal couple doing this kind of stuff for their kids. If you have money and / or a spouse with time, you can do a LOT more on this front for your free-from-school kids.
One example - of course REAL learning isn't about school at all - they can go deep in mathematics or physics, or history, or some other discipline that inspires them, and you can hire postdocs to tutor them and help them grow in their understanding and knowledge.
An example from my own life - I wish I'd gotten into athletics earlier, because by the time I got into them I was older and had less background than most other people in it. I ended up being regionally competitive, but If I'd started at age 12-16 like everyone else, who knows where I might have been. So why not sample from whatever sports or physical pursuits they like, and take the time to get good at them?
Some kids will want to do a passion project: writing a book, coding software, building some sort of physical robot or machine (building an open source Mobile Aloha robot, anyone?), and that's a great use of time that you should encourage. I hope all my kids learn how to work on cars from me and how to do around-the-house fixes handyman stuff, because it's good to be able to do those kinds of things for yourself, too.
Some will want to start a business, and you should mentor and help them through that.
Broadly, there's really zero *downside* to being done with school faster, because school is mostly a waste of time, and mostly about signaling anyways. If they finish faster, they get to do the actually important and enjoyable things in life!
The most salient point you make is college as a mating market. But what better way to get into the right T20 school or grad school than taking the time from 12-17 becoming competitive at some sport, starting a business, building a Mobile Aloha robot, and so on? They'll have a much better shot than the kids who just stayed in school for those years.
Another option for STEM-oriented gifted kids is Olympiads - they can easily add an extra year of meaningful learning (well, at least in physics, chem, CS, and several years in the case of math) without requiring a college environment. As a bonus, if you can make it to the camp stage, you get a free summer camp with other equally talented kids. For really gifted kids who don't go to MIT or Caltech etc, it might be the only time in their lives they're around a significant group of people at their intellectual level. That's a priceless social opportunity.
"or are they going to live in their parents' house and commute to and from campus daily" yes, that's what most 12 year olds do. Lol.
If they do college academics remotely from the school, they still have all the social benefits of the school.
Keeping kids at the school after they've met 12th grade standards seems to resolve all your issues. Just replace 6 hours a day of teac-sorry, guide-directed productive activity with 8 hours.
I haven't seen any comments from Deiseach yet, I eagerly await her appearance with her customary "No shot, Sherlick, of bloody COURSE when you limit yourself to kids whose parents can afford $40k/kid/year for fancy-schmancy schooling, those kids are going to do well! Show me something that works for Tommy from the projects, whose mum is a drug addict living with her fourth boyfriend in the last two years, who also happens to beat her and Tommy."
(No shade on Deiseach; she's excellent at this and I agree with her!)
From where I'm standing, it's very much like Americans are kind of reinventing China but with less tears. Chinese schooling, which includes heavy loads of after-school classes (not activities, classes), is pretty similar to what's being described here, but a bit lower-tech, and with more emphasis on getting the lower performers up to speed. Basically you do lots and lots of drill until you've really got it, then you move on.
The use of IxL is just comical to me, because it's such a staple feature of international schooling here.
Obviously the key feature of Alpha so far is that it's small and enthusiastic and expensive. When it gets bigger and cheaper, you get more families/parents who don't care, and the school's time and energy will be sucked into making sure the lower performers aren't completely stopping... and then you've reinvented public school.
But it sounds great at the moment.
This was a very clear and helpful review, as well.
I feel like your first and third paragraphs argue against each other, unless you think China’s model wouldn’t add anything for US public school cohorts?
It's very possible, I'm not sure that my thoughts are very coherent...
As I see it, the US and China basically take two opposite tacks at the moment: Chinese schools say "regiment, inentivise, force feed"; US schools say "offer, care, avoid harm".
I personally am pretty comfortable with the Chinese model - I don't think it hurts kids more than the US model. But I also don't think that the Chinese model is obviously superior. I think everyone assumes that the Chinese model will produce better academics, and the US model will better protect kids' mental health. And there's lots of anecdotal evidence to support that.
However - that anecdotal evidence is crap when it comes to assessing the systems as a whole. It seems to me entirely possible that Chinese schools are still academically failing the vast majority of the population. (I work as a tutor in the catchment area of a relatively good urban Chinese school, and we see lots of kids who have studied English for 3-4 years, and still can't recognise the word "a". Everyone in China believes that yeah, the English teachers are bad, but of course the Chinese teachers are great... but I have some anecdotes that point the other way as well.)
Similarly, do American schools really look after children better? The dropouts, the school shooters, the violent? All those kids taking drugs for their mental health - is that a sign of better care in the school system, or worse?
I honestly don't know the answers to these questions.
One might assume that some kind of "happy medium" would be the best answer, but that's pure guesswork.
So do Chinese schools have anything to offer the US? I really couldn't say. And I think it's important, when you don't know, to be clear about not knowing.
(Background assumptions: I don't think that there is a massive difference between public and private schools if the selection effects are taken away (evidence: Sweden and the performance of US charter schools); so when I said public school, I meant any non-selective system, because I think they'll all end up performing about the same.)
My understanding is that private schools were significantly more likely to continue providing daycare service https://www.econlib.org/not-even-daycare/ during COVID.
To play devil's advocate on the last part, the 2 hours are solely exam focused, which is a quarter of the student's school life. More than one year equivalent.
I should clarify. In China, nearly all education is ultimately exam focused, but the final year of high school is *just* revision of material learned in the previous two years for the gaokao exam.
You may be right. I was very much commenting off the top of my head, and I may just be wrong.
What I see as the commonality is this: acceleration on pure academic tests beyond US grade levels, achieved through an intense incentives to complete lots of bog-standard drill and kill.
In Alpha, the incentives are positive, and the acceleration is used to free up time for rich people extracurriculars. In China, the incentives are negative, and the acceleration is achieved through massive time investment. Nevertheless, the real value-add that all the parents above are talking about is getting ahead of some notional American basic academic speed. That seems to be the thing that is valued.
I think you're missing the point when you talk about each teacher doing their own thing. The core curriculum is a single defined set of exercises delivered by computer. There's no human freedom there. The human freedom comes in the extracurriculars.
Solving for scale is often a lot harder than solving for quality, esp given the 4x population difference. E.g. it's like "why do you do things in such a roundabout/painful way at Google"
Hopefully the system explores ways of improving quality on these rails. Especially since we're entering an era where just getting good grades and a good degree does not guarantee a better (socio-economic) life
China's model doesn't seem related to this - it gets similar results to Finland with much more school time, whole Alpha likely gets better results with significantly less.
Maybe the Alpha guys could license their product to other schools, turn it into a model?
One data point: the year my son made the most progress in math was the year his teacher just let him go through EPGY math courses, as fast as he wanted, as long as he shared his progress; since he loves math, he did over three year’s work in one year.
We never found another teacher willing to let him do that, even in the fancy private school he went to later.
They are actually heavily marketing to parents to ask for this model from their private school. Futurefirst Families. You have to have a notebook to keep up with all their companies
In many ways it might work better, as A levels and GCSEs are much better standardized than the US' education system. The issue is that the free third party programs they piggyback off of are US-aligned
Great essay. It revived my interest in alternate learning environments, potentially as an entrepreneur.
There's a thematic thread in the essay and in a number of comments about 'scaling this idea', making it more affordable, et al. One of the differentiating aspects of experiments in this space is differentiated curricula/differentiated pace et al. By extension, the idea of scaling alternate learning systems is also going to require a multitude of concepts at different price points and using different formats (screen + coach OR screen + parent OR screen + environment + coach AND others) and also addressing different social/contextual needs.
I believe we have to celebrate each 'win' regardless of scale and track both short-term and long-term outcomes without getting trapped by an over-riding desire to find a broad replacement for the predominantly industrial-revolution education system we have all critiqued. It is quite likely that the replacement for the current system will not be 2-3 alternate systems and require thousands of formats which will inform each other while staying discrete (perhaps converging in some areas for phases).
Every child helped to actualize a greater fraction of their potential is a win.
As a homeschooler of a gifted child who's ~2-3 years ahead - a new 6y/o doing 3rd grade math and reading - I'm conflicted about this school model. While the community and extracurriculars sound great, I can't get past the fact that the academics are based on... IXL. Not that there's anything wrong with online learning apps, and we do use them as practice and a supplement. But I feel this is letting students down in a significant way.
As an analogy - imagine a world where the goal of education is to become physically larger. Historically, this would mean 'good' schools served hearty meat-based dishes and encouraged physical exercise. Cheaper schools offered bread with whatever protein they could afford. Nobody had yet learned about progressive resistance training, or the roles of micronutrients, but they knew you did much better in life with three square meals than without. But over time, American public schools found that they could provide fast food to children, and they would certainly become physically larger. Which was of course the goal! The only test that mattered was the scale. The government itself adapted the curriculum to encourage the use of these newer, simpler foods. Meanwhile private schools still marketed their in-house chefs and organic ingredients, but ended up serving fries and hamburgers, too. But the real, true point was never to just get *physically larger*. It was to become physically powerful, empowered, useful, and capable. Size was the stated goal. And then of course, the number on the scale wasn't even a very good way of measuring basic physical size - let alone measuring physical empowerment!
This is how I feel about the standard curriculum and MAP.
We have incredible insights today - the equivalent of micronutrient research and strength training regimes. And yet this school charges $40k to shovel the intellectual equivalent of fast food into smart kids' brains at twice the normal rate! It's mind-boggling to me! Isn't the goal to have a better brain? To be intelligent, knowledgeable, adaptable, curious? Those aren't SMART goals so they get lost along the way, but I personally feel they are the *actual goal*. Will Alpha achieve this? Maybe in the non-learning hours. But those sound as though they're full of competitive, performative activities, too.
I genuinely believe two things: these kids will be fine and will do well, and probably much, much better than their public school peers. And I also believe that this school will leave them with this nagging sense that many people leave school with - that they know a lot of things but don't really understand them, that they do a lot of things for reasons they don't understand, that they struggle to find pleasure anywhere, that they're driven by forces that feel external to them. This is why I choose to homeschool - I don't want my child to pass tests. I want him to internalize knowledge. I don't want him to note the key themes of a text. I want him to read at length for pleasure, and to write to express himself. I want him to be empowered, powerful, useful, and capable. And I don't think that nailing the pathetic bullet points of the Common Core curriculum is the way to go about that, sadly - otherwise I'd love for him to go somewhere like this.
I've seen a number of anecdotes from other commenters in this thread on their (very positive) impression of Alpha graduates even compared to other gifted/magnet school grads, maybe that assuages your concerns a bit? Although do adjust for cherry-picking.
As a parent of 3 kids from the Brownsville Campus I can tell you this model does not work for EVERYONE. There are some commonalities among their success stories and that is income and background. 85% of the Low SES students from the Brownsville Campus that started at the school in 2022 are no longer there and its not due to lack of "motivation" or ability. This is a good option for those whom its model is targeting but not a silver bullet as replacement for our current failing educational system.
" 85% of the Low SES students ... are no longer there and its not due to lack of 'motivation' or ability." In your opinion, what is it due to? The obvious criticism of Alpha School is that its students' successes are highly correlated with having wealthy, smart, and motivated parents. One counter to that criticism would be a record of proven success with students without that background, and the Brownsville campus would be the obvious place to test that. If the Brownsville campus is failing that test, it would be useful to know exactly why.
There are a lot of reasons families struggled with this model. Reasons the school never addressed, likely because they were too busy with their marketing machine. After reading this article, it’s hard not to conclude that income and background played a major role in how families experienced ALPHA. They’re used to serving families who can relocate across the country and afford $40,000 per child to “try out” a revolutionary school. But that’s not who we are. We’re families living paycheck to paycheck, with different life experiences and different starting points. That doesn’t mean our kids weren’t capable of success, far from it! It just means they had to work twice as hard to adapt to ALPHA’s rigid model.
This article brings up a lot of valid concerns, but I saw firsthand how much more deeply these issues impacted kids from our background, especially around the concept of "motivation." and their buggy tech.
Thank you for the reply. That helps a bit in understanding this. I'm curious if the school itself surveyed (or surveys) parents and students to determine why they left the school? The answers seem very relevant to the possible success of any Alpha School-sponsored charter schools, which presumably would be targeted at a wider cross section of the student population. Would any of the folks who work at Alpha School care to comment?
Could you share exactly what the issue is for 1 or 2 example cases? As of right now, it's really unclear how the difference in student demographics lead to issues. Sure, Brownsville families are poorer and more stretched. But this review article says Alpha tuition seems to be all inclusive and does not require parental involvement. Is that not accurate?
The problem isn't tuition as we were given tuition assistance. The problem is, is the school addressing the needs of those who it serves and realistically meeting the children and families where they are and doing what is best for them or are they trying to make them adjust to Alpha's measure of success based on their main customer base i. e. Families that could pay 40k tuition per child and trips to Europe with classmates are expected?
So many times it seemed like things were lost in translation when we would communicate our needs and the response would make us feel we were wrong for having those concerns. Like they couldn't understand why would even ask that? They never understood our community and at one poin even said "Well, this is not a problem at Austin" insinuating we were the problem.
> So many times it seemed like things were lost in translation when we would communicate our needs and the response would make us feel we were wrong for having those concerns. Like they couldn't understand why would even ask that?
What were some of the needs that you tried to communicate, which were subsequently not being met? Could you provide some examples of things you asked for?
I honestly don't feel comfortable sharing specifics in a comment section about the systematic way the school chipped away at the collective sense of trust and safety of local families. I would have to write a piece just as long as the original author to explain. But I am noticing there is alot of prespective and context missing. First of all, Brownsville is NOT Austin, not even close. Even the richest person here does not compare to Austin rich (unless you count Elon Musk). The school started with 99% local families which most if not all are Low SES. By the end of year 3 there were only 5% of the original families left. Most replaced with SpaceX families and non low SES students. That alone should raise some questions. Alpha is a private school geared to the elite which is great for the elite, but trying to shove a model that still needs alot of work onto the masses seems unethical to me.
I'm not even getting into their tech and model specifically which according to them works 95% of the time and we were sadly the 5%. They had no solution to their system failure other than expecting my child work twice as hard to make up for their failure.
but after reading your comments, I still don't have any concrete idea of your problems with the school. if you don't mind being more explicit or providing more details for my benefit?
e.g. you said you communicate your needs and you feel that they made you felt you were wrong to have those concerns [which is understandable but light on details] but somehow that is linked to "never understood our community"?
and how did the system fail and made your shildren work twice as hard to make up for their failures?Poor User Interface and Technical Glitches?
Thanks for sharing your experience. Not a parent but I care about the topic. The article emphasized that the improved outcomes relied on a 3-4-punch combo of principles, in spaced repetition, immediate feedback, incentivizing with Alpha bucks, and probably some others I'm forgetting. Like you said yourself, this doesn't echo "silver bullet".
I can imagine academic issues persisting if kids:
- still aren't internally motivated to learn any faster than what's required, e.g. it's not pleasurable, or they don't see the point
- can't feel comfortable around the majority of their peers; especially important for them to thrive in the afternoon tasks
A quote re: the "check charts" stuck out to me:
>"If their friend moves up before they do, they need to double down so they can catch up."
This can work if they have a solid enough friendship to begin with. I.e., they can still see themselves in their (currently) overperforming friend, and not that they're inherently worse, so there's no point in trying to catch up. This ties into fitting in socially with the class.
IME the rare rich students are taught not to flaunt their wealth, and so they fit in decently with the rest. With poorer students, I can imagine a lot of "othering" happening, if they're just a few amongst a privileged majority. If that was the case in the Brownsville campus, improving social integration is a worthy goal but understandably not their top priority. Few (if any) institutions have ever managed that, let alone managed that well. I don't know of any that did better than the church, and that requires a whole community to "buy in" in a way for which even a 40k annual donation can't substitute. A Jesuit school may be the next best thing. All the best to you and your family
I thought the author was pretty clear on suitability -- he said the Alpha School audience is "elite nonconformists" (three personas: "David Disruptor", "Arjun Academic", "Alex Amplifier") which is probably at most a mid-single digit percentage of everyone
Exactly! So why are they pushing so hard for charter status all over the country and discussing changing public schools to their model with the department of education?
They use Brownsville as their evidence that it works for everyone. This is what makes me doubt any of their claims.
This was really interesting, but I am just having extreme difficulty getting over the fact that anyone is paying $120k in cash each year for the kids to go to elementary school. I mean, I got that right, right? $40k and 3 kids who are all elementary age are going?
Presumably this is a person for whom money is no object, but still. To me, everyone learns the elementary school stuff fairly easily (just on different timelines, sure) and public schools are fun at that age and a lot of singing and play. This whole model seems much more interesting at later ages, when it's a lot less fun and kids pay less attention and learn and retain less. But then, I've always been in the Bran Caplan none-of-it-matters side of things, so paying any amount for elementary school when it's free is wild to me.
You would be surprised how unfun public schools with a 1:1 tablet program and a garbage online program or 3 and a test-prep focused environment. If you want to see it in action, try an ST math demo lesson or 10
The "Dojo points" part made my past child self wince though. As a smart kid with Asperger's, I was punished almost constantly in school, no matter how much I tried to fit in and despite much more extreme incentives than "Dojo points".
Eh. I knew a kid who stole the gold stars and gave everyone a gold star one day (some kids never, ever got a gold star). Pretty sure the teacher knew who did it, too.
> In November 2020 we had a meeting with the head of our kids’ original elite private school for the gifted. Her un-blinking eyes stared at us down through the Zoom screen as we listened compliantly, “My job is to keep everyone a little unhappy,”
> I resisted the urge to mention Vilfredo Pareto.
> We had just spent a month working with a team of kindergarten parents drafting potential constructive fixes to the COVID mess our kids were experiencing.
One of Matt Yglesias' essays made the point that the Biden administration seemed to be treating legislation as a pure exercise in coping with a set of fixed demands from different sources - everyone gets something they asked for, and nobody gets everything they asked for.
He observed that if you put in the effort to understand _why_ certain parties have asked for certain things, you may be better positioned than they are to know what you can do for them, and offer something that they prefer to what they asked for.
> I don’t see how you can teach a language a couple of hours a week to a group of 18 kids with skill levels from zero to fluency and expect to have any impact
This will still work if you enforce the rule that nobody speaks anything other than the target language.
Language learning is moderately unusual in that the "simple" work at the beginning of the process is very difficult and the "advanced" work at the end is easy. In the general case, students encounter language instruction that is not intended to be difficult (or to teach them the language), don't themselves intend to learn the language, and unsurprisingly don't learn the language. They never get past the highest barrier, because it's also the first one. If you have students who actually want to learn the language, you can use more effective methods, but a general-purpose school is unlikely to do that.
Almost as far back as history goes, we have records of students being beaten for speaking to each other in Akkadian when they were supposed to be learning Sumerian.
> Every parent we spoke to was very impressed with the school. Their kids really were advancing at 2x+ speed – and no one believed it was just a “selection effect”.
Note that the selection effect is still, by your description, overwhelmingly powerful. Think of what it would take to get every student in a public school system to place in the top 10% at at least one local chess tournament.
> For me, the real value that comes from Alpha is not the performance uplift. The most important feature of Alpha is that they have found a way to learn more efficiently. It allows students to condense all the “required” state-mandated material into half a day for ~6 years instead of a full day for ~13 years.
What? This piece describes Alpha as getting children to spend more time on learning. That's not the same as learning more efficiently. Under the status quo, students go to school for a "full day" for ~13 years and they spend almost none of that time learning. Under the Alpha system, they do the same thing, but they spend somewhat more time learning. If you forgo playing in the park during 3rd grade so that later, in 8th grade, you can do some extra playing in the park, what did you gain?
Presumably it's not the playing in the park you're forgoing, it's the sitting around bored doing nothing. At any rate, I don't think we ever did "playing in the park" at my school.
That wasn't an example I made up. It's from the review:
> But once the kids started at GT, those same iXL lessons became a game for them. I remember taking the kids to the park one day after school. They asked me, “Instead of playing can you set up a hotspot so we can do a few more lessons? I want to earn more GT-Bucks!”.
Oh? The review says they spend the same amount of time on school at school, and more discretionary time. It would seem to be a necessary consequence that they have less discretionary time which is not spent on school.
This is good if you think spending time on school is good. But not otherwise. And all of the benefit is lost if you balance it out by ending your studies early. What's the goal?
This review was absolutely fascinating - lately my company has been working on a personalized tutor beginning with SAT math - https://aaris.ai/ (after Aristotle ofc).
If anyone here has any comments, I would love to hear about them. The way Alpha School does things has provided a lot of ideas.
It seem really cool. I have only one reason to doubt it.
Y'see, school not just gives knowledge, it gives some skills required to acquire knowledge. Including a skill of sitting in a classroom, listening to a boring lecture, while keeping yourself awake and attentive. Or a skill of learning by heart some text, while having nothing except a copy of this text.
Or more generally, problem is no one knows which skills are needed to be successful in a college or in other environments. No one know, how human mind works, no one can create AI because of that. The education is a ritual knowledge ("we do like we do, because we always did like we did") because no one knows exactly which skills are trained, and which parts of the education system are responsible for them. If we have something working, and no one knows how it is working, then Chesterton Fence is a very important principle to follow.
All these spaced repetition computer assisted techniques are great, I tried them with Duolingo and got my German skills from exactly 0 to a level when I can read a German news, with a help of a dictionary. It took me 3 months. For a comparison, it took me 10+ years to master English to this level (though, German is not a good way to test the technique, because German seems to me as a mix of English and Russian, with weird word order, non-intuitive genders of nouns, and a lot of new words, I'm going to try with Chinese next time). Spaced repetition is great, but are you able to use it, when you deal with not with a ready-made curriculum, but with a college course, where all your learning materials are textbooks and lectures?
I'm sure, that some relevant skills are trained by Alpha School. Like an ability to assess your "mastery" level: if you try 1000 times to learn something and to pass a test on that, and each time you get a grade, you'll learn to predict a grade in advance. It is a very important skill, it allows to decide is it advisable to spend more time learning something.
But how about a skill of sitting for a couple of hours in a classroom taking notes? I believe this is not a skill that is hard to acquire at 18 yo, but still. Or a skill of reading a book, taking all the important parts from it, and learning them by heart? The last part can easily be done with Anki or something, but how to select important parts? I think, that Alpha School will give some relevant experience, but it needs to be scaled from small passages in Alpha Reads to whole books. Again, it doesn't seem to me very hard to do it at 18 yo.
I cannot see some fatal flaw, some critical skill that is missed by Alpha School, but I do not know the full list of skills needed, I can easily miss something. So I would be very suspicious and would look everywhere all the time, if my kids went to such a school.
> But how about a skill of sitting for a couple of hours in a classroom taking notes? I believe this is not a skill that is hard to acquire at 18 yo, but still. Or a skill of reading a book, taking all the important parts from it, and learning them by heart?
FWIW, these aren't skills I ever acquired and I've done all right.
> But how about a skill of sitting for a couple of hours in a classroom taking notes? I believe this is not a skill that is hard to acquire at 18 yo, but still. Or a skill of reading a book, taking all the important parts from it, and learning them by heart?
Then again, it seems that Alpha School teaches the skill of sitting at a computer for long(ish) periods of time, watching YouTube videos and extracting useful information from them. Which is actually how most of college students learn these days, I think (at least according to Reddit posts; I finished my education too long ago and don't have kids, so no direct evidences).
Taking notes in class was on the way out even when I was at university in early 2000s: when you have teacher's own presentation you can read at your own pace, few people care about taking notes (yes, I know listening and writing stuff down is helpful to SOME people, but not others; I would guess people who NEED to write stuff will either learn to take notes from YouTube videos at Alpha School, or find it a very bad match and drop out and go to some other school).
Learning something from a book, that was my personal point of hate. I have the book. I can find the god-damned formula, if I need it. I only need to know it exists and its name, so I can easily search for it. Why should I ever learn it? It's a well-known meme that a good engineer is not one who knows everything about his field, it's one who knows where to find the knowledge. It was a true statement when it was made up (in 60's?), I think, and it's even more true now, with all the electronic references, and now AI assistants.
So I don't think these are very useful criticisms of Alpha Schools (not that there aren't any).
> I believe Alpha is the rare educational intervention that dramatically increases the speed that students can learn the required material. But that just begs the next question: “So what?” Does it matter if kids learn the full K-12 state curriculum in six years instead of thirteen? Then what?
1) I have another concern about automated test based education. Can it ruin motivation for tasks that don’t provide immediate positive feedback? In adult live you sometimes need to work through negative feedback to reach your goal
2) what alpha calling 2.5 acceleration isn’t exactly translating to time spent learning. At what age median student completes school program? What’s their MAP percentile at the time?
3) I doubt that third party tools have ready materials for more advanced topics. What’s then?
Also I know trip to Poland sounds impressive but honestly it’s probably cheaper than classical trip to any other eurozone country. With only a dozen students going I wouldn’t include it in major expenses
Nice submission. I walked away skeptical of the school itself, it sounds like they bundle existing platforms with bribing kids, that’s about it. But the good thing about the review is not whether the school is speeding up their learning. It’s how it dwells on the question “if the core stuff can be done in the morning, how shall we spend the afternoon?” Based on this review, it would be nice to shift the discussion from finding ways to get better scores, to wasting less of their time and getting them a chance to build other skills.
I’d also like to hear the authors thoughts after more time at the school. Let us know some of the juicy stuff when the shine wears off a bit.
Scattered thoughts. The core claim that with this well optimized program students learn 2.6x more in two hours per day than traditional students learn in 8 hours per day. So it's really a 10x speed up. I can honestly believe that. I went to Catholic private schools and for complex reasons, I had to be home schooled for 2 weeks at age 8. I spent maybe 2-4 hours per day with my mom who the school generously gave a 2 months of the curriculum and lesson plans. I finished everything before the 2 weeks was up. When I went back, I was confused as to why we were moving so slowly. And this was without fancy techniques - the speed up was a result of actually testing me on the material as we went, and then just moving on once I had learned it.
Second thought - public schools cost the government about $20,000 per year. So $40,000 isn't that crazy. You could probably cut that down by getting rid of the fancy trips and other expensive parts leaving the core system intact.
Regarding things that can't be tested via multiple choice - I think that is a problem but it's also one that traditional schools have. My writing sucked until college because I never got meaningful feedback. It was always just a grade followed by a vague one sentence statement. Before college I was never once asked to write a story or analysis, and then make it better on the second draft. For math math or science, when you get something wrong you want to know why and what the right answer was. But for writing, every single test or assignment was one and done.
Lastly, I'm honestly kind of jealous of kids who got an opportunity to get this kind of educational experience. I was mostly bored in school (until college), but also didn't spent much time on activities that might have meaningfully improved my life like public speaking, event planning, socialization (I went home straight from school everyday).
I'm a bit confused what the conclusion to this piece is meant to be. The final line:
-The 2-hour learning platform is gifting them an additional ~9 years of childhood.
sounds like the conclusion is:
"Mainstream education wastes most of childhood chasing pointless targets. Here's a way to hit those targets in half the time." Which is justifiable, premised on accepting the signaling theory of education. But it's not an interesting conclusion because 1.) being more efficient than mainstream education isn't that hard. 2.) it's still not actually accomplishing anything worthwhile.
The main body of the text makes some effort to try and argue that there is something to gain from educating kids more. But that's a much harder argument to make and I don't think it will convince anyone who already leans toward the signaling theory.
"I just hope they use it wisely." Good luck to them making a wise choice given the massive amounts of non-evidence based and motivated thinking surrounding the whole subject of education and childhood development.
-This is the most efficient we've seen on a meaningful scale
Fair enough that's a good point, it acts as a proof of concept at least.
If the article had focused just on the efficiency gains I wouldn't have minded. If the argument was "It's still a waste of time just less so than normal schools." But it did seem to want to argue that the school was making real gains towards making the kids grow up to be more intelligent/productive adults. Which is the same thing normal education claims to do and which it has almost no evidence to support.
-the afternoons seem quite worthwhile to me
That would be great. But given how prevalent social signaling games are upper class American kids lives, even apart from school, those afternoons could easily just get absorbed by sports clubs, extra curricular activities or whatever.
"those afternoons could easily just get absorbed by sports clubs, extra curricular activities or whatever"
They aren't, at least on the main campus. I'm a big nerd but even I would have to admit that even those "social signaling games" have genuine lifetime value.
-But it did seem to want to argue that the school was making real gains towards making the kids grow up to be more intelligent/productive adults. Which is the same thing normal education claims to do and which it has almost no evidence to support.
When there's no strong evidence on either side, I'll go with my gut, which is that the afternoon activities seem more valuable, especially since I can add full books and history and art etc after the alpha school day but I can't add Alpha afternoons after the traditional school day.
Kind of the same thing, right? If SCDS teaches the basics in a couple hours a day and uses the rest of the time on enrichment, then it sounds like this model also teaches the basics in a couple hours a day and offers the rest of the time for enrichment.
BTW, Mr J has done great as the science teacher, and anyone who signed up for the school thinking there was no chance the nearly 80 YO science teacher would retired before their kindergartener reached 4th grade probably should have thought about it more.
Thinking about Alpha School and my 10 year experience running the Hybrid Model -three days at school, two days at home.
Both systems compress seat time substantially. The ACX review claims Alpha School compresses it to ~17.5 hr per week and at St. John Paul II the hybrid model compresses it to ~18hr per week for a second grader.
These gains are very much real. And honestly, not that hard to achieve. The results are surprising only if you don't believe in instruction.
In our teaching staff the Hybrid model prizes expertise; Alpha prizes coaching & logistics.
The shape of efficiency is very different between the two systems as well. St. John Paul II spend the least amount of money per student of any accredited school in the St. Louis Metropolitan area. It is the Moneyball Oakland A's. ($5,300 spend / student) The efficiency savings return to parents.
The efficiency at Alpha is very expensive ($40,000 tuition, and I wonder if per student spending is actually higher?). I am reminded of Henry Kaiser's shipyards in WWII, which could produce ships at a dizzying rate, but at a great cost. Ultimately, though, even at a lower rate of production 40 days rather than 4 it was still a 600% improvement on prior shipbuilding speeds. Alpha is like that right now. Like the shipyards in WWII, competing to show how fast is possible.
Is a synthesis possible here? Teacher-led seminars in classical liberal-arts tradition with minimal screen use on the one hand and fully algorithmic competency training on the other?
I believe so and I look forward to the day I find a way to bring these algorithms into the world of atoms rather digitizing the physical. I want to see liturgy, virtue formation, physical books with eye-to-eye conversation coupled with micro-data, tracking, and algorithmic targeting.
Chromebooks, modern ux: these are ugly (but have their place). Paper on large wooden surfaces, physical books: these are beautiful.
Your hybrid model seems to require 3 days of 6 hours plus 2 days of home education - that seems like more than 18 hours per week. And what are your average map growth percentiles?
We don't take the MAP just the CLT. I can construct a table of proxies for CLT → SAT and then walk it back from SAT→ MAP, but because the construct errors involved in that. It'd be basically invalid.
The three days are 4:15 hours of core academics and our survey data says home days require about 2.5 hours for a second grader. That's how I got ~18.
This is a great review and very interesting. What struck me was the fact that the core learning that Alpha is doing is not that unique.
My daughters are a a good quality public school in the USA. They have iPads and have access to ixl (or something like it) for their main subjects. They get:
- immediate feedback on their answers
- personalized learning according to ability
- spaced repetition
I have been very impressed by this. Compared to my schooling where I would do a sheet of problems, hand it in, and receive it back the next day, this technology truly is revolutionary for learning. In my day, I could have completely misunderstood the concept, and got all of the answers wrong, but wouldn’t know until after I’d done all of them.
No doubt the alpha school is implementing the software more rigorously, and a big difference is they are allowing kids to move on at their own pace, but I’d suggest that this isn’t a unique application of technology- it’s the same disruptive, powerful new learning technologies that are available now in many good public schools, done better.
All of this to say- the world is still waiting for the *true* application of AI to learning. Some day it’s highly likely that every student *will* have a personalized one on one tutor, whose pace, way of explaining, subject order, and even tone of voice are fully personalized and optimized for their learning, and for the cost of a few million llm tokens. It’s possible that today’s ‘AI’ learning technology solutions will look pedestrian in comparison to this.
Something I'm confused by though - why is the 5:1 Guide/student ratio required for this model? It seems like a lot of teachers, and I'm not seeing why this model requires such an extreme student/teacher ratio (especially since it seems like it would be economically viable for a lot more people with a lower one).
I liked a lot of this. But whenever I read a long thing that attempts to dig into education research and then cites Bloom's 2 sigma result without qualification, it immediately changes my confidence in the analysis.
https://www.educationnext.org/two-sigma-tutoring-separating-science-fiction-from-science-fact/
This review of Bloom's two-sigma claims by Paul T. von Hippel would itself probably earn a top spot in the ACX review contest. Worth reading. Thanks for posting.
The claim about two-sigma tutoring effect was based on a 3-week study by Bloom's two PhD students.
"... they weren’t obtained by tutoring alone. Instead, Anania and Burke mixed a potent cocktail of interventions that included tutoring; training and coaching in effective instructional practices; extra time; and frequent testing, feedback, and retesting....Bloom’s two-sigma claim had some basis in fact, but it also contained elements of fiction."
I liked this from the article you posted:
“Tutored students received extra testing and feedback. Burke’s and Anania’s two-sigma intervention did involve tutoring, but it also had other features. Perhaps the most important was that tutored students received extra testing and feedback. At the end of each unit, all students took a quiz, but any tutored student who scored below 80 percent (in Anania’s study) or 90 percent (in Burke’s) received feedback and correction on concepts that they had missed. Then the tutored students took a second quiz with new questions—a quiz that students in the whole-class condition never received. If the tutored students still scored below 80 or 90 percent, they got more feedback and another quiz.”
In Made To Stick the authors drive home one of the most important tools for improved performance is regular testing (ie students with 9 quizzes/year outperform students with a midterm and a final on almost all metrics). It seems like Bloom’s tutoring was combined with more regular testing than the control group. I expect the impact he found was a conflation of the combination of (at least) both methods
I don't see how that really negates the point about 1-on-1 instruction accelerating educational performance, though? The point is that a single teacher focused on a single student can give rapid, tailored feedback and quizes, they can't do that for an entire class nearly as easily.
The article corb linked to did not discredit 1:1 tutoring. It just said that Blooms original research was overstated and that a 2-sigma improvement has not been replicated. The article says that stand alone 1:1 tutoring only gets you about a 0.4 or 0.7 SD improvement (still a lot!)
So it’s still very effective and possibly even more effective when combined with regular testing for comprehension.
Main takeaway stays the same, but just caveats on Blooms original claims
Are you saying that the overall cocktail of interventions that Bloom implemented has not replicated the same benefits, or that tutoring alone doesn't deliver the ~2SD increase? Does the overall cocktail of interventions require 2 PhDs per student working 15 hours a day, or something?
Bloom didn't replicate.
Maybe (?) worse is that there is no evidence that the 2-sigma result would generalize or maintain over years.
Doing GREAT for one or two subjects for a few weeks is good. But if that better performance doesn't maintain then ... does it matter?
For what it is worth, I think Bloom's approach was correct. Just that his results are quite narrow.
I don't believe that you can find me ten elementary school math teachers that would willingly teach 2's complement to a child who couldn't master arithmetic any other way. This took until "college algebra" to fix, all the while the student was winning State Physics awards, in order to graduate high school while -still failing algebra.- (Four times through the same course, failing it every time. No, this was not from lack of work).
I'm not sure I understand your point?
Have any of the replication studies replicated all the non-tutoring aspects of the intervention?
I recommend reading the book on expertise that this review linked. Having rapid feedback on performance is an absolutely essential part of the "deliberate practice" mentioned here. It's not at all surprising that more frequent feedback works better (although I would still think of something that happens 9 times a year, which is around once per month in a standard school year, as a "unit test" rather than a "quiz").
The impact he made WASN'T REAL! Check the research record please!
I don’t love how qualifying Bloom’s 2 sigma has become a shibboleth for being able to talk about education research. But I agree the study has issues, has regressed, etc.
I would say that we hold it as an engineering goal, not a research goal. We believe we can get effects that large and are trying to do so. (I work for this org.)
Most of that criticism, as I read it, isn't relevant to the way the 2-sigma problem is being used here. If you are citing the 2-sigma study to promote after school tutoring, or an AI tutor, or some other tutor-specific intervention, then the details in there matter a lot.
But if you are citing it as a way of saying "we know ways of dramatically increasing performance, but they are too difficult to scale" (as it is being used here), then it mostly doesn't actually matter that they did more than just tutoring, or that it was a special kind of tutoring, etc. If anything that strengthens the point, that those results are _even_ harder and more expensive to scale.
The fact that it was on a narrow set of tests is somewhat more convincing, but, at least for me, doesn't really do much to change the larger point. I think adding those caveats, in this context specifically, would have just been extra cruft (on an already long essay) that wouldn't have changed the message at all.
Uncritically accepting both Bloom and Polgar should be grounds to disqualify this from competition.
Okay, but if we're applying that standard, shouldn't we also disqualify from the comments section people who complain about uncritical acceptance, without giving some outline of the key criticisms that should have been included?
Yeah, at least post a link man! You probably have much to share about those ignoranton the topic. Just a blog post or whatever.
Polgar falls into the midwit trap of being unable to understand intelligence, and thus just going with "everyone says this is smart." There are two types of game designers in this world, ones who love chess, and those who hate it. I know which ones create world-changing games (not those who love chess).
Polgar was used correctly. No one is claiming anything about teaching genius in this article, only teaching to a higher level of skill than typical; in that context, Polgar is a great example of what's possible.
Polgar wasn’t a grandmaster (some describe him as a mediocre player) Isn't it amazing that a very dedicated small-town chess player can raise world champions?
Bloom's results are indeed more questionable...
I would love to hear a perspective from another parent from the acx community to see if their parenting ties out. It strikes me as almost too good to be true.
FWIW, some relevant Reddit threads with negative reviews are
https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/17feoeu/a_school_with_no_teachers_alpha_private_school_in/ (mentioned in the OP) and https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/1hbahyt/private_school_comparison_alpha_versus_magellan/
Yeah… I’ve seen this. The commenters are all Reddit-flavored criticism from people who have no direct experience except for one (“dipnoob”), who said his daughter didn’t like it after going for a year. In his post history he also says he has an 18 year old trans daughter, and given the schools association with Elon musk it seems like that could easily be an area of conflict that isn’t necessarily related to education quality for the average student.
There are also two comments from actual students at the first link (ProgressPlane4465 and Relevant_Habit6774), both have no other reddit history which may or may not be suspicious (I guess it's easy to sign up just to comment on a single post and then it gives you this sort of random username? But also someone who wanted to astroturf would just do the same)
"I guess it's easy to sign up just to comment on a single post and then it gives you this sort of random username"
Yep, reddit selects a username for you
I wouldn’t expect much astroturfing in a city specific subreddit though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/17feoeu/a_school_with_no_teachers_alpha_private_school_in/mr5i99q/
> The school environment was also a challenge. It was very cliquey, with one main group of extremely affluent students whose parents were involved in founding the school. While they were generally friendly, they were not particularly welcoming, which made it difficult to form connections. Since Alpha offers so much independence, having a strong social network is key to both feeling a sense of community and succeeding in classes. That was difficult to achieve. There was also a lot of favoritism and nepotism. This group of students had access to more opportunities, learned about them before anyone else, and received extra support from staff. And, the affluent student alumni who received extra support are shown when they are showing successful results of the school. I am not trying to discredit these students hard work because I know they worked hard, but what Alpha shows on their social media is not the full picture based on my experience.
One of my biggest issues with the school was its approach to student performance. Instead of fostering a nurturing environment, Alpha relied on public shaming and a punishment-based system for students who fell short of their goals. The culture made me feel like I needed to be a robot rather than a student. I constantly felt pressure to perform, and even now, I struggle with an unhealthy relationship with school. I find myself constantly thinking about school even when I should not be worried about it. Alpha discouraged students from doing anything outside of school and made it seem like school had to be our entire life.
__________
Makes sense to me. Individualized learning does not lead to a “corpse spirit” in a class. But almost any school has to deal with bullying or cool/popular cliques.
The problem is that the comment is 1 month old, coming late to a 1 year old post. The review we're discussing which links to the reddit post was widely discussed on X starting about a month ago when it was posted as part of the ACX review contest. So it looks plausible that "ProgressPlane4465" came to write that comment b/c of their interest in AlphaSchool and not because he/she was organically reading the Austin subreddit.
I still think it's more likely that ProgressPlane4465 is a former student who learned of the review through ACX or X, followed the reddit link (or just searched reddit for Alpha School out of curiosity) and decided to leave a comment. But because the tone of the comment, the vocabulary, the syntax all read a bit academic and stilted to me ("affluent" rather than "rich"; abounds in folk-psychology cliches like "fostering a nurturing environment", "unhealthy relationship with school", "pressure to perform"), I can't also discount the possibility of someone with an axe to grind against Alpha School trying to astroturf.
I do like the comment and it agrees with my biases! It does make sense to me.
I'm not saying these comments were necessarily astroturfed. But the city subreddits are absolutely filled with paid and farmed posts. I have seen people do it firsthand.
Interesting - for political purposes, or commercial? Tell us more!
The fact that their only criticism is likely specific to that campus and not the methodology is actually a good sign of the methodology not being terrible.
Maybe this is interesting from Mexsal123:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/1hbahyt/private_school_comparison_alpha_versus_magellan/mny1hh4/
> As someone who goes to Magellan and has gone to Magellan for 11 years there were quite a few kids that actually transferred from Alpha to Magellan (for middle and high school) and when I asked them why they all said the same thing “its too small and there aren’t even actual teachers in the room”. Magellan offered them actual student-teacher 1 on 1. Not only that but while the IB is hard for some of these ex-Alpha students they have teachers with subject, specific knowledge that can help them out anytime they need it and not have to rely on an app or “guides”. I’ve seen first hand how a little bit of help from these teachers can really make these kids excel in the IB program.
I don’t know anything about Magellan, but I want to know more if students are struggling/excelling after transferring from Alpha to an another (more normal? Differently weird?) school.
One of the comments on the second posts says
> I know a family who goes to Alpha. They don’t learn history, and the other things I’ve gathered from the family about the school make me certain I would never send my kid there.
Its from 7 months ago so I wonder if they have talked to this family since 2022.
Links to two comments from kids who go to the schools
https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/17feoeu/comment/mr5i99q/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/17feoeu/comment/lm1ezva/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Hi Nicholas! I have had 2 students at Alpha's flagship location here in south Austin these past 3 years and have been blown away by their experience. Not usually active in ACX comments but have been reading for years and my husband is a prominent writer in this social neighborhood broadly (Byrne Hobart of The Diff, https://x.com/ByrneHobart/ )
My 9yo daughter is quite high ability and I very much doubt that anywhere else would have let her move quickly. I never had to make a single request for accelerated material or schedule a single conference to complain that school was too easy or boring for her, I have basically no friends in Austin who have not faced these issues in various other charter and private schools for their children. She has maintained the 99th ability not just for NWEA MAP score achievement but also the top few percentiles for growth throughout these 3 years.
My 7yo daughter is also bright but a tough cookie, the label is "2e/twice exceptional" i.e. on the spectrum but also gifted. She spends very little time on the apps because the school environment is challenging for her. Her growth has also nonetheless been incredible - I am extremely confident that the academic environment Alpha provides via its 2 Hour Learning platform is the most potent available today. https://x.com/gtmom/status/1931058079745056974
I believe in the model so much I've gone to work for Alpha/GT school and am moving my daughters to the GT school this fall.
Wow, thanks for this. Another data point that makes it sound amazing.
It's not gonna make the slightest difference Pamela. You and their father blessed your kids with their genetic endowment on the day of conception. Nothing will ever matter a significant percentage of how much that matters moving forward. So love you kids and accept that they will be what they will be.
It blows my mind that this argument is so popular with rationalists. There's a really large chunk of life outcomes unexplained by genetics. Even Bryan Caplan homeschools his kids! Studies aside... have you ever been a kid? Do you really think it's just irrelevant how you spend the first 12 years of your life?
I read this review and think, actually, sending your kids to this school *would* make more than the slightest difference.
1. Let kid do what they want.
2. Kid wants to drop out of school.
3. Kid drops out of school.
I mean, it doesn't matter, just accept that they're gonna be what they're gonna be.
Well, yeah. Here's the difference, though -- "kid drops out of school" has to mean "kid has a job lined up, or is currently bringing in cash." We hobble our children by removing their ability to create work-product and price it on the fair market.
I have paid money to a school that teaches glass blowing to 12 year olds. It's an orphanage in Mexico. They get burnt, in the process of learning. But they do graduate with life skills.
I don’t get this. Isn’t your view that effective instruction on basic competencies as measured in standard ways is a good thing for school or parent to care about?
Should one really just not give a damn about a school doing well by one’s child? Does absolute learning not matter? It’s all just relative station in The Sort, which is eternal? Hard for me to understand what prompted this reply.
This was my dads conversation with me about playing baseball:
Do you want to play baseball?
No.
Ok.
This was his conversation about guns:
Do you want to watch me clean this gun and learn how to use it?
No.
Ok. (But vaguely angry)
I can cite a few dozen examples.
I’d have fucking loved to play baseball and learn about guns. This isn’t me looking back with cherry flavored glasses on about me as a child - I would have loved doing those, and other, things.
But he didn’t know how to parent because his dad was a huge piece of shit and so he became a bad parent.
I find your post appalling - especially considering that it’s objectively incorrect about the nature of a persons being.
That sounds like being a good parent? I said yes to baseball and my dad taught me how to play. If I had said no should he have forced me?
I think he's saying he didn't have a warm and nurturing relationship with his dad. So "Do you want to play baseball?" didn't mean, "Hey let's go to the sporting goods store and buy a glove...I wanna show you how to get one that fits just right. We're gonna oil the glove and strap a baseball in it overnight to build the pocket...I'll play catch with you on the lawn so you'll be able to throw and catch and field grounders on the first day of practice...let's watch an MLB game on TV and then go see a minor league team. Wonder if we can spot the differences?" It was more like, "Do you want me to drive you to a strange place where a strange man will yell at you and the other kids won't talk to you and you'll probably be the odd one out and then you can walk home alone afterwards?" No Dad, I don't.
Kids don't know what they don't know. He likely had no idea what those things were or how fun they could be.
Less of this please
Sounds about right to me. I was given every opportunity, growing up, and raised very differently than my parents were raised—but I turned out to be a big piece of shit. It's caused my folks a lot of heartache and self-blame, but I really think there's nothing they could have done; I have been roughly the same person since day one. Always myself. Unfortunately.
I'm curious. In what ways are you terrible?
In a word: unsuccessful. In four words, maybe: "poor discipline; squandered potential."
--------------------------
I could probably have gotten into any school I wished, with at least some portion of the costs paid by scholarship, but I didn't think it mattered so much; I got the idea from somewhere or t'other that as long as it was a sizable, accredited university, then the rest would rest upon your ability alone.
No; actually, it turns out that people do very much care if you went to Dullard State (Podunk Branch) instead of MIT or whatever. Shoulda listened. Instead of being a good studious boy with lots of extracurriculars, I goofed off & relied upon test-scores to get in to the nearest big university.
Then, /again/ instead of listening to my folks, I decided I would choose my major on stupid criteria instead of doing what I liked. I like a lot of things, but mostly non-remunerative & not-so-Impressive™ subjects like history & linguistics. I think, looking back, that I have enough ability that—esp. combined with the Internet—I probably could have had a happy & comfortable life had I pursued such a course.
No, instead I decided I'd get a PhD in chemistry. Not sure what I was thinking, except "I want money" and "my dad got a hard-science PhD so I want to too". (In my defense, I entered university pretty early—boy, did everyone have some high hopes for me at that point; whoops! heh—but... I doubt I would have been any better had I gone in at 18 or 19.)
Turns out I hated that, though. Also turns out that I am susceptible to drug abuse when depressed & unsupervised. Ended up crashing & burning & leaving with only my undergrad degree, to spend the next years living with my folks & struggling to kick heroin.
Then I got another chance! I kicked heroin & found a lovely wife! I went back to school!
...except no, my stepfather died & my mom was ill, so I quit again. But then I found a great job!
Nah, ruined that too, eventually; I eventually quit when some nepotism was rubbed in my face—I had started thinking I was worth somethin' & could easily find another, similar position. No, turns out. It was luck that it happened the first time. I shouldn't have quit.
Drugs again. Wife left. Fuck it. Drugs harder.
Been "clean" a few years now, but looking back at the succession of mistakes that is my life it's almost like...why bother—y'know? I had some ability; should have been able to do better; but it has been squandered, instead.
(Haven't /totally/ given up yet, but... think maybe it's too late—like, whence a chance at a better life now? I dunno. Makes my mother sad, sometimes... but I pretend like I don't mind. I think she almost believes me.)
--------------------------
TL;DR: bad choices & drug abuse. Folks pulled themselves up from nothing to get advanced degrees, and never touched illegal drugs on their lives, and didn't quit excellent positions just because Mr. The-VP-Is-My-Daddy stepped on them. I had much more opportunity than did they—and yet I'm divorced, impoverished, and only still tryin' because my mother, ex-wife, and cat would all be sad if I left.
Went wrong /somewhere/... and it's the same way a lot of the extended family went wrong; I just got the wrong set of genes, I suppose, heh.
Please don't give up. None of this translates to POS. Your mother, ex-wife and cat are all excellent reasons to stay here. You are clean now. That is amazing--a lot of people never get there. One day at a time, right? There is so much going on in the world. Don't you want to see what happens next? I hope you keep looking for a job like the one you left.
I wonder if it would help to reframe your life story? "Smart kid. Parents took a big step up the socioeconomic scale and probably didn't have the social connections and family traditions that went along with their new socioeconomic class. Extended family with a tendency toward substance abuse; I got the bad genetics. Graduated high school early, which made everyone happy but put me in a position where I was making life decisions too young. I made life choices that were not cynical and advantage-seeking: didn't play the college admissions game and went to a large state U. Then made the OPPOSITE decision and picked a hard-science PhD, for financial reasons and to follow my father's path. It didn't work out--like many PhD students, I got stuck and floundered. Developed a drug addiction. Worked hard to resolve the addiction, found a great wife because I am a good and attractive person. Re-started at school...got some destabilizing life rolls and slipped back again. Got a good job because I am smart and personable...and made another non-cynical choice and quit. Relapsed. Lost my wife, sank down a bit farther, worked extremely hard and got clean again."
The throughline here is that you criticize yourself no matter what choice you make. What would it feel like if you STOPPED criticizing yourself? It sounds like you are still in touch with your ex. Why not ask her what she thinks of this comment? Stay off drugs and try to move forward. You are probably half my age. Believe me, there is a lot of life left.
Hey brother don't be so hard on yourself. You seem like a good dude. Also you write really well.
FWIW I never did hard drugs or partied much and I didn't have a ton of privilege growing up but I still squandered my potential somewhat. I wasted years just hanging out online, at least doing heroin would've been a more interesting story
Got some momentum about a year ago hoping to keep it going, things are much better than they used to be
Keep going man ❤️
This position is ludicrous – and I'm a hereditarian! Genes matter a very great deal to educational outcomes. That fact in no way implies that education environment does not also matter a great deal.
No one acquires knowledge of calculus or Latin "genetically." These things, and many other such things, must be taught, no matter one's IQ. And quite obviously, not all educational environments afford that opportunity.
Question: Out of the top 1% by IQ of the population of England in 1600, what percentage knew calculus?
Answer: 0%, because no one was teaching calculus in 1600, because it hadn't been invented yet.
QED: Acquisition of knowledge of calculus cannot be "merely genetic."
The point is that there are many educational environments in the U.S. that are relevantly analogous in that they are not affording the relevant opportunities. And this is the case regardless of the genetic basis of IQ.
Let me guess, you haven't got a dozen kids, raised in varying places? Having "good genes" isn't very predictive of geniuses. Know what is? Motivation -- "My parents are going to sell my house for a pile of beans. I know it! They're that dumb!" leads straight to getting jobs at 12 years old that most adults are not qualified for, in a rather desperate attempt to keep a roof over one's own head.
Geniuses tend to be motivated people, and they don't tend to do very well at school (particularly in the "middle range" of grades, as G isn't terribly well incentivized when you're being told to memorize arithmetic -- they take longer to wire their brains to be capable of using "general" intelligence).
I am a parent at GT School, the gifted school of Alpha. My son, Nate is reading at a 7th grade level, is in Pre-Algebra, and similarly ahead in science and language. He is 10 years old, and a young 10 with his birthday mid-April. After being bullied in two different (well-renowned) public ISDs we chose to switch to private. His first week of school he was beaming and exclaiming that kids “got him” at this school. Alpha truly does foster a love of learning and does accelerate learning. Though I agree it may not be for everyone, my son loves it and is thriving.
Also he is testing in the high 90th percentiles 96-99 across the board through MAP
How has his AMC 8 score improved? That's a better measure of math achievement in gifted kids in my opinion, given that it's designed to challenge that age group. I'm not sure how well IXL can prepare a student, even a gifted one, to tackle those sorts of problems. Do you know why alpha GT doesn't use a third part math program designed for high achievers like mathacademy or Beast Academy or EMF math?
If he hasn't taken the AMC 8 yet and he likes math, he'll probably find it fun. Let me know how he does: https://live.poshenloh.com/past-contests/amc8/2018
I'm one of the parents at the school and posted my perspective in the comments.
Parent of 3 kids at the Brownsville campus and there are commonalities in their success stories at the Austin campuses and they are income and background. Their model could theoretically work for everyone but they are much more focused on mass marketing and producing than in actually helping ALL kids. 85% of the students that started at the school in 2022 are no longer there, most of which were low SES students.
Is your experience that the Brownsiville campus isn't much better than a regular/public school, because the other kids tend to be from lower income households? Did you end up pulling out your kids, or staying the course (if you don't mind me asking)?
No, it's because Alpha never cared to listen to our community's specific needs. They wanted to replicate Austin and when the model didn't work for the students (due to the issues raised in this article), the students needed to adjust, not the school. Hung on for 2 years. No longer there.
What were the specific needs?
As a former Alpha parent I agree more with the Reddin reviews than any of the ones I've seen here. Income level might have alot to do with it.
The part about kids hounding you about wasting water was familiar. My 4 year old daughter is always like, dada turn off the water you don't need it :)
:tin-foil-hat: Schools teach children to turn the tap off while brushing because its one of many little wedges they insert between children and their parents that know better
:counterpoint: Running water while brushing is pretty pointless and wasteful. If an adult can't refrain from doing it (shouldn't be too hard), how can they reasonably expect their children to do anything?
It's interesting that people do this in the first place (it's pretty common). Is it learned behavior?
My wife keeps the water running while cleaning the house / counters. It drives me crazy. I guess we all have habits we picked up from our parents or whatever. I try to be more mindful on it while brushing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/homeschool/comments/x86xfq/how_long_do_you_homeschool_per_day/
Seems like most homeschoolers are already spending way less time than they would in a traditional public school, so this piece overstates the impressiveness of Alpha's homeschool pilot results.
Second this. It’s nice that it’s preassembled, but my kids are homeschooled and advancing at 1x speed on less than 2 hours a day (for a lot less than $10k per year).
I always point out that Finland and South Korea get near-identical PISA scores despite vast differences in hours worked, and Scott already did a piece arguing that homeschooled kids who do little or no work are only about a year behind their public-school peers.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even
That said, learning 2-3x faster with only 2 hours a day is pretty impressive, for the full Alpha program. It's a shame the entire progressive establishment are impervious to evidence.
"That said, learning 2-3x faster"
I haven't read the entire review (yet) but 2-3x sustained would have the kids performing at college freshman level by about grade 5. Do they? Or does the 2-3x mean something else?
I think the article mentions top-end students performing at the level of high-school graduates by grade 3, so... conceivably, yes? Maybe you hit a point of diminishing returns at some stage once you get into adolescence/adulthood- there are a lot of interventions that give impressive results in kids that don't persist into adulthood, although some socialising interventions do seem to be longer-lasting (I think Charles Murray wrote about this at some point.)
But even if the only permanent benefit is *not* squandering vast amounts of childrens' time that's well worth pursuing. Bring back child labour, unironically.
"I think the article mentions top-end students performing at the level of high-school graduates by grade 3, so... conceivably, yes?"
So I'd then want to see how they define "level of high-school graduates".
Do these 3rd graders understand Newtonian mechanics? Can they read, day, the Fagles translation of the Iliad and understand it?
Or does this mean that they can read a bit beyond Harry Potter and reliably work with fractions?
Do you know where to find the definition?
I'd... recommend reading the whole article and maybe contacting the Alpha admissions department, then?
So this is mainly measured by MAP test scores, which heavily correlate to SAT/ACT scores. This is mainly going to measure reading and math proficiency. So my guess would be, yea, a fifth grader in this system would probably be able to read and understand Fagles’ Iliad (though the depth of understanding is going to be limited by emotional development). Having the reading ability would enable them to have at least a conceptual understanding of Newtonian physics if they’ve encountered it, and I would think that if the curriculum contains instruction on application of Newtonian physics there’s no reason they can’t understand that as well.
It's in the review. It's entirely MAP score based. So top level 3rd graders get the same MAP score (multiple choice testing) as median high schoolers. So they probably don't understand Newtonian physics or read the Illiad....because median high schoolers can't do those things either.
Read the article first. It doesn't make much sense to basically have people explain it to you.
I waited till 7 to teach most of my five boys to read. In each case they were reading regular children's literature (My Side of the Mountain, Lord of the Rings, etc) within a year of learning to read. I gave them pretty much unlimited reading time. We did some math, geography, natural science, history. We were pretty unstructured.
Three graduated salutatorian, and one valedictorian of small public classical schools.
I think the point is not just that others shouldn't be allowed to waste children's time, but allowing children to waste their own time and pursue their own interests is very important.
Also, it is very important that you don't put before your little children people who are in a position of authority but who are ignorant and foolish. And I am afraid this is the case with most people working in public schools.
I'm curious about the fifth one. Was he a happy student or did something about the program not work for him?
Not unnecessarily wasting children’s time is definitely the most laudable part of Alpha
The 2hr claim is similar to describing your commute as "1hr on the train" without mentioning 15 min drive to the station and 15 min walk to the office.
The 2-3x was narrow measure of learning.
My impression from reading is that the author doesn't place very high value on the marketing claim.
(I work for Alpha.) We don’t think our homeschooling platform is impressive (yet). And yeah, “you can use time more efficiently than schools for learning school things” is not magic or unique to us.
It’s still true though, and I’m happy to be working on a project that elevates it to a constraint in the school system.
What is the primary reason Alpha’s homeschool program is not impressive yet in your view? Lack of incentive, culture, not strong enough teachers/guides? Curious if Alpha is considering more of a “local microschool with Alpha infra” model as well?
Yes, those things are the hypotheses. Modal at-home motivational system and culture don’t hook into the platform as well as Alpha school’s.
We are opening microschools, but in the sense of schools that start in one classroom, not in the sense of schools owned and operated by a third party community.
Long term I think open to exploring anything, but gated by quality bar; if we can’t figure out how to make it work at least as well as extant schools, the we’d rather acknowledge our limits and just not do it.
Interesting, so homeschools (or local microschools) where kids are learning at ~1x speed in 2 hours a day is not a successful enough outcome for Alpha? I would guess there is value for homeschooling parents to have standardized infra for the formal academics portion of the day. I suppose Alpha is not interested in that kind of a SaaS model / feels that it is not sufficiently differentiated there?
1x def not high enough. That’s the national average and it’s really bad. 2x is a minimum.
We’ll either get the product to a point where it works for homeschool (my prediction) or we won’t, but greatly differentiated learning outcomes are non negotiable IMO.
Agreed that it's really bad, but it still seems valuable to be able to get it done in just 2 hours compared to a full length school day. That would still free up quite a bit of time for homeschooled children. Or is the thinking that homeschooled children who would use something like Alpha already get 1x in ~2 hours through other methods?
This right here. Homeschoolers often spend way less time per day and get good results, with a wide spectrum of curriculum and approaches. That these Alpha folks did something similar and got results like that should not be news.
Small group tuition is really, really good. I strongly suspect that on average homeschooling accomplishes less per hour of pupil/teacher interaction, but in a class of 30 a pupil will get very little one-to-one attention.
If - if - AI can provide the same advantages, it will be a game changer, but the evidentiary standard claims that it can should be held to should be very, very high.
Loved this.
This is really interesting and will directly change my parenting from this day forward: my husband and I spend 30 minutes every morning 1-1 tutoring our kids, and I will start adding financial incentives from next week. Our 3yo can read and write (not very well! But better than most 3yo!), and the 6 yo is very good at reading but not quite at adult level fluency yet. I'll be paying him to read the Roald Dahl corpus and for completing handwriting worksheets. The 3 yo can get money for finishing each phonics book. Thank you for an informative review!
Any tips on introducing early reading and writing? I have a 2.5 year old and I’m very encouraged by these non traditional models. Big fan of 1:1 tutoring. Thanks!
There are two approaches I've used. The first is Siegfried Englemann's famous "Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons". The lessons are not easy and it took us 400 days to complete the whole book with my first son. However, it was successful and my son did learn to read. It was a painful process and the Distar orthography was somewhat frustrating and at odds with the Phonics approach taught in his reception class. Fortunately we live in England which has fully adopted evidence-based reading education. I didn't do the writing element which I regretted - my son's handwriting and writing ability was far behind his reading level which held him back somewhat. I will be teaching him "joined up" handwriting this summer before Year 2.
With my younger son we decided to use a different approach. We bought Read Write Inc flashcards (the phonics scheme his eventual school uses) and taught him the Set 1 sounds. We started "blending" very early, but this is the part that took a huge amount of time and perseverance for both my sons to be good at. This is going from c-a-t to "cat". I.e. blending "c" and "a" together to get "ca". We worked for 3 months on this before he got it - we basically did direct instruction (e.g. going "c-a, ca" now you try - the copying works!).
We then bought a different phonics scheme books, so that when he starts Reception (this September - he'll be a summer born kid - we're not holding him back - I still question our decision) he won't be bored/remembering the books so they can properly assess his level. He started reading these - exceptionally painfully - but it worked. I then introduced writing, again using RWI - first using wipe away sheets, then buying the RWI workbooks. I also make him write his name every day - he's a pro at that now. He writes something every day (i.e. The cat is is on the mat).
We've now moved onto Set 2/Set 3 sounds. And we've memorised high frequency non-decodable words, as well as working on sounding things out in your head.
It's pretty painful at times but very rewarding to see his progress.
How do you prevent them from just memorizing the phonics books, and instead actually learn to sound them out? I feel like working through sounding out with my 4 year old, she'll struggle through it to get a word, but then she just kind of knows it, and doesn't have to sound it out so much the second time and I feel like she's not actually getting good practice with reading but just partial memorization of what the word looks like.
You do both. We have "speedy green words" which we get him to sound out in his head and just "say" and harder words he has to sound out. You sound like your kid is already getting a great level of semantic knowledge where they don't need to sound i tout - lucky you - mine laboriously sounds out every word (the younger one) apart from the non decodable memorised words.
Yeah I know it's sort of a good thing, but we can't use the same texts too many times to practice sounding out so she's acquiring words but not getting that much better at sounding things out. I guess it will come, and we just have to get new books a lot.
We use little wandle letters and sounds, they have 9+ sets of books with 6-12 books per pack. not in danger of running out any time soon!
OK have reread this. We don't have this issue as the phonics scheme we are using has a huge number of books. We reread each book twice and then move on. There are over 100 decodable books in the scheme.
When my wife and I were teaching our child to read we had "hold out" books (maybe a Clifford book or a Little Critter book) that we knew the child had never read before. When the child could read one of these, we'd score his as reading.
This did NOT prevent him from simply memorizing all the words that would appear in the book from exposure in other books, but that is what we did. The "if he can read a brand new book" metric seemed to track what we meant by reading.
IME it's mostly genetic. My first learned all his letters by 18 months. My second still didn't know them by 5y. I didn't do anything differently; in fact I did so much more with the second because I was concerned. Turns out the first one was autistic and hyperlexia is a symptom. More of a curse than a blessing, in the end. Meanwhile the second did eventually catch up.
Why do you want to teach a three-year-old to read? (Serious question.)
1. Put a sock on your hand and play the sound puppet game to teach phonemic awareness. https://bancosparenting.wordpress.com/2018/12/29/puppet-sound-game/
2. Get a copy of Montessori: Letter Work and read it together regularly to teach the letter sounds https://www.amazon.com/Montessori-Letter-Work-Bobby-George/dp/1419704117/ref=asc_df_1419704117/
3. Get a set of letter tiles and play around with them. Play "Can you find..." with specific letters (calling them out by sound, not by name). Make up silly games like saying "alligator" and racing to cover up the "a." Build words and read them together. Kids can learn how to "write" by using a moveable alphabet to build words at a much younger age than if they have to wait until they have the motor skills to hold a pencil. https://www.lakeshorelearning.com/products/language/phonics-word-building/word-building-tiles-student-pack/p/GG954/
4. Once your kid knows all their letter sounds pretty well and is able to read short phonetic words, get a set of phonics readers. It should be the kind that gradually introduces new phonics rules and keeps sight words to a minimum. The main set we've used is Primary Phonics. Bob books are also nice for when you're just starting out because they're super short. https://www.amazon.com/Primary-Phonics-Complete-Storybook-Package/dp/B06ZYHBY75/ref=sr_1_1
Sit with your child and have them read to you. It's okay if they only have the attention span to read a few pages at a time, just try to be consistent about reading together every day. If they make mistakes, correct them but keep it playful: "What?!? 'Hat' doesn't start with a /k/! Are you trying to trick me?" Point out new phonics rules in the context of specific words: "In this word, the two o's make an /oo/ sound."
Put the supplies where they can reach and you'll know they're into it when they bring you the book to read or the letter tiles to play with. My kids figure out pretty quickly that I'm much easier to interrupt if it's reading related. Somehow they also have a tendency to get into reading when it would otherwise be time for bed — I call it "late night literacy."
If you try something and it's really not working for your kid, take a break and try again in a few months. No need to stress, rush or push, especially when you're starting so young. Not all kids will be interested at the same time and it "clicks" for different kids at different ages.
I assume some kids will need something more structured than this, but so far my kids have done really well with our casual one-on-one reading together approach! My 8yo has been reading chapter books for several years now. The just-turned-6yo is only just now starting to read books for pleasure but he reads very capably in other contexts (e.g. navigating the computer) and is at least two years ahead in terms of overall reading level.
I was convinced by this review's defense of incentives, but I *don't* think paying a kid to read Roald Dahl books in particular is a good idea. Reading fiction is something you want kids to enjoy for its own sake, and I think there *is* convincing research supporting the view that rewards undermine that sort of intrinsic motivation. (See https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/newt-gingrichs-reading-plan/ for a brief overview.)
I think rewarding kids for completing educational modules is different, because we don't really care whether kids enjoy those things for their own sake--the educational modules are obviously just a means to the end of acquiring the necessary skills and knowledge. But if you want the kid to WANT to enjoy reading for its own sake as an adult, paying him to do it now is counterproductive.
Isn't the whole point that you give them £1 to read Roald Dahl books and it doesn't impact on their enjoyment at all - instead it may actually improve their motivation to read even without monetary incentive!
I can't see how paying my son to read a great book would make him less likely to enjoy it.
I also don't particularly care about intrinsic motivation. I don't see why anyone should - I'm familiar with Alfie Kohn and think his influence on education is malign.
I think in a perfect world, kids would read a few great children’s books and spend their free time doing other things than reading.
But my experience of kids myself included and, coincidentally, my genetically related kid - who go on to become constant readers as adolescents and adults, is the personal search for books, almost furtive and almost entirely undisturbed; a lot of which is plowing through a fair amount of garbage, or short of that at the very least, deeply unedifying books.
Parents should probably not try to make readers.
I spent my whole childhood reading - it was an immense source of pleasure for me. I hope it will be for my kids too. But why on earth shouldn't we try to make readers, given the links between volume of reading and educational outcomes?
I guess we need Scott A. to craft a survey question to get at: if you are a reader - someone who, at the thought of a threat to vision, as is beginning to happen at my age, of course I’m nearsighted and astigmatic but I don’t mean that - your second thought is not: to lose the sight of beautiful waterfalls, or relatives - but rather: the fear of not being able to read text many hours a day!! - if you are that …
Were you made by your parents? Would you not be so without parental involvement? Did your parents have anything to do with this at all, or was it more like a pulling away from them into a private world?
I don’t know many readers (any beyond the nuclear family?) so they may have been generated by those contests in school or parents saying, now is your 30
minutes you must spend reading.
Some of us did indeed get in trouble for reading too late; and I myself once took my son’s copies of LoTR and hid them away.
I developed no useful skills as a kid but it may not be fair to blame reading. I watched a good deal of TV as well - enough to be full up for my whole life as it turned out.
I am an hours-a-day reader and my parents absolutely caused it. My entire family loved reading, and I loved them, so why wouldn't I want to read?
The first thing you'd see on the way into my grandparents' house was a bookshelf. One of my early memories is of my father cutting up MDF boards and glueing then clamping them together because he was making a bookshelf large enough to take up an entire wall of our living room. My grandmother would always ask me to show her what I was reading; today, my parents and I trade books almost every time we meet.
I wasn't directly paid to read, but there's a big charity event in Australia and elsewhere called the MS Readathon which rewards kids for raising a certain amount using t-shirts and bookmarks. Kids sign adults up to give them $X per book, and then collect the cash at the end of August based on how many books they read. I definitely read a lot more during that month, and I also liked the validation: "hey, here's this thing you're good at, but did you know you can get a sweet dinosaur t-shirt and help people with multiple sclerosis just by reading 2x the normal amount?"
I decided to learn programming after reading my dad's copy of "The Idiot's Guide to Visual Basic". When I was a little older I bought a five-year-old copy of "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" for $2 second hand. I read both of them cover to cover multiple times, even though the latter was the size of a phone book. Those books, and by extension, reading itself, formed the basis for my entire future career.
I think we might have had very different childhoods and might feel very differently about reading because of it.
This is a very interesting take I've never seen before - what's the negative of reading? That many books are bad? What would you want kids to do instead?
I am a lifelong voracious reader. It is a lonesome activity and my social skills are certainly worse than if I read 20 per cent less.
It's a totally solitary activity that erodes your relationships or need for or interest in other people, as well as your physical health, when you do it obsessively, as I did. I can totally see how I could've been a physically healthier person with more and better relationships if I hadn't had my nose in a book most of my life. It trains you to just be locked in your own mind. It's not all bad and you don't want kids who NEVER read, but many of us clearly took it way too far.
I'm in the camp that probably read a bit too much as a kid. It was fine and fun and helped me get a stellar SAT score. Overall, though, I probably would have been better off reading 20-40% less and putting that time into more sleep and things like physical activity, socializing, the school play, etc.
As an adult, I also find that I spend a bit too much time reading and not quite enough time doing. I just find good writing a bit intoxicating. It's perhaps the world's least harmful thing to overindulge in, but one can overindulge.
> What would you want kids to do instead?
Physical + social stuff - playing with other kids, being active, etc.
There is the famous quote by Pessoa, "Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life."
That said, it's one of a dozen ways of performing escapism. You can make socializing easier for the bookworms without reducing reading's pleasure. There are even situations (e.g. bullying, not fitting in) where socializing can't be improved, and reading then serves as a refuge.
I can see why common-sensically it might sound silly that paying a kid to read would make them less likely to enjoy it, but there does seem to be a fair amount of evidence that it can genuinely have that effect.
For example, there are experiments that show that if you reward kids for doing a particular activity on one day, they're less likely to freely choose to do that activity if given the option on the next day. Now, admittedly, we have to take basically all psychology studies with a grain of salt, but in this case, I think this really does line up with my own experience of my own motivation. If I got paid to do something before, but then later I'm merely offered the opportunity to do it without pay, I have some tendency to now think, "Why should I do it if I'm not getting paid?" Doing it "for free" now strikes you as a waste of time. And this does seem to be born out by research.
Sending the message that reading Roald Dahl is something you need to be bribed to do, rather than a delightful thing you *get* to do, seems like a bad idea to me.
But if you don't particularly care about intrinsic motivation, I guess we might stand too far apart to have common ground for conversation. I can't imagine not caring about intrinsic motivation. To me, it seems that happiness in life absolutely depends on being able to enjoy for their own sake as many of the things you *have* to do as possible.
I think all the evidence we have shows that intrinsic motivation is one of the most heritable things there is! So to the extent my children do or don't have it, that's not something I can influence.
The research quoted in the article seems at odds with what you're saying - that actually rewards don't make kids less likely to pick that activity - they make them more likely to choose it!
There’s a big difference between an incentive to get over a hump and kickstart a process, and an incentive as a crutch to solve for an exercise that a child really and enduringly does not want to do.
If my picky toddler won’t try a donut (a real example), I can bribe them to take one bite, and then the issue is obviated. This kind of thing comes up all the time. The point is not to be an imperialist or a reductionist about incentives, it’s to have them in the toolkit.
My husband gives our kids money for household chores (which I disagreed with - I felt it should be an expectation not something to he rewarded). He's read my comments, disagreed with bribing to read books and has countered with incentives to use family Duolingo which I have agreed with.
Not sure why that should sound silly. After all it’s a pretty common observation among adults who make a beloved hobby their career is that they lose a beloved hobby.
Of course mileage can and does vary there – might also be an interesting thing to study: What about personality and activity structure makes adding material incentives to passion work or fail?
This is an ill-fitting analogy, the kids aren't supporting a family with their reading wages
So, same for a lot of single people who carry on with jobs they don’t really like any more for the lifestyle?
One of the risks might be that there’s no guardrail against your son rushing it and reading badly to get the money, or choosing easier books to get they money rather than something they might enjoy more. If they’re reading out loud to you, and you’re choosing the books, this is hopefully fine
I say, don't micromanage. There aren't that many Dahl books. Let them read what they want and pay up. As a kid I hated when something that sounded fun turned out to have all these terms and conditions. "Good practice for being an adult", yes. "Incentive", no.
That's a good idea actually. Read any book of x pages or more and get a quid. I like it!
The point of the argument here is that external incentives is the first step on the ladder to internal motivation.
The hypothetical for reading fiction would be:
Child doesn't like (or maybe just doesn't care about) reading -> incentivized to read -> finds out that some books were actually enjoyable -> decides to keep reading on their own
That, to me, is at least plausible, as a way of encouraging a child to find out whether or not they might enjoy reading. For it to work, you probably want to be incentivizing a wide range of different books until they find out what they like.
There's also the skill hump to get over. When you're not yet that good at reading, reading a whole short book is a lot of effort, and the story isn't enjoyable because the struggle of actually reading it is so hard. After a lot of practice, you get better at reading and it becomes easy, and the story is its own reward.
I'm still undecided on the idea of monetary rewards for basic tasks, though. I know my kids will do just about anything for a dollar, but I also know that if I overuse this then soon they'll be refusing to do anything without getting paid... and then they'll start negotiating for more money.
Curious: do you think *monetary* rewards are the best way to go with a 3yo? Back when I was bribing a 3yo to read, it earned him ice cream; I'm curious about the relative merits of ice cream vs cash. (That former 3yo is now 6, and I'm planning to bribe more reading with movie nights -- TBD how well that works.)
I think there is some evidence bribing with food might lead to a bad association with food = rewards = obesity. I don't know how right that is, but in any case, cash rules all and you can use cash to buy what you want, including an ice cream. I think he's probably too small to get it just yet, but we'll see.
My approach was "the 3yo should get an immediate reward; an extra dessert seems like a sustainable level of immediate rewarding". (This is presumably the mechanism behind stickers, I just never quite figured out what kids are supposed to *do* with the stickers they get, and consequently my kids don't quite seem to know either.) If cash works as an immediate reward for a 3yo (and if you actually keep cash in small denominations on hand! -- part of my problem was that I don't), then I don't disagree that it's equally good.
I will report back!
food = rewards = obesity
hahahahaha what
Eating too much food can lead to obesity - hope that helps
seemslike catastrophizing to me, but I'm not a parent
This is really interesting, thank you ! As a parent of similarly aged kids, do you have any advice on how to make those 30 mn a day a pleasant time ? I feel that every time I try to teach my son, I have a hard time staying calm and he is not very interested either.
Stay calm, over praise your child for tiny successes ("oh wow!!!! you're soooo clever - that's right - that sound is "oy, a toy to enjoy"!). Be very firm; the exercise/reading does not end until you say it ends. Use rewards/incentives - we already say "you can watch TV, but first, finish your reading". Be very clear at the beginning what the expectation is - i.e. "first we're going to practice your writing with the yellow sheet, then we'll do your red book, then you'll write your name, then we'll practice some sounds, then we'll do red words, then we'll read two pages of your book".
It's not going to work. I'm telling you now - this will not prove to be meaningful for your kid or kids in general.
Incentives? I mean behaviour incentives work incredibly well for all kids so it kind of makes sense. Or something else?
As someone who doesn't mind breaking conformity but DOES mind 40k a year, is there any other way to get something similar to their software?
I think the home school product has become available. But my googling can’t find it. It’s been quoted at $10,000/year though and doesn’t include afternoon programming, “babysitting” or incentives
You can get on the list to be notified about the homeschooling version of 2HL here https://go.alpha.school/home-school
In Alpha's pilot of this program, however, it has been much harder to get the 2x+ learning results in the home environment without the wonderful guides and various tailored incentives.
Thanks! Surely you could do your own incentives program if you can see the testing scores?
Oh certainly, it's just that homeschool users (even early adopters) may not understand how critical the motivational model/incentives really are. We can probably do more in that regard to educate/support as we continue to experiment and roll it out, but ultimately Alpha cannot control whatever is happening not within its walls.
I homeschooled another child of mine for a while and it did not go well for many reasons but I did find that incentives at home felt much more manipulative to him - whereas learning alongside a bunch of other kids who are also racking up their app time and cheering each other on and sometimes going on outings together as a reward feels way more natural. At home with just me and him it felt admittedly lame : "do your work!! don't you want these stickers?? chop chop " 🥴
Love that point at the end! I think eventually some kind of cohort-driven model with the homeschool program so kids have that would work well.
Perhaps the unnaturalness is that you already have a love-and-nurturing relationship with your child, and now you're imposing this weird structure with a different set of rules and behaviors.
How about a homeschool exchange program? Parents partner up and exchange kids for (home)-schooling. Now the parents can retain the parent-chile relationship. The teaching-reward relationship now might feel natural to the kids because it's the only relationship with the partner parents they've ever known, and the partner kids have the same relationship going on. The teaching parents then tell the parenting parents what rewards their kids have earned; the outings are with their own family or jointly.
This sounds like a worthwhile idea, certainly many homeschoolers are quite creative, resourceful, and committed to making it work.
I have some extenuating factors that made homeschooling only a stopgap solution for us, and it barely served even that modest purpose for a few months, so I don't mean to say any of these issues are strictly insurmountable while using the Alpha apps platform or any other curriculum at home - just that there are several dimensions of major trade off.
Local microschools using Alpha infra sounds like the most scalable version of the Alpha School model tbh
I wonder why their marketing leans so heavily on AI instruction when that angle is very unpopular and seems not even really true?
Is it unpopular among their current target audience?
(Alpha parent who now works for them) There is AI behind the scenes refining our apps platform, including eye tracking and lots of interpretation of student learning behavior to determine when the material needs revision vs. when the students are choosing to waste time, etc.
But you're correct that the "AI tutor" is not like talking to an LLM/chatbot or anything of the sort, and that many people who see various media coverage are misinterpreting it as such.
I wasn't part of that strategic decision, to lean into "AI" branding but, as a parent who was considering Alpha a few years ago, the "AI" component didn't loom large in my own decision making. It has probably changed by now as AI enters the popular discourse more and more.
I feel like "data driven" would communicate the same thing in a snappy way without sounding like "we put your kids in front of a chatbot."
I'm working on an SAT math AI tutoring app for this very purpose - would sincerely love your feedback. Aaris - https://aaris.ai/
Know some presently studying for the SAT - thanks. We’ll check it out and let you know.
Thank you so much! Feel free to reach out to me at abishr@aaris.ai if I can help in any way.
Given the section about their current consumer base, it might be that it's really unpopular among the general populace (although even that isn't actually obvious to me) and much more popular/less unpopular among the group of people who are considering these kinds of schools.
If that's the case, it might make sense now, but it could wind up being a poor choice down the road depending on how large their scaling ambitions are.
I believe it's for PR & virality purposes. Everyone's wondering how AI will "transform education" and journalists are hungry to write about it. Alpha Schools has existed for a while, has always used personalized apps, and only got this level of media traction when they started saying it was 'replacing teachers with AI.'
If that makes some parents and educators angry, all the better for provoking discussion.
I mean, there’s also a sense in which it’s true. The in person teachers don’t give academic instruction or do lesson planning. AI is integrated into evaluations of mastery and decisions about next steps.
But yeah, I do think that people are (naturally and understandably) misreading it as “replacing teachers with chatbots”.
Hi Matt! Definitely agree there's a sense in which it's true - though the guides give some form of instruction during afternoon workshops, yes? And their presence (paired with incentives) seems to meaningfully drive completion of the 2 hour learning, given that homeschool students achieve less impressive results. And the virtual coaches available for extra support when kids get stuck could also somewhat qualify as teachers, right?
And yes, although I'm pretty deep in this stuff (spoke to people at Alpha back in 2020 before Gen AI boom) I was surprised to read that chatbots aren't a bigger part of the 2-hour-learning model now.
I think when people hear about AI replacing teachers, they expect this to mean that education is being done cheaper and more scalably - whereas Alpha's pitch is AI = education done faster + more effectively. It's more like "AI replacing some of the typical functions of a teacher's role, while actually having a student:teacher ratio lower than typical schools and paying teachers more, leading to a counterintuitively higher tuition price." Of course this is addressed really well in the piece, but I agree there are major scaling concerns. Nonetheless I do think there are ways to make the model work to some degree at home + virtually.
Gonna try to find time to write a higher-level comment on the pedagogy since this review is so rich and fascinating. For full disclosure in this thread, I've spent the past 5 years building Prisma, a virtual school in the same innovative education space.
Yes to all of this.
An enormous portion of our costs right now are paying for AI models, which will come down.
Teacher salary is actually not the bottleneck, which I think should remain high. Nor is teacher:student ratio, which will be and in some cases is higher in other models that use the platform successfully.
The system does not function without teachers and the purpose of the system is not to replace teachers. The purpose of AI is specifically perfect and automate academics, which is a process that is not complete for some of the reasons you note.
Edit: I think the reality is that we are just dipping our toes into scale. There’s a lot to figure out. That’s the attitude from this side of the project.
Love all that! And I think that messaging will resonate and not offend - most parents know and feel that the best teachers are the best at driving relationships that enhance learning, and academics can be optimized other ways.
Hi Emily! I am Alpha parent who now works with them/Matt as well. You're right that there are several sliders here, not far from the usual "good, fast, or cheap" pick two situation. Unfortunately conventional education actually picks 0.
The counterintuitively high tuition price has several causes: huge expense of the behind-the-scenes tech stuff (building and improving the apps, this is AI powered with eye tracking data etc), guides who earn 2-3x public school teachers in the same areas with dramatically higher teacher:student ratio, and some of the workshops are quite expensive (indoor climbing 3 days/week, swim lessons, field trips to a ranch...). These could be adjusted in various ways in the future , like well paid guides in different ratio, cost effective workshops, cheaper buildings in lower cost zip codes.
The guides do create and implement the afternoon workshops, and some of those have used LLM/chatbot type AI, as a kind of educational dessert and not the main course. Here is a video about the recent "AI Imagineers" workshop, my daughter is the one making animal trading cards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foGBJHdjhZg
Will look forward to your additional comments!
Very cool, love the video. Can easily see the way 2-hour learning could become the seed/base and some models build on top of it in a much cheaper way.
This sounds very cool, though I neither live in Austin nor have a spouse who is open to homeschooling, so I don't think I'll ever be able to use it. Alas.
The one thing I *wouldn't* be happy with is the lack of a few things that I considered really essential to my own education: (a) significant periods of sustained silent reading for pleasure in elementary school, (b) in middle/high school, classes where everyone reads a classic work of fiction over a few weeks, discussing it as a group as they go, and (c) lots of practice writing, including creative writing, where it gets read and critiqued by a human--at least by a human teacher, but sometimes also by fellow students.
These are things that you can't (or certainly shouldn't) get AI to grade, where performance isn't going to be clearly quantifiable, but they should be included.
I had similar thoughts! I’d heard that kids in general aren’t reading full books in school these days, so if there were a way to combine that with the accelerated study in other areas, that would be ideal…
I went to a Montessori school from preschool through 6th grade, so I have a lot of appreciation for parts of this approach (I got to have a much more self-paced experience than most kids do, though obviously not to this extent).
The things I would probably not have liked:
-So, if you’re in the GT program, you have to do chess *and* quizbowl *and* public speaking? Sounds great if you’re into all of those things; not if you’re interested in some but not others. Or is the idea “some schools choose to include Latin or programming in their Official Curriculum; we’re choosing to include public speaking in ours, so everyone has to do that”?
-Similarly, I have this vision of my 7-year-old self cruising through 4th- or 5th-grade math and English while still officially not having “leveled up” from first grade due to not doing, say, the paper airplane thing (maybe due to some difficulty at first, subsequently out of something like spite).
-Not a fan of the idea of everybody learning just enough piano to play a grade 1 solo, and then not playing piano anymore. Maybe this is just my personal bias (for me, chess is the thing I would have chosen to pick up for a few weeks and then put down, but for them, it’s music).
Hi there, I am Alpha parent who's gone to work for them, my 2 daughters are moving to the GT version this fall.
Since core academic learning is so efficient when done on the Alpha apps platform, there is a ton of time for workshops, even with a relatively short school day that starts late (~8:45a-3:30pm). You're right that some kids will like some of those activities more than others, but they've got to be doing something constructive with the time, and the workshops rotate each short session (~6 weeks) so it's not like being stuck coming into school at 6am every day for quiz bowl that you hate.
I have exactly that kind of salty first grader lol (cf https://x.com/gtmom/status/1931058079745056974 ) . In practice the wonderful guides eventually get them through each of the check chart activities required to advance levels, though students do genuinely do this on different schedules and may indeed be delayed for failure/noncooperation. Students can move up at each session throughout the year so this is not disastrous like being held back an entire year.
Since GT school is about to go into only its second year, we are still experimenting with the schedule and may be moving some of those activities into an optional after school hour for more depth and continuity.
Personally I hope they/we also find a way to do piano (or music broadly) more continuously, my daughters missed that one! stay tuned!
>> -Not a fan of the idea of everybody learning just enough piano to play a grade 1 solo, and then not playing piano anymore.
Nothing to stop anybody from continuing to play piano.
It's possible that you'd get more people continuing by getting everyone to do it for a bit. (Though, one could argue that doing that isn't fair to people who really have no interest.)
I’m planning on adding literature (and history and some other things) along these lines to the Alpha system. There’s no resistance to it, and there are patchwork solutions in place in the interim. It’s just a young project.
One of my spicier takes these days is that AI absolutely can grade writing assignments with quality above the median level of a human teacher. The standard caveats about motivating kids, human connection with teachers, and so on do still apply. But I think the benefit would be worth it. Feedback on demand on writing could be as big an unlock for a kid motivated to write as the feedback described in the review for other work.
>in practice they use 20:1 guide:student ratios (vs the 5:1 ratio at the Alpha private schools)
These ratios are reversed, right? Or do they really have more teachers than students?
There are some ratios later in the piece with the same problem, and since they refer to normal public schools it looks like they must be all reversed. Is it in the spirit of the contest to let the author fix errors like that? It's pretty distracting.
Yes those are reversed, fewer teachers than students (I am Alpha parent)
They're reversed, as 4gravitons explains. There's only one place where it's stated correctly:
"At the five‑to‑one student‑to‑teacher ratio Alpha runs[...]"
The review also suffers from bizarre use of hyphenation, misuse of homophones and near-homophones ("skimming" vs. "skimping", "shoot" vs. "chute", etc.), and other MUGS problems.
The review is very informative and extremely thought-provoking, but I expected that a finalist of an essay contest would have better writing fundamentals.
I “disaglee”
It's intentional, so you know an AI didn't write it.
(/s, but only a little)
Came to the comments to make sure this is noted - It was really distracting.
> "When the data and anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. It’s usually not that the data is being miscollected. It’s usually that you’re not measuring the right thing."
I'd like to offer an anecdote of a recent Alpha School graduate I know that supports this review (which was great btw).
I know a guy who graduated from Alpha School in ~2023. The class size was only about 10 people, so he was either a late entry, or one of the early beta testers from back when Alpha school was a new concept (thus likely not getting the full benefits of K-12 Schooling). This guy is one of the most impressive people I've met.
In his senior year, he raised ~$3 Million dollars to build a dirt bike park outside of Austin, apparently with some competitive advantage of shuttling bikers to the top of the hill and being larger than the other parks. He successfully built the park, operates it at a profit, and is now building a national mountain bike apparel brand that seems to be doing quite well. He's 19 by the way.
He told me about Alpha school shortly after graduating when he was looking for his next cofounder for his new company, and I remember I was thoroughly impressed at the time. We were both looking for cofounders at the time, so we had some in-depth discussion on past achievements, business philosophy and whatnot, meaning I got a good look into how he had become so successful literally in high school. It didn't end up working out, since we were both guys in the "driving seat" so to speak, looking for people to join our existing venture and business idea rather than looking to join someone else's.
He obviously isn't going to college, but he doesn't need to since he owns the majority of a company that returns more money than the average American makes in a year, while also owning the majority of a $2M+ piece of land. If he wanted, he could probably not work for the rest of his life, and he's 19 mind you.
Now you might be thinking; "Ok. This guy is a rich kid. His dad or family friend probably gave him millions of dollars and he built a return-producing asset with it, big whoop. It's no big deal to build a known business model with daddy's credit card." and that's the same thing I was asking him. It's impressive to build a company, but a lot less impressive to replicate a known business model when given a large amount of money to throw at the problem. Bike parks are certainly common enough, and it's not like he was building the new "Uber for dogs" so with a few million dollars it seems like no surprise he succeeded.
How he raised the money is the interesting part. He cold-called (actually called, something people don't do so often anymore) every multi-millionaire in Austin he could identify until he found one that would listen to him. He pitched the idea; secure $1M in investment, purchase a piece of land outside of Austin that's a good fit for a bike park under a mortgage, operate the bike park (and apparently there was a lack of bike parks around Austin) according to known business principles, and return a profit. He was a competitive mountain biker, and had worked at a bike park previously (I assume one of the afternoon activities that Alpha School encourages), and that was a very attractive part of the pitch to an investors.
Anyway, to sum it up he raised money, bought a property, built his bike park, and is now building his next thing. I've met a LOT of people in the startup space, like literally 500+ founders, and his story sticks out to me as one of the most practicable (he didn't try to reinvent the internet in his first company) and successful (he actually built a profitable company on his first attempt). Now you could say, as a lot of people like to do about successful startup founders, that his success was due to his unique position. That it wasn't his individual magic that led to success, just his circumstances (Bezos raised money from his parents, Elon's Dad's Emerald Mines, Bill Gates being the 0.01% of children with regular access to a computer when that was uncommon, etc.) but... isn't that kind of the point here? If that's the critique we levy against him, then that's an accolade for Alpha School! Since they're the ones who created the circumstances for him to succeed in a major way.
I don't have kids, and probably won't for the next few years at minimum, but when I do, Alpha School has been at the top of my places to send them to school for the past couple of years. My previous plan was to do elite Aristotelean-like home schooling/tutoring, possibly in conjunction with other like-minded parents, but if there's a functional model already out there, why reinvent the wheel? This review simply increased my confidence in Alpha School.
My prediction is that this review will win. SSC readers already are really interested in alternative forms of schooling, it's very well written, extremely detailed, and probably the most "review with potential real world impact" on the list of finalists.
The only bad thing I have to say about Alpha School is the branding. A-priori, the name sounds like something Andrew Tate would come up with, and its relative unspecific "We use AI to teach kids to learn!" copy on their website makes them look like the very many AI vaporware startups and/or Web3/Crypto/NFT bs. This is completely a personal issue with their branding, not substance though, and is just my personal impression, and I don't think they should change their vibe because of the association with less savory lines of business.
Edit: Apparently he is going to college. When I last had a long conversation with him it was summer after his graduation (or maybe he was intending to take a gap year? I don't remember), but apparently that changed. It still stands that he, more than most people didn't HAVE to go to college though.
Great comment.
I think the kid was Rhett Jones. He didn’t want to go to university but his parents insisted he go. I think he ended up choosing University of Austin (not UT Austin) as they agreed to give him some credit for running the bike park.
(I would love to read a review on the University of Austin from a ACX reviewer…)
Also worth noting that Rhett is definitely to most successful to come out of the Alpha High program. He was in the first class and he is the one the school brags about the most (they even filmed a documentary - I think this might be it — https://youtu.be/IsUwcO61irw?si=TkObs_CY34iwD2Pj )
Ahahah I wasn't aware he was their biggest success, and that definitely qualifies my anecdote. My assumption was that while he was better than average, doing great interesting things was pretty typical in the senior year at Alpha School, although I now realize that might not be the case.
I wasn't aware he ended up going to UATX, but it makes sense. It's probably unnecessary in terms of educational outcomes, but university provides structure at a time in life when structure is quite important. Wunderkind with money, prestige and free-reign do whatever he wants is a very common backstory behind washed-up adults. Having the skills and mindset to build a business is rare, and incredibly valuable, but that isn't necessarily the same skillset for a life of flourishing. Especially if you lack some other important things like humility, genuine friendships, discipline, delayed gratification, etc, which quick success early in life might make harder to develop or retain.
From my interactions he seems like a really great person though, although I don't know him personally well enough to make any judgements. Life is long, and 3 years at a unique university won't set you back if you're already well ahead of the pack.
To be fair there were only 10-12 graduates of the first class (Rhett was in the first graduating class) so the fact he was the most successful is not like it was a super high N. And the author of Austin Scholar (who is mentioned elsewhere in the thread) was also in the class.
I heard there was someone else in the class who was apparently a national-level waterskied who also had photos published in major magazines. And someone else who published some sort of computer game that was mid-successful.
Second class just graduated. Have not heard details about them yet.
It would be interesting if Alpha School published their success stories on their website, at least the ones that have a public presence like Rhett, Austin Scholar and that national-level water skier.
That might eventually create the wrong incentive, to do flashy things that will get you noticed rather than do things students actually enjoy doing, but it would also serve to show exactly what outcomes the school produces, which is ultimately what the public will judge it on.
Either way it’s far and away where I’d send my kids (if I had any), and I’ve half convinced my cofounder to send his kid there when he’s old enough, especially since he already lives in Austin.
As someone who went to a magnet high school (TJHSST) that had a wonderful culture of kids enjoying STEM for its own sake which has gone downhill since, the point about creating the wrong incentives hits hard. It seems almost impossible to avoid though… how do you market an alternative school without highlighting outlier success stories? Kids having more time to just enjoy what they’re doing doesn’t seem to be enough of a selling point for parents to shell out that much cash.
Frankly their homeschool option seems the most promising to me in terms of something that could actually scale. Alpha School infra in local microschools around the nation would be a wonderful outcome IMO
Thanks for sharing your experience. (I'm not a paid subscriber, so I can't upvote.)
Likes are turned off for everyone including paid subscribers (This is unique to Scott on substack). If you read on mobile you can still like comments, but that's not intentional.
Interesting. A week or so ago, I was notified that someone upvoted one of my comments on ACX. I assumed the distinction was between paid and unpaid subscribers; it's funny that it's actually because of a bug in the mobile version.
If you were remotely aware of the history of schooling, you would know exactly what it is - yet another hype-ridden gimmick that will not be remember a decade from now. The brain at the other the if the technology is what matters, and it can't be changed by software.
We have different foundational beliefs when it comes to education. An ideal school for you would be the least desirable school in my view, and vice-versa for your opinion on my ideals.
Opposing ideologies will look at the same information and come to opposing conclusions. For me, a school that promises to increase excellence while also increasing inequality, is great, since I value excellence and don’t care much about equality. For you, a school that gives further advantages to the intellectual elite, is a perpetuation of inequality and therefore undesirable.
I am forever grateful to my good friend Tracing Woodgrains's reframing of the values in modern education. It sounds so obvious once stated out loud in plain English, but nobody had been saying it.
If you're ever in the Philly area, come to an ACX meet-up! At our meet-up last week, Trace eviscerated Keeping Track, the book that was the foundational text for applying Marxist principles to public education. It outlines how an education system should create equity in all students and cut down the elite as a terminal goal. The point of this style of education is not to educate students or teach skills; it's to achieve equality of outcome.
This sounds bonkers when you actually spell it out, but every single School of Education in the US believes in this as their core value system.
What day of the week do you have meetups?
Typically the final Thursday of each month, with adjustments around holidays. We haven't scheduled our July meet-up yet.
I drive to DC from NYC multiple times a year and pass through Philly on my way. I have a trip scheduled for Tuesday, but in the future I’ll see if I can time a trip for the last Thursday of the month.
You made quite a few comments under this review with a similar message, and similarily without bringing up your reasoning/evidence. I do agree with you in that my prior is that "revolutionising education" is overwhelmingly likely to not work out, but that's a prior that can be overcome, and this review seems to have put in some work towards overcoming it. Could you expand on your reasoning or why you find the review unconvincing, aside from just priors?
I'm skeptical of many of his views but on his blog he has a lot of essays about education.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work-20
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-commentary-is-dominated
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-week-educational-assessments
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/elite-education-journalism-still
I thought he had a summary post somewhere to his greatest hits but I can't find it.
Thank you very much, I'll read these.
He has a book, The Cult of Smart. I thought most of it was great but remember the ending as basically a commercial for Bernie Sanders' platform.
>Caplan showed that, within the normal range, nothing you do in education or parenting matters.
If I am not mistaken, didn't Caplan argue only that nothing we do in HIGHER education matters? Has he made that same claim re K-12? The decline in test scores associated with COVID remote learning (and decline in attendance) certainly implies that K-12 is more than just signaling,
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g4_8/national-trends/?grade=8
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/student-level-attendance-patterns-show-depth-breadth-and-persistence-of-post-pandemic-absenteeism/
Bryan addresses that directly back in 2015:
That is remarkably unconvincing, since the only "data" he cites is his n=1 personal experience. And is completely inane:
> My K-12 memories include thousands of hours studying material I knew I’d never use after the final exam. The three years in Spanish were especially traumatic, but they’re only the tip of the signaling iceberg. How many years did you study poetry, art, music, history, and civics during elementary, middle, and high school? Even math often smells of signaling; honors math students usually have jobs that don’t use advanced math.
The test of the effectiveness of three years of K-12 Spanish is not whether the student ends up happening to use it; it is how proficient the student is in Spanish.
And the trope of "I will never use it, there it is valueless" is completely inane. First, although I have not used 90 percent of what I learned in school and you have not used 90 percent, IT IS NOT NECESSARILY THE SAME 90 PERCENT. A school cannot know what each student will use in the future. Second, the idea, because I do not use historical knowledge at work, the history I have learned is useless is obvious nonsense. Eg: How do know that "the Democrats are the real racists because slavery" is a dishonest claim? Because I know who the Dixiecrats were, among other things. How did I know that the claim (which I heard on NPR at the time), "the Obama Iran nuclear deal is really about oil, because the Secretary of Energy is involved in the negotiations" is stupid? Because I know enough civics to know who the Secy of Energy was. How do I know that, no, the chance of Biden winning PA and GA was not one in a quadriilliion? Because I know enough statistics to know that what assumptions underlie that claim.
And, I note Caplan, and economist does not bemoan the hours spent teaching Economics, a graduation requirement in California and, I assume, elsewhere. How odd, since almost no high school grads use econ at work. But some economics knowledge sure comes in handy in deciding who to vote for for mayor of New York.
Honestly, Caplan's take here is no obtuse that it is hard to take anything he says without a very, very large grain of salt. He certainly should not be cited in an article re K-12 education.
Bryan addressed the confusion about his beliefs about k12 directly back in 2015:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/02/signaling_in_k-
(He may have changed his beliefs since then)
Your link is broken, this is the correct one https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/02/signaling_in_k-.html
On Caplan's beliefs, I believe he has said basic reading, writing & arithmetic can be learned early on in school, but after that it shifts away from building human capital.
Quick note on a minor confusing thing: This post at one point says that a "mastery test" is like a final exam, but later implies that it's something that happens every day. I assume this is just a terminological error or something.
HI Taymon, I am Alpha parent who's gone to work for them. While the mastery tests are indeed like final exams, the other mastery implication probably refers to the fact that, day to day, Alpha's apps platform enforces mastery learning on each discrete skill.
Mastery learning is a core Alpha value. Most (possibly all) commercial education apps out of the box do not insist on mastery and instead pass students along with traditional "passing" scores of ~80%, which soon leaves them with big holes in their knowledge.
To be clear, I was not making a comment on Alpha School itself, I was just making an editorial suggestion for how the author of the review could make it slightly clearer.
Understood, just for the drive by other readers out there, cheers!
Our family has found that incentives work, and video games are a particularly effective carrot. Our homeschooled kids have to complete their modest IXL workload and practice piano for 30 minutes to unlock 30 minutes of game time each day. They do it pretty much automatically each day with minimal complaints.
How did you develop your homeschool curriculum? Having a kid soon and would like to homeschool but don’t know where to start
We're pretty relaxed. We figure if we can ensure our kids are literate and numerate, they'll be able to learn whatever else they ever need to. Of course, they do more than reading, writing, and math, but that's our core focus.
We used to use Kumon workbooks, but I was manually grading them so sporadically that they didn't get meaningful feedback. That's where IXL really shines--it gives them immediate feedback when they make mistakes, and this ensures mastery.
Although I am impressed by the entire IXL curriculum, we only use it for math at this point. The other major component for us is Classical Conversations, which is a community-based classical Christian program. I think the CC experience will vary considerably depending on the quality of the local community, but ours is great.
Very interesting. Thank you for taking the time to respond!
This brings back memories. My parents did the same thing with me and piano. Worked like a charm, but I never did get around to independently loving the instrument even as I became skilled at playing it.
I think I would still trust data over anecdotes, regardless of what Jeff Bezos says. I come across WAY too many anecdotes from unreliable people on the internet (often anti-vaccine or COVID denialists).
I think you have to be looking at well-selected anecdotes whose provenance you understand. Anecdotes of random people on the internet are actually just really bad data.
I wouldn’t accept what Bezos says very literally, but there’s a clear phenomenon he’s talking about that is probably easiest to see in the context of “evidence-based medicine”. That particular movement says that basically only randomized controlled trials count as evidence. This meant that things like aspirin, whose efficacy was established before there were such studies, needed new studies in order to “count”.
As far as I know, there is no “evidence” in that sense that a sustained yoga practice “works” for anything, but anecdotally, a large number of people seem to find a benefit for their yoga practice. The big issue is that it’s hard to even precisely formulate, let alone measure, the benefits that people identify from their yoga practice, and then on top of that there are all kinds of statistical confounds (it’s hard to randomly assign people to a yoga practice and have it stick, and there are antecedent differences between the people who do and don’t stick with it, and there’s no way to blind the assignment to the subjects, and many of the benefits take years to emerge).
This is the sort of case, where there’s a well established practice, including serious people, where I wouldn’t accept trust the anecdote (particularly from my own experience but also those I know well) over the data.
It's true that you can't blind the subjects of a yoga study, but I think you can look at objective measurements for which the subject's awareness would be less relevant. Without that, I would still be skeptical.
Sweet Jesus, this article is almost 18 thousand words long.
Scott, let me strongly suggest that you put some sort of upper bound on the lengths of these reviews in the future. Three thousand or five thousand words should be ample for making a point or three about virtually anything. The authors can always link to more elaborate supporting material if they really want to go in depth.
I liked this article a lot, so really appreciated the length--I wouldn't have liked to miss out on any part of it.
I think it's best to leave the length up to the author. Reviewers can penalize they think were unnecessarily long.
I strongly disagree, and as a parent with kids about to enter school, I found the entire thing interesting.
It’s easy to summarize long posts with AI, but hard to find detailed and well-thought-out posts in the first place.
"Brevity is the soul of wit,"
A phrase that around here is not a hit,
"Brevity is a great charm of eloquence,"
A sentiment scoffed and guffawed at hence.
Readers can always stop reading if they find the material isn't interesting enough to hold their attention. A word count limit would've eliminated Lars' excellent series on Georgism, among many other important posts.
The trouble is that if I don't finish one of the contest entries, I feel like I can't fairly vote on any of them.
Also if I don't finish a review I don't feel like I can engage in the discussion because it's inevitably "duh that thing was addressed at word 12,932".
This review started out very interesting but I lost interest in the "Does It Work?" section, whose content I could predict before I started:
1. It certainly seems to!
2. Look at these graphs!
3. But watch out for these confounders!
4. So basically we don't know, but also yes.
You are not obligated to read every single review. That's explicit: Scott asked people to pick as randomly as possible, knowing that most people wouldn't read every one. If it's acceptable to rate reviews without having read every single one, then it's okay to stop reading a review which isn't holding your attention and penalize its rating accordingly.
"Not interesting enough to keep me reading all the way through" is a valid critique, though if you find yourself skimming or skipping frequently, you might want to get your content elsewhere.
You are correct that it's not good practice to engage in discussion before reading the entire review, but if it wasn't interesting enough to read all the way through, why do you want to waste your time discussing it?
> The trouble is that if I don't finish one of the contest entries, I feel like I can't fairly vote on any of them.
This is a mistake you're making IMO. A review's ability to keep you interested enough to read all of it is an important part of its quality. If it's failing to do that, you should vote in a way that reflects that or you're biasing the overall results.
I can relate to your reaction, but I don't think that's a popular position. Judging by their votes, ACX readers consistently prefer longer essays. The book review contest winner in 2023 was extremely long too. This year 5 of the 10 longest essays became finalists, including the three longest ones. Unless Scott sees some kind of utility in restricting the length of entries, I doubt that is going to happen.
ACX readers have the highest essay length stamina of any internet audience on the planet
My friend asked me to look over a text conversation he'd had, to get my read on the situation. He warned me in advance that it was "a lot" and that I didn't need to feel obligated to read the whole thing.
I said "I read Scott Alexander for FUN. Your text conversations do not scare me".
Granted, I've also read War and Peace a few times, but only because it's the perfect book for reading before bed: interesting enough that I won't not read it, but not interesting enough to keep me from falling asleep. Also, it's so long that it's practically a new book on every read-through.
You make me want to read War and Peace for a second time. Do you have a particular translation you recommend?
The only version I've read was translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. I enjoyed it immensely.
This is the blog with posts titled “much more than you wanted to know” (and it never is!)
Strong disagree. Many of Scott's essays, and many of the better previous ACX contest finalists, were well beyond 5k words and I'm glad they were.
If you don't like it, vote against it. If most of the voters disagree with you I'm not sure why Scott should feel obligated to enforce your preferences in particular?
Because, for right or wrong, most people are not comfortable voting against something they haven't read.
If you're comfortable agitating for it to be banned from the contest, but not giving it a bad rating, that seems like a you problem.
If we're worried about the overly scrupulous biasing the results I guess I'd be fine with an official statement of policy that making a good faith effort to read an entry and losing interest partway through is valid grounds for a bad rating.
I strongly agree with an upper limit on word length, for at least 3 reasons:
1. This is a contest, but a 2000 word review is a different art form from a 18,000 word review. Neither is inherently better or worse, but comparing reviews to reviews instead of reviews to novellas makes the contest more meaningful and more fair for everyone. If Scott wants to open a novella contest with a minimum word count of 18,000, he can do that too.
2. Most people don't have time to read excessively long reviews, and are therefore locked out of the voting and the discussions. Yes, I know you can vote against long reviews without reading them, but doing so feels unfair to me, Melvin, and probably a substantial fraction of other would-be voters.
3. Most people who don't finish the review aren't going to vote, and the people who do finish the review will give it a high score (otherwise they wouldn't have read the whole thing). This means the voting is biased in favor of long reviews.
The point of a review is to entertain and inform you. If a review is so long you can't be bothered to read it, it has completely failed to do either and you should absolutely give it a bad rating. Although I'd encourage you to give it at least a bit of a chance to hook you in first- if you're not willing to read an extremely long post regardless of how good it is, I'm not sure why you're reading this blog in the first place.
That last sentence really is the meat of the problem (he say, having just tapped out a couple hundred words on the subject). Asking for shorter reviews on ACX makes me wonder if these people are tourists, brought to the blog because the contest got linked somewhere and now trying to make it more like the rest of the internet.
"If a review is so long you can't be bothered to read it, it has completely failed to do either and you should absolutely give it a bad rating."
I disagree. There are entertaining and informative books that are thousands of pages. That doesn't mean holding a contest where voters have to judge ten 1000-page reviews is reasonable. Not everyone has the time to read even the most interesting 1000-page reviews, and Scott has an interest in keeping community activities accessible to a reasonably large fraction of the community.
This sounds like a youse problem. As was pointed out on reply to Melvin, the readership consistently prefers longer essays, and length is not exactly a new feature for SSC/ACX content. If some people don't have enough time to read an essay in one sitting, and they're unwilling or unable to break down their reading into multiple sittings--well, first, I have to wonder how they read books or even posts by Scott himself, but also--I don't think it'd be a good thing to artificially crop content just to accommodate them. I want to see the best writing out there; I have no trouble giving a poor rating to a review which doesn't hold my attention for its entire length (the 0th Dimension review could've been two sentences and it still would've been too long to hold my attention); and while I suspect most of the core audience vote the same way, I don't think it makes much difference.
In a world flooded with TikToks, YouTube shorts, cable news soundbites, image macros delivering punchy one-liners in Impact font--where everything is chopped into easily-digested chunks free of nuance or depth--we have found one space where people are not only free to take deep dives into their preferred subjects, but are in fact encouraged to do so. You can find content of your preferred length almost literally everywhere else on the internet.
"The readership consistently prefers longer essays" partly because those who prefer shorter essays are locked out of participation, if not by official rules, then at least by personal scruples and unspoken norms. (Speaking of official rules, I think one iteration of the book review contest did say you can only vote if you've read all the entries, though I might be misremembering.)
"well, first, I have to wonder how they read books or even posts by Scott himself"
If they're here, they probably prefer posts by Scott over posts written by other good writers. Also, this review is substantially longer than most posts by Scott. Even if that wasn't true, reading one long Scott post is 1/10 the effort of reading ten long reviews.
"In a world flooded with TikToks, YouTube shorts, cable news soundbites, image macros delivering punchy one-liners in Impact font"
Do you think it's possible, even in theory, for a post to be too long? If all posts on ACX were a million words and the comments are either sparse (because nobody has the time to read the posts) or uninformed (because nobody has the time to read the posts), would that be the optimal outcome? There's clearly a happy medium in length between a soundbite and War and Peace. I'm saying that this review is longer than the happy medium, and the Georgism review definitely was.
The problem, as you state it, is that people don't vote unless they read every entry all the way through. This filters the voting population for people who, at minimum, tolerate long essays, and introduces a bias into the voting.
1. What portion of voters do you think read every entry all the way through? It would need to be a significant portion in order to have any effect. I certainly didn't. I didn't even get to the last alphabetical "Other" document, and, as previously mentioned, happily skipped most of the "0th Dimension" review, among others
2. Even if it were a real effect (which I doubt; my answer for 1. is "a few percent at most"), and even if I agreed that it's a negative effect (I think it's a feature, not a bug, to filter for people who can read longform content, but I am glad this is an organic effect of the community Scott has attracted and not the result of an official minimum word count or something), the correct solution would be to remove the source of the bias by clarifying that people can vote without reading every single entry all the way through.
You're describing a problem where the results might be shifted somewhat as the result of implicit beliefs; your proposed solution is a hard-coded restriction baked into the rules. The contest isn't inclusive enough, so we need to... exclude a significant portion of the most popular entries? The Bay Area House Party series has an example of this very thing, where one guy's parties become increasingly Inclusive as he bans more and more people; eventually, it's so Inclusive that he's the only one allowed to attend.
As to your last question: yes, it is entirely possible for an entry to be too long; the acceptable length is based on the quality of the content. I read Scott's posts because they're good, and I don't mind the length because they're good (indeed, you can see people in this thread talking about how they want MORE). I've already brought up multiple times a specific example from this very contest which I skipped after a few paragraphs because it was uninteresting to me, so clearly I am capable of NOT reading or enjoying a long post; conversely, my Keep Notes file lists several reviews which I rated highly as "Short and Sweet".
As an aside, the Georgism contest entry and the accompanying guest-post series comprise some of the most important writing Scott has ever had on his blog, and I've read War and Peace several times, so you're barking up the wrong tree with your examples (though I think I'm on the extreme end, even in this community).
To give specific examples of short essays I rated highly:
Balatro
Disco Elysium (the first one; the second one got stuck up its own ass and degenerated into LLM filler)
Permaculture
Dall-E
I think long things are fine but most of the review isn't about the thing being reviewed which is why it's too long
Excellent piece, written ACX-style and good chances to win. I felt it could do without the complaints about their first DEI private school (but fun to read). And I wonder why you guys pay those sort of money - instead of getting a private tutor from idk Russia. Or unschool, put the school+college money in an ETF and on "graduating" your kids have enough dough for life. Numquam parum est quod satis est.
I can’t speak to author but institutional school has advantages, and a gifted school in particular has a major cohort effect. That’s part of the appeal for me, anyway.
Sure, the parents have their reasons to spend that money. I guess: *their* marginal use of spending it elsewhere may be small. - Just saying a) that sounds like insane amounts of bucks to me (and I am a teacher - who loves to work with smart learners and never met a teacher who loves teaching 'dumb' ones). Still, the marginal use of 12*40k+(elite)college= 700k? for the kids may be different. Meeting other kids from your income-cohort: why should that be hard? - An K12 education that costs half a million bucks is neither revolution nor reform, just: a non-starter.
1. GT School costs a lot less than Alpha, fwiw.
2. A typical K12 education costs a quarter of a million dollars.
3. But I agree that cost sensitivity is important in engineering education solutions. Hard problem.
In Germany, it costs the government 11k US-$ per year in Germany - often 13 for years. (I was aware that NYC is much costlier). Surely, I consider neither German nor US gov-schools worth the money. Hoping for an acx review of private schools in India. ;) Tracking eye-movements during screen-time is not what I would invest in. Alles Gute! Bon Chance!
Cursive? So I'll never get past 4th Grade-yes-I-know-not-literally.
I haven't willingly used cursive since the end of Grade School when the expectation changed to typing. Blue-Book essay exams were my nemesis.
Lol, this stuck out to me too! I was nodding along the whole time like "ah I would have loved this school so much as a kid", until I saw that and immediately switched to, "I would've flamed out and begged my parents to transfer me". I couldn't force myself to learn cursive back when there was some semi-coherent reason for it, but imagining trying to do it *now* with the full knowledge that it's entirely useless seems like it would've been even more impossible.
I was thinking at first that maybe they only need to complete a few of them, but the review seems to indicate they need to complete every single item on that list, which also seems a bit odd and against the personalized ethos.
Having seen it in practice at GT School, I believe that (a) cursive is a standin for “handwriting practice” and (b) the dosages of cursive instruction truly were not very high. None of the students seemed especially tortured by it (these were 6 to 8 year olds).
Your description of private school sounded so awful it made me nauseous. I can't believe people even consider putting up with that for 35k a year
This was a good review!
This might be a dumb question. But isn't homeschooling pretty similar to 1:1 tutoring? If the parent doing it is educated, motivated, and following something like The Lost Tools of Learning substack (or something else, I just mean a well-rounded curriculum), I would think that at least in the elementary years it would be pretty similar. Sure, it might not be exactly 1:1 (as I'd expect most homeschooling parents to have multiple children), and the parent is probably not going to be a subject-matter expert in every topic the kids ask questions about, but teaching them to research and find the answers is also valuable. You've still got rapid feedback and tailoring to the kids' needs and interests.
Why, then, aren't all homeschoolers Polgars, and why do the homeschoolers in Alpha do worse?
Hypothesis: the *typical* homeschooling parent does not put in anything like professional full-time attention to their child’s academic motivation or the wider motivational system in which academics occurs. Obviously there are going to be a lot of exceptions on the right tail, which is why you get Polgars and why some of the homeschoolers in Alpha do well, but it would explain the modal outcome.
I think a big aspect is also selection bias. I home ed because my son is autistic and I would say well more than half of the homeschoolers I know are doing so due to some form of disability; in some cases, cognitive disability.
The other issue for more religious families are large families. It's extremely hard to home school if you are also taking care of under 5s. And there's also some evidence they under-educate girls purposefully. There's also the unfortunate trend of classical education which leaves children with significant content gaps.
We also know the recent trend of 'unschooling' tends to result in pretty poor performance.
If think if you took a subset of families with a secular, academic educational philosophy, who were neurotypical, and there were no more than two kids in the family, the results would be better.
I suspect this actually is most of our homeschooling families but I haven’t dug into the data. Our primary homeschooling beta testing audience at the moment is people who say “I want to try this but cannot move to Austin”.
Points taken about the range of homeschooling contexts though.
Appreciate your comments throughout this thread and your passion for this project.
I kinda want to try this but cannot move to Austin? Filled out the form to check it out.
But... we already do a mix of ixl and beastmath. ChatGPT, Project Gutenberg, and the library help a lot with reading samples. I can see the appeal of monitored progress and guides, but I feel like most of the value we're missing out on is in interactions with peers to supplement parental motivations.
So I'm mostly curious about how you would keep up the value prop for homeschoolers.
We have a local homeschool coop that offers some classes similar to some of your life skills courses, so you can pay ala carte for 1-5 classes per week on subjects you're interested in. A new online curriculum would compete with all these other components we use to round things out, it's hard to make a one stop shop with all those elements.
Sounds great! I don’t think it’s impossible to get as-good-or-better effects in a homeschooling environment, just difficult. Not even difficult in the sense of “takes a ton of work”, more that a lot of judgment is involved.
For things like IXL we build that judgment into our system by setting the smartscore minimum to 100 and adding an additional layer of AI evaluation based on screen recordings.
Generally the problem with edtech apps is that their mastery standards are either non-existent or (in the case of IXL) far too low. So a lot of our value add is putting them in a platform that tortures the apps into having a high bar for mastery.
You're definitely right in general. But also my colleague Matt Bateman is correct that the latter description fits those piloting the Alpha homeschooling program thus far.
If these smallish family & low special needs users have trouble achieving good results without the in-school motivational model offered by bricks and mortar Alpha, a general (homeschooling) audience would likely find it even harder.
Maybe parents are more susceptible to accommodating their child's natural inclination to be a bit lazier than they would optimally be. "I've done so much math today, can't I go do [other thing that is also constructive but is not math]?" is easy for a teacher to say no to, but maybe not Dad.
Also having an external tutor is more motivating for the child
Homeschooling varies widely but, among reasonably conscientious and educated/intelligent parents, there's little doubt that it achieves outcomes at very least comparable to conventional education and in fewer hours per day.
The Alpha apps platform stands to put this process on steroids, as each lesson in core academics is offered at the exact right time, with the appropriate number of repetitions, to full mastery. Thus you get even faster progress in usually even less time.
But the apps can only work if you do them, and I for one am a failed homeschooler. I have 2 kids at Alpha and one who needs something a bit different, homeschooled him part of his kindergarten year recently. My son is a huge extrovert and he hated being home just me and him all the time, very low mood.
At home, the incentives I put in place soon came to seem like plain manipulation, whereas at Alpha, the guides get the students working at the same time, cheering each other on before and after, the emporium feels like a proper, well-stocked store for spending one's Alpha currency (not just a lame treat mom is dangling over your head). At home it's easy to let the minimum instruction time drag on and on, or you get started late, etc. Not impossible to manage these factors but not for everyone either.
The "if" here is huuuuuge. Never forget that most people are dumb chimps.
I believe the homeschool program is the closest the the real metrics. Kids at Alpha are working far more than the advertised 2hrs a day. The motivation part is to push them to complete more masteries out of their "own choice". The writer states his kids were working through a vacation. Which is common at the school. At home, I'm assuming they would only do the advertised 2 hrs. What I wonder is, what are the instructions given to the homeschooling parents. Do they encourage the parents not get involved and let the kids learn on their own (which was said to us at Alpha) or are the parents allowed to teach content and support their learning. If its the former, I would again assume the homeschool program numbers to be the most accurate.
I can assure you that kids at the Alpha flagship school do not work more than 2 hours per day, in fact many work significantly less like my first grader, see results here: https://x.com/gtmom/status/1931058079745056974
My older daughter has completed 3 years at Alpha and she spent perhaps 2 hours per week, if that, doing additional academics only the most recent year, 3rd grade.
The author sends their children to the gifted & talented version of Alpha, which does more like 3 hours of core academics during the school day. Those students are the ones who want/need even more academics in some cases.
Because, of course, Polgar's research is bunk.
And yet it* moves.
*the chess piece pushed by his daughter who - by unpredictable and ineffable circumstance, wholly unrelated to the intensive training she received from an early age under the tutelage of a father who just happened to have the best chess genes in the world - became the best woman ever to play chess and peaked at top ten in the world.
I realize that sounds snarky, and I do think a bit of snark is warranted when you refer to Polgar's life work as "research" that is "bunk" rather than practice that produced three extraordinary players of a game nobody in the world is born knowing how to play, but I would be curious to hear how you reconcile this frame with their unambiguous demonstrated narrow-domain expertise.
Chess is rote-memorization. That's not intelligence.
Are you under the impression that learning openings is the entirety of chess?
If you want to be snarky but at least vaguely grounded in reality you'd say that chess is "just pattern recognition." But it turns out pattern recognition is pretty closely linked to intelligence!
I'm under the impression that I know a game designer who routinely beats highly ranked chess "experts" through sheer psychology (you may variously term this "acting like a horse's ass" or "trolling" but it does win games).
Pattern recognition in the general sense is navigating uncertainty, which doesn't exist in chess. There's a reason why talented game designers hate chess, and people who love chess make poor game designers (but decent puzzle designers).
One could say the same about school, which is the main point of the argument. In fact, school requires a hell of a lot less novel thinking than even CM-level chess, nevermind the world class chess. I find it highly unlikely that Polgar's method succeeding at creating world class female chess players but would have failed at creating students who learned 2.6x the speed of their peers with similar math scores.
It is honestly astonishing, isn't it, how much we value conformity over genius?
Tensei, the Japanese word for "genius", more aptly characterizes the issue... geniuses are the people with novel, disturbing ideas -- who you only talk to when you absolutely are at wits-end.
I believe that Polgar's method would have done about the same, yeah, given... most midwits as starting points. Given geniuses? That's a different matter -- they honestly tend to struggle with rote. (My friend the actual genius believed very strongly in "making the teachers work to grade his papers"... he wasn't popular among teachers, needless to say).
The GT kids don't seem to be struggling with the same system used by Alpha school
The academic results seem impressive, but is there any data about the effects of that amount of screen time upon developing brains, or are such concerns only made up by neo-Luddites? Or is it that screens are now ubiquitous and therefore any attempts to reduce screen time are futile? Just suck it up and accept that human brain development and eye development are potentially permanently affected? Assuming that the trade-off is that accelerated learning will mean more time for other potentially non-screen pursuits, we just might have to accept it the way we have to accept the eternal presence of microplastics in our blood and tissues.
There is no research indicating that 2 daily hours of screen time (which is not very high, and not dissimilar from typical in the majority of American public & private schools) is detrimental to elementary+ age kids.
Indications that kids under 5 should be limited to no more than one hour of screen time daily. After that age, inconclusive - some evidence pointing to higher rates of depression & anxiety in teens as daily screen time increases, but these studies (at least ones I've seen) don't typically differentiate between academic screen time and social media/gaming use. To me there's obviously a major qualitative difference between two hours of reading/science/math practice and spending your entire evening scrolling TikTok and Discord.
Thanks for the information. I appreciate it, and agree with you about the qualitative difference between one type of screen time and another.
I think most complaints about “screen time” are really about the junk that it’s filled with, whether it’s algorithmically-curated social media or short format video, or trashy freemium games. If you could ensure that people were having live video conversations with interesting people, or watching classic movies and reading classic novels and playing deep video games, then the screen time itself doesn’t seem like it would be as big a problem (especially if there’s something making them get up and do something outside every 20-30 minutes so their eyes refocus).
Are there screen time studies that adjust for content? And speaking of breaks to let their eyes refocus(which I agree with), are there any studies that specifically look at attention span differences with regard to amount and/or content of screen time? i.e. long-form video essays vs. "shorts"?
Just my opinion, without any sources: I think that the "dangers of screens" are the following:
* If children spend most of their time inside, their eyes may not get enough sunlight. Sunlight is important for the eyes to grow healthy -- people may not realize it, because our eyes are good at adapting to light, but even in the shadow outside during the day there is 10x more light than in a brightly lit room. It may be difficult to make your kids spend a lot of time outside, if there is too much fun on the screen.
* Small screens (e.g. phones) are much worse than large screens (e.g. large monitors). In front of a large screen a child can be relaxed, and can let other children watch the same screen. In front of a small screen the child will crouch and try to get as close as possible to the screen, and if another child wants to take a look at the same screen, they will start to fight.
* It is important to sit straight in front of the screen, to prevent back injury. The risk of damage is multiplied by the time spent in front of the screen. With other activities done at table, such as reading or writing, children often vary their positions, but in front of a computer screen they often sit motionless for long periods of time, sometimes in a bad position.
* By letting your children access the internet, you expose them to all kinds of bad content, such as the stupid videos with hypnotizing music for the youngest ones, social networks and cyberbullying for the older ones, applications optimized for addictiveness, and various predators.
* Humans need moments when they have nothing to do, and can just relax and think. That's where creativity comes from, and probably a few more things. The problem with screens is that they can fill the entire day with content, often stupid, never leaving a moment for the mind to digest the information.
I think it is probably okay for children to spend a lot of time in front of a screen, as long as you make sure that the screens are large enough, the children are sitting properly, the content is reasonable, and the children also spend a lot of time without the screen, both playing outside, and doing something else at home.
I have students at Alpha and couldn't have written this better myself. Since my kids seem unwilling/unable to sit still anyways and love to play in the yard, my main concern is crowding out other valuable uses of time (sleep, socialization) rather than purity testing the ways they do spend their time.
Am I reading this right? Now, they’re collecting 40K in tuition from extremely bright children with motivated parents and teaching them in a specialized environment full of enriching externals but running at a loss. The author says the software piece is fine but basically useless without that structure. And their financial plan is to massively expand — to reach children who are not naturally bright, and do not have motivated parents, and to strip away the non-essentials, which the author says is necessary to make the program work. Doesn’t this sound like the classic tech disruption strategy, but for education? Offer a very good but financially unviable product to start, drive the competition out of business, and then offer the true, shitty, profitable product once there are no longer viable alternatives?
There are many bright children at Alpha but we don’t do an academic screen. Lots of students come in behind.
The “massive expansion” is stepwise and will occur across models with differing cost constraints and price points. I’m sure we’ll learn a lot and have to adjust a lot. The unit economics are not at all crazy. A lot of the R&D cost will *definitely* go down. The AI model costs right now outstrip almost everything else.
Screening for ability to sit quietly and follow instructions on a screen for 20 minutes, on top of high tuition (implying successful parents), seems like pretty strong filters for at least above-average academic ability though, no?
There are all sorts of optimizations involved in helping students sit in front of a screen for 20 minutes. It’s not assumed at all. The assumption is the platform/school-as-a-whole has to earn this.
But, honest question, what would Alpha actually do if they had to deal with students who did not learn the expected minimum during their 2 hours? Those are exactly the students that generate the most work and expenses in other schools.
Perhaps paying them could motivate them to work a little more.
But even if not, at least they wouldn't be slowing down their classmates.
This happens all the time. Teacher resources are deployed to help solve motivational issues and diagnose blocks immediately, but the main thing is that really that the engineers and curriculum developers are deployed. The core assumption is that the system is always at fault, not the student, and that the system needs to be fixed.
The minimum standards at Alpha are much higher than the national average, but they aren’t insane or anything. They are achievable by the vast majority of students.
Does Alpha GT use mathacademy or Beast Academy for math instead of IXL? If not, why not?
Yes on MA. It’s ”in addition to” IXL.
The reality is that IXL set to smartscore 100 (and tortured into compliance with our platform) is quite good. MA is also extremely good.
And I definitely have intentions to explore BA/AoPS particularly for GT School.
In general the particular apps on the platform are in a very non-final state, so if you’re trying to understand the nature of the project, the trajectory is important. (If you’re a parent deciding on next year, obviously the current state is also important.)
They only screen at GT School which is the gifted program, but I believe they don’t screen kindergarteners, only kids with previous schooling.
They are screening kindergarteners now fwiw, with the Cog-AT test, which can be taken by students who don't read yet. Hope to meet you soon Katy, I am mother of Alpha students but they're moving to GT School this fall
Are you saying you moved from another alpha school to GT? If so, why?
I don't think the author ever said "bucks" are non-essentials. They don't seem so expensive that they need to be targeted when even public school teachers can often afford to fund class prize pools on their own salaries.
Great review!
I'm not American so forgive me if this is a stupid question - it sounds like Alpha children complete the full curriculum in half the number of years the state expects? What do they do when they've finished the curriculum? In the UK there basically isn't any way to skip from primary to secondary school early, so if this model was expanded to the UK it seems like there would be a few years a thumb-twiddling built in. But presumably the solution to this problem is so obvious to Americans that I don't think I see a mention of it in the review.
Presumably they just start taking university-level classes? This is how it generally works in public school as well to a limited degree (e.g. AP classes).
While it is also very difficult for most bright children to 'skip ahead' in America, it *is* possible, and the main roadblocks are typically actually at the institutional rather than state level (because most institutions do class-based instruction grouped by age & ability, they do not want kids getting more than a year ahead because then the kids will be with much older children who are not at the same level of social and emotional development).
After that the hard part is basically just finding a university willing to accept a young student (though this does happen, so clearly it's not impossible) or alternatively building a post-curriculum after the state curriculum is completed.
There are universities with special programs just for gifted kids - I can't recall them, one was at a UC, one at bard, one at a private all girls school that accepted girls as young as 13. Chatgpt probably know the specifics.
(I am parent of Alpha students who's gone to work for them) Not stupid! - basically high schoolers begin to move in different directions. Some students are set on entering very competitive colleges, for them doing the minimum to have finished high school equivalent is not enough, they continue to do math/literacy to prepare for SAT (college entrance exam) and Advanced Placement coursework (college equivalency program). Others move more in an entrepreneurial direction, for instance.
You can see more about the AlphaX projects as they're called here https://alphahigh.school/alphax/
The gifted and talented version of the school essentially aims to have students college ready academically by the end of 8th grade though it's new enough that I don't exactly know what the first classes of graduates (several years away) will in fact choose to do. Some probably will enter college before age 18.
I'm not sure that's the best option, at least for kids interested in science. For them, I would try to use a math program that covers post highschool material like mathacademy or something much more rigorous than IXL like Beast Academy and AoPS classes, or EMF Math.
You can actually go to college a couple years early in the US without any significant difficulty, and earlier than that with some more effort and arrangement with the school.
I've discovered, partially as a result of this thread, that if GT School students eventually wish to take some time off before college, perhaps 1-2 years and then enter around 16-17?, they will need letters written by their parents attesting to the fact that they're being homeschooled until the age when truancy laws go out of effect, 18. They would need such letters even if they immediately enrolled in college!! Thankfully homeschooling regulation in Texas is so lax that the letter basically suffices, parents need not provide lesson plans etc.
Yep, and while truancy laws vary from state to state, most states make homeschooling about that easy (with some not requiring a letter at all.)
> In the UK there basically isn't any way to skip from primary to secondary school early
There is no legal or organisational impediment to anyone who can provide legal id and pay for the exams doing GCSE or A-Levels early. If a ten year old does 4 A-Levels and gets good results the step after that is probably starting a degree at the Open University, which has no entrance requirements for its bachelor degrees.
England doesn’t have much in the way of academic acceleration for the same reason the US has little of it. Schools and teachers don’t want to offer it.
Actually there is - I read of a 15 year old who went to Cambridge for maths. My understanding is that if you have the A levels, admissions test scores, and the interview goes well, you're in.
But from my reading of the article the students are spreading out the "thumb-twiddling" by only working "2" hours per day. The MAP scores are not actually measuring advanced grade level standards - rather they measure how well students can do basic math problems. In other words, you don't need to know any trig to score at the 12th grade level.
For anonymity reasons you should probably blur out the name in certain screenshots; anyone familiar with a certain educational Substack would recognize it.
I didn't read the whole thing, because it is way too long and not particularly interesting to me personally. I stopped about halfway through and skimmed the rest. However, from what I gathered, this seems like a great program for gifted kids, and not so great for other types of kids, especially ones that would struggle with the pace. But then again, gifted kids will do great in just about any type of program, especially if they are self-motivated. So what's the point in spending $40,000?
I think the point is Alpha is self-paced so they go faster with less time wasted on bureaucratic busywork. It leverages AI in a way that semi-simulates a 1-on-1 tutor experience. It's an improvement over traditional private schools which people have already demonstrated a willingness to pay 40k a year for.
It seems promising but my guess is the real secret sauce is selection effects and enthusiastic founders. Wealthy early-adopters are a highly-selected cohort, as are educators willing to take a chance on a radical new teaching model. That's unlikely to do well at public-school scale, particularly in misbehavior-prone urban districts. But it might be a viable alternative to both magnet schools and traditional private schools.
As far as I can tell there is no AI involved. You could probably do something similar with the FSRS algorithm and the same third party tools
The quote is deeply ironic in that the point of teaching the child is for the child to learn, which using AI undermines. The point of the teacher teaching is for the child to learn, which using AI for that half does not undermine.
There may be other reasons but not that one.
We are lucky that books were invented earlier than schools, otherwise textbooks might have been banned. ("A piece of paper could never replace an actual human teacher.")
Surprised Austin private elementary schools are so cheap. Elite Atlanta privates cost $35K+ for elementary school now.
Many cheap privates are subsidized by the Catholic Church. That's probably the case for the Austin ones, considering it's a blue island so res folk might not trust the public schools and thus support a parochial school
"20:1 ~teacher~ guide:student ratios (vs the 5:1 ratio at the Alpha private schools)"
Are all of these teacher:student ratios inverted throughout the piece? It's very confusing.
Yes they are and it’s surprising to me that no one else pointed it out, it was incredibly confusing
I thought the 5:1 teacher to student ratio was pretty crazy, then he mentioned public schools having a 25:1 ratio and I realized what went wrong. I could see some school for rich kids that has five people teaching each student, but I've certainly never been to a school with 25 times as many teachers as students.
To clarify, there are five students to one guide at Alpha.
As homeschoolers we do some of the same things; we use anki (which is free!) for spaced repetition, we do a sustainable amount of academic work daily rather than pausing for the summer, and of course we don't have to try to educate thirty kids at a time. These make learning vastly more efficient and Alpha School didn't invent them. But we also do everything we can to surround our kids with adults who are enthusiastic and open about their own lifelong learning (ourselves included) and with materials that are worth their time (a thing I wouldn't say about IXL).
Humans are very driven to learn, care what the people around us are doing, and are also mostly at least a bit demand avoidant, so it has always seemed to me that homeschooling parents can choose between spending their time explaining why kids have to do math but adults don't, doing some tricky alcumus problems themselves, or paying their kids and hoping the kids don't find a better revenue stream.
I have no issue with paying kids to do things that they are free to refuse to do, but as a kid I would have found it insulting to be required to do something and then paid just a bit for doing it. I understand that other kids are more pragmatic though, and are happy with the arrangement. I also would hesitate to pay a kid to read a book because there is no clear definition of reading a book well enough, and I'd rather read some of the same books they do and enjoy talking about them together than quiz them and incentivise the opposite of close reading while becoming the did-you-actually-read-it-though inspector.
I think your child-self's attitude is the pragmatic one. Alpha bucks seem to be worthless yet valued by kids in a similar way to Robux - realizing that they're worth very little strikes me as the pragmatic angle. To make a falsifiable prediction: you don't think you would be the type of kid to beg your mom for in game currencies if they existed at the time, do you?
The pragmatism that I refer to is in realizing that that if adults are offering to give you /something/ in payment to do a thing, and if you refuse they will probably instead take something away from you in order to get you to do the thing, you will probably maximize the goodwill of the adults toward you, the amount of stuff you have, and the amount of free time you have if you take the first offer. But if you are instead driven to maximize your autonomy you may feel a need to demonstrate to them that you cannot in fact make a person eat broccoli or do math or read.
Yes, I also found the incentives bribes piece the most surprising bit out of everything in the review. It is quite well-studied in the psychology literature that providing extrinsic rewards for an activity that children already enjoy doing “crowds out” intrinsic motivation. That makes me a bit skeptical of the Alpha School bribes approach, but then the fact that (1) what they earn with their Alpha Bux is personalized, (2) it’s over a longer period of time in the context of a presumably extended relationship with a teacher/guide, and (3) the rewards are only given upon mastery (crowds out intrinsic motivation less) make me more amenable to it. The motivation studies are almost all completed over a relatively short period of time with generic prizes (cash or equivalent).
Your homeschooling approach sounds similar to what I would consider in the future. Do you have a sense for how much more efficient your children’s learning has been compared to a traditional school?
I just realized that the review itself disregard rewards over vague thing (be succeed at X) and encourage rewards over exact thing (Do X, Y times). While the Alpha School rewards is over "vague" thing (a child can't force themselves to master things if they can't, right?). I guess we do need more data and study over what kind of rewards works (or does reward even works).
All I can say is that I continue to be surprised at how efficient it is, both in terms of time spent on academics and in terms of (complete lack of) time spent on trying to get people to do academics. And I also continue to be surprised at how fun it is, and how it just keeps getting more fun. Heartily recommend.
This is doubtless racist, sexist and homophobic, but Alpha seems to have a lot in common with schooling methods during lockdown. And Bastet knows that those methods were disastrous for educational outcomes.
The one exception I know of personally was one ant colony, and that was simply because the queen ant took homeschooling to insane levels. Before, the little ants had been begging to be homeschooled. Soon, they were begging to be able to go back to school.
Which brings me to my real point - for decades now, humans have been pushing various nostrums to address the fact of Why Can't Johnny Read? None of these nostrums and magic spells perform as advertised, although many of them do enable educational consultants to make bank.
Fact is, parental involvement, parents that ride little Johnny like they are trying to win the Preakness, combined with an environment that stresses learning, is the only thing that works. Nobody wants to hear that, because other than that queen ant, nobody wants to put in the work. Nobody wants to point the finger at the parents. Far easier to look for magic bullets.
Aristocratic tutoring worked very well without parents having to ride Johnny - the secret was to hire a ride to whip the crop (which is of course hard work). But the research mentioned in the article seems to indicate that the carrot (alphabucks) works too, hence the success.
Scientists have long since figured out Why Johnny Can't Read; whether that's the fault of the parents (it's certainly their responsibility) or the schools ostensibly paid by our taxes to teach our kids how to read is a separate issue.
There are some really obvious cases of ChatGPTese sprinkled throughout this review, yet it's also clearly thoughtful and original, with lots of concrete and specific claims. Very unusual combination in my experience.
I hope once the contest is over and things can be de-anonymized, the author would be willing to comment on how they use AI in the writing process yet produce a high-quality non-slop document. Although I do worry the answer is just "you have to be literate, and also actually care".
ChatGPT has a writing assistant mode. You can tell it what your central idea is and have it produce a rough draft. This guy probably did that and then rewrote it, leaving some of the original in.
Would be interested to see some specific examples from the text.
most obvious to me was this paragraph:
"Elite private school attendance buys you smaller classes, brighter kids, and fancier field trips – not academic acceleration ... That prior—show me velocity, not polish—is the lens through which the rest of this review should be read."
What about that says LLM to you? Is this just em-dash discrimination? They're not even consistent, which I'd expect from something copy+pasted.
The highly telegraphic writing style and punchy parenthetical phrases in italics (“show me velocity, not polish”) are in my experience extremely characteristic of o3.
Excellent article. I'm a bit more skeptical than you are on the magic of Alpha School compared to other schools, academically, and its ability to scale to a true mass market product. However, the tech-heavy model does seem like a way to cut expenses ($40k flat) compared to Horace Mann ($64,070 + a lot of extras + an endowment) or Harvard Westlake ($49,700 + a lot of extras + an endowment) for an elite school, and even if they have to drop some of the international travel for grade schoolers, it might be a sustainable long-term business without billionaire financial support. I hope it's still available when I have kindergarteners.
$40k/yr for 17 years to have a 95th percentile achieving kid is an incredibly good investment.
hmm education is so complex
Quick story about another student who goes by Austin Scholar here on Substack.
When I first met her, she was a sophomore in high school (15 years old). I was teaching writing at the time and actually rejected her from my program because it didn’t seem right for a teenager to participate in a program designed for high-powered adults. To her credit, she pushed me to get in the program and after a short interview, I reluctantly let her in.
There were ~250 students in the program and she was a top 10th percentile writer as a high schooler. Watched her get a perfect 1600 on the SAT and get admitted into Stanford. Even as I’m writing this, she’s doing an internship with me for the summer and one reason why I’ve been eager to hire Alpha students for various projects is that they’re uniquely self-reliant because of the lack of teachers in school while also being uniquely on top of things because of the strict standards that Alpha maintains.
All this is to say that Alpha doesn’t work for every students (and it’s not designed with that in mind), but when it works, it works pretty darn well.
She’s written about her time at Alpha if you’re curious to hear a student’s perspective: http://austinscholar.substack.com
Isn't this totally confounded? You don't have a before and after Alpha control group. People who pay 40k for private school are top 1% and higher across many metrics, and part of that is genetic.
Though I don't doubt the spaced repetition software is way more effective.
As someone who has done casual inference professionally for a very long time, I can say with confidence that Caplan's work is an exemplar of Gelman's many-forked path, where the results were mostly determined beforehand and confirmed by choosing the right path through the data. Not work to be taken very seriously.
Can you elaborate on this?
I don't have time to do a deep dive. This critique of one of his books gives you some idea: https://www.educationnext.org/main-purpose-of-schooling-review-case-against-education-book-caplan/
Basically the things he's trying to claim are very hard to identify in the statistical sense. And extrapolating even from studies where ~everyone would agree the causal inference is solid is always low confidence because of shifting context and the specifics of the outcome. This means that it's a matter of judgement for every analysis about what the results are actually telling you. This would make the kind of sweeping statements he makes suspect no matter what. (The deep dive into a specific analysis of his is what I don't have time for).
But there are a number of other clues that you shouldn't believe his judgement calls aren't always strongly biased. First, his shocking lack of technical skill. His anti education book was based on 15 months of building an opaque tangle of spreadsheets. Which he then complained no one double checked and reanalyzed 🤦♂️ This alone is near disqualifying. It's almost certain he's doing mediocre-at-best casual inference when he's limited to what's available in excel. It also makes his work opaque and pragmatically unreproduceable.
Second, he writes a mixture of opinion/ideology, data reporting, and results from his own spreadsheets. He will often try to pass off his ideological commitments as facts. Essentially I'd argue that he's revealed his commitments. Everything he does is work to bolster his ideological commitments through data mining and argumentation. He spends a lot of time on polemic and constructing logic chains that he thinks make his analysis solid. But he's never spent the time gaining the technical skills to actually do best-in-class non-experimental casual analysis. In the same way you should be skeptical of left wing academics whose work always just so happens to "prove" that whatever flavor of leftist campus activism is hot right now is true, this shouldn't give you a lot of confidence in all the methodological choices he makes in constructing his data argument.
No, I'm sorry, his thesis is correct. An absolutely overwhelming amount of data demonstrates that students gravitate to a particular performance band around five years old and remain that performance band throughout academic life, with remarkable fidelity, almost certainly because of genetic influence.
What do you make of the fact that in modern datasets, the heritability of educational attainment and IQ drops substantially in high income / high SES environments (see: Rask-Anderson et al. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33900812/ or my summary of other studies here: http://gusevlab.org/projects/hsq/#h.eujbeu4ca5ot). This would be consistent with higher resources compensating/mitigating genetic disadvantages (think: fancy schools give out free glasses and the heritability of eyesight goes down).
Many of us care about absolute performance, not merely relative performance, and expertise, not merely intelligence. The takeaway you should have had from your mountains of research is that if you put kids from across the intelligence band into Alpha School, some will progress relatively faster, some will progress relatively slower, but all could progress more in absolute terms than elsewhere.
For anyone who cares about absolute improvement and the pursuit of excellence in domains that require rigorous training, not mere equalization, there are opportunities everywhere. Alpha School is one such opportunity.
This claim is in no way equivalent to Caplan's. Supposing we take it as a given that a student's cognitive abilities--in the sense of which sorts of primitive cognitive tasks they're good or bad at and to what degree--are either locked in by genetics from the moment of conception, or shaped by unseen environmental factors that school can't influence. That *does* imply that students will gravitate towards (and remain in) performance bands, which educational interventions will not shift. It *very much does not* imply that the only things schools do is help signal the traits the students already have.
This should be staggeringly, blindingly obvious to anyone who's ever relied on any sort of hard skill, be it a second language, a mathematical technique, a specialized tool, a programming language or anything else of that nature. If Alex is gifted and Jamie is not, Alex may learn many things faster and better than Jamie. But if Jamie spends 3000 hours learning Spanish over a 5-year period and Alex spends 0 hours over the same period, there is *no level* of human-scale cognitive ability that will let Alex best Jamie at the task of communicating with a monolingual Spaniard. Maybe Alex is absolute hot shit at languages and a mere 500 hours would have closed the gap. But 0 hours won't. Neither will 10 or 20 or 50.
Now, it's very possible that many schools have a poor selection of content, technique, or learning time breakdowns that mean they're not doing a very good job teaching skills to students, or that the skills they're teaching aren't very useful. It is not just possible but near-certain that some of the practices schools institute for the *explicit purpose* of signalling and ranking interfere with their purpose of instilling skills[1]. But the idea that students who spend five days a week being taught and practicing skills will not have any more skills at the end of it than if they had spent time on activities that didn't involve that is...extraordinary, to say the least.
I can't help but suspect people who make this claim either had unusually bad school experiences, are very high-percentile autodidacts (an unconsciously model almost everyone else as the same) or have spent their whole lives relying on soft skills[2] and have simply never encountered a career situation where spending time and effort learning how to do [thing] ahead of time was preferable to plunging right into [thing] and learning as you go. Suffice to say that such situations very much exist, and many peoples' careers are full of them, which is why (at least some of) the apparatus of education exists.
[1] I have quite a lot of criticisms of contemporary educational norms, many of which boil down to "the obsession with grading and ranking interferes substantially with learning, especially in the way its implemented by most schools now."
[2] Where "soft" by no means signifies "less useful." Writing is one of the most important skills there is in many jobs and (after reaching basic proficiency) it's a soft skill. The distinction (as I'm using it) is about how much proficiency you need to usefully apply the skill at all. A low-skilled writer may bore, confuse or annoy people but will generally get some fraction of their point across: they may accomplish less than a higher-skilled writer, but they'll accomplish something. Meanwhile a low-skilled programmer or engineer can be worse than somebody with no skill at all, managing truly impressive feats of negative accomplishing, in the form of causing costly problems that other people of higher skills must spend time fixing.
Yeah this is just a weakness of your understanding of casual inference. I'm guessing my simple assertion won't convince you. But consider that the confident argument you hold is the same as the race scientists who pompously point to various contingency tables over and over to justify their just having to say that they're sorry but the science proves Africans are (genetically, insoluble) stupid. All the while, the sophisticated dismantling of their points that Sasha graciously produces over and over goes right over their heads.
Alpha's marketing is excellent - and there are many educators and parents I admire who are excited about them. I've been craving more detail and this answered many of my questions.
On the pedagogy of app-based learning & measuring using MAP:
This approach seems solid for the basics of math and reading, though this piece's point that reading and discussing longer form books is missing is key. Much has been written about the negative impacts of over-optimizing for short passage reading on the literacy skills of American young people. The short-passage only approach is usually associated with public and charter schools, while the Harvard Westlakes of the world go all-in on literature.
Science is even trickier to teach via apps and measure via standardized tests. Many schools don't take MAP Science at all, as a note. IXL works well for learning baseline science content, but I have a hard time imagining multiple-choice modules go far enough to produce mastery of science skills as written in the Next Generation Science Standards. You can read those on their website, but they are largely complex and applied skills such as 'developing models,' 'representing and graphing data,' and 'making evidence-driven arguments'. IXL teaches these skills by having learners 'fill in the blank' of a partially completed graph or argument. The MAP Science test does the same, because it's also a multiple-choice measure. Isn't this fill-in-the-blank mode of thinking much easier than asking a learner to actually demonstrate the skill (figure out how to represent and graph data) themselves? If I were an Alpha parent (especially one not at the GT school with the extra academic competitions, which sound great), I would worry the science learning isn't rich & applied enough.
Not sure how History/Social Studies learning is assessed at Alpha, since MAP doesn't have a Social Studies test. I assume just in-app and their mastery tests. Similarly to science, I would worry IXL + a sprinkling of reading passages in AlphaReads lacks the richness and depth I'd want. To learn Social Studies well, I'd want them to follow a more comprehensive trajectory that includes longer sources, group discussions, research projects, etc. I'd worry that the afternoon activities as described are too piecemeal to succeed in this area but could be wrong.
Not surprised Writing is a miss in this parent's eyes - I've never been impressed with any edtech writing app. There are a few that are nice for drilling grammar and can supplement writer's workshop style teacher-led classes.
These things feel surmountable. I wonder if Alpha has considered using a portion of afternoon time for teacher-led, Hoel-style 'aristocratic tutoring' in humanities and/or science to see how well these in-app learning gains transfer to real-world applications and open-ended conversation, while remaining hyper-personalized.
Also, I was surprised to see IXL as the app of choice. The questions in IXL are quality, but it's boring as hell - the forms of engagement are unvaried and dry, and it must feel repetitive for kids to learn in the same mode every day for up to 12 years. Last time I spoke to somebody at Alpha, they said they used several apps for each subject for variety and to ensure coverage - perhaps this has changed, or maybe just wasn't mentioned here. They'll need to find a way to make the incentive system foolproof for parents to implement in the homeschool/virtual model.
Early in building Prisma (virtual program I work for), we experimented with an app-driven morning schedule. We ended up retiring that approach for every subject except math, for some of the reasons above. This year, our kids grew 2.3x as fast as their peers nationwide in math, and 1.6x as fast in reading on MAP. We definitely could read this as evidence that apps are the best method and should be applied to the other subjects. But our parents tend to choose us for reasons other than optimizing these scores, and would hate if we abandoned our discussion and project-based Literacy curriculum for IXL. Could we supplement with apps and boost those further? Probably! Overall I'm excited Alpha exists. They're developing some cool innovations that can meaningfully improve the space.
This article was a great read, and I agree as a parent of GT School (Alpha’s school for gifted children in Georgetown). My son is 10 and taking 6th and 7th grade classes. He met and/or exceeded all of his end of year MAP goals and continues to be in the 96-99th percentile across the board (one reason we entered GT School to begin with). He also has developed a true love of school. To the point where he sometimes complains of we take him out for a day for a long weekend. He especially loves his guides, who routinely find ways to customize rewards and incentives to each child’s interests. My son won a Lego chess set and Mario stickers amongst other things with his GT bucks. Their reward system is highly effective and the personalization acts to make students feel seen and understood. Though the author is correct that I don’t think this model will work for every child, my son has ADHD and is actually doing spectacularly well even without his pervious IEP accommodations. Their low ratio and individualized learning model have been both impressive and effective. This all coming from someone who was highly uncertain and critical of the idea of AI teaching my child.
How has his AMC 8 score improved? That's a better measure of math achievement in gifted kids in my opinion, given that it's designed to challenge that age group. I'm not sure how well IXL can prepare a student, even a gifted one, to tackle those sorts of problems. Do you know why alpha GT doesn't use a third part math program designed for high achievers like mathacademy or Beast Academy or EMF math?
GT School does use Mathacademy. (Other Parent of the same student). We haven’t tested him with AMC 8 but would be an interesting comparison.
That's cool! Here's where he can take a practice test:
https://live.poshenloh.com/past-contests
https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/AMC_8_Problems_and_Solutions
The first link has the nicer interface, the second has a greater diversity of solutions.
Are you familiar with Art of Problem Solving?
Cool to hear your positive experience! Would be curious to hear about the culture at the GT school, specifically around if it is competitive or not? Fostering an overly competitive culture is a common failure mode for very academically focused schools in my experience
The website has a much weaker 100% money back guarantee than the one stated here. Can anyone find a link to it? Perhaps they've walked it back as guaranteeing every child wins a national award seems like a good way to lose your shirt.
It is only the GT school. It is still there at the bottom of the homepage: https://gt.school/
From Edward's link https://gt.school/
> 100% Money Back Guarantee Our Promise to You:
> Students starting in Kindergarten: We guarantee our students will finish high school academics with 5s on APs and a 1350+ SAT by 8th Grade.
> Students starting Grade 1-8: We guarantee our students will be top 1% academically and win national academic competitions.
I am curious about this actually. Maybe Pamela or Matt could chime in?
Hey there, GT School is only 1 year old so this is still a work in progress like everything else (though not a scam, real guarantee!) I received feedback from another source that "win national academic competitions" is probably the weak spot here, it's harder to specify what counts and also in its current form GT school may rotate afternoon workshops too often to get the depth needed in a single area to become nationally competitive.
Happy to tell you anything else you want to know here or privately!
I think it's the strong point - it shouldn't be too hard to find a national competition with a ton of "winners" and make it mandatory. I would be shocked if they meant each GT student would be incontrovertibly #1 in at least one winner-take-all national competition with a non-trivial number of participants
I see people are interested in hearing from the parents — I am one, and I'm NOT employed by the company. My 7-year-old is at the GT School (which, btw, is $15K/year; Alpha's specialized academies have lower price points). AMA.
To start, here is a bullet-point list of why we drive 30 minutes to the school (TL;DR: it's worth it. We will move closer now that we know it works for our son):
- Compressed academics utilizing the Pomodoro technique — work intervals followed by breaks; much more effective for high-energy kiddos who can't yet focus for extended periods of time
- Self-pacing — go as fast as you can or as slow as you need in each subject; no shaming through grades, no "B student" stigma
- Verification and accountability — tests are used in a productive way. Apart from three-times-a-year MAP testing, there are mastery tests whenever the student completes the lesson plan for each grade. I wasn't a big fan of the testing part going in, but they use the detailed data from the test report to identify gaps and then serve additional supporting lessons in those areas. My son completed 2.5 grade levels in one year, but I'm more wowed by the fact that he actually mastered that material than the speed itself.
- The guides!!! — well-paid, highly motivated individuals who are not burned out from a mountain of paperwork and can truly engage with the kids
- The group workshops and individual pursuits (check chart) — the element of real-life skills, learning how to bring a project from concept to fruition, on your own or with a team — this part was really important to us
- Growth mindset environment — "the power of yet," philosophy of high expectations with high support, finding your "why"
- Community — engaged parents who are willing to take reasonable risks to try something different for their kids
It's not the AI, it's not a magic bullet — it's not one thing; it's the whole package.
And before you say, "Your kid is already gifted, so he would do well anywhere," that is a common misconception. Gifted does not equal high-achieving. Our boy is extremely high energy, motivated mostly by his interests, with spotty attention-paying ability. We are quite certain he would not thrive in a conventional schooling setting, and we have spent countless hours researching and considering various education models. This is not perfect; it's just the best we found.
Also, just for fun — and also to address the "wealthy kids" stereotype — we fall into the "first-generation immigrant family" pool, making sacrifices to give our son the best shot. I know every parent wants that for their kids, and I'm hoping my long comment will be somehow helpful in your journey.
Are the mastery tests done through IXL or something else?
No, not IXL. Grade completion/mastery tests are STAAR Tests via Pear Assessment *Formerly Edulastic.
They take them individually at any point of the year whenever they completed the grade level lessons and need to do it with at least 90% accuracy to pass the grade.
How often can they take the test?
Do you mean if they can retake it if they didn't get 90%? Not right away. They will be first served a lesson plan consisting of "Knowledge Gap" subjects focusing on the areas that they got wrong in the test, they need to complete that before trying again.
I appreciate the comment, but re yr reference to "wealthy kids"--are you not extremely high-income people? Let me know if you're not in the top 10% in terms of household income ($240k/yr). I have a feeling many people here are.
I would consider the top 10% to be upper middle class. If they're wealthy, they're not extremely so.
I am the parent of two Alpha students, they are moving to the GT school this fall. As for me, I've been drawn out of more than a few years of stay-at-home motherhood in order to get involved in the Alpha mission.
We initially chose Alpha just because all the other schools available schools seemed blah. My husband, Byrne Hobart (an independent finance and tech writer) is one of the non-conformist types mentioned in the piece.
But my older daughter turned out to be exceptionally bright and her results at Alpha have been way beyond expectations. With no homework at all and very little drama, she has maintained not only 99% achievement but also top several percentiles of growth for 3 entire school years.
I never heard her complain that she was bored, never had to meet with a teacher to grovel or battle for acceleration. At home we focus on reading for pleasure, arts and crafts, and exploring niche interests (she's obsessed with penguins).
Intense acceleration offered in a pleasant environment has been a priceless gift to our family. I never worried about oldest's education while I was pregnant again and caring for an infant.
If it means anything to you, this is what o3 says when offered my daughter's MAP scores: "[X] is operating at an 11th-grade academic level while still in Grade 3 and is continuing to out-grow almost all comparison groups. Alpha.school’s 2-Hour Learning model is not only keeping pace with, but in several dimensions outperforming, America’s most elite K-12 institutions—all while freeing up 60-70 % of the day for deeper projects and community-building, exactly in line with the school’s founding mission."
My second daughter joined Alpha a year ago and she's a tougher cookie (2e/on the spectrum). Even with far less than 2 hours per day on the apps (despite her wonderful guide's ceaseless efforts and encouragement), her growth has still been immense: https://x.com/gtmom/status/1931058079745056974
Very happy to answer any other questions, here or privately.
The review and school concept is quite interesting, but an important question I think is glossed over: What actually happens when your kid finishes high school requirements years ahead of schedule?
In the context of the Alpha School itself, what happens when a kid masters high school requirements after ~6 years, at age ~11, say? Do they graduate then? If not, what is done during the lesson time for the rest of their time at the school?
When graduation occurs with high school equivalent mastery, either nominally after 8th grade or even earlier, how does this work legally w.r.t. requirements to attend school? Most compulsory education laws seem to be based around time, not mastery, but that may be specific to the states I'm familiar with (and I'm not that familiar with exceptions, honestly).
What are you planning for your kids after mastering high school level so early? What is typically done by Alpha School kids/parents? Is it to send them to the Alpha High School, where they'll make a company or something? I tried looking for "Alpha School graduates" stories online to get an idea, but couldn't readily find anything, only descriptions of what the Alpha High School kids are currently doing.
At Alpha School (the non-selective version), students can choose between an honors track and regular Alpha high, with a capstone Alpha X project. https://alphahigh.school/
My 9yo (who's been at Alpha for 3 years) already gets ~10th or 11th grade 50th percentile scores on MAP tests, but I don't consider that literally college ready academically, even social/emotional issues aside. It's not true mastery of high school material, it's just a testament to how little average high schoolers in other schools typically learn.
For the GT School (selective, roughly top 10 percentile students) it's 1yo so we haven't graduated a class yet. I expect some will continue to high school anyways, at Alpha or elsewhere. Many students find that being bright at high school is not as painful as early grades when AP courses are offered and also various extracurriculars.
I wouldn't be surprised, though, if some entered college a year or several early. Just depends on the student, where they want/need to go to college, etc. I am moving my 9yo and 7yo to GT school and haven't given this a second thought.
The truancy laws here in Texas at least are dumb, you have to claim to be homeschooling the teen until 19 even if they enroll in college!! But no substantiation of home curriculum, etc is required. Just an admin matter.
And you can also "dual enroll" for free on paper while enjoying pretty much all the benefits of full time college enrollment.
One tricky hoop, if you take the unschooling route after GT, is submitting a high school transcript and teacher recommendations. Dual enrollment definitely helps with the latter. Another trick for schools that don't do dual enrollment is to enroll as a nondegree seeking student. But the easiest and cheapest option would be Dual Enrollment through Austin Community College.
I would imagine the graduating GT students would have a ready made friend group for, e.g. unschooling, doing programs like boundless, gap year(s) stuff, going deeper in academics (Olympiads, research)
I don't think the MAP does not actually test 11th grade material, does it? Does your daughter know trig, factoring quadratics, etc? What grade level is she at in IXL (if that is the program they use)?
I could easily be misunderstanding things but it looks to me like the MAP does cover trigonometry and polynomial algebra (and probability!), but not calculus or statistics.
Here are a couple of documents I'm leaning on for this claim: https://teach.mapnwea.org/assist/help_map/Content/Data/RIT2Concept.htm
https://cdn.nwea.org/docs/RIT+Reference+Brochure_July19.pdf
meh, nothing about this is particularly different from other educational fads, because they all share the same commonalities:
1. cherry pick the most gifted and motivated students
2. target parents who are both rich and overinvested in their kids education.
the thing is, those two things can make any kind of system work. I see this with homeschooling; everyone glazes it the fuck up, but its horrific otherwise if the kid or parent just can't throw heroic levels of energy at it. That's when teachers help, not systems per se, because its very easy to game a system. Hence chatgpt writing papers and passing around test answers. or cheesing curriculum requirements.
and honestly you all overrate intelligence and underrate connections and money in life success, that is why your kid does well or not short of mental illness or parental tragedies. Education is probably not going to help you beyond a point, and there is some truth to Caplan.
(only at the extreme levels, though: its annoying he is so stupid and doesn't realize he needs a widely educated base of people to keep his university running, and that tenure hothouse people give far less value to life than he things)
#2 is fairer than #1. Alpha admits plenty of students who are behind academically and not especially excited by school. GT School screens for academic potential, Alpha absolutely does not.
Re: cheesing curriculum requirements, the students sometimes do try to do this, and it gets patched. It’s a fun arms race.
I don’t think the premise that “any system works with rich kids” is particularly true. A lot of very specific works goes into helping these students, and I don’t really see evidence that it’s just a wash compared to very different methods at other schools, and see plenty of evidence that the school is helping these students. (Other elite schools don’t even publish their K8 testing data.)
behind compared to who, though? parents who give kindergarteners IQ tests? other elites? i really don't think there is that strong a difference, and that's not getting into parent differences in how tiger mom they are.
the cheesing i just mean that without motivation by some one systems fail. id bet the weak point is the brazil teachers, lol at tech bros offshoring. better hope they don't fake answer calls, or exploit the system because they can.
and no those kids would be fine without that school. places like alpha bank on that, because its really hard to actually teach struggling students. little effort of maximum profit is the good way for modern business men
There are multiple comparisons of interest. I think with Alpha in particular the most helpful comparison is other elite schools, yes.
The “brazilian teachers” are software developers and academic specialists who work on the curriculum and platform. They run the coaching calls because they are the ones who need to know what’s not working and fix it on the app side. Not sure about Brazil but some of them are indeed remote.
Do they admit something like the school population of Newark NJ? The poorest parts of West Virginia?
A few, or at least a few much closer to this than they are to middle class. But that’s generally not the current population, no. None in rural poverty (a la WV) afaik.
> meh, nothing about this is particularly different from other educational fads, because they all share the same commonalities:
This seems like an oddly defeatist attitude. Everything you try will appear to work, therefore there's no point in trying to figure out how to do it better.
> and honestly you all overrate intelligence and underrate connections and money in life success
This I agree with, but it does seem like Alpha School is aware of this and trying to deal with it, with "life skills" (of the sort practiced by mid-level managers at large tech companies) being a large part of the curriculum.
they arent trying to do better, they are trying to do cheaper and get quick bucks.
like you don't need to keep reinventing a stable solution; a private school with correct teacher/student ratios and managed well is perfectly fine. But to run one is expensive and modern businesses love their mvp and getting something for nothing. They'd love it if your kids teach themselves with ai lapdogs and the occasional overseas (got to pay as little as possible!) check in.
honestly businesses are not looking out for your own good.
the life skills...eh its a skill to know the right people i guess, my point is more the kid being smart or not matters less than the dad being famous, which zip code you live in, if dad overloads you with extracurriculars, or if parents can bankroll first business or internship. or failure might be from things education cant help much with.
think the chinese dudes know with guanxi, but we kind of love our horatio alger.
> like you don't need to keep reinventing a stable solution; a private school with correct teacher/student ratios and managed well is perfectly fine
It's perfectly fine, but is it optimal? My K-12 education was perfectly fine, but could have been better.
> the life skills...eh its a skill to know the right people i guess, my point is more the kid being smart or not matters less than the dad being famous, which zip code you live in, if dad overloads you with extracurriculars, or if parents can bankroll first business or internship.
Right, that's exactly the sort of life skill I wish I'd learned at school and didn't. I emerged from school with too much faith in the idea that just "being smart" is the route to success, and ignoring all the other aspects.
Yes. Selection bias, small samples in terms of n and also time, convenience samples, no scaling data, no systematic fraud investigation - all the hallmarks.
You understand the 2.6x claim is relative to peers with similar map scores? That precludes #1. And considering no other privates school has similar results despite most having highly motivated parents, it makes #2 highly unlikely
I, too, felt some instinctive revulsion to the idea of incentivizing children to learn, and I think I know why it feels wrong: it might actually work.
No matter how you dress it up, school must involve adults compelling children to behave in certain ways. People who like freedom find this somewhat unpleasant to think about, but most agree it's for the greater good. But incentives are just a much more effective means of compulsion than other methods. At least when a teacher hits a student it's clear what's going on. Incentives are, well, seductive.
Reading this essay makes the whole school feel very creepy. Points for compliance. Eye-tracking software. When we're worried about socialization, we set up a new system to reward that too. The kids in this system don't really seem to have free will -- they are allowed to make choices, but only within the system.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing! If we're going to control how children think and behave to educate them, we might as well do it effectively. This school sounds a lot more fun to be in than the one I grew up in. But it is very much the Brave New World to the public schools' Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it's hardly a surprise that a lot of people find that scary.
I think you underestimate how much guidance and incentives were applied to people in older societies and older classrooms. Like, I went to a school that made us do chapel once a week. That's just as much of a behavioural nudge as anything Alpha might be doing. And it usually doesn't get labelled as creepy.
I went to a little Baptist school, half-day kindergarten, then first and second grade. We had "chapel" once a week and while there was of course no pretty ritual, it was a lovely space and we sang, prayed, and listened to a homily. It wasn't creepy - I would remember creepy.
I expect this would actually be supremely difficult for children nowadays, to sit just thinking their own thoughts, or trying to follow an adult human talking at length on some moral or Biblical question, whether or no they were talking about it well.
In fact in my last experience of mainstream Protestantism, many years in the rearview, they had gone so far as to have not just Sunday school but children's services and activities in parallel with all services so that children need never sit in an actual church service.
Now, locally, I see that there's not demand for more than one service, on the marquees of the many churches hereabouts. I doubt also that there is any longer an army of volunteers for the children's stuff.
Yeah, that sounds similar to my experience. I never hated the church stuff. But it's hard to deny that it was a coercive religious practice.
If Alpha's incentives are a bit coercive as well, I...think that's probably OK?
As for whether kids are capable of sitting through stuff, I dunno. I mean, my feelings are the same as yours. I just don't trust my feelings, or yours. Have you watched a kid playing a computer game? Have you tried to play one? The things that kids sit through these days are weird, but I don't have any reason to believe that they're worse than the things we sat through.
I only meant that it strikes me sitting through something that is ostensibly without any stimulation, such as video games provide, might be harder.
My child, bless him, read the Bible in church.
I don't think that Alpha is being more coercive. I think that it's doing the coercion in a novel way, so people actually think about it rather than just accepting it automatically. And I think that its method is much more effective, so if you're averse to the idea of that sort of behaviour modification, you'll be more averse to their methods. I'm not saying it's morally worse, I'm saying it's scarier.
The only thing I thought was disturbing was the eye tracking software. It's needlessly intrusive, probably faulty like past eye tracking software I've been forced to use, and should absolutely be an opt out. Everything else seems normal. You get positive feedback when you're not an asshole in public. You get a raise when you work more. Normal schools grade you well for following directions. These are all incentives that exists and are whatever. But the eye tracking reminds me of the guy on twitter that measures his boner lengths while he sleeps.
Fascinating read. Really appreciate the context outside the school as well as the deep dive into the entire methodology.
There is one big, conformity forced assumption here and that's competition. Absolutely everything in western society is a competition and we've been taught that is the best way and the only way to live. Our kids are measured by percentiles and only if you are the best of the best can you ever hope of being accepted into the best colleges and once you have the name of that institution on your resume then you can work for the best firm to make the most money and then you'll be happy. The problem of education is always framed as "how can I make sure my child WINS?"
For all the talk about nature vs nurture and Caplan's work, this entire post reads like signaling. “Insofar as schooling makes you healthier by raising your status, its health benefits are zero-sum: you can’t raise your rank without dragging others down” (Case Against Education, p.171). I don't believe your claim that after love and respect the best thing you can give your kids is time. Or rather I believe the claim, but I don't think you believe it. Why move your family across the country in the middle of the school year and spend $120k a year on that schooling? You didn't do it to give your kids time. You did it so they can make the same kind of money.
How do I know it isn't for time? They don't even have a free half-day. Chess competitions, quiz competitions, essay competitions, property management (I'm so curious to see how a bunch of 5th graders would decorate an Airbnb). Even if you went to the sports academy it's the same game. Parents will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on sports training to beat other kids. Beat all the other kids and they can go to those same colleges to get those same jobs. A huge percentage of Olympians in the 2024 games from around the globe were currently attending top American Universities. In that context as you mentioned over-optimization runs the show. And if they finish school before college age are you telling me they will actually spend 7 years of their life with free time to do what they love? Maybe some will, but the kind of parents enrolling in this school are likely going to push their kids to finish college early and make money earlier.
This kind of schooling may require a certain kind of non-conformist to enroll, but you are still conforming. I'm certainly not telling you how to parent and I'm not saying money doesn't matter. I'm saying is I don't experience any happiness from "keeping up with the Joneses".
At GT School, competition is opt-in. The students find it fun. It’s a culture of *friendly* competition. Really remarkable—that culture is actually the thing that sold me on the school.
I completely agree. My son enjoys the competitive aspect, but also excitedly tells me about his friends beating him. GT School is comprised of high achieving kids that like competition but the guides are very gifted at making everything friendly and cooperative at the same time.
One of the main reasons we're sending our kid to this school is because this model is not based on a zero-sum game like - I would argue- most conventional schools are. I can't comment on the author's ambitions for his kids but ours are simply that he finds an occupation that brings him joy and fulfillment and finds a way to support himself and his family doing so. Many ways to skin the cat, many ways to live a happy life and this model offers more time and freedom to explore those ways, while still maintaining accountability for the basic core skills, than others that we looked at.
Fair enough. I'd probably send my kids to this school too simply because I'd want them to learn as much about the world as they can. It seems like they really excel at that. And no matter my objections it's not like other options are going to be so drastically different for the end goal. We're all just doing the best we can with what we can.
My frustration is more about the problem we are trying to solve here. The post is focused on academic measurements, percentiles, and the marketing material feels aimed at winning the zero-sum game. Learning itself isn't. But as the author points out the natural next questions are about getting into a good college and getting a good job. The questions almost all parents inevitably ask themselves.
I recently talked to my cousin who went through an accelerated program, started college 2 years ahead. I asked what she loves about her chosen field/major, basically what drives her in school. She said she doesn't like it, but it'll make good money. Her parents and every single adult in her life talks the same way. It's always about making as much money as possible as early as possible.
It may be impossible to not play the game no matter how pure your intensions. It's just so culturally ingrained. Personally I'd want us to solve the problem of "loving to learn". In many respects I imagine this school does a great job of that. However I often think of Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. We are measuring academic performance relative to other kids. Our hyper fixation on comparison in academics or on social media can really suck the joy out of living if you let it.
I loved this essay but your comment here captures most where I land.
We humans with fairly finite lives can only serve one or two priorities at a time. If getting ahead, faster, so that one can "win" the money game is the priority, it will crowd out quite a few other good potential priorities.
In the video of the little kids each talking to their own individual AI about how to do their hobbies, one of the boys asked the AI, "And what do I do now?" The AI was instructing him step-by-step what to do to for his arts and crafts. *To what end?* What happens when we can't really guide ourselves any longer?
I really liked this essay and would also love to send my kids here if it was cheaper. But I agree there is something deeply unsettling.
I also read thezvi’s childhood roundups, and while I like those they make me bristle at times about the absolutely relentless min-maxing. I have been considering posting a comment similar to yours on Zvi blog actually.
I feel like the optimization bug has infected me and sucked the joy out of my life. I suspect it became ingrained over a million hands of online poker, or maybe it’s an OCD thing. I have to justify everything in terms of EV and I hate it. I don’t want to pass this on to my kid.
His kids clearly have a lot more free time now than before. I don't see why you don't believe he values his kids time, considering that he was willing to spend $120k and move to Austin to give his kids a few extra hours in the day. That is far, fae more than most parents would.
And even if Austin school was a zero sum game like a publci school, it would still be the superior option due to only including it for 2 hours rather than 8
Very impressive essay.
I was caught off guard when the author mentioned using Duolingo to teach foreign languages. I thought it was fairly well established that Duolingo isn’t particularly effective for learning new languages, due to the lack of active recall, among other factors.
Yes. Take that insight about Duolingo, and consider that the other educational apps mentioned are similarly engineered. I wrote a lengthy comment elsewhere in this thread elaborating, but this is a real concern - does bite-sized, multiple-choice module learning transfer meaningfully to an authentic context as well as it does a similarly designed standardized test?
There's evidence that it may - SAT scores are the best predictors of college achievement, for example. But I wonder if Alpha students' test scores represent their real-world intellectual ability as accurately as a kid who spends much less time on 'test prep' style learning.
Maybe Alpha's mastery exams are designed in such a way to mitigate this, too, I don't know.
We agree that Duolingo doesn’t work. The students wanted to try it last year at GT School for various reasons, but it’s not part of the platform.
Re: transfer, overfitting to tests, and achieving deep understanding, I do think that’s a risk area for us. We have a different pedagogical risk profile than most other alternative schools. I think we’re managing it well but it’s ongoing. I definitely don’t think it *trades off against* the methodologies we use, but we have to be sure we’re achieving it.
Would you be willing to say more about how Alpha tries to achieve deep understanding/not overfit to tests?
It was made particularly worse by the fact he complained about the effectiveness of language classes in regular high schools with human teachers. And he brings up Duolingo as a better alternative????
I agree. Duolingo is useful for vocabulary memorisation, (very) basic reading comprehension, and habituating the learner to a range of native-speaker accents. But its commitment to bite-sized chunks of content prevents it from teaching grammar in the clear and explicit way that's necessary for language learning. There are many grammatical concepts that simply cannot be taught from scratch in five minutes flat.
Effective compared to what? I suspect that if you used Duolingo three times a week for an entire year, you would still learn more than during one year at school.
I suspect it depends a lot on what "mostly" means (are we talking 60% or 90%?) and what the rest is. I've spent some time both learning and teaching languages, and I expect Duolingo to be at least moderately useful as a tool, but wildly insufficient as a sole source of language learning. It seemed decent at getting you to actively engage with a nicely level-appropriate set of grammar and vocab, which I expect to be useful enough at getting those things from nonexistent to OK-ish, but not to mastery.
As far as I can tell there really isn't any secret sauce for learning foreign languages, there's just practice. More practice is better. The qualifier is that if you funnel your practice time into too narrow a range of language-use patterns, the usefulness will plateau far short of full proficiency. A while back I spent four or five months trying to very rapidly improve my German[1]. I used a fairly early version of Duolingo quite a bit during that time, but I also read stories, watched short films on YouTube, listened to music and eventually (with some effort) sought out some places where I could have live conversations with actual people. I'd go out on a limb and guess that last part is a sticking point for quite a lot of academic language learning--there's really no substitute for talking to people if talking to people is what you're trying to learn. Anyway, I'll credit the Duolingo with a pretty good job of greasing the wheels on those other things, but it certainly wouldn't have got me there on its own.
[1] Much of which was knocking rust off, especially at the beginning (I'd learned up to a low conversational level as a teen and then spent around a decade not using it much). But by a few months in I'd certainly regained and exceed my old level of proficiency.
Anything is better than shitty full immersion classes in public schools. The teacher is always an asshole and enforces a no English policy that makes it so nobody communicates with anybody else. My high school classes also mandated no technology so you couldn't even fucking look up vocab words and translate them. Just 90% of the students that aren't fluent staring blankly as the teacher asks them a question because their ability to problem solve has been artifically crippled for adherence to a retarded teaching philosophy that is the norm in the district.
This is one of the best things I have read all year. But I can’t help being just a bit upset.
As someone not involved in education, it has always seemed to me that an approach similar to this is, as kids used to say, “a no brainer”. If I had a billion dollars and wanted to design a school to optimize learning, it would look something like this. This is what I remember worked best when I was in school, and new technology would just empower it more each year.
The reason I am a bit upset is because I have heard for decades how “nothing works or scales in education”.
I am starting to think that the problem in education isn’t the children, it is the dysfunctional mindsets and frameworks of most people involved currently in education.
Obviously this won’t work for every kid, and is currently not affordable for most, but I think something like this could soon make a difference for millions of families.
> I am starting to think that the problem in education isn’t the children, it is the dysfunctional mindsets and frameworks of most people involved currently in education.
I agree. Unfortunately, a lot of those dysfunctional mindsets was made law (depending on country), so even having the right idea and finding the right teachers may not suffice.
One source of tension is that in absence of a superhuman AI, good education requires great teachers, but great teachers do not scale. The only way to scale is to make those great teachers create content (such as books, videos, or AI lessons) so that they have to spend less time teaching directly in the classroom or even individually. But that will be tricky, because the great teachers usually love to teach, and they actually need to teach in order to get the necessary experience. Perhaps we could alternate e.g. three years of teaching with one year of creating educational materials. But if you needed such materials for all topics in all subjects, for all grades, consider how many great teachers you would need for that. This makes it a very expensive and long-time project.
I could imagine an iterative process that starts as a level zero with perfectly ordinary school, and gradually introduces the improvements. That would remove the need to have all the improvements ready up front. Unfortunately, even running a perfectly ordinary school seems to be quite a lot of work. If it's a state school, you probably won't be allowed to do those changes you want. If it's a private school, it will probably need to make profit since day 1. I could imagine doing it as an independent project, maybe release everything under a free license, and let some schools use it if they want to. It would still be a lot of work.
I guess if it can't scale without exhausting resources, it "doesn't scale". The ultimate bottleneck is quality teachers, and this is always the problem for centuries. Theoretically lots of things will work if we have one teacher for every student, but we certainly won't have that.
I think an AI coach would be very scaleable (pretty much free on the margin) and will work for the top tier of students. The other 80% just need to learn the basics (and that is all they learn today).
It appears the reason Alpha School is currently losing $ despite 40k tuition is because they actually pay their teachers (“guides”) quite well. I am sure they are experimenting to see how central the guides are to their current 2x+ educational outcomes; let’s see where they land, but I would bet that it’s hard to achieve those outcomes at scale without well-paid and well-trained guides/teachers. Which is the bit that doesn’t scale economically.
"Some kids will rush into college classes. Some will choose to use the time to play sports. Some will use the time to master chess or quiz bowl or programming. Some will take time to travel the world with their families."
If we go by the South Korean case study, ~all kids (or all kids of ambitious parents) will choose to spend that extra time on more and more classes, as competition for "elite" colleges and the "elite" jobs they entail only gets tougher and tougher. In the end this just increasing the price of signalling even further, leading up to a very expensive equilibrium.
Not all kids! My son enjoys the 2 hour learning model because he is bright and that’s all he needs, but also because he finds school work boring compared to workshops. He aspires to be a gaming programmer and we won’t pressure him to attend a fancy school to do so. Wealth doesn’t always equate to elitism. I’ve found that most private school parents just want happy, thriving kids, just like any other parent.
That sounds wonderful and I don't doubt for a second that this is a great environment for a kid right now. In fact, if I was living in Austin and had that kind of money, I'd also consider this school for my son - mostly for the wide plethora of cool and exciting things the kids seem to be doing in the afternoon according to the review.
What I am skeptical about is how such a system will evolve at larger scales (if it is as effective as advertised). Consider this scenario:
You start with Alpha school with 2h learning in the morning and workshops in the afternoon. Then someone comes up with Beta school that uses the same method but ramps up the learning to 3 hours to get 40% higher test scores (let's assume some diminishing returns). Gamma school is at 4 hours, Delta at 5. The alumni of each of them crowds out the alumni of the previous one from elite institutions, providing constant selection pressure. By the time you know you have rooms full of kids glued to computer monitors for 8 hours a day doing spaced repetition pomodoros.
There is currently no market for this. Most parents, even parents shelling out for Alpha, believe that the 2x learning promised by 2HL is already possibly too much/too fast, not too little. The scattered parents who are like this satisfy their preferences with tutoring, math camps, etc added onto other private or public school educations. They do not, in the U.S. at least, form an interest group that drives whole schools into or out of the market.
Though I do wish that there were some secret cadre of academic accelerationist families ready to book out GT school and pressure us for even more right away. Would be a great problem to have, to be banging the drum that their students need life skills and not just academics, rather than explaining how little students learn at regular school over and over.
(Am Alpha parent turned Alpha employee)
Germany is just as obsessed with education as South Korea and yet they don’t have anything resembling hagwon. If you don’t have a single universally adhered to status hierarchy based on one exam you don’t get “all cram school, all the time”. Even Japan and China aren’t as bad, and nowhere else comes close.
That's because they are afraid to fix the admissions process. Right now it's a race to the top: you need to score as high as possible on the Suneung when everyone else is trying to do the same, every single point you can earn must be earned.
If about 2% of Korean high-school graduates get into SKY, just make everyone who scores high enough on the Suneung (let's say within the top 4% last year) participate in an admission lottery to SKY instead, with the losers getting to pick any other NU10 university. The same could apply to the NU10 (but with the top 20% as the cutoff).
This way if you're comfortably in the top 4% you can't improve your chances any further and don't need to spend every free minute at the hagwon.
Phenomenal piece. It highlights a point that any rational observer of the lock-step "product" of American education might ask: why not let kids progress at their own pace, tailored to their ability, and focus on mastery instead of simply promoting them annually by default? You're not claiming to have a gold-standard study here, but honestly, it’s not hard to imagine how well that kind of model could work.
That said... I felt a real sadness reading it. The image of kids drilling on computers—even with breaks—was disheartening. My reasons are entirely anecdotal, and I can’t back them with empirical evidence, but I went to a remarkable private school from preschool through 8th grade. My cohort in the "Honors" track was made up of extraordinarily bright, talented kids who later became academic, economic, and artistic achievers. Total selection bias, no doubt—but here's the thing: we loved school.
Why? Because our teachers loved teaching. History came alive for us every year—from the Egyptians in 4th grade to post-WWII in 8th. My lifelong love of literature was sparked by our English teachers reading aloud with passion. If you've seen Dead Poets Society, it felt like that. We wrote and wrote. We adored our science teacher most of all—my closest lifelong friend, now an M.D. Ph.D. and Chief Science Officer at a biotech firm, credits that teacher with changing his life. Another close friend, a composer, points to our Head of Middle School—a master musician who packed our days with Glee Club and Orchestra—as his inspiration.
I don’t quite see that at Alpha School. There’s no shortage of engaging extracurriculars, and maybe kids just self-select into what resonates with them. Still, I don’t see love and passion. And I get it—love and passion don’t scale. They didn’t even scale within our own school. The honors track received all that energy; the median cohort—still smart, still tuition-paying—got "good, not great."
Maybe what we had was the modern equivalent of a Victorian-era tutor: personalized attention in a small enough class where everyone could thrive.
The love and passion are there. I wouldn’t be sending my daughter there next year if it wasn’t. It’s hard to capture and convey in the same breath as one is talking about the software platform, but they are there.
I get the worry about wanting inspiring teachers and role models, though. I had this worry too, before I visited. The teachers do serve this role, it just has a different specific look than it does in Dead Poets Society.
OK, that is wonderful. It would be interesting to try and quantify the "inspiration" effect. We talk about how the data says, well, it's mostly your genes, and maybe your peers. But so there is so much anecdotally about inspirational teachers and professors, that maybe "the data isn't measuring the right thing." (OK, maybe in this case not measuring "all the right things." Appreciate your response.
We have a survey question we ask to students annually: “Every adult had 1 or 2 teachers who changed their life. Is your teacher that for you?“ A crude measure, for sure. But that’s the aspiration, and we take the answers seriously.
Fantastic.
Can you say more about how the teachers at Alpha serve this role? Are they involved with the afternoon workshops as well? It does on its face seem more difficult to achieve compared to in a traditional school
> If all of this makes your inner Bayesian flinch, you’re in good company. After twenty‑odd years of watching shiny education fixes wobble and crash—KIPP, AltSchool, Summit Learning, One-laptop-per-child, No child left behind, MOOCs, Khan‑for‑Everything—you should be skeptical.
Wait. Can someone please explain to me how KIPP failed?? AFAIK it's done great for low income minority kids.
KIPP lost its "no excuses" orientation and went a bit "woke" like many other schools but as far as I can tell the academic results are still notably good.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickhess/2020/07/06/kipps-new-mantra-slack-off-be-mean/
Ah, Thanks!
Wouldn't count this as a fail though.
That said, could I pm about how to get a job at Alpha? I'm working on a school concept that will take underserved kids to do school abroad (thinking Prospera) and I think it might be strategic to learn from them and perhaps use their model as opposed to Khan World School (which is very similar, but with less focus on spaced-repetition AI)
Hey Kev, I'm inclined to agree with you on KIPP actually, though it seems some other "no excuses" type schools have fared worse. Steven Wilson just wrote a book about this, The Lost Decade
Sure PM anytime happy to chat
I am not familiar with the software used for other subjects, but Duolingo for foreign language instruction for $40k a year is very funny :) I hope you do not expect your children to actually learn any foreign language as you would be disappointed.
I thought that was interesting too. I've used duolingo quite a lot after having learned a few languages the old way previously. It's a really impoverished platform. I started using Pimsleur to compare and it's a much much better program, if you're doing language learning without a live person. But language is a human communication tool -- it seems very odd to me to not learn it through human communication with all the nonverbal cues and emotional involvement that come along with that. To properly learn another language is to absorb another culture and history into your bones, and to some extent to become a somewhat different person in the world.
It feels to me like there are a bunch of deeper layers of learning that happen simultaneously when solving a math problem live with a group of people or discussing history or talking about ways to interpret a piece of writing than can be taught through an algorithm and tested for with multiple choice quizzes. The affordable, scalable two-hour part of this seems much like duolingo to me, which is to say impoverished. And the afternoon enrichment looks much like any other kind of enrichment available to rich private schools.
I think you are hitting on something very important in the second paragraph. Leaving foreign language aside, it looks like Alpha appreciates the need for live intensive mentor and peer interactions and collaborative/competitive activities when it comes to behaviour (dojo points) and the afternoon time. But for the actual learning they ditched it for a solitary screen time with AI Eyed Wide Shut style controls. But why the most productive activity of the day should be sanitised from human interaction? In real life, leaving autistic programmers aside, most people are productive around other people, and not interacting with a gaze controlling AI.
When the subject of learning is human interaction (as with foreign languages) this is clearly absurd. But I think this may be almost as bad with some of the higher level mathematics learning.
The good news is that we don’t use Duolingo for foreign language instruction and we agree it doesn’t work. It’s something the students at GT School wanted to try this year.
The bad news is that we don’t have a solution for foreign language instruction at present.
You should talk to the people at baselang.com They charge $200 a month for individuals for all you can eat one on one tutoring in Spanish. Their in house curriculum is very good. I doubt you’d get too many students willing to spend 4 hours a day on learning Spanish but a year of that would definitely be worth more than the average Spanish language degree.
You should look at nativshark, at least for Japanese. And for math, at least for the GT school, look at programs meant for gifted kids like Beast Academy, mathacademy, EMF Math (even if only as options for those who wish to go deeper in math)
I'm assuming you already looked at Rosetta Stone?
And Forbes lists a bunch of other apps here, though the only other one I've even heard of is Pimsleur and something tells me their app is quite different from the CDs you could buy in the 90s. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/l/language-learning-rs/
My impression of Duolingo purely secondhand on hearing my elderly mother interact with it, occasionally supplying her the answer so she can move along, is that it is just another phone game for her like wordle or bridge or Connections.
She likes the cartoon character. She even likes the "shaming", I think. Someone cares whether she is doing her lesson, like so long ago. She has learned no Spanish, and cannot, but it's a fun little activity. When we go out to a Mexican restaurant, she will as ever cringily order her customary "Chilly Ray-leen-o", impervious to correction.
typo that "My 8-year old started 2nd grade content in mid-October 2025" probably meant 2024
> Alpha is much cheaper than a Victorian Governess
Nit: Victorian governesses actually made very little, like £80 ($2000) a year plus room and board. There was very little competition for educated female labor. https://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/feature/governesses
Also just from a modern perspective, at $40k a year for the school, if you have three kids you could probably hire a humanities PhD full time to tutor them for less than the school tuition.
But then what about STEM? You can hire one expert, but not several of them. And they might not be willing or able or ready to create and administer a curriculum designed for 1:1 teaching
> But then what about STEM?
You don't need to be a top expert to teach high-school level math and science. I'm sure there are plenty of people with PhDs in history or philosophy who can manage it just fine. Remember our basis of comparison here is "Victorian Governess"- the bar isn't *that* high.
> And they might not be willing or able or ready to create and administer a curriculum designed for 1:1 teaching
Then they probably won't apply for the job and you should hire one who is instead. It's not like you're picking someone at complete random here- hire someone who's interested in the job, same as any other kind of work.
The aristocratic tutoring mentioned in the article that gave us world changing minds was the type to involve a team of subject matter experts, not just a single governess.
I think the other main benefit of Alpha School is the benefit of having a social community.of peers who can make learning peer-driven (the second stage, after learning for rewards or parental approval)
From the Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches", published in 1892:
“I have been a governess for five years,” said she, “in the family of Colonel Spence Munro, but two months ago the colonel received an appointment at Halifax, in Nova Scotia, and took his children over to America with him, so that I found myself without a situation. I advertised, and I answered advertisements, but without success. At last the little money which I had saved began to run short, and I was at my wit’s end as to what I should do.
“There is a well-known agency for governesses in the West End called Westaway’s, and there I used to call about once a week in order to see whether anything had turned up which might suit me. Westaway was the name of the founder of the business, but it is really managed by Miss Stoper. She sits in her own little office, and the ladies who are seeking employment wait in an anteroom, and are then shown in one by one, when she consults her ledgers and sees whether she has anything which would suit them.
“Well, when I called last week I was shown into the little office as usual, but I found that Miss Stoper was not alone.
“‘You are looking for a situation, miss?’ he asked.
“‘Yes, sir.’
“‘As governess?’
“‘Yes, sir.’
“‘And what salary do you ask?’
“‘I had £ 4 a month in my last place with Colonel Spence Munro.’
“‘Oh, tut, tut! sweating — rank sweating!’ he cried, throwing his fat hands out into the air like a man who is in a boiling passion. ‘How could anyone offer so pitiful a sum to a lady with such attractions and accomplishments?’
“‘My accomplishments, sir, may be less than you imagine,’ said I. ‘A little French, a little German, music, and drawing—’
“‘Tut, tut!’ he cried. ‘This is all quite beside the question. The point is, have you or have you not the bearing and deportment of a lady? There it is in a nutshell. If you have not, you are not fitted for the rearing of a child who may some day play a considerable part in the history of the country. But if you have, why, then, how could any gentleman ask you to condescend to accept anything under the three figures? Your salary with me, madam, would commence at £ 100 a year.’
“You may imagine, Mr. Holmes, that to me, destitute as I was, such an offer seemed almost too good to be true. The gentleman, however, seeing perhaps the look of incredulity upon my face, opened a pocket-book and took out a note.
“‘It is also my custom,’ said he, smiling in the most pleasant fashion until his eyes were just two little shining slits amid the white creases of his face, ‘to advance to my young ladies half their salary beforehand, so that they may meet any little expenses of their journey and their wardrobe.’
“It seemed to me that I had never met so fascinating and so thoughtful a man. As I was already in debt to my tradesmen, the advance was a great convenience, and yet there was something unnatural about the whole transaction which made me wish to know a little more before I quite committed myself.
...“‘My sole duties, then,’ I asked, ‘are to take charge of a single child?’
“‘No, no, not the sole, not the sole, my dear young lady,’ he cried. ‘Your duty would be, as I am sure your good sense would suggest, to obey any little commands my wife might give, provided always that they were such commands as a lady might with propriety obey. You see no difficulty, heh?’
“‘I should be happy to make myself useful.’
“‘Quite so. In dress now, for example. We are faddy people, you know — faddy but kind-hearted. If you were asked to wear any dress which we might give you, you would not object to our little whim. Heh?’
“‘No,’ said I, considerably astonished at his words.
“‘Or to sit here, or sit there, that would not be offensive to you?’
“‘Oh, no.’
“‘Or to cut your hair quite short before you come to us?’
“I could hardly believe my ears. As you may observe, Mr. Holmes, my hair is somewhat luxuriant, and of a rather peculiar tint of chestnut. It has been considered artistic. I could not dream of sacrificing it in this offhand fashion.
“‘I am afraid that that is quite impossible,’ said I. He had been watching me eagerly out of his small eyes, and I could see a shadow pass over his face as I spoke.
“‘I am afraid that it is quite essential,’ said he. ‘It is a little fancy of my wife’s, and ladies’ fancies, you know, madam, ladies’ fancies must be consulted. And so you won’t cut your hair?’
“‘No, sir, I really could not,’ I answered firmly.
“‘Ah, very well; then that quite settles the matter. It is a pity, because in other respects you would really have done very nicely. In that case, Miss Stoper, I had best inspect a few more of your young ladies.’
“The manageress had sat all this while busy with her papers without a word to either of us, but she glanced at me now with so much annoyance upon her face that I could not help suspecting that she had lost a handsome commission through my refusal.
“‘Do you desire your name to be kept upon the books?’ she asked.
“‘If you please, Miss Stoper.’
“‘Well, really, it seems rather useless, since you refuse the most excellent offers in this fashion,’ said she sharply. ‘You can hardly expect us to exert ourselves to find another such opening for you. Good-day to you, Miss Hunter.’ She struck a gong upon the table, and I was shown out by the page.
“Well, Mr. Holmes, when I got back to my lodgings and found little enough in the cupboard, and two or three bills upon the table, I began to ask myself whether I had not done a very foolish thing. After all, if these people had strange fads and expected obedience on the most extraordinary matters, they were at least ready to pay for their eccentricity. Very few governesses in England are getting £100 a year. Besides, what use was my hair to me? Many people are improved by wearing it short and perhaps I should be among the number. Next day I was inclined to think that I had made a mistake, and by the day after I was sure of it. I had almost overcome my pride so far as to go back to the agency and inquire whether the place was still open when I received this letter from the gentleman himself."
Well, the salary goes up to £120 per annum, she agrees to cut her hair, and the plot plays out to demonstrate that she is not being hired for her skills as a governess.
So if £48 per annum as a governess to a couple of children over five years was the average wages, you can see that Alpha is, in fact, very much more expensive. In 1892, one website gives me a value of £1 = $4.87, so £48 would have been $233.76.
Translating that into modern values gives $8,257.76 today. So for $40,000 you could have hired around five Victorian governesses for your child.
They make a lot more now, though.
ZipRecruiter says your average California governess today earns $74k a year (not including benefits, but also probably room and board is not expected).
https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Governess-Salary--in-California
Here is a job ad which it looks like would cost the family at least $100k/year, considering benefits.
https://www.ziprecruiter.com/c/British-American-Household-Staffing/Job/SK199-Governess-Los-Angeles,-CA/-in-Los-Angeles,CA?jid=25ffc9a4c81c3e8f
>Workshops in the afternoons are the “fun” part of school. They are the equivalent of the music, theater and art classes that fill in a traditional school schedule (just more focused, measurable and creative).
Am I hopelessly crunchy-granola for thinking that if Alpha is willing to dedicate a whole afternoon program to sports, it would make sense for them to have comparable humanities program? Maybe it’s not “measurable” enough, but engaging with art at a young age seems at least as valuable to me as knowing how to operate an AirBnB.
working on it
I agree. And when it comes to the literature part of the humanities, I don't see how computers can be much help. The thing about the classics is that many of them are hard to access -- hard to find your way into and like. If you can't find your way in -- if Dickens just seems slow and boring, if Shakespeare just seems like a jumble of way way too many unfamiliar words -- then you need someone who loves those writers to show you the way.
There's really no point in forcing yourself to read one of these things if it bores and vexes you from beginning to end, just so you can say you read it. These are pieces of literature that can give immense pleasure. If you can't get over the hump and don't feel any of that, then even if you read it and can answer College Bowl questions about it you haven't read it.
Computers can help by freeing up 6 hours to spend on literature (or any other humanity) vs the 40 mins if you're lucky you would get at a public school
I homeschooled my daughter through 6th grade. Based on my experience, I wanted to give people a data point when it comes to acceleration and speed of learning.
I was extremely laid back regarding book learning until one year before she was going to return to school. By age 5 or she taught herself, with a little help from me, to read and write. (But her spelling was intuitive and phonetic, and her handwriting was very messy.) She picked up a modest amount of add-and-subtract math and simple geometry from games and Montessori type toys. But that was it when it came to the 3 R’s. She did read a lot during her homeschooled years, and was involved in various activities that enriched her mind and life but probably had little effect on testable academic skills.
During the year leading up to her returning to school we worked 2 or 3 hours almost every day on the 3R’s: Spelling, grammar and punctuation, math, handwriting, and expressing ideas in paragraph length bits of writing. I used conventional textbooks and workbooks popular with homeschoolers. Neither of us enjoyed these sessions much, but they worked fine. By the end of the year she was up to speed on all these subjects. I did not attempt to teach her school curriculum science, history, geography etc., since it seemed to me like mostly she would be learning new stuff in those areas, and would not have trouble filling in any gaps in her knowledge if needed.
So she and I sort of did it backward. Instead of getting her way ahead academically, so that she could finish her formal education early and then be free to begin a career or do other things, I let her be free to do other things for 6 years, then taught her the essential skills covered in school in a tiny fraction of the time that would have taken in school. Of course she learned lots of other things during her homeschooled years, and if I wanted to explain more about why I homeschooled the way I did I would describes these. But it’s not relevant to my main point: Teaching the 3 R’s does not take anything like the amount of time schools take with the task. And if you wait til kids are older it far easier for them to learn it — in fact it is extremely easy for them. And my daughter is not one of those intellectually super-gifted kids. In fact when she was small she had some kind of low-grade spoken language disability. (I adopted her from China when she was 2 years old, and language delays and problems are very common in foreign-adopted kids.).
I understand that my entire take on child education is different from the one being described in this review, and am not here to argue about that. Just wanted people to have this data point about how rapidly a kid can master basics, especially when older. You should also know that even the homeschoolers I knew who were trying to approximate a public school curriculum and pace of learning only did a couple hours per day of work on conventional school subjects.
I would be interested to hear why you chose to do it the way you did. Your point kind of reminds me of friends I have who potty train early vs those who wait as long as possible and their kid basically trains themselves. For the former, it's a ton of work and takes a lot of time and the kid probably isn't quite ready for it, but they're done much younger. For the latter, they are in diapers longer and not being challenged past their own comfort level but when they are ready it happens fast and easy. Which is better? Depends on the kid, depends on the parents.
I don’t think I can face posting in detail about it here. But here are the beliefs that were behind my approach:
-Kids are subject to states of very deep fascinated delight. Preserving the ability to enter that state is the most important aspect of early education. It’s not possible to systematically train small kids in basic reading, writing and math in a way that has them in that state. You can make it fairly *fun* by using kid-centric computer training, but “having fun” is not the magic state, just a pleasant one kids enter easily. You can also engage kids in learning that stuff if you have a reward-laden set-up where kids get rewards for engaging in training, or where kids are motivated by a desire to win. But wanting to win stuff and wanting to beat other people out are also not the magic state.
I think the best way to preserve kids’ capacity for fascinated delight is to put then in varied environments where there are a lot of things they can mess around with, and when they discover something that delights them give them lots more chances to mess around with it. Ex: I used to go to the library with my daughter and go to the section where the coffee table books were and come home with 30 or so at a time for her to page through.
If some of the things that fascinate a kid look especially promising as the basis of careers or lifelong interests it’s fine to put extra effort into finding ways for them to develop that interest.
The aim of coming at education the way I did is to raise someone who as an adult is able to engage in projects with fascinated delight. If the projects are done as parts of their career, that will probably make them more successful, but even if it does not it will make their life much happier and more meaningful. And if instead they end up earning a living with work that’s kind of tedious, but with hobbies they adore, they will still lead happier and more meaningful lives than most.
- People undervalue empathy and other qualities that are not especially compatible with being competitive, or even just being focused on improving one’s personal excellence. Every time there’s talk on here about selecting among embryos for intelligence, I pipe up in favor of selecting for empathy as a way to make life on earth better. Nobody’s very interested.
- There are some numerical things that I just do not think are as important as most people here seem to. One is income. I can see the point of making it into at least the lower rungs of the upper middle class, because if you don’t make it that far you are too vulnerable to being rendered destitute by dark turns of fate in the form of war, natural disaster, severe health problems in the family, etc. But beyond that — ehh, of course more money enables you to do and own more things and be protected in more ways, but it seems to me you’ve passed the point of diminishing returns.
The other is age at which one reaches certain milestones. Beyond the “wow” factor, what is so great about being 20 rather than 27 when you get a degree or publish a book or have some notable career success? Whether you are 20 or 27, you have many decades of health and vitality ahead of you, many years of fertility. There is plenty of goddam time. The thing that’s in short supply these days isn’t youth, it’s joy.
I agree with basically everything you wrote.
Do you think your approach to encouraging that state of fascinated delight in your daughter accomplished what you hoped to accomplish? And now that she is in school, what does she think about the years she spent in homeschool?
Heh. I love talking about my daughter.
She is now 29. She did OK academically after enrolling in public school, but was quite unhappy in high school, and extremely critical of me — not only of my homeschooling her, but of various other things I did as well. I felt quite miserable myself during that time, and was not sure how many of my decisions had been bad. I’m still not.
She had had quite a hard start in life. Almost all Chinese girls that were given up for adoption during that era were dropped off at the orphanage, or in some place where they would be found, soon after birth. She was left on the steps of the orphanage at age 14 months, so she was old enough to actively miss her parents, and probably old enough to sense that they had decided not to keep her. (My guess is that her parents chose to keep her until a second child was born, and that they had a son when my daughter was 14 mos. old.) She stayed in the orphanage until I adopted her when she was 28 mos. old. By all reports the staff of the orphanage were kind, and the place was reasonably clean and well-run, but it was a grim place with no toys and not enough staff to give kids any individual attention. I’ll never know for sure how much that start in life contributed to her teenage misery and how much was my fault.
But during college she gradually emerged from being miserable and bitter, and had a couple of boyfriends she felt helped her a lot. And since then things have gone well for her. She got a degree in the least technical branch of engineering, environmental engineering, and has had no trouble finding work. She changed jobs a couple times til she ended up in a setting where she likes the people. Her work is not especially interesting but it’s also not very demanding and she enjoys her co-workers. For the last 3 years she’s been living with a guy I like a lot, and they will probably get married. They’re an extremely compatible couple. Go on long demanding backpacking trips, sleeping in one shared sleeping bag. When I’m visiting them and leave the room for a little while I hear them continuing to talk and laugh. They just really enjoy each other’s company.
As for fascinated delight: She has that for rock climbing, which she’s been doing for the last 15 years. She is now extremely good at it, and currently has a goal in mind she is training hard to reach. Takes lots of trips to interesting climbing areas, and has a big circle of climbing buddies.
I’d say she’s one of the happier people I’ve known, actually, and has a lot of things she’s looking forward to.
https://imgur.com/a/AgVgbLj
Why did you choose to send her back to school instead of continuing the unschooling?
About incentives (bribes). I bribe our dogs so they learn what I want. I use to bribe my kids to go on walks down to the creek. Both with food. I wish someone had given me the idea of bribing my kids to read. I did semi-bribe them by saying I'd buy any book they wanted to read/ look at. "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" got one of my kids hooked on reading that way. I love this review, and fully endorse the idea of doing a non-book review again. Every other year maybe. (I love books too.)
In dog training, there is an important difference between "bribing" and "positive reinforcement", according to the book I've read when we adopted our mutt puppy. Both involve giving the dog food for some behaviour, but they lead to different outcomes: "bribing" gets the dog to do what you want it to as long as it sees the reward in your hand. The moment the reward is gone, it's not interested in doing that any longer. But if you do "positive reinforcement" right, the dog will do the thing in expectation of getting a reward, even without seeing it.
I'm not sure how this insight might be applied to kids, though (aside from never calling it "bribery", of course, that works).
Anecdotally, my parents used to buy me sweets after going to a museum, but it was never explicitly stated, not like "if you go with us to a gallery, we will buy you a Snickers afterwards". I'm not even sure I EXPECTED the sweets, although I'm sure I formed some kind of association between museums and buying sweets. These days, I actually like going to museums, so I guess it worked. To a degree. I only like exhibitions of realistic paintings, and dislike impressionists, or, god forbid, "modern art", so I guess some things are more powerful than food-based reinforcements.
About growing up in an atmosphere that fosters competition.Please do not try to tell me this school does not foster that kind of attitude or that your kids do not partake of it.
<Afternoon programming focused on excelling in “academic competitions” like chess, go, debate, public speaking, robotics, programming and Quiz Bowl.
<This past year four kids placed in the top-8 in a global debate with more than 1000 entries, and two kids are competing at national championships in chess and an academic bee respectively, but not national champions yet.
Come on! Even if your kids don’t get involved in the afternoon “academic competitions” (why put them in quotes? I’d say they’re not “academic competitions” but academic competitions), they are swimming in water with one fat fucking packet of Competitiveness dissolved in it. They’re sucking that solution in through their gills and sending Competitiveness ions up into their brains to have a word with the neuroplasticity supervisor.
I do not doubt at all that a competitive atmosphere has upsides, but I’m here to tell you it has a very substantial downside, too. I’m a psychotherapist and have somehow ended up as one of the go-to CBT therapists in town for super-smart students and young professionals. One person I see was described by the usually down-to-earth neuropsychologist I use for testing as having intellectual powers that are “stratospheric.” There’s somebody who got a perfect score on the LSAT — that’s 99.9 percentile in a test-taking group that’s quite a bit above average intelligence. There’s somebody whose tested IQ when they were high school age was in the 160’s. Unsurprisingly, quite a few of the people are graduate and professional students at the local Ivy.
Some of the supersmarts aren’t Ivy leaguers, though, and were not raised with the expectation that they would be highly successful. And these people come across as having a pretty different take on themselves and on life. There are, for instance, 2 people each of whom had one professional parent and one without a college education. Both were erratic students until they discovered some science and math subjects they loved, then they excelled in those and went on to get degrees in them at places that are not famous, and now have careers in the field. Their point of view about work and achievement is pretty different from the Ivy people’s. They know they are very good at what they do, but they don’t find ways to *signal* that. On the other hand, if you ask them a question that taps into how good they think they are at work skills, they’re cheerfully honest: “Yeah I’m fine at X, Y and Z, but at Q I’m a *monster*! I’ve been playing around with that stuff since I was 16 and I just don’t get stumped by anything anymore. Everybody brings their Q problems to me. And then there’s W. It’s not really in my field, but I was having trouble working with the W guys who did code for some of my projects, so I ended up just learning W myself and doing my own W works out much better. Actually now I’m interested in W itself and have some ideas about a way to revamp it.”
And they don’t seem very prone to jealousy. One works for a company where a management change has brought in a bunch of people who used to work for a couple of the most prestigious tech companies in the world. And he says, “wow. They’re great. They’re some of the smartest and most talented people I’ve ever worked with.” His enthusiasm sounds quite genuine. I can’t tell whether he thinks they’re cleverer than him, but is admiring and entertained, or whether he recognizes that they’re as speedy and clever as he is and are going to be a lot of fun to work with.
Another difference: both have hobbies they love and throw themselves into.
Another difference: neither has much trouble with akrasia
.
In contrast, the Ivy Leaguers come across as much more aware, moment-to-moment, of status, whether it’s professional status in the grad program or their job, or who’s making the best quips at dinner. They are vulnerable to intense jealousy, and equally vulnerable to despising themselves for being jealous. They feel deep despair, and might even think about suicide, when forced to realize that somebody is simply more talented than they are.
They have unreasonable expectations of themselves. One became engaged to a woman whose family is mega-wealthy, and felt as though he could not live with himself unless he himself became as rich as the woman’s parents. (He is in a profession where his earnings will make him wealthy, but it will not be wealth on the order of his inlaws’.).
They are very highly motivated to excel, but have trouble with motivation to do the actual work they can excel at.
They are superb networkers, but feel bad about putting more effort into networking than into making new friends and hanging out with their old buddies.
They tend to feel tired and drained after work, and don’t exactly have hobbies — more settings and activities where they socialize and network.
This is fascinating… I wonder how much you think environmental choices by parents &/or teachers play a role vs. how much of this is mostly self-selected. I’ll say that I’m still pretty young, but mostly fall into the competitive, “procrastinates and has ugly feelings” category, even though I’ve been at public schools all my life, and my parents were generally super hands-off.
And I’ve kind of always been this way! Self-selecting into sports and academic competitions since ~3rd grade… Is it possible that the Alpha kids who are super into competition were just sorta made that way? They just sorta like it? And if the author’s kids are less into it naturally, then maybe they won’t catch as much through osmosis as you say.
I don't know, but I'm sure school environment has an effect.
I tended towards competitiveness and jealousy myself for many years, and I also was not pushed or raised with high expectations. I did not grow up with wealth, did not have highly successful parents who assumed I'd be a big fat success too. If I had chosen to be an airline stewardess my patents would have been fine with that plan so long as I sounded happy and excited about the job.
In my case I think the factor that pushed me towards the competitive end of the scale was that I'm an only child. I was not spoiled in the bratty sense of the word -- my parents did not give in to begging, nagging, whining, etc., in fact they briskly discouraged these forms of manipulation. But I was accustomed to being the apple of their eye, accustomed to having someone interested in what I was thinking and doing. And when went to school I discovered that in a group setting, you only got that level of attention if you stood out some way. Of the various ways to stand out, being the smart kid was the one that came naturally to me.
It has taken me quite a few decades to mostly get over that orientation, and even now I am not completely free of it. For instance, I felt pretty deep distress when I learned that my review did not make the finals. In most of my life, though, most of the time, other scripts dominate.
What if you were in an environment where being the (singular) smart kid wasn't feasible? Do you think that would be better for your mental health on the long run? In my opinion, that's the main benefit of gifted programs and competitions - they show kids how big and great the world is, and how they don't have to be the smartest. Much better to learn this on middle school than try to learn it as an adult.
Just curious, if it was Chess or a sport they were competing in, would you be clutching your pearls as hard? It seems like these kids have discovered some of these activities to be their Q or W. What's the issue with them doing so before 16? What's the evidence that public school would somehow fix these issues which seems suspiciously closely linked to their intelligence?
I have put in a lot of time and done a lot of self-disclosure in an effort to get across my accumulated info and opinions about schooling, and am open to follow-up questions. However, I’m not going to respond to yours, because you’re rude (“clutching your pearls”). You sound to me like you have a case of undergraduate arrogance. Fuck off.
I apologize for my rudeness.
OK, I accept you apology. Peace.
As for your questions:
-Why I sent her back to school when I did: She really wanted to go to school, I think mostly because she had hit the age when the preteen and teen stuff starts up, and a kid’s peers and social group become very important to them. It’s also the age when kids generally make a best friend for the first time. I thought it was unfortunate that there wasn’t a way for her to have that social stuff without going to school, but I couldn’t think of one, so I did not protest.
<What if you were in an environment where being the (singular) smart kid wasn't feasible?
I don’t think it would have made any difference in my yearning for individual attention, which was I think the result of being an only child. it just would have foreclosed on one possible way of getting the attention. I would probably have hunted around for another way to feel special.
<Just curious, if it was Chess or a sport they were competing in, would you be clutching your pearls as hard? It seems like these kids have discovered some of these activities to be their Q or W.
In a setting where there are lots of choices (school play, music group, band, art, Q, W) I’d be at peace with kids choosing chess or a competitive sport. My objection to the options offered at Alphadog were that (1) they were all intellectual competitions. (I posted about the effects of competitive elements in early education here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school/comment/130067331 and here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school/comment/130309116.) (2) the afternoon time was not being used to introduce the kids to literature, art, etc. (I posted about introducing kids to the humanities here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school/comment/130072554 )
Also, here's one more post about learning, and why I don't see mastery of the material as the real challenge: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school/comment/130551522
<What's the evidence that public school would somehow fix these issues which seems suspiciously closely linked to their intelligence?
None. I’m not speaking up in favor of public school, just expressing skepticism about Alphadog.
Thank you!
This is my primary concern about the GT School (Alpha doesn’t do any academic screening & afternoons seem to be spent on non-academic things as well, so less concerned there). Even if the early culture isn’t yet very competitive, it seems inevitable that it will become so over time as awareness spreads. I saw that happen over time at the magnet school I attended as people started moving across the country to go there. It’s also part of why I wouldn’t want my kids to grow up in a hyper-competitive academic environment like parts of the south bay area & where I went to school. It’s just clearly not healthy as kids so quickly tie their self-worth to academics.
That being said, the Alpha School concept of get formal academics done in a couple hours a day and then spend the rest of the day doing workshops/ideally discovering & working on things you enjoy.. seems incredible. Self-directed time like that is invaluable in childhood.
> On Friday the kids are presented with a bunch of locked boxes. One of the boxes has a prize in it. The kids with keys check the boxes to see if their key opens the box with a prize.
Loot boxes. They added loot boxes to kindergarten.
…Okay, fine, that’s not a fair comparison. It’s not a true gambling system because the kids aren’t choosing to spend a resource they could otherwise save up.
But as symbolism goes, it feels like an unflattering metaphor for the system as a whole.
It's a fair comparison at least for games without microtransactions. Loot boxes weren't invented by EA.
And gambling is a fair comparison in that random rewards (in psychology, a variable-ratio schedule) has been shown to be incredibly addictive. Slot machines target the exact ratios that will keep people invested. Abusers are able to keep their victims around because they're only randomly abusive, not 24/7. Higher drug use makes the output more random as tolerance increases, leading to people "chasing the high".
But those have a negative connotation because money-wasting, subjection to abuse, and illicit drugs are bad. Addiction is pathological, and pathology is defined by disorder and disruption to life.
If this *truly* works (I'm as skeptical as anyone), then it's intentionally addicting kids to learning and prosocial behavior.
It feels icky by association. But... these results aren't a bad thing. And addiction frequently leads to people continuing even past the point of reasonable reward. If it keeps people learning and behaving morally in the long run, what more is there to say?
Getting kids addicted to good behavior works for me. As far as methods of compelling behavior go, it seems quite benign compared to the alternatives.
"Once you have freed up half a day for 6-years and a full day for the other seven, you open up a limitless number of possibilities.
Some kids will rush into college classes. Some will choose to use the time to play sports. Some will use the time to master chess or quiz bowl or programming. Some will take time to travel the world with their families."
Sorry to be all grumpy and critical, but I gotta say, that is a *wildly* optimistic and most likely unrepresentative take.
OK, so these kids are limited to those whose parents are both able and willing to spend $40k/year on Alpha, which means. most likely dual-earner couples where both parents have fairly demanding careers. Their kid graduates from Alpha at age 12 instead of 18. Yay! Now what?
"Some kids will rush into college classes." At age 12? Seriously? Are they going to live on campus (in a dorm with a bunch of 18+ year olds? In a frat house?) or are they going to live in their parents' house and commute to and from campus daily, in which case you'd better hope there's good public transit or have a parent who can take you to and from campus daily, because at age 12 you're four years away from being able to get a drivers' license.
Ok, sure, you can do college 100% remotely, but then you miss out on the formative experience of socializing, making friends in person, maybe finding a girlfriend/boyfriend/future spouse.
Some will choose sports! Chess! Programming! Excitement?
Again, how is this going to work *logistically*? Both parents are likely working long hours, probably outside the house. A 12-year-old can be legally left home alone, but cannot drive. Assuming this family lives in the suburbs (= crappy or nonexistent public transit), the kid is stuck home all day. They're not hanging out with other kids their age, because guess what, those kids are at school (Alpha students being a tiny % of the population).
How likely are they to teach themselves chess/programming/other intellectually rewarding pursuits 9 h/day as opposed to, you know, spending the majority of their time on TikTok/video games/p0rn? We're talking *adolescents*, who are not famously known for stellar impulse control, and "intelligent" != "highly motivated autodidact."
Traveling with their family? Sure, that works for maybe 2 weeks/year, i.e., the amount of vacation time the parents have. If you're super lucky, maybe you can send your kid off to travel with a willing grandparent/aunt/uncle for, say, another two weeks, so that covers 1 month out of 12. Also, this works once all your children have graduated from Alpha. If your youngest is still in Alpha or regular school, you can't just leave them behind while you and your firstborn go gallivanting off on a world tour.
TL;DR: This plan has problems, lots and lots of logistical problems.
I think the assumption here is that this is for a family which this *would* work for. I'm a single earner providing for my family. My wife currently home schools our kids, but after reading this I'm very interested in alpha school. We live in Austin and would be able to afford this on my income.
> Their kid graduates from Alpha at age 12 instead of 18. Yay! Now what?
One option is to work on their own projects. A child good at programming can make computer games and publish them on various platforms. An artistically gifted child can publish their art on a blog, and maybe sell it. (Both of these may be soon outcompeted by AIs, but the same is true for people with standard education.)
Another option is to study university lectures at home. Many lectures are online, you can buy or download textbooks, etc. Then maybe at 16 enter college and excel there.
> They're not hanging out with other kids their age, because guess what, those kids are at school
They can work on their projects in the morning, hang out with other kids in the afternoon. And sometimes hang out in the morning with homeschoolers. You can hire university students as tutors for them (probably not a problem for someone who could pay $40000 a year for school).
Both "good at programming" and "publishing your art" have problems. You're not allowed to do too much work as a child, particularly at age 12 (that's far more of a problem for programming, to be honest, as you can use most of your sketching time as "practice"). Far safer to pretend to be older, and then you can get "normal person critiques" (as opposed to "child prodigy" critiques).
> You're not allowed to do too much work as a child, particularly at age 12
Work done at home can for legal purposes be declared as "an older relative did it".
This can be adapted as necessary. If a relative has a contract that prevents a side job, choose a different relative. If the child wants some bragging rights, the story could be adapted as "the older relative did it, but the child helped" without being specific about details -- which allows the kid to say "actually, I did it all", and the adult to say "you know, kids exaggerate".
Then at 18, the easiest way is just to create a new account under the child's name, and publish new things there. (Transferring the existing assets is probably not worth the effort; soon the best pieces will be published under the new account.)
> Far safer to pretend to be older, and then you can get "normal person critiques"
I agree.
I'm confused - who's going to come knocking if your 14 year old starts programming too much? How much is too much?
According to federal law, 14- and 15-year-olds cannot work more than 3 hours on a school day, including Friday, and more than 18 hours per week when school is in session.
(I think it's 40 when school's out)
Check your local laws.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/youthrules/young-workers/non-ag-14-15
Oooh, you can't bake, but I'm not seeing (on a quick skim) that you can't blow glass (which is substantially more hazardous).
I'm pretty sure this refers to employment outside of school - someone programming who is homeschooled and getting class credit doesn't seem to count. If it did, every school would be breaking the law due to requiring upwards of 8 hours per school day
Yep. I'm saying that kids getting paid for work product is a good incentive to get better. Getting paid as a professional is a good way to develop professional habits.
Don’t kids bike in the US?
I guess it depends on the city, but probably not safe in many.
If you can afford alpha school you can afford transportation for the kid to the local college.
> Their kid graduates from Alpha at age 12 instead of 18. Yay! Now what?
This really depends on the kid. I plan on doing accelerated education like this for my kids, because it's what I wished I had (I did skip grades and CLEP / AP about half of undergrad, but wish I'd had more acceleration). What is right for your kid is largely going to be a function of their personality. More school? Get through undergrad faster - it's at least a ~50% waste of time, too, and you don't actually do any real learning until grad school, anyways.
I think you're also assuming essentially a "middle class, dual career" background, where money and time are both constrained, and I just don't think that's the modal couple doing this kind of stuff for their kids. If you have money and / or a spouse with time, you can do a LOT more on this front for your free-from-school kids.
One example - of course REAL learning isn't about school at all - they can go deep in mathematics or physics, or history, or some other discipline that inspires them, and you can hire postdocs to tutor them and help them grow in their understanding and knowledge.
An example from my own life - I wish I'd gotten into athletics earlier, because by the time I got into them I was older and had less background than most other people in it. I ended up being regionally competitive, but If I'd started at age 12-16 like everyone else, who knows where I might have been. So why not sample from whatever sports or physical pursuits they like, and take the time to get good at them?
Some kids will want to do a passion project: writing a book, coding software, building some sort of physical robot or machine (building an open source Mobile Aloha robot, anyone?), and that's a great use of time that you should encourage. I hope all my kids learn how to work on cars from me and how to do around-the-house fixes handyman stuff, because it's good to be able to do those kinds of things for yourself, too.
Some will want to start a business, and you should mentor and help them through that.
Broadly, there's really zero *downside* to being done with school faster, because school is mostly a waste of time, and mostly about signaling anyways. If they finish faster, they get to do the actually important and enjoyable things in life!
The most salient point you make is college as a mating market. But what better way to get into the right T20 school or grad school than taking the time from 12-17 becoming competitive at some sport, starting a business, building a Mobile Aloha robot, and so on? They'll have a much better shot than the kids who just stayed in school for those years.
Another option for STEM-oriented gifted kids is Olympiads - they can easily add an extra year of meaningful learning (well, at least in physics, chem, CS, and several years in the case of math) without requiring a college environment. As a bonus, if you can make it to the camp stage, you get a free summer camp with other equally talented kids. For really gifted kids who don't go to MIT or Caltech etc, it might be the only time in their lives they're around a significant group of people at their intellectual level. That's a priceless social opportunity.
But screens are addictive. If the child is on a screen at school, they're going to want to do that the rest of the day.
I can't imagine being addicted to IXL. And the school shouldn't let them waste their school day, and after that parenting is up to the parents.
"or are they going to live in their parents' house and commute to and from campus daily" yes, that's what most 12 year olds do. Lol.
If they do college academics remotely from the school, they still have all the social benefits of the school.
Keeping kids at the school after they've met 12th grade standards seems to resolve all your issues. Just replace 6 hours a day of teac-sorry, guide-directed productive activity with 8 hours.
I haven't seen any comments from Deiseach yet, I eagerly await her appearance with her customary "No shot, Sherlick, of bloody COURSE when you limit yourself to kids whose parents can afford $40k/kid/year for fancy-schmancy schooling, those kids are going to do well! Show me something that works for Tommy from the projects, whose mum is a drug addict living with her fourth boyfriend in the last two years, who also happens to beat her and Tommy."
(No shade on Deiseach; she's excellent at this and I agree with her!)
How well you know me!
That was some excellent fucking Deiseach mimicry/parody.
The results are relative to equally achieving peers, not the general population.
Tommy needs a lot more than any private education company can provide.
There is a mistake in the first date in the "Lesson Clock Speed" subsection.
From where I'm standing, it's very much like Americans are kind of reinventing China but with less tears. Chinese schooling, which includes heavy loads of after-school classes (not activities, classes), is pretty similar to what's being described here, but a bit lower-tech, and with more emphasis on getting the lower performers up to speed. Basically you do lots and lots of drill until you've really got it, then you move on.
The use of IxL is just comical to me, because it's such a staple feature of international schooling here.
Obviously the key feature of Alpha so far is that it's small and enthusiastic and expensive. When it gets bigger and cheaper, you get more families/parents who don't care, and the school's time and energy will be sucked into making sure the lower performers aren't completely stopping... and then you've reinvented public school.
But it sounds great at the moment.
This was a very clear and helpful review, as well.
I feel like your first and third paragraphs argue against each other, unless you think China’s model wouldn’t add anything for US public school cohorts?
It's very possible, I'm not sure that my thoughts are very coherent...
As I see it, the US and China basically take two opposite tacks at the moment: Chinese schools say "regiment, inentivise, force feed"; US schools say "offer, care, avoid harm".
I personally am pretty comfortable with the Chinese model - I don't think it hurts kids more than the US model. But I also don't think that the Chinese model is obviously superior. I think everyone assumes that the Chinese model will produce better academics, and the US model will better protect kids' mental health. And there's lots of anecdotal evidence to support that.
However - that anecdotal evidence is crap when it comes to assessing the systems as a whole. It seems to me entirely possible that Chinese schools are still academically failing the vast majority of the population. (I work as a tutor in the catchment area of a relatively good urban Chinese school, and we see lots of kids who have studied English for 3-4 years, and still can't recognise the word "a". Everyone in China believes that yeah, the English teachers are bad, but of course the Chinese teachers are great... but I have some anecdotes that point the other way as well.)
Similarly, do American schools really look after children better? The dropouts, the school shooters, the violent? All those kids taking drugs for their mental health - is that a sign of better care in the school system, or worse?
I honestly don't know the answers to these questions.
One might assume that some kind of "happy medium" would be the best answer, but that's pure guesswork.
So do Chinese schools have anything to offer the US? I really couldn't say. And I think it's important, when you don't know, to be clear about not knowing.
I'm curious about the anecdotal evidence for better mental health outcomes from the US system. Are you able to elaborate on that?
It's usually the negative comparison: In China there has been a spate of reports about child (teen) suicides, mainly attributed to academic pressure.
From what I understand, the USA doesn't have many teens killing themselves because school is so gruelling.
It's not really reinventing public school if the school's aren't publicly operated. They would just be a larger private school system.
Sure. I was being too imprecise there.
(Background assumptions: I don't think that there is a massive difference between public and private schools if the selection effects are taken away (evidence: Sweden and the performance of US charter schools); so when I said public school, I meant any non-selective system, because I think they'll all end up performing about the same.)
My understanding is that private schools were significantly more likely to continue providing daycare service https://www.econlib.org/not-even-daycare/ during COVID.
I'm just totally perplexed here.
As someone very familiar with the Chinese system, isn't Alpha just the absolute polar opposite to the Chinese system in almost every way?
Alpha: A bunch of cool extra-curriculars; China: Only for the elite
Alpha: Strong positive incentives; China: Negative incentives, top-down pressure and shaming
Alpha: Small classes and 1-on-1 time; China: 40-50 student classes are the norm, with some higher.
Alpha: Minimising class time; China: 13-hour days.
Alpha: No strict curriculum, each teacher doing their own thing; China: You will literally spend a year revising for an exam.
To play devil's advocate on the last part, the 2 hours are solely exam focused, which is a quarter of the student's school life. More than one year equivalent.
I should clarify. In China, nearly all education is ultimately exam focused, but the final year of high school is *just* revision of material learned in the previous two years for the gaokao exam.
You may be right. I was very much commenting off the top of my head, and I may just be wrong.
What I see as the commonality is this: acceleration on pure academic tests beyond US grade levels, achieved through an intense incentives to complete lots of bog-standard drill and kill.
In Alpha, the incentives are positive, and the acceleration is used to free up time for rich people extracurriculars. In China, the incentives are negative, and the acceleration is achieved through massive time investment. Nevertheless, the real value-add that all the parents above are talking about is getting ahead of some notional American basic academic speed. That seems to be the thing that is valued.
I think you're missing the point when you talk about each teacher doing their own thing. The core curriculum is a single defined set of exercises delivered by computer. There's no human freedom there. The human freedom comes in the extracurriculars.
I dunno, the comparison may be inapt.
Solving for scale is often a lot harder than solving for quality, esp given the 4x population difference. E.g. it's like "why do you do things in such a roundabout/painful way at Google"
Hopefully the system explores ways of improving quality on these rails. Especially since we're entering an era where just getting good grades and a good degree does not guarantee a better (socio-economic) life
China's model doesn't seem related to this - it gets similar results to Finland with much more school time, whole Alpha likely gets better results with significantly less.
Maybe the Alpha guys could license their product to other schools, turn it into a model?
One data point: the year my son made the most progress in math was the year his teacher just let him go through EPGY math courses, as fast as he wanted, as long as he shared his progress; since he loves math, he did over three year’s work in one year.
We never found another teacher willing to let him do that, even in the fancy private school he went to later.
I suspect they'd be nervous to dilute the brand (and their impressive data) by relinquishing control.
I suspect that's also why they're reluctant to market/distribute their homeschooling product.
They are actually heavily marketing to parents to ask for this model from their private school. Futurefirst Families. You have to have a notebook to keep up with all their companies
Alpha is totally not cheaper than a Victorian governess was in the *Victorian* era.
any Londoners here? Would a school like this work in London? Most private schools are very traditional
In many ways it might work better, as A levels and GCSEs are much better standardized than the US' education system. The issue is that the free third party programs they piggyback off of are US-aligned
Great essay. It revived my interest in alternate learning environments, potentially as an entrepreneur.
There's a thematic thread in the essay and in a number of comments about 'scaling this idea', making it more affordable, et al. One of the differentiating aspects of experiments in this space is differentiated curricula/differentiated pace et al. By extension, the idea of scaling alternate learning systems is also going to require a multitude of concepts at different price points and using different formats (screen + coach OR screen + parent OR screen + environment + coach AND others) and also addressing different social/contextual needs.
I believe we have to celebrate each 'win' regardless of scale and track both short-term and long-term outcomes without getting trapped by an over-riding desire to find a broad replacement for the predominantly industrial-revolution education system we have all critiqued. It is quite likely that the replacement for the current system will not be 2-3 alternate systems and require thousands of formats which will inform each other while staying discrete (perhaps converging in some areas for phases).
Every child helped to actualize a greater fraction of their potential is a win.
As a homeschooler of a gifted child who's ~2-3 years ahead - a new 6y/o doing 3rd grade math and reading - I'm conflicted about this school model. While the community and extracurriculars sound great, I can't get past the fact that the academics are based on... IXL. Not that there's anything wrong with online learning apps, and we do use them as practice and a supplement. But I feel this is letting students down in a significant way.
As an analogy - imagine a world where the goal of education is to become physically larger. Historically, this would mean 'good' schools served hearty meat-based dishes and encouraged physical exercise. Cheaper schools offered bread with whatever protein they could afford. Nobody had yet learned about progressive resistance training, or the roles of micronutrients, but they knew you did much better in life with three square meals than without. But over time, American public schools found that they could provide fast food to children, and they would certainly become physically larger. Which was of course the goal! The only test that mattered was the scale. The government itself adapted the curriculum to encourage the use of these newer, simpler foods. Meanwhile private schools still marketed their in-house chefs and organic ingredients, but ended up serving fries and hamburgers, too. But the real, true point was never to just get *physically larger*. It was to become physically powerful, empowered, useful, and capable. Size was the stated goal. And then of course, the number on the scale wasn't even a very good way of measuring basic physical size - let alone measuring physical empowerment!
This is how I feel about the standard curriculum and MAP.
We have incredible insights today - the equivalent of micronutrient research and strength training regimes. And yet this school charges $40k to shovel the intellectual equivalent of fast food into smart kids' brains at twice the normal rate! It's mind-boggling to me! Isn't the goal to have a better brain? To be intelligent, knowledgeable, adaptable, curious? Those aren't SMART goals so they get lost along the way, but I personally feel they are the *actual goal*. Will Alpha achieve this? Maybe in the non-learning hours. But those sound as though they're full of competitive, performative activities, too.
I genuinely believe two things: these kids will be fine and will do well, and probably much, much better than their public school peers. And I also believe that this school will leave them with this nagging sense that many people leave school with - that they know a lot of things but don't really understand them, that they do a lot of things for reasons they don't understand, that they struggle to find pleasure anywhere, that they're driven by forces that feel external to them. This is why I choose to homeschool - I don't want my child to pass tests. I want him to internalize knowledge. I don't want him to note the key themes of a text. I want him to read at length for pleasure, and to write to express himself. I want him to be empowered, powerful, useful, and capable. And I don't think that nailing the pathetic bullet points of the Common Core curriculum is the way to go about that, sadly - otherwise I'd love for him to go somewhere like this.
I've seen a number of anecdotes from other commenters in this thread on their (very positive) impression of Alpha graduates even compared to other gifted/magnet school grads, maybe that assuages your concerns a bit? Although do adjust for cherry-picking.
Well they already agreed that it might be better than the other private schools
As a parent of 3 kids from the Brownsville Campus I can tell you this model does not work for EVERYONE. There are some commonalities among their success stories and that is income and background. 85% of the Low SES students from the Brownsville Campus that started at the school in 2022 are no longer there and its not due to lack of "motivation" or ability. This is a good option for those whom its model is targeting but not a silver bullet as replacement for our current failing educational system.
" 85% of the Low SES students ... are no longer there and its not due to lack of 'motivation' or ability." In your opinion, what is it due to? The obvious criticism of Alpha School is that its students' successes are highly correlated with having wealthy, smart, and motivated parents. One counter to that criticism would be a record of proven success with students without that background, and the Brownsville campus would be the obvious place to test that. If the Brownsville campus is failing that test, it would be useful to know exactly why.
There are a lot of reasons families struggled with this model. Reasons the school never addressed, likely because they were too busy with their marketing machine. After reading this article, it’s hard not to conclude that income and background played a major role in how families experienced ALPHA. They’re used to serving families who can relocate across the country and afford $40,000 per child to “try out” a revolutionary school. But that’s not who we are. We’re families living paycheck to paycheck, with different life experiences and different starting points. That doesn’t mean our kids weren’t capable of success, far from it! It just means they had to work twice as hard to adapt to ALPHA’s rigid model.
This article brings up a lot of valid concerns, but I saw firsthand how much more deeply these issues impacted kids from our background, especially around the concept of "motivation." and their buggy tech.
Thank you for the reply. That helps a bit in understanding this. I'm curious if the school itself surveyed (or surveys) parents and students to determine why they left the school? The answers seem very relevant to the possible success of any Alpha School-sponsored charter schools, which presumably would be targeted at a wider cross section of the student population. Would any of the folks who work at Alpha School care to comment?
Could you share exactly what the issue is for 1 or 2 example cases? As of right now, it's really unclear how the difference in student demographics lead to issues. Sure, Brownsville families are poorer and more stretched. But this review article says Alpha tuition seems to be all inclusive and does not require parental involvement. Is that not accurate?
The problem isn't tuition as we were given tuition assistance. The problem is, is the school addressing the needs of those who it serves and realistically meeting the children and families where they are and doing what is best for them or are they trying to make them adjust to Alpha's measure of success based on their main customer base i. e. Families that could pay 40k tuition per child and trips to Europe with classmates are expected?
So many times it seemed like things were lost in translation when we would communicate our needs and the response would make us feel we were wrong for having those concerns. Like they couldn't understand why would even ask that? They never understood our community and at one poin even said "Well, this is not a problem at Austin" insinuating we were the problem.
Can you give a concrete example of these "needs" and how you were not "met where are"?
> So many times it seemed like things were lost in translation when we would communicate our needs and the response would make us feel we were wrong for having those concerns. Like they couldn't understand why would even ask that?
What were some of the needs that you tried to communicate, which were subsequently not being met? Could you provide some examples of things you asked for?
I honestly don't feel comfortable sharing specifics in a comment section about the systematic way the school chipped away at the collective sense of trust and safety of local families. I would have to write a piece just as long as the original author to explain. But I am noticing there is alot of prespective and context missing. First of all, Brownsville is NOT Austin, not even close. Even the richest person here does not compare to Austin rich (unless you count Elon Musk). The school started with 99% local families which most if not all are Low SES. By the end of year 3 there were only 5% of the original families left. Most replaced with SpaceX families and non low SES students. That alone should raise some questions. Alpha is a private school geared to the elite which is great for the elite, but trying to shove a model that still needs alot of work onto the masses seems unethical to me.
https://open.substack.com/pub/danmeyer/p/the-truth-about-2-hour-learning-and?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=3zol2p
https://www.levernews.com/the-headmaster-of-the-ai-apocalypse/
Frankly, in several comments now, you have said there are problems because Brownsville is different without saying what the differences are.
I'm not even getting into their tech and model specifically which according to them works 95% of the time and we were sadly the 5%. They had no solution to their system failure other than expecting my child work twice as hard to make up for their failure.
I am sorry for my lack of comprehension
but after reading your comments, I still don't have any concrete idea of your problems with the school. if you don't mind being more explicit or providing more details for my benefit?
e.g. you said you communicate your needs and you feel that they made you felt you were wrong to have those concerns [which is understandable but light on details] but somehow that is linked to "never understood our community"?
and how did the system fail and made your shildren work twice as hard to make up for their failures?Poor User Interface and Technical Glitches?
Thanks for sharing your experience. Not a parent but I care about the topic. The article emphasized that the improved outcomes relied on a 3-4-punch combo of principles, in spaced repetition, immediate feedback, incentivizing with Alpha bucks, and probably some others I'm forgetting. Like you said yourself, this doesn't echo "silver bullet".
I can imagine academic issues persisting if kids:
- still aren't internally motivated to learn any faster than what's required, e.g. it's not pleasurable, or they don't see the point
- can't feel comfortable around the majority of their peers; especially important for them to thrive in the afternoon tasks
A quote re: the "check charts" stuck out to me:
>"If their friend moves up before they do, they need to double down so they can catch up."
This can work if they have a solid enough friendship to begin with. I.e., they can still see themselves in their (currently) overperforming friend, and not that they're inherently worse, so there's no point in trying to catch up. This ties into fitting in socially with the class.
IME the rare rich students are taught not to flaunt their wealth, and so they fit in decently with the rest. With poorer students, I can imagine a lot of "othering" happening, if they're just a few amongst a privileged majority. If that was the case in the Brownsville campus, improving social integration is a worthy goal but understandably not their top priority. Few (if any) institutions have ever managed that, let alone managed that well. I don't know of any that did better than the church, and that requires a whole community to "buy in" in a way for which even a 40k annual donation can't substitute. A Jesuit school may be the next best thing. All the best to you and your family
I thought the author was pretty clear on suitability -- he said the Alpha School audience is "elite nonconformists" (three personas: "David Disruptor", "Arjun Academic", "Alex Amplifier") which is probably at most a mid-single digit percentage of everyone
Exactly! So why are they pushing so hard for charter status all over the country and discussing changing public schools to their model with the department of education?
They use Brownsville as their evidence that it works for everyone. This is what makes me doubt any of their claims.
If anyone in the comments:
- is in Austin
- is a parent of young children
- wants to meet up and discuss this post, alpha school, and/or adapting this to home schooling
please send me a message!
This was really interesting, but I am just having extreme difficulty getting over the fact that anyone is paying $120k in cash each year for the kids to go to elementary school. I mean, I got that right, right? $40k and 3 kids who are all elementary age are going?
Presumably this is a person for whom money is no object, but still. To me, everyone learns the elementary school stuff fairly easily (just on different timelines, sure) and public schools are fun at that age and a lot of singing and play. This whole model seems much more interesting at later ages, when it's a lot less fun and kids pay less attention and learn and retain less. But then, I've always been in the Bran Caplan none-of-it-matters side of things, so paying any amount for elementary school when it's free is wild to me.
You would be surprised how unfun public schools with a 1:1 tablet program and a garbage online program or 3 and a test-prep focused environment. If you want to see it in action, try an ST math demo lesson or 10
> The 2-hour learning platform is gifting them an additional ~9 years of childhood. I just hope they use it wisely.
There is a 0% chance they will use it wisely, but I don't think that's a bad thing.
They can spend 9 years failing at something that others haven't even started!
Wow, this was a really interesting review.
The "Dojo points" part made my past child self wince though. As a smart kid with Asperger's, I was punished almost constantly in school, no matter how much I tried to fit in and despite much more extreme incentives than "Dojo points".
Also, I'm confused as to why they don't use a more linear, less zero-sum reward
What's interesting about "bribes" is that:
- you can always get more by being a little better, not matter how good you are
- your score doesn't depend on your peer's (not directly at least, I'm sure if all the kids start raking in too much they'll lower the thresholds)
Seems like this would be useful for rewarding "good behavior"
Eh. I knew a kid who stole the gold stars and gave everyone a gold star one day (some kids never, ever got a gold star). Pretty sure the teacher knew who did it, too.
> In November 2020 we had a meeting with the head of our kids’ original elite private school for the gifted. Her un-blinking eyes stared at us down through the Zoom screen as we listened compliantly, “My job is to keep everyone a little unhappy,”
> I resisted the urge to mention Vilfredo Pareto.
> We had just spent a month working with a team of kindergarten parents drafting potential constructive fixes to the COVID mess our kids were experiencing.
One of Matt Yglesias' essays made the point that the Biden administration seemed to be treating legislation as a pure exercise in coping with a set of fixed demands from different sources - everyone gets something they asked for, and nobody gets everything they asked for.
He observed that if you put in the effort to understand _why_ certain parties have asked for certain things, you may be better positioned than they are to know what you can do for them, and offer something that they prefer to what they asked for.
> I don’t see how you can teach a language a couple of hours a week to a group of 18 kids with skill levels from zero to fluency and expect to have any impact
This will still work if you enforce the rule that nobody speaks anything other than the target language.
Language learning is moderately unusual in that the "simple" work at the beginning of the process is very difficult and the "advanced" work at the end is easy. In the general case, students encounter language instruction that is not intended to be difficult (or to teach them the language), don't themselves intend to learn the language, and unsurprisingly don't learn the language. They never get past the highest barrier, because it's also the first one. If you have students who actually want to learn the language, you can use more effective methods, but a general-purpose school is unlikely to do that.
Almost as far back as history goes, we have records of students being beaten for speaking to each other in Akkadian when they were supposed to be learning Sumerian.
Based on my experience, that can help a bit but it's by no means a silver bullet.
> Every parent we spoke to was very impressed with the school. Their kids really were advancing at 2x+ speed – and no one believed it was just a “selection effect”.
Note that the selection effect is still, by your description, overwhelmingly powerful. Think of what it would take to get every student in a public school system to place in the top 10% at at least one local chess tournament.
> For me, the real value that comes from Alpha is not the performance uplift. The most important feature of Alpha is that they have found a way to learn more efficiently. It allows students to condense all the “required” state-mandated material into half a day for ~6 years instead of a full day for ~13 years.
What? This piece describes Alpha as getting children to spend more time on learning. That's not the same as learning more efficiently. Under the status quo, students go to school for a "full day" for ~13 years and they spend almost none of that time learning. Under the Alpha system, they do the same thing, but they spend somewhat more time learning. If you forgo playing in the park during 3rd grade so that later, in 8th grade, you can do some extra playing in the park, what did you gain?
Presumably it's not the playing in the park you're forgoing, it's the sitting around bored doing nothing. At any rate, I don't think we ever did "playing in the park" at my school.
That wasn't an example I made up. It's from the review:
> But once the kids started at GT, those same iXL lessons became a game for them. I remember taking the kids to the park one day after school. They asked me, “Instead of playing can you set up a hotspot so we can do a few more lessons? I want to earn more GT-Bucks!”.
The difference seems to be that the overall amount of free time is greater with alpha school
Oh? The review says they spend the same amount of time on school at school, and more discretionary time. It would seem to be a necessary consequence that they have less discretionary time which is not spent on school.
This is good if you think spending time on school is good. But not otherwise. And all of the benefit is lost if you balance it out by ending your studies early. What's the goal?
The goal is more time for the afternoon activities, which traditional schooling can't give you due to being inefficient.
This review was absolutely fascinating - lately my company has been working on a personalized tutor beginning with SAT math - https://aaris.ai/ (after Aristotle ofc).
If anyone here has any comments, I would love to hear about them. The way Alpha School does things has provided a lot of ideas.
Selection effects. In a decade no one will be pretending that this matters.
Can you clarify that? It seems like it would matter if you’re trying to isolate what the best program is
Sorry- what is "The Moth"?
https://themoth.org/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=13882176648&gbraid=0AAAAAC6hOseKmSqkQcFulHLDKB6m-ocA2&gclid=Cj0KCQjwpf7CBhCfARIsANIETVrGOdeRjOvRh6SefbTmvz8SmVlX7b0bEh18k012eL-H_XS9nOQdpF4aAojUEALw_wcB
It seem really cool. I have only one reason to doubt it.
Y'see, school not just gives knowledge, it gives some skills required to acquire knowledge. Including a skill of sitting in a classroom, listening to a boring lecture, while keeping yourself awake and attentive. Or a skill of learning by heart some text, while having nothing except a copy of this text.
Or more generally, problem is no one knows which skills are needed to be successful in a college or in other environments. No one know, how human mind works, no one can create AI because of that. The education is a ritual knowledge ("we do like we do, because we always did like we did") because no one knows exactly which skills are trained, and which parts of the education system are responsible for them. If we have something working, and no one knows how it is working, then Chesterton Fence is a very important principle to follow.
All these spaced repetition computer assisted techniques are great, I tried them with Duolingo and got my German skills from exactly 0 to a level when I can read a German news, with a help of a dictionary. It took me 3 months. For a comparison, it took me 10+ years to master English to this level (though, German is not a good way to test the technique, because German seems to me as a mix of English and Russian, with weird word order, non-intuitive genders of nouns, and a lot of new words, I'm going to try with Chinese next time). Spaced repetition is great, but are you able to use it, when you deal with not with a ready-made curriculum, but with a college course, where all your learning materials are textbooks and lectures?
I'm sure, that some relevant skills are trained by Alpha School. Like an ability to assess your "mastery" level: if you try 1000 times to learn something and to pass a test on that, and each time you get a grade, you'll learn to predict a grade in advance. It is a very important skill, it allows to decide is it advisable to spend more time learning something.
But how about a skill of sitting for a couple of hours in a classroom taking notes? I believe this is not a skill that is hard to acquire at 18 yo, but still. Or a skill of reading a book, taking all the important parts from it, and learning them by heart? The last part can easily be done with Anki or something, but how to select important parts? I think, that Alpha School will give some relevant experience, but it needs to be scaled from small passages in Alpha Reads to whole books. Again, it doesn't seem to me very hard to do it at 18 yo.
I cannot see some fatal flaw, some critical skill that is missed by Alpha School, but I do not know the full list of skills needed, I can easily miss something. So I would be very suspicious and would look everywhere all the time, if my kids went to such a school.
> But how about a skill of sitting for a couple of hours in a classroom taking notes? I believe this is not a skill that is hard to acquire at 18 yo, but still. Or a skill of reading a book, taking all the important parts from it, and learning them by heart?
FWIW, these aren't skills I ever acquired and I've done all right.
> But how about a skill of sitting for a couple of hours in a classroom taking notes? I believe this is not a skill that is hard to acquire at 18 yo, but still. Or a skill of reading a book, taking all the important parts from it, and learning them by heart?
Then again, it seems that Alpha School teaches the skill of sitting at a computer for long(ish) periods of time, watching YouTube videos and extracting useful information from them. Which is actually how most of college students learn these days, I think (at least according to Reddit posts; I finished my education too long ago and don't have kids, so no direct evidences).
Taking notes in class was on the way out even when I was at university in early 2000s: when you have teacher's own presentation you can read at your own pace, few people care about taking notes (yes, I know listening and writing stuff down is helpful to SOME people, but not others; I would guess people who NEED to write stuff will either learn to take notes from YouTube videos at Alpha School, or find it a very bad match and drop out and go to some other school).
Learning something from a book, that was my personal point of hate. I have the book. I can find the god-damned formula, if I need it. I only need to know it exists and its name, so I can easily search for it. Why should I ever learn it? It's a well-known meme that a good engineer is not one who knows everything about his field, it's one who knows where to find the knowledge. It was a true statement when it was made up (in 60's?), I think, and it's even more true now, with all the electronic references, and now AI assistants.
So I don't think these are very useful criticisms of Alpha Schools (not that there aren't any).
> Including a skill of sitting in a classroom, listening to a boring lecture, while keeping yourself awake and attentive
This is not a useful skill for acquiring knowledge.
> Or a skill of learning by heart some text, while having nothing except a copy of this text
Only useful for situations where you need to learn a text by heart with only a copy of that text. Pretty contrived.
> not with a ready-made curriculum, but with a college course, where all your learning materials are textbooks and lectures
You can make your own Anki cards. Medical students often do this.
> but how to select important parts
School certainly doesn't teach this. In fact, it punishes you for it when the unimportant part you ignored shows up on the test
> I believe Alpha is the rare educational intervention that dramatically increases the speed that students can learn the required material. But that just begs the next question: “So what?” Does it matter if kids learn the full K-12 state curriculum in six years instead of thirteen? Then what?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
Great stuff, sorry to have missed it in the finalist voting. Is it too soon to call it a front-runner?
Probably would have been good to define the "MAP" acronym sooner than the ~fifth time it was used.
1) I have another concern about automated test based education. Can it ruin motivation for tasks that don’t provide immediate positive feedback? In adult live you sometimes need to work through negative feedback to reach your goal
2) what alpha calling 2.5 acceleration isn’t exactly translating to time spent learning. At what age median student completes school program? What’s their MAP percentile at the time?
3) I doubt that third party tools have ready materials for more advanced topics. What’s then?
Also I know trip to Poland sounds impressive but honestly it’s probably cheaper than classical trip to any other eurozone country. With only a dozen students going I wouldn’t include it in major expenses
I doubt many other schools include intercontinental travel in the tuition cost, regardless of the destination.
3) the third party tools appear to go to 12th grade
So alpha school student should run out of them by 3rd if we believe all marketing or by 6th realistically
Nice submission. I walked away skeptical of the school itself, it sounds like they bundle existing platforms with bribing kids, that’s about it. But the good thing about the review is not whether the school is speeding up their learning. It’s how it dwells on the question “if the core stuff can be done in the morning, how shall we spend the afternoon?” Based on this review, it would be nice to shift the discussion from finding ways to get better scores, to wasting less of their time and getting them a chance to build other skills.
I’d also like to hear the authors thoughts after more time at the school. Let us know some of the juicy stuff when the shine wears off a bit.
Scattered thoughts. The core claim that with this well optimized program students learn 2.6x more in two hours per day than traditional students learn in 8 hours per day. So it's really a 10x speed up. I can honestly believe that. I went to Catholic private schools and for complex reasons, I had to be home schooled for 2 weeks at age 8. I spent maybe 2-4 hours per day with my mom who the school generously gave a 2 months of the curriculum and lesson plans. I finished everything before the 2 weeks was up. When I went back, I was confused as to why we were moving so slowly. And this was without fancy techniques - the speed up was a result of actually testing me on the material as we went, and then just moving on once I had learned it.
Second thought - public schools cost the government about $20,000 per year. So $40,000 isn't that crazy. You could probably cut that down by getting rid of the fancy trips and other expensive parts leaving the core system intact.
Regarding things that can't be tested via multiple choice - I think that is a problem but it's also one that traditional schools have. My writing sucked until college because I never got meaningful feedback. It was always just a grade followed by a vague one sentence statement. Before college I was never once asked to write a story or analysis, and then make it better on the second draft. For math math or science, when you get something wrong you want to know why and what the right answer was. But for writing, every single test or assignment was one and done.
Lastly, I'm honestly kind of jealous of kids who got an opportunity to get this kind of educational experience. I was mostly bored in school (until college), but also didn't spent much time on activities that might have meaningfully improved my life like public speaking, event planning, socialization (I went home straight from school everyday).
I'm a bit confused what the conclusion to this piece is meant to be. The final line:
-The 2-hour learning platform is gifting them an additional ~9 years of childhood.
sounds like the conclusion is:
"Mainstream education wastes most of childhood chasing pointless targets. Here's a way to hit those targets in half the time." Which is justifiable, premised on accepting the signaling theory of education. But it's not an interesting conclusion because 1.) being more efficient than mainstream education isn't that hard. 2.) it's still not actually accomplishing anything worthwhile.
The main body of the text makes some effort to try and argue that there is something to gain from educating kids more. But that's a much harder argument to make and I don't think it will convince anyone who already leans toward the signaling theory.
"I just hope they use it wisely." Good luck to them making a wise choice given the massive amounts of non-evidence based and motivated thinking surrounding the whole subject of education and childhood development.
1. This is the most efficient we've seen on a meaningful scale
2. It's not clear what you mean by worthwhile - the afternoons seem quite worthwhile to me
-This is the most efficient we've seen on a meaningful scale
Fair enough that's a good point, it acts as a proof of concept at least.
If the article had focused just on the efficiency gains I wouldn't have minded. If the argument was "It's still a waste of time just less so than normal schools." But it did seem to want to argue that the school was making real gains towards making the kids grow up to be more intelligent/productive adults. Which is the same thing normal education claims to do and which it has almost no evidence to support.
-the afternoons seem quite worthwhile to me
That would be great. But given how prevalent social signaling games are upper class American kids lives, even apart from school, those afternoons could easily just get absorbed by sports clubs, extra curricular activities or whatever.
"those afternoons could easily just get absorbed by sports clubs, extra curricular activities or whatever"
They aren't, at least on the main campus. I'm a big nerd but even I would have to admit that even those "social signaling games" have genuine lifetime value.
-But it did seem to want to argue that the school was making real gains towards making the kids grow up to be more intelligent/productive adults. Which is the same thing normal education claims to do and which it has almost no evidence to support.
When there's no strong evidence on either side, I'll go with my gut, which is that the afternoon activities seem more valuable, especially since I can add full books and history and art etc after the alpha school day but I can't add Alpha afternoons after the traditional school day.
Kind of the same thing, right? If SCDS teaches the basics in a couple hours a day and uses the rest of the time on enrichment, then it sounds like this model also teaches the basics in a couple hours a day and offers the rest of the time for enrichment.
BTW, Mr J has done great as the science teacher, and anyone who signed up for the school thinking there was no chance the nearly 80 YO science teacher would retired before their kindergartener reached 4th grade probably should have thought about it more.
I’m also curious to hear what schools that did a better job with COVID actually did, given that our kids went back in-person in Nov 2024.
Thinking about Alpha School and my 10 year experience running the Hybrid Model -three days at school, two days at home.
Both systems compress seat time substantially. The ACX review claims Alpha School compresses it to ~17.5 hr per week and at St. John Paul II the hybrid model compresses it to ~18hr per week for a second grader.
These gains are very much real. And honestly, not that hard to achieve. The results are surprising only if you don't believe in instruction.
In our teaching staff the Hybrid model prizes expertise; Alpha prizes coaching & logistics.
The shape of efficiency is very different between the two systems as well. St. John Paul II spend the least amount of money per student of any accredited school in the St. Louis Metropolitan area. It is the Moneyball Oakland A's. ($5,300 spend / student) The efficiency savings return to parents.
The efficiency at Alpha is very expensive ($40,000 tuition, and I wonder if per student spending is actually higher?). I am reminded of Henry Kaiser's shipyards in WWII, which could produce ships at a dizzying rate, but at a great cost. Ultimately, though, even at a lower rate of production 40 days rather than 4 it was still a 600% improvement on prior shipbuilding speeds. Alpha is like that right now. Like the shipyards in WWII, competing to show how fast is possible.
Is a synthesis possible here? Teacher-led seminars in classical liberal-arts tradition with minimal screen use on the one hand and fully algorithmic competency training on the other?
I believe so and I look forward to the day I find a way to bring these algorithms into the world of atoms rather digitizing the physical. I want to see liturgy, virtue formation, physical books with eye-to-eye conversation coupled with micro-data, tracking, and algorithmic targeting.
Chromebooks, modern ux: these are ugly (but have their place). Paper on large wooden surfaces, physical books: these are beautiful.
I want the best of both worlds. Help me get it.
Your hybrid model seems to require 3 days of 6 hours plus 2 days of home education - that seems like more than 18 hours per week. And what are your average map growth percentiles?
We don't take the MAP just the CLT. I can construct a table of proxies for CLT → SAT and then walk it back from SAT→ MAP, but because the construct errors involved in that. It'd be basically invalid.
The three days are 4:15 hours of core academics and our survey data says home days require about 2.5 hours for a second grader. That's how I got ~18.
Do you find the CLT to be a good measure of students' academic skills, or is it a bit of a "least bad option" situation
This is a great review and very interesting. What struck me was the fact that the core learning that Alpha is doing is not that unique.
My daughters are a a good quality public school in the USA. They have iPads and have access to ixl (or something like it) for their main subjects. They get:
- immediate feedback on their answers
- personalized learning according to ability
- spaced repetition
I have been very impressed by this. Compared to my schooling where I would do a sheet of problems, hand it in, and receive it back the next day, this technology truly is revolutionary for learning. In my day, I could have completely misunderstood the concept, and got all of the answers wrong, but wouldn’t know until after I’d done all of them.
No doubt the alpha school is implementing the software more rigorously, and a big difference is they are allowing kids to move on at their own pace, but I’d suggest that this isn’t a unique application of technology- it’s the same disruptive, powerful new learning technologies that are available now in many good public schools, done better.
All of this to say- the world is still waiting for the *true* application of AI to learning. Some day it’s highly likely that every student *will* have a personalized one on one tutor, whose pace, way of explaining, subject order, and even tone of voice are fully personalized and optimized for their learning, and for the cost of a few million llm tokens. It’s possible that today’s ‘AI’ learning technology solutions will look pedestrian in comparison to this.
This is great.
Something I'm confused by though - why is the 5:1 Guide/student ratio required for this model? It seems like a lot of teachers, and I'm not seeing why this model requires such an extreme student/teacher ratio (especially since it seems like it would be economically viable for a lot more people with a lower one).
5:1 student to guide, actually. That's typo
Okay but that's still very high and leaves the question in place.
I can only assume the afternoon activities are in very small groups for students with different interests