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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   31313 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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I read the new ACX Review post about Alpha School (by an anonymous writer, not Scott). It was well written, but a bit of a slog, because it's quite long for an essay, but not as polished as a book. Some thoughts:

  • The school in question costs $40,000/year, and the writer sent three children there last year. There were apparently only 10 children in their cohort.
  • The big headline for the Alpha School model is that it has only two hours of core academics. I looked at the schedule for my local elementary school, and they have 2.75 hours of core academics. I don't think most people know this. I get the impression the writer, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars sending three children to this elite private school and wrote a very long essay about it also doesn't know this. Forty-five minutes a day is not nothing, but is not a huge deal or the main thing the school has going for it.
  • The other headline is that they progress 2.6 times faster on the state mandated curriculum, so they'll probably finish it all by junior high or so. Sure. Great. It's nice for kids to learn more things sooner.
  • They have an incentive structure that appears to cost about $400 per child per year, which they earn mostly for completing their lessons well and on time, and can buy real things that they like, not extremely cheap things that individual teachers can afford to buy themselves, like at many schools. It's not impossible that public schools can adopt this, if they're convinced enough. Medicaid gives mothers points for taking their babies to checkups, which they can use in an online shop to buy books, toys, kitchen items, etc.
  • The teachers are well paid ($60,000 - $150,000), not called teachers ("guides"), and have a slightly different schedule structure from public school teachers. In public schools, the art, music, PE, library, and sometimes other teachers are the only specialists, and their schedule is determined entirely by the need to provide a break to the main teachers. There's some office politics around when this "prep" happens, and how the schedules are set up. Apparently at Alpha, all the students work on the digital platform for the first half of the day, and it's not entirely clear what the "guides" are doing during that time -- students ask for individualized help from call center teachers in Brazil -- but given the pay rates, presumably they're doing something. Then they lead clubs and whatnot in the afternoon. That sounds nice, but they're paying them more than the public schools, so I wonder if there's a catch. That's a big part of the question of whether it could scale or not. Could educational assistants do what the Brazilian on call tutors are doing? Could public school teachers do whatever the guides are doing? It's unclear.
  • Every public school teacher I've talked to likes the idea of morning academics, afternoon specials. This doesn't work due to the schedules of the specials teachers, and also staggered lunches. Large elementary schools have six lunches a row, and are very inflexible about that. Apparently it works at Alpha both because all the teachers are, to some extent, specials teachers, and they have less than 100 kids, so lunches are not a huge concern.
  • I can see why the SSC-sphere is apparently full of well off people with gifted children, but do not personally relate all that strongly. If I were going to send my kids to a school like that, it would be for the better/longer electives and more interesting peer group, more than for the accelerated learning.

Thanks to the cringy association with supplements and PUA bootcamps, I've been conditioned to automatically suspect anything whose name begins with—or is just—"Alpha" is a scam or will otherwise underwhelm. It's petty but this is why I'm putting off watching 28 Years Later, despite originally being hopeful about its release and having enjoyed 28 Days Later and parts of 28 Weeks Later.

While the author might be a bit extreme than most, in general it's amazing how much handwringing people do over the details of children's school curriculum design and teaching methodology (teaching content might be more understandable) when the heavy-lifting is done by your partner being smart, you being smart yourself, and keeping your children away from the riffraff. The rest is window dressing.

Doesn't the author know how much Nutritional Security and Socioeconomic Factor he's leaving on the table by not supplementing his children's diets with Alpha BrainTM?

Whilst I agree with the general sentiment of your post I think there are is a very valid reason for why a child should be placed in this sort of program over public education, at the very least.

Considering the child will largely grow up to be similar to mom and dad, barring bad friends and unlucky accidents, why not put them in a program that maximally conforms to whatever ruleset upper class academia emphasizes? It's a good use of time if we assume the kid will inherit the brainpower to meet the demands of higher learning. Instead of being potentially stifled by public education, which is poor, it can potentially be motivated to pursue education and have the resume to enable that pursuit.

whatever ruleset upper class academia emphasizes?

Quis paget entrat, is the joke about that. Though upper-class academia does have its share of clever, as well as well-connected, students.

St Cake's School is an imaginary public school, run by Mr R. J. Kipling (BA, Leicester). The headmaster's name is part of the joke regarding the name "St Cake's", in reference to Mr Kipling cakes. Articles featuring the school parody the "Court and Social" columns of The Times and The Daily Telegraph, and the traditions and customs of the public school system. The school's motto is Quis paget entrat (He who pays gets in), although variations on this arise from time to time, such as when the school decided to admit only the daughters of very rich Asian businessmen, and the motto became "All praise to the prophet, and death to the infidel". While the school's newsletters feature extraordinary and unlikely results and prizes, events such as speech days, founders' days, term dates and feast days are announced with topical themes, such as under-age drinking, drug abuse, obesity, celebrity culture, anti-social behaviour and cheating in exams. The school is sometimes referred to as "the Eton of the West Midlands", in reference to that area's relative lack of such schools and the magazine's founders' attendance at Shrewsbury School in that region.

It is worth noting that the top British public (i.e. private) schools do not run on a quis paget entrat basis, and have not done since roughly the 1980's. There is a standard examination (Common Entrance) meaning that the system is transparent enough that people would know if it ran like Harvard admissions. At the time Prince Harry got into Eton in 1997, they apparently still had slightly lower academic standards for children of hereditary peers (and significantly lower standards for royalty - he wouldn't have met the reduced standards for the aristocracy), but they had no need to let a dim kid in for cash, and didn't. The other top schools had published pass marks with no exceptions.

Part of the joke about St Cake's is that there used to be a lot of mildly shit public schools that were selling social exclusivity and nothing else (and the resulting stereotypes survive because the upper classes are one of the designated acceptable targets for outgroup-bashing humour) but most of them went out of business after WW2.

28 Years Later may be in my top ten favorite films … just need a rewatch so solidify my opinion on that.

Top 5 are:

Event Horizon Suspiria (2018) Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Stop Making Sense

5th is always floating - just completely variable at anytime but it’s probably another Tarantino

Shit, based on your list I had better go see it.

The other headline is that they progress 2.6 times faster on the state mandated curriculum, so they'll probably finish it all by junior high or so.

This bar is not quite as low as the Dead Sea, but it's at least as low as Amsterdam. The state mandated curriculum is supposed to be set up so that every kid gets through it in 12 years. It doesn't do that well, but the numbers are consistent with it working for kids down to more than 1SD below the mean. If you have a program that's almost certainly only going to attract kids 1SD ABOVE the mean and higher, going much faster should be easy.

This is pretty interesting.

All of the GT Workshops are focused on a measurable, legible output. They don’t learn “public speaking”, they learn how to craft and deliver a speech and then submit the performance to the Moth to be judged by external parties. The school’s “100% Money Back guarantee” is that every student who attends will be in the top 1% academically and win at least one national academic competition (for kids who start in kindergarten they guarantee 1350+ SAT and 5s on APs by 8th grade). 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.

Winning national academic competitions is a bold claim, but maybe there is that much alpha (ha!) to find versus conventional schooling.

Additionally

Airbnb: Maybe the most impressive one. The 5th graders learned about the economics of property management - from property sourcing, mortgages, interior design, taxes, marketing, photo shoots, etc. And then they actually bought and managed a small property as a class (yes, the 5th grade class manages an actual property with a P&L)

I find this fucking awesome. You're clearly not only paying for kids to practice Duolingo. Also, an Alpha School guy replied in the comments and said "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."

Mostly, I just enjoy how willing they are to experiment and iterate even in the face of unpopular ideas. And apparently paying kids to read books is insanely unpopular?

Roland Fryer, who has done extensive work on what works in incentivizing students, quotes a 2010 Gallup poll that found that only 23% of American parents support the “idea of school districts paying small amount of money to students to, for example, read books, attend school or to get good grades” (76% opposed the idea with only 1% undecided).

There are not many things that 76% of Americans agree on. Only 69% of Americans believe another Civil War would be a bad thing. Only 78% agree that American independence from Britain was the right choice. People REALLY don’t like paying kids to read books.

So what do these parents think we should do instead? Mostly they believe that kids should just be “intrinsically motivated” and school should be about inspiring that internal motivation. Their concern is that if we provide external motivation for learning it will crowd out internal motivation. They worry that when the external motivation goes away (no one is going to pay a 30-year-old to read books), there is no internal motivation to keep learning happening. In this model “education” is not about educating per se, or even about teaching habits, it is about inspiring character.

The other option is that rather than use the carrot, you could use the stick. Fryer shares another poll from 2008 where 26% of parents think grade-school teachers should be allowed to spank kids (35% in the Southern US states!). As Fryer summarizes: “The concept of paying students in school is less palatable than the concept of spanking students in school”.

We homeschool our kid and while he is crushing it academically, we do notice his motivation sagging a bit in some areas. Our headline update from reading this entire post was not to move to Austin and send him to Alpha schools, but to try greasing him a bit.

We've been paying for online piano lessons because his mind was blown by Elton John videos and he seemed genuinely interested in learning how to play and we were like sure why not.

And he's been practicing pretty consistently with very little prodding from us for almost 18 months and plays really well. He's decent enough that the last Christmas party we went to he just played and kept it bumping while everyone else sang along. I find this impressive enough because I can't play piano for shit.

But! He hit this one module that has one song that he just doesn't like and his motivation to finish it fell through the floor. It's pretty surprising since it's not even a hard song, it just doesn't seem to satisfy him the way the other ones do. He's been stuck on it for months, just does not care at all to practice it. So... having just read this post we decided to offer him $1 to finish the song by Monday and he bunkered down and has been practicing it hard since.

Are we worried about ruining his intrinsic motivation entirely? Not really. There's some rationalization later about how bribing kids does not render them incapable of doing things without external motivation as adults, and indeed it might be a solid way to push them more towards having intrinsic motivation later.

There's a fairly lucid section in the article about how genius level masters didn't appear born with intrinsic motivation and the simple explanations like "they just love practicing more" don't hold.

They don’t learn “public speaking”, they learn how to craft and deliver a speech and then submit the performance to the Moth to be judged by external parties.

Maybe I'm just dumb, but trying to navigate The Moth's website makes me think this is just a Gen Z version of Toastmasters. I mean, yay for "public storytelling" but I doubt they're going to be very hard on a bunch of elementary schoolers and since they seem to be aiming for podcasters, well okay maybe yeah they are training the new generation of social media influencers who will be hosting podcasts as a career given that AI will take every other job by the time these kids have speedrun the national curriculum and are ready to join the world of work aged sixteen.

It's been around longer than gen z has. It's probably more well-known than the Toastmasters, as that Moth Radio Hour has been on various NPR stations for over 15 years, and while I'd never make a point of listening to it, late on a Sunday afternoon it's often the only thing on the radio worth listening to.

I guess I can see the appeal.

Our family skills are art and nature photography, and the daughter has become excited by the prospect of displaying her creations. She walked into a gallery and announced that she wants to have her work in a gallery. She made a figurine, and got all excited about the idea of selling it. It occurs to me that I don't have any sales and finding display space skills at all, I always gave things away, as did my mom. I think she tried selling her art once, and took my brother and I with, but even though she was next to her friend, it wasn't good enough for her to want to continue. It would be nice if I knew more about competitions or something.I always put stuff in the country fair, so maybe we'll do that in a few years.

I'm not sure what you're responding to exactly. Are you saying this seems inane and that school shouldn't focus on this, or that this doesn't seem like a hard academic competition to win. Is this even an academic competition?

I tried to read the book review before making a top level response, I really did. But I couldn't make it past this part without going on a rant:

In practice “deep” just meant “un‑measured.”

It should certainly raise our hackles when an organization claims its strengths are unmeasurable. Like maybe these people are lying.

But more to the point, there seems to be this mentality of the educational institution being what matters. Not results, not the kids. The system. Spending more money on public schools is automatically better, even if it's spent on buying cigarettes to pass out to the kids it's better than spending the money on some not-public-school-related thing. Iron law I suppose.

None of this is casting shade on individual teachers, who mostly care about how the kids are doing, would like to be paid more but wouldn't everybody, and are simply very conformist women who've been taught that people pulling ideas out of their assholes are 'experts' who should be listened to. Union heads and admins, on the other hand...

I think we see this mentality on wild display with the principle in this first section- she is, by virtue of her position, entitled to deference and respect and obviously knows best, correspondence to reality be damned.

None of this is casting shade on individual teachers, who mostly care about how the kids are doing, would like to be paid more but wouldn't everybody, and are simply very conformist women who've been taught that people pulling ideas out of their assholes are 'experts' who should be listened to. Union heads and admins, on the other hand

I think the lack of concern foe whether the methods actually work, and thus you go through fads that are dumped for other fads rather than trying to actually figure out what methods actually get kids to improve in a given subject. This would absolutely never fly anywhere else. If I try a new method at work, and I don’t see any improvement, im not going to be allowed to keep going. If I’m just doing a new process and don’t even bother to see if it works at all, it’s going to probably get me canned rather quickly, especially if when the results are measured, it doesn’t work. Teachers and administrators can flit from idea to idea, have kids do worse, and nobody cares.

A couple of thoughts:

  • Almost nobody is good at getting preferred behaviors from people who don't want to cooperate. Even good managers are not all that good at it, they refuse to hire almost everyone, and sometimes fire people when things aren't working out. Paying more sometimes helps, but there are a decent number of unemployable people out there. All of them were once children who's teachers couldn't remove them from class for more than about 10 minutes at a time unless they physically assaulted someone.
  • Almost nobody is good at social science research, including actual social science and educational researchers.
  • Elementary teachers are not selected for their educational research and testing abilities, they are selected for patience with small children, helping them learn to get along with each other, and the ability to work within a system that isn't all that well designed, where nobody can ever be expelled and almost nobody can be fired or demoted.
  • Individual teachers can't decide anything about curriculum, schedules, or class compositions. Which are almost everything. They can conduct classroom management, and do actually iterate a lot on who sits next to whom, sticker charts, fidgets, and so on.
  • "If I’m just doing a new process and don’t even bother to see if it works at all, it’s going to probably get me canned rather quickly, especially if when the results are measured, it doesn’t work." It depends on what you mean by work. If you have an unstable client who keeps freaking out and throwing things around the room and pulling random people's hair, and your method works to decrease that but not to improve other metrics, did it work?

Although I'm biased as someone with a statistics degree, we'd get much better research if we either outright banned people who are bad or inexperienced in math and statistics from doing research, or significantly raised the standards for anyone wanting to do research (or as a compromise simply bit the bullet and mandated collaboration with a more math/stats-aware consultant). The number of statistically-illiterate or inexperienced questions that show up on reddit's askstatistics subreddit that mention offhand that it's for a paper they intend to publish is, frankly, frightening.

The big open question as I understand it in educational circles is how would we even implement something successful if the traditional mechanisms are non-functional? Any implementation requires some trust, and that trust is very diminished by administrators mandating often terrible programs or ones with onerous and impractical requirements to be implemented, which teachers understandably sabotage after paying lip service to. These programs or pushes always seem to cycle every 5 years so there's little consistency or follow-through. A lot of it is milked by educational consultants who have never taught in their lives and who have suspect financial incentives to sell things. And it poisons the well for actually-good initiatives, because they also can't get good compliance. It's almost a similar model to how dysfunction occurred in Soviet planned economies.

So in that light your point about cooperation is key.

Indeed. I'm not quite anonymous enough here to talk about this in detail, but it's very much an issue. Trainings can become incredibly hollow if the administrators aren't fully on board, so that teachers don't even understand or have access to the full ideas behind what they're supposed to be implementing, even if they want to do it.

The author (seemingly not scott) seems absolutely deranged. He outlined how he was being abused and exploited by some shitty yet expensive sjw private school yet still groveled to their admin when they vaguely threatened to kick him out for complaining too hard.

it was an invitation to grovel so our kindergartener could remain enrolled – “This meeting is not about your proposal or changing anything. This meeting is to decide if you are still a good fit for our school”

If you don't leave after hearing this, you're the school's bitch and paypig. You should never expect them to listen to or do a single thing for you ever again.

He directly says that the main benefit of his abusive provate school is that it lacks undesirables in the student body. Dude bussing is over just move to a better district using the savings from not paying insane tuition.

Then when his shitty private school was going through some changes, he wanted out, and could only say there were no good options and was thinking of staying anyways. Dude your kids are less than 10 just go to normal school.

Our oldest was going to be entering fourth grade; her incoming roster read like a rebuilding year for a professional sports team. It was possible we could get her into a middle school that would feed into a top tier high school, but those did not start until 5th grade. Our best option looked like “suck it up and accept whatever we had for at least a year”.

What the fuck, your kid is in fourth grade!!! She should be playing in the woods with other kids not training to get into a feeder school like it's the olympics!

One option was to do something radical. We considered taking a GAP year and traveling

Going to a "normal" school with "mid" teachers is sooooooo bad. Instead I'm gonna take my kids to travel the world.

Worst case, it would be a one‑year sabbatical from stagnation.

Apparently having his kids growing up in a school where a few of the best teachers quit is "stagnation". Just going to a normal school must be absolutely ruinous to all of the victims who don't have insane parents like the author.

CPS should be going after people like this for child abuse if anyone.

Your comment inspired me to skim the article.

it was an invitation to grovel so our kindergartener could remain enrolled – “This meeting is not about your proposal or changing anything. This meeting is to decide if you are still a good fit for our school”

giga_chadette.jpg

Virgin “but but my academic data breakdowns” father vs. Chadette head of school.

It also reminds me of the "Dick Flattening / Yes Honey" meme: "It's 4PM! Time for your groveling session."

One might be tempted to call the author weak, pathetic, spineless, a bitch. However, in some ways he has more mental fortitude than I do. I'm not sure how I could live with myself after getting bent over so hard by a school administrator of all people.

The author (seemingly not scott) seems absolutely deranged.

The article too gave me some "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People" vibes. The author mentioned that:

In practice my oldest daughter got four years of learning about the basic ideas of Martin Luther King Junior and Rosa Parks, a rough understanding that some people are non-binary, and a great deal of anxiety every time I left the water running while I was brushing my teeth.

I wonder how or from where else the daughter's anxious personality might had been acquired?

Seeing the hoops that the first private school made them jump through just to get their kids in, the headmistress could well afford to have the attitude "we fire you, you don't quit" towards the parents. Let them take their kid out and leave, that just opens up a gap for the next affluent, anxious, and aspirational parents on the waiting list to get their little budding genius in. Demand definitely outstripped supply, even at that level of fees.

Honestly, aside from the non binary thing, this basically reads what I vaguely learned at that age in the 90’s.

It took me into my 20’s to think about that the water I use here has no effect on the Chinese (why not African??) kids with no water.

It took me into my 20’s to think about that the water I use here has no effect on the Chinese (why not African??) kids with no water.

I assumed he was in California or something, which is adjacent to a desert. My mother let me play with a hose and sandpile as a kid, and the canals are very robust, but driving through, say, San Diego to Phoenix is weird, and the water system is highly engineered.

What the fuck, your kid is in fourth grade!!! She should be playing in the woods with other kids not training to get into a feeder school like it's the olympics!

That's the Elite Human Capital route to success, and why the likes of us are too normie to ever be worth the time of day from Richard Hanania 😁 Reading articles by Freddie deBoer from his time in NY, it gets even more insane: you have to get your kid into the right kindergarten so you and your spouse train the kid like you're stuffing a Strasbourg goose prepping them to pass the entrance exams while both of you cultivate the right connections and present yourselves as the 'right kind of parents'.

You need to get into the right kindergarten to get into the right school to get into the right high school to get into the right college so they will network with the right connections and get into the right careers. Or else their entire lives will be failures.

At least in England, they were upfront about the model of getting into Eton or other public school -> Oxbridge -> civil service career, the professions, or inherit Papa's estate.

"We're smart and successful, our kids are gonna be smart and successful, that means making sure they get into the right schools which will advance their learning on the time-table we think most efficient, you don't get to be the 1% just by lollygagging". The parents would die rather than acknowledge the snobbery, because they've been brainwashed in their turn that this is all about merit: they were smart and bored in school, why didn't the mean ole teachers let them learn what they wanted to learn how they wanted to learn at the pace they wanted to learn, they're going to do better by their own kids.

The fact that achieving this meritorious path means you have to have the spare resources to throw around 40k per kid and be able to quit your job(s), move across the country, and be pretty certain of walking into a similar well-paying job just for a school is swept under the carpet. No, it's all about pure intelligence and enabling kids to learn without clutter of traditional education system.

I've noticed this blue tribe insane striver culture, like white orientals. I feel bad for their children and strongly believe the striving doesn't actually do anything. But at the end of the day, it is the default response to a hyper-credentialist culture with overproduced elites(see also, oriental countries). I... don't actually know what we can do about it, other than to let the blue tribe shrivel up and die from the low fertility this produces.

strongly believe the striving doesn't actually do anything.

I'm reminded of Scott's old homeschooling post where, iirc, he proposes that in early childhood there's just an underlying brain maturity process that can't be meaningfully accelerated toward basic educational attainments, such that you could either spend every day from, say, age 5 to 7 strenuously trying to teach a kid how to read and do arithmetic before their brain is ready for it, or you could spend those years doing basically anything else and by the time they're 7 they'll pick up reading and arithmetic easily in a couple of weeks. (Some version of this has to be true -- you can't teach a baby to read).

I was "unschooled" through elementary age myself and I don't think I learned to read til I was 8, but when I did it barely required any instruction and I was reading at a college level by 12, possibly because I hadn't learned to resent the attempt.

So much of this striving for early acceleration is probably pushing rope, physiologically, putting in 10x the effort to get to (at best) the same result marginally faster.

I was about four and a half when I went to school (no such thing as kindergarten in my day) and I was able to read. Learned at home, can't even remember learning so I can't brag about "I was two (or three) when I learned to read". That wasn't a sign of me being particularly smart, it was (a) the result of freaky genes on the paternal family side where everyone is an early reader, for some unknown reason (possibly bound up with the strongly suspected but not formally diagnosed autism spectrum/Aspergers we got going on as well through the generations) and (b) my maternal grandmother lived with us and she did a lot of the childminding of infant me, and what is a bedbound old woman going to do with a two year old but start them on the alphabet etc.?

All that means that I have no idea what the optimum age for learning to read is, or what is the best method for teaching reading, but there's definitely a range between "will pick up reading anyhow be it late or early" and "need to be taught or will fall behind" where school is useful.

From the public school's perspective, the problem is that there are all these families where the parents don't read, and would like their kids to read better than they do, but don't necessarily do things like reading in front of their kids, making the whole thing much more difficult and tedious. And there are also kids with various processing differences, who have to be taught very concretely, but English is a bit odd phonetically, it takes up a lot of memory space, so they have to drill a lot.

My daughter just turned six, and has started spontaneously spelling things out loud. She'll say "that's good" and try to spell out the "g-o-o-d" part. I'll tell her the right spelling if necessary. This is not something I suggested, she seems to just want to do it, as a developmental thing. I remember being a teenager and was reading more than I was talking, so my internal monologue contained spelling and punctuation. But that's because my parents had a bunch of curated books in there house, and had designated quiet reading time because they actually wanted to read themselves, which a lot of kids don't have and the schools (not Alpha school, of course) are always trying and struggling to replicate that.

From the public school's perspective, the problem is that there are all these families where the parents don't read, and would like their kids to read better than they do, but don't necessarily do things like reading in front of their kids, making the whole thing much more difficult and tedious. And there are also kids with various processing differences, who have to be taught very concretely, but English is a bit odd phonetically, it takes up a lot of memory space, so they have to drill a lot

Oh gosh yes. Reading aloud fluently and easily, you need to practice that, and the best way in school still is "have everyone read out loud in class and take turns reading several paragraphs". If there's no reading at home, and no practice with books, that's hard to pick up (having said that, my parents never read bedtime stories to us, but my father used to tell us stories every night). You can only do so much in school, and if it's not happening at home, then what you get at school is even more vital.

Oh gosh yes. Reading aloud fluently and easily, you need to practice that, and the best way in school still is "have everyone read out loud in class and take turns reading several paragraphs". If there's no reading at home, and no practice with books, that's hard to pick up (having said that, my parents never read bedtime stories to us, but my father used to tell us stories every night). You can only do so much in school, and if it's not happening at home, then what you get at school is even more vital.

I think people fret far too much about reading happening at home. Maybe there are some edge cases where mom reading bedtime story helps out, but the biggest issue still seems to me happening when that sperm hits that egg, and sometimes what happened during the 9 months of pregnancy. My son just like, looks at books himself. He can't read (to my knowledge there is no such thing as a kid as young as him doing so), but he recites them on his own. I can hear him in the other room "reading" books to himself. I suppose in a world totally devoid of reading at home he couldn't do THAT, but he'd be doing some other thing that smart kids do. He'd be inventing his own stories (he also does this), he be practicing whatever new thing he discovered (like skipping about a month ago). The difference in self-play amongst kids is pretty vast. The kids that cant read at 12 never wanted to read, and reading to them for a lot of their lives is akin to torture.

The kids that cant read at 12 never wanted to read, and reading to them for a lot of their lives is akin to torture

What should the system formerly devoted to education, but definitely committed to keeping kids off the street do with them? A brief look at https://nces.ed.gov suggests it's something like 30% of people are below literacy level 2 (of 5).

Lots of running.

If you read The Idea Factory with a somewhat critical eye you can easily see why Bell labs isn't happening now, and can't happen in the near future. Sure, some of their best guys went to MIT, but that was when you got into MIT by like taking a train there then passing an entrance exam. None of this extra-curricular and AP maxxing nonsense. But many of the main figures also just were like paperboys who were the small town genius and went to a random engineering school nearby. At some point, however, determining actual merit, talent, and skill became unfashionable for academics and hiring managers so they outsourced to boring metrics and racial adjustments.

Asian tiger parent culture is different due to bugman conformalism. They send their kids to extra lessons to get ahead in public school, the same one normal kids go to. Not this abomination that this parent is getting into.

Asian tiger parent culture is different due to bugman conformalism

I can’t parse this sentence. Asian culture is more conforming, so their children go to public instead of private schools? Weird tech-nerds are more non-conforming? I don’t know what bugmen are.

"Bugman" in this sense is meant to evoke eusocial insects, like ants and bees; the implication is that Asians, though hard-working, are highly conformist. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down and all that.

Probably genetic; East Asian cultures have a history of collective punishment that is largely absent from the West, so if you fucked up, you didn't just get yourself killed, but your whole family; that strongly selects for conformist genes.

Bryan Caplan would not have lasted five minutes in ancient China or feudal Japan.

I'm not sure I have this right as I'm only going by impressions picked up online at third-hand, but there seems to be the reverse idea about Asian universities: what we would call the state ones are considered the high-value, high-class colleges you want your kids to get into (the equivalent of MIT and the Ivies), going to a private university is considered a step down (think "small liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere versus an Ivy League college").

So you grind grind grind to get into the right university to get the degree that will get you into the handful of 'acceptable' large business combines where you grind grind grind to get on the executive path or else you're just an 'office worker' which is a failure.

There is this notion of being an elite/belonging to the elite, and elite seems to mean "from a wealthy family, went to the right university, got into Big Corp and am on the executive promotion track".

Let the more informed correct me, please!

This is the case in germany as well for the most part, though it's as always more complicated. For the state universities, there are very few shortcuts, top degrees are kept highly selected & small, and it's free to boot - you just have to be good enough. The private universities, meanwhile, have the reputation that anyone can just buy their way in. It's gotten even harder for them since there's lots of new, easy-to-get degrees even in state universities nowadays. But most people know which are which, so they're only worth it if you can't get anything else.

All bugman references aside, I think the point is that Asian societies are more conformist, so everyone sends their children to the same (public) schools and then quietly to cram school out of sight.

Weird tech nerds are more likely to brag about sending their children to an experimental school, whereas in Japan this is kind of like saying ‘I’m an enemy of society and I don’t want my children to be brought up in the normal way’. There are special schools for diplomats’ children etc. but not enough to matter at scale.

You are not wildly off, but this is an exaggeration. There are many private schools at the secondary level in Japan. They cost more and in general may have a higher academic standard. Their accreditation is only relevant in terms of what they may prepare students to expect in the college entrance exam. In some cases these private high schools have International Baccalaureate programs, etc. As for university, the highest ranked schools are public (Tokyo, Kyoto, Kobe, etc.) But any kid from any high school, public or private, who can pass the entrance exam can get in. This, as you say, is the purpose of cram schools at the high school level.

Re: private schools, would I be right in saying that most of them are grandfathered in? Particularly thinking of the Catholic schools.

For any school in Japan, if a kid can pass the entrance exam (these can begin as early as junior high) he or she can get in. There is a 推薦 / suisen or recommendation-based or so-called "escalator" system as well for kids who begin school in, say, Takagi Goodschool elementary--they will probably then go to Takagi Goodschool JHS, HS, and even university if there is a TG University (sometimes the Takagi Goodschool is associated with a different university and is a feeder school for that one.)

If I am understanding your question correctly, yes, some children who are legacy entrants (whose parents or whatever went to Takagi Goodschool) will go there as well. But as I say, any kid can go there if they pass the entrance test. Still, you will find that some suisen students are exempted from what are sometimes considerably difficult tests (because they are athletes or demonstrate some other skill, or have a very good recommendation from someone at their high school who is a known and respected quantity.) This results in a lot of students who got in via social standing/parental influence/hereditary reasons and then some who are just really smart and/or know how to study for tests.

Not to get too much into it, but Japan has a system where low level students are filtered very early in a way that doesn't seem to happen in the US, at least not how I understood it as a kid. Here, a kid who has no real academic skill will be counseled, channeled into a JH school or then HS where none of the kids are really so academic, and they will focus on sports or trades or whatever, or be pushed to universities or junior colleges or 専門学校 senmon gakko (vocational schools). Of course some do fall through the cracks and become delinquents or just move into something else. Students can opt out as young as 15 (and some do, if they have no parent pushing them to continue.)

I don't know much about specifically Catholic schools, though, so there very well may be something going on there that I am not aware of.

I... don't actually know what we can do about it, other than to let the blue tribe shrivel up and die from the low fertility this produces.

Considering this guy has three kids, this plan isn't panning out in this case.

I'm immediately skeptical of this whole thing because they are using DUOLINGO of all things for language learning. You're much better off doing something like dreaming Spanish + Anki and/or paying a talented SL teacher to do comprehensible input for younger kids then add in YouTube/Graded readers. Duolingo is okay I guess for the really basic stages of language learning, but it quickly veers off into territory that is IMO not useful (way too many reps of vocabulary that undermines the spaced repetition, forced translation, early output). I've learned far more Spanish (and even Italian) through reading+Anki then I ever learned doing Dutch Duolingo.

To be fair, I wouldn't expect to learn that much Spanish from Dutch Duolingo.

It's tragic the entire article is derailed by people hyperfixating on this one bit.

DUOLINGO

An Alpha School guy replied in the comments and said "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."

Forget the Duolingo. It looks like most of the "teaching" this school does is plopping the kids in front of computer education modules that give them feedback on the problems. One wonders why they need "guides" who make 100k a year to not teach them. Presumably the effect of a good teacher is proportional to the amount of teaching they actually do.

Teaching involves a lot of grunt work that teachers don’t necessarily enjoy doing - testing vocabulary etc. It also means being able to identify when a concept in the child’s head is subtly twisted and swooping in to correct it. I imagine flashcard software does the former and the ‘guides’ the latter.

You're much better taking a conventional Spanish class with grammar and homework and taking field trips to the taqueria.

Wtf my spanish class never had field trips to the taqueria

I took years of public school Spanish class. In one class we left school and walked to a local taqueria.

The best part about being a grown-up is that any time you want can be a field trip to the taqueria!

Thats why you dont speak spanish.

The only thing I remember about elementary (homeschool co-op) Spanish class is making hot chocolate with the hand carved mixer and singing a chocolate song in Spanish.

So inauthentic; if you're doing that you should be singing in Nahuatl.

Above the pale stale Dodgers’ objections, a Stunning and Brave latinx #ChicaJefa recently sang the National Anthem in support of undocumented citizens, sticking it to gringos and their Eurocentric linguistic imperialism by singing in Spanish instead of English.

Call me a dirt poor europrole, but I would rather get $480K (plus interest/stock increases) when turning 18 years old, instead of my parents paying half a million for Duolingo.

It tickles the mind though how education could be disrupted/advanced by modern tech.

Or maybe it is not so important after all? One comment on the blog claimed that Finland and Japan have similar PISA scores, despite Japan/Asia being famous for forcing children to grind obscene hours for school.

"Education" can't be disrupted by modern tech because learning is only kind of adjacent to it. The thing called education is mostly signaling + childcare. The ACX OP even basically admits he is paying for segregation.

How much of the Asian academic system is spent on teaching/necessary repetition of core subjects, as opposed to ridiculous grinding scoremaxx training on standardized tests? Asian countries are rather famous for this.

PISA is itself a standardized test though. Admittedly it's low-stakes for individual students since it isn't part of your grade, so you could hypothetically have a model where South Koreans are "studying for the test" which helps them on that individual standardized test but if they were spending that time on more holistic learning it would be dramatically more effective on standardized tests they haven't bothered to study for, but I'm dubious. It's not like students know what is going to be on the test that exactly. Or at least I assume not, I've never actually looked into the practice tests that "cram schools"/hagwons have.

Looking at actual PISA scores I assume he's talking about 2018, in 2022 there's more of a gap since Finland's score dropped by 74 and South Korea's rose by 11.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scores-by-country

I haven't looked into how much of this can be explained by changing racial demographics. A quick search finds this page saying it can't be explained by that because only 7% of Finnish students are immigrants, but that only includes 1st and 2nd generation immigrants. Actual racial data would make things easier, I know the U.S. collects racial data for PISA tests, allowing this interesting chart, but Finland might not. In any case that last chart also shows U.S. whites matching South Koreans, which seems to support the point that either all those extra hours don't make much of a difference to PISA scores or they're doing something very wrong to render them ineffective. Come to think of it I wonder if anyone in those east-asian countries has done randomized control studies on the effects of cram-school enrollment.

Finland collects fairly granular data on languages spoken in Finland, which are often used as a proxy for "foreignness". Here's a table with the numbers of approximately school age children by language family, showing that a large majority continues to be Finno-Ugric speakers and the next largest groups are Germanic speakers (including Finland-Swedes) and Slavic speakers (including recent Ukrainian refugees).

this interesting chart,

Huh, it's kind of funny seeing "US two or more races" way up there. I wouldn't rule out there being some difference in IQ-mediating genes between races because it would be extremely weird if there was net zero selection effects on intelligence everywhere, but I don't believe any current measure of estimating racial IQ differences is even close to accurate because nutrition + education + early childhood stability are known, massive confounds. That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage. Someone on the motte once suggested breeding brahmins and Ashkenazi's to see what would happen and I have to admit that it would be the funniest possible twist if actually mass immigration was because some secret society of benevolent galaxy-brained racists decided to take the idea of eugenicizing their way to peak human performance seriously, instead of constraining themselves to nazi dog show fanatic inbreeding retardation.

That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage.

If there was an effect like that it should be apparent in admixture studies on IQ, like this one on european/african admixture. Instead performance just scaled with percentage european ancestry.

I think the PISA results would mostly just reflect the specific racial composition, where the majority of multiracial-identifying people in the U.S. are "White and Hispanic" and often have little or no genetic difference from the people identifying as just "White". Looking at this Wikipedia page 13.8% of multiracial people identify as black and something else. If we assume they have 40% black ancestry (since regular African-Americans average 80% black ancestry), then by comparison the U.S. is 14.4% black so people who identify as multiracial have half as much black ancestry as the average American. There's also 7.2% of multiracial people who identify as "White and Native American", but most people who identify that way have much less than 50% Native ancestry. 6.1% identify with 3+ races, but that shouldn't shift aggregate ancestry that much. Since biracial self-identification is unreliable, there could also be a bias where more intelligent families are more aware of their family history or more likely to belong to communities where biracial identification is high-status.

tbh that's part of why I don't believe in that current data adequately demonstrates the HBD thesis. If the HBD people are right about selective pressures leading to genetic differences we should expect heterozygote advantage to show up, but it doesn't. A -> means !B -> !A and all that. That's why I gave that whole list of disclaimers before I actually got into discussing the interesting-but-likely-false bit. But it would be fascinating, wouldn't it? My dad recently did a massive study of [telling you the crop might tell you my identity] genetics and it involved hybridizing modern elite genomes with a massive quantity of heirloom varieties from a seed bank to try and find useful alleles that were previously outbred while trying to look for local minima. If anyone wants to actually take HBD seriously they should be thinking of what an equivalent project looks like for humans, not trying to create a single inbred variety on the basis of... ???skin color???

Barring the AI apocalypse Americans will eventually evolve to be darker over large timespans anyways-- people living at our latitude always do. Sunscreen and indoor time will slow the selection effect but not eliminate it entirely.

That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage.

I suspect that it's some amount of selection bias as well. Specifically, being multi-racial is higher class than being single-race, so people with X% of their genes from one race and Y% from another would answer differently on the survey based on their class.

I don't believe any current measure of estimating racial IQ differences is even close to accurate because nutrition + education + early childhood stability are known, massive confounds.

Ah yes, those socioeconomic factors that everyone "know[s]" are "massive." Despite the hate facts that racist neo-Nazis like to spread (such as the PISA score graph with US broken out by race), everyone knows childhood deprivation can explain those outcomes. That's why anyone who's walked around the US and Vietnam can tell you how thin US black kids are and how fat Vietnamese kids are, and why US blacks and whites of the same SES background perform similarly on standardized tests.

Except the data inconveniently shows that "high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials," and the pattern is even more drastic between blacks and Asians. This is peskily consistent with the HBD hypothesis, and peskily inconsistent with the blank slatist hypothesis. Bonus: A similar phenomenon holds for homicide rates.

I would also not get too excited about interpreting "two or more races" underperforming whites (and moreso Asians) as evidence in favor of hybrid vigor and a desire to pwn the racists—since, for example, "two or more races" contains Asian-white mixes. It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size, something along the order of square root off the top of my head.

Ah yes, those socioeconomic factors that everyone "know[s]" are "massive."

We do, in fact, know empirically that SES affects IQ. You can't refute that just by using scare quotes.

thin US black kids are and how fat Vietnamese kids are

Childhood nutrition is a lot more complex than "calories in, IQ out." Culturally variable diets also impact development, and the western diet--particularly concentrated in poor westerners, including blacks-- is particularly bad. Plus, diet has epigenetic effects. It's not enough for your parents to be well-fed; relative to your genetics, you will grow up stunted if your grandparents weren't well fed.

Except the data inconveniently shows that "high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials,"

That exact blogpost proves that SES is a confound-- you can see the line going up for higher SES in blacks. Given the explicit and abundant evidence of existing confounds, the null hypothesis shouldn't be "assume blank-slatism by default, and everything we can't explicitly point to as coming from confounds must be because of genetics."

I would also not get too excited about interpreting "two or more races" underperforming whites (and moreso Asians) as evidence in favor of hybrid vigor and a desire to pwn the racists—since, for example, "two or more races" contains Asian-white mixes. It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size, something along the order of square root off the top of my head.

To be clear, the fact that evidence for hybrid vigor is shaky is evidence against genetic differences in racial IQ. If you'll let me use symbolic logic...

A: There exist race-based differences in genes that code for IQ B: When genetically distinct populations hybridize, hybrid vigor results. C: We observe hybrid vigor

A + B ⇒ C

So ¬C ⇒ ¬(A + B)

Therefore if C is false and B is true, that implies ¬A.

I'm aware that the following could be used as an argument against B:

It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size,

But also, I'm having hard time squaring that with the standard HBD viewpoint where racial differences in IQ are due to differential selection effects-- which presumably lead to roughly equal levels of mutational load overall (barring particularly inbred populations). If racial differences in IQ do exist, it would be as the result of selection for alleles (and novel mutations) that optimize for intelligence at the cost of some other trait, like the Ashkenazi Gaucher disease thing, but still bounded by other adaptions to local climate and food variations that sacrifice IQ for survivability in other ways. That's exactly the sort of thing that should cause intra-race susceptibility to heterosis as a function of masking deleterious alleles.

We do, in fact, know empirically that SES affects IQ. You can't refute that just by using scare quotes.

The established correlation between SES and IQ is not proven to be causal. You can't make it up by emphasizing word "empirically". SES is not a confounder because there are genetic differences in SES. Higher IQ allows for person to have upwards mobility and trasmit their higher IQ genotypes to their children. This process has been run many times.

"IQ" of 2 year children in these plots is ludicrous. Certainly it does not measure same thing at 2 yo as it does for 16 yos. People may have different IQ trajectories in childhood and only final thing is what matters.

that optimize for intelligence at the cost of some other trait, like the Ashkenazi Gaucher disease thing

Blacks mature faster than whites, run faster, have better color vision and immune systems. Maybe smell either.

The established correlation between SES and IQ is not proven to be causal.

And the correlation between genetics and IQ has? Nobody's running randomized control trails with polygenically screened embryos. We're at least as confident that SES affects intelligence as we are that any particular gene marker of intelligence does. Sure, SES effects genetics too, but it's not like causality is required to be unidirectional.

Blacks mature faster than whites, run faster, have better color vision and immune systems

Even if these claims are true, and true because of specifically genetic factors, It's not clear to me at all that these things should result in tradeoffs. Faster maturation seems like it would select for greater learning speed; color vision for visual pattern analysis; faster running for spatial intelligence. Maybe I'm wrong-- but either way, it's an empirical question that the current data can't resolve. That's ultimately my big problem with modern race-based intelligence research: that the data is too fuzzy, and that there are too many empirical questions left unanswered. At this point I simply can't reject the null hypothesis and accept that the HBD racial intelligence rankings accurately reflect reality.

More comments

Huh, it's kind of funny seeing "US two or more races" way up there

I'd assume it's a selection effect. Think Amy Chua the Tiger Mother marrying a Jewish law school professor. Assortive mating is being driven by higher education and people moving to cities. Cities and colleges are both more racially diverse than towns/neighbourhoods.

Exactly. Korean tests are, by their very nature, actually not good at assessing intelligence. It's all multiple choice. You can't do writing as multiple choice, you need an essay response to assess real comprehension. But if there's an essay then it becomes subjective and open to endless appeals and lawyering, whereas multiple choice is consistent, uniform and totally fair. Just get the right answer loser!

I remember having to study the 'theme' of 'belonging' in some awful book English teachers probably think is profound. That did not help me understand or wield English any better. The only way to get better is to read and write widely, not obsessively study a single text at 10x the intensity of what I was doing just because it's on the test.

The preliminary rounds of the British Mathematical Olympiad are multiple choice. The later rounds move to written solutions because some of the questions require you to come up with a formal proof.

The multiple choice sections of the science O-levels (the more demanding age-16 qualification that was dumbed down and replaced by GCSE) were the first part to go because they were notoriously the hardest part of the paper.

The LSAT reading comprehension questions, which are notoriously effective at actually testing understanding, are multiple choice.

You absolutely can assess intelligence, real comprehension, ability to apply knowledge etc. with a well-designed multiple choice test. What you can't assess is the ability to make arguments or tell stories. A subject like history has to be tested by essay writing because the skill history teaches is about is making arguments. It would be an interesting exercise to replace one-third to one-half of a history exam with a multiple choice test asking LSAT-style questions about a set of primary documents and a (real or cod) extract from a piece of modern historiography drawing conclusions from them. I think it could be even harder than "write 3 essays in 3 hours with a single page of printed notes and no electronic devices".

To add to these examples, in later rounds of the US physician licensing examination (USMLE Step 3) they will sometimes ask questions which are designed to be novel - no way you know this specific fact or have seen it in a board prep resource. You are then asked to determine what would be the most likely answer based off of your understanding of the underlying biology and so on.

These are hard to do so you don't see too many of them, but it is possible.

Not much of a comment on the rest of your post- I broadly pretty much agree and appreciate the exponentiation on my point- but I think a huge supermajority of Finnish immigrants are very recent, so all of them are first or second gen.

I suppose it's possible that there was some large Sami-Finn fertility differential that opened up exactly the right time ago, but my guess is that the Sami don't have scores that much lower than the Finnish majority anyways. My guess would be changing teaching practices with bad results, but I don't think we have the data to really tell.

this interesting chart

I don't think this really means anything. It certainly doesn't imply that 'actually the US education system is a good as X's'. If you let all the other countries filter out their historic underclass then they'd probably go up as well. Whatever reason you ascribe that underclass status to, it has to be at least partly self-reinforcing a la Ogbu.

I have a genuine question- most of continental Europe uses a three tier education system with kids destined for college, trade school, and unskilled labour literally in different schools. Do European countries administer the PISA test to all levels of school or only the gymnasia? If the latter, it would have much the same effect as only testing middle class white kids in the US.

A bit of a late reply but it includes all types of schools. If you dig into the data there's a division between academic and vocational streams. It doesn't include kids that have completely dropped out of school though, which is relevant for some countries.

The school in question costs $40,000/year, and the writer sent three children there last year.

Yeah, I'm hoping that is the total for all three and not 40K each because holy crap. Mind you, the description of the private school they were attending before the parents decided to up sticks and move lock, stock and barrel to Austin also had me going holy crap, this should be the school anthem. (Knowing the original makes the Horrible Histories version even more enjoyable, though I digress).

The fact that this guy is able to up sticks, move across the country, and enrol three kids in a private fee-paying school means that once again, this is something that probably works very well for smart (see the description of the hoops his kids had to jump through to get into the first private school) kids of well-off families who will have support from interested and involved parents, and the genetic and environmental advantages of the same. That's why I went "holy crap" about the private school, because creaming off the best of the best and ensuring you don't have the dummies, the average, and the troublemakers - yeah, you could just stick the kids in the library and leave them to their own devices and they'll come out okay.

Small classroom numbers and highly motivated teachers? Yeah, once again: skim off the good young teachers as soon as they finish teacher training, promise them (reasonably) good salaries and conditions plus they will not be running the risk of getting stabbed in the face for telling a kid to get off their iPhone in class, plus they get freebies like going on ski trips in order to supervise the kids and of course you get them before they're burned out and they're still full of enthusiasm and optimism about education.

How well this Alpha scales up (or down) is something I'm fascinated to know - there's mention of trying it on kids from deprived backgrounds:

I also heard that around this time Alpha began testing the 2-hour learning platform at a facility for juvenile delinquents in Florida. I heard that from one individual who was not directly involved and I have not found any written documentation on it, so unclear if it worked, it was a one off, or if it even happened.

That is where the rubber will meet the road about "is this a genuinely innovative approach to education that will enable kids to learn more, learn faster, and learn more deeply?" versus "is this something that is about a bunch of very smart kids from well-off families who, let's face it, would do equally well if left in a field supervised by wolves?" and the fact that the author seems to have heard nothing more about it would lead me to believe "the success comes because we cherry-pick really smart kids and put them into a specialised environment of nearly 1:1 tutoring".

In the end, I had to laugh that even the Alpha programme ended up re-inventing school. They have teachers, even if renamed "guides". The selling-point of "only 2 hours per day to learn all they need!" turns out to be "and then we fill up the afternoon with the socialisation, practical subjects, etc." part of education.

I hope it works out for his kids, but this sounds more like "yet another Bright Idea that doesn't scale up" in the field of educational reform. The problem is not "does this work for smart kids from motivated families", the problem is "so now does it work for less able kids from families that don't give a damn so long as the brats are taken off their hands for six hours a day".

EDIT: I'm also curious about this bit:

Could educational assistants do what the Brazilian on call tutors are doing?

So maybe they have a handful of very well-paid "guides" but the real teaching is being done on the cheap by call centre tutors in Brazil? Because why would you have the kids ringing someone in Brazil if they have problems with the material, rather than the guides on site? This, on the face of it, seems to be the way they can afford to pay the "guides" much more than if they were public school teachers - less of them, the real work being done by cheaper outsourced labour.

I'm hoping that is the total for all three and not 40K each because holy crap.

Without looking this up, how much do you think the state spends per kid in a public school in a major but not very high cost of living city?

California I would say is probably into the 28-35k range right now. How insanely expensive public school is is a major blind spot for most people I encounter.

Another interesting comment from the Substack:

Jessica Lopez

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.

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.

N=3 and all, but that isn't promising for their method scaling any time soon.

Yeah, I think so. At the very least, if the school is bringing the kids on ski trips, that presupposes the parents can pay for the ski trips. If they can't, and the ski trips are treated as part of the curriculum about learning something, then the low-income kids are going to lose out on that 'learning experience'. The ordinary school day is structured to mesh at least some way with the parental work days, if the Alpha school means parents can't drop them off early/pick them up late, or other reasons, that's not going to work out in the long term.

Schools are expected to do a ton more than simply teaching, and the home environments of the kids also has a heavy influence on how well they do. Alpha and the other suggested fixes work best for those who are "I hated school, I was too smart and was held back" and who now have smart kids and plenty of money to burn on "send them to a programme that will accelerate their learning".

What happens after that, though? So now you have a fourteen year old who has completed the school requirements up to age eighteen and can graduate four years early. Maybe they get into college four years early. But now they're fourteen on a campus with eighteen year olds who are theoretically their peers, and unless there is someone there to act in loco parentis they may not cope well.

What do you do with the extra four years? Go into a job? Start your own business? Maybe some of the genius fourteen year olds will do that. Do your college learning at home? The example of "paying the kids to learn" with the tokens as per the review doesn't reassure me about that, because it seems the kids didn't want to explore their own learning during summer holidays and free time, they wanted to do it in school time to earn the tokens.

Smart kids from well-off families is where the 'fixes' work and if the parents demand them, then there will always be an educational entrepreneur revolutionary with the latest fix, but it's never going to scale for the average kids from low income backgrounds.

Frankly I've never understood the argument for early graduation as "success". Or even skipping so many early-level college courses. To some extent I understand this, as time in college = money spent, but if you spend less than 3 years doing your undergrad, part of me wonders if that's a partial waste, because as the pop psych things says, your brain isn't fully developed until 21 (I know to the extent this is accurate it's more like important growth tapers off nearer to 25 but still)... If you're already graduated by 21, maybe you missed out on something? Plus, as we all know, the skills/knowhow is only half the benefit. While we definitely don't want schools to become purely a social/life experience, the networks and friendships you gain are surely important. Too much acceleration only weakens these.

On the other hand yes we know that even a 15 year old historically is plenty capable of working on something important, even if it's more of an apprenticeship, so sure you can accelerate. Part of me wonders if we should really be experimenting with some other part-time supplement in those years for youth besides pure traditional educational attainment. I'm not sure exactly what that would be.

I think this is just your brain on the system. The system says you should graduate high school at approximately 18 years of age, then spend 4 years getting drunk and sometimes doing coursework, then go out into the workplace.

This system "works" because it is highly subsidized, and pleased the clients. Those being the 18-22 year olds who get to party, the professors who get to be paid to be lecherous, and the companies who get to externalize some of the costs of on the job training.

The rest of society loses.

But also the losers are the talented who should be done with all this silly fake education at age 16, but instead are subjected to an environment of drugs and booze when they get to campus.

What happens after that, though? So now you have a fourteen year old who has completed the school requirements up to age eighteen and can graduate four years early. Maybe they get into college four years early. But now they're fourteen on a campus with eighteen year olds who are theoretically their peers, and unless there is someone there to act in loco parentis they may not cope well.

If I were managing a school like this, I’d send the kid to the local community college with night school classes and have them start farming up two years worth of college credits and do something like productive wage labor on the side to drag things out. Possibly I’d see how challenging it would be to get my own school thus accredited.

At 18, apply to a four-year with two years of credit and plan to graduate at 20, which is not that far off from the larger cohort and is a fine time to go for the first rung of a white-collar job. Most American four-years permit this. It’s something I did myself, with the ages shifted around somewhat (I got my two years of credit while working starting at 18, and went to an ordinary high school).

Maybe they get into college four years early. But now they're fourteen on a campus with eighteen year olds who are theoretically their peers, and unless there is someone there to act in loco parentis they may not cope well.

Maybe someone can start a college that only accepts 14-year-olds (but otherwise has the same admission standards as regular colleges).

Some specifics would be nice. At the moment it sounds like every other complaint made by parents when their children don’t have much ability.

Agreed. Alpha et. al. need to come out and own their model as not being suitable for the average kid. Lead with the fact that it is designed to turn the top 5% of children into Überkinder and damn the consequences...

Lead with the fact that it is designed to turn the top 5% of children into Überkinder

It's American, so they can't. Some of the wealthy striving Blue Tribe parents that these programmes are intended for may, indeed, be one or two generations away from the horny-handed sons of toil, so if they're trying to attract the newly wealthy through tech jobs sector, they can't be overtly snobby. The old money upper class already have their own snobby schools, as the review notes:

How do Alpha’s MAP score improvements compare to other selective private schools across the country?
This is an important question for some parents. It is great if you can expect your 5th grader to advance 2.6x faster than they would at the local public school, but if you are planning to spend $40,000/year to send him to Alpha, your alternative is likely not the local public school. And if you are considering moving your family to Austin for the school, your alternative options are places like Horace Mann, Harvard-Westlake, and Lakeside.

So the market for Alpha (and others like it) are the new money, self-made, middle to upper-middle class:

2013 – 2017 | Garage‑School to “Alpha”
MacKenzie Price, then a mortgage broker in Austin, wasn’t impressed by the city’s gifted programs. She invited a small number of neighbourhood kids (including her two) into a makeshift microschool that ran two intense, teacher‑led academic “sprints” each morning, then “life‑skills” projects after lunch. Joe Liemandt — Founder of Trinity Technology,  ESW Capital billionaire and family friend (MacKenzie’s husband worked for him) — kept his own children in conventional private school until he saw the qualitative improvement in the life skills of MacKenzie’s kids. He decided he wanted his kids to join MacKenzie’s but he wanted to take the project to the next level. Sometime around 2014-2017 he joined MacKenzie as a co-founder and started writing checks. Alpha recruited more students and guides and the operation jumped from location-to-location looking for a larger permanent home.

And these people can't be appealed to on snobbery grounds, since as part of the Blue Tribe values they are all about the DEI, fairness, fight racism, and all the rest of the shiny liberal values. Hence why Alpha has been trying to expand out past the "you're smart and well-off, your kids are smart, let us provide a boutique concierge alternative to public education for you" market so the parents who fork out the 40k per kid can soothe their consciences about their privilege:

The success of the 2-hour learning platform was giving the Alpha founders confidence. Liemandt in particular wanted to see if the program had legs beyond the elite group of students being educated in Austin. Alpha’s first external test in August 2022 in Brownsville, TX – a small community on the Mexico border with less than half the per capita income of Austin. SpaceX had recently launched Starbase in Brownsville in 2014 and the employees there were not happy with the existing school options. Someone at SpaceX approached Alpha and asked if they could launch a new campus for their employees. It is unclear if any money changed hands, but when Alpha launched their Brownsville campus (available to SpaceX employees and any other locals who are interested) tuition was only $10,000 (vs $40,000 at the main Austin campus); incoming students trailed national academic standards by over a year. But after nine months on the Alpha program the first cohort of students had caught up and surpassed the national average, and they kept accelerating, achieving an average learning velocity of ~2× the national average (see section four for what that means). Brownsville was Alpha’s attempt to show that their model wasn’t just rich‑kid selection effects.

...I also heard that around this time Alpha began testing the 2-hour learning platform at a facility for juvenile delinquents in Florida. I heard that from one individual who was not directly involved and I have not found any written documentation on it, so unclear if it worked, it was a one off, or if it even happened. But it fits into the pattern of Alpha at this stage: “We know this program works for a specific type of kid. Let’s find out how broadly it is applicable. Can it work for everyone? Is it the solution for learning and education for the world?”

Personally I don't think "kids of employees at SpaceX" is the move out from 'well-off smart parents' that they think, but also the comment from a Brownsville parent seems to show it really does work on "rich-kid selection effects", as does the lack of information about the Florida effort.

So in short: they can't sell it overtly as "this is for the 5% to help you hoist your kid into the 1%", as the 1% already have their established track for their kids and don't need Alpha, even for their dumber scions (see the joke about being the cream of society - rich and thick) and the middle-class strivers don't want to think that they're using their privilege to get an unfair leg up.

Private schools in my area typically cost in the 30s to 40k per year.

So maybe they have a handful of very well-paid "guides" but the real teaching is being done on the cheap by call centre tutors in Brazil? Because why would you have the kids ringing someone in Brazil if they have problems with the material, rather than the guides on site? This, on the face of it, seems to be the way they can afford to pay the "guides" much more than if they were public school teachers - less of them, the real work being done by cheaper outsourced labour.

I found an interesting comment on that by someone involved in the program:

Matt Bateman

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.

So that's interesting. I guess the hope is to eventually need even less human interaction, it's one of those "training your AI replacement" positions. Which brings me back to: what are the Guides doing in the morning? They've selected for kids who won't disrupt everyone to get actual human interaction, so they presumably aren't conducting classroom management. Are they spending half the day preparing the extracurricular programs?

They must be doing something necessary because if I understand the review correctly, Alpha is burning through money. So they're not going to pay "guides" higher than market salaries for no reason. I think there must be a lot more 'under the hood' traditional teaching going on than the marketing materials make out. Maybe they discovered that hey, you actually do need physical bodies on the premises when you have a bunch of kids running around, no matter how smart and well-behaved the kids are.

eah, you could just stick the kids in the library and leave them to their own devices and they'll come out okay.

Uh, no you couldn't. The kids would spend all their time in one, maybe two, sections and not get a balanced education. That's at best; worst case is they never progress because they get distracted by, say, Terry Pratchett books.

Uh, no you couldn't. The kids would spend all their time in one, maybe two, sections and not get a balanced education. That's at best; worst case is they never progress because they get distracted by, say, Terry Pratchett books.

Absurd statement.

Young enough and the problem is the kids ruin the books and end up soiling themselves.

Older they do fine.

Even older they just have sex in the library.

You could do far worse than Terry Pratchett, IMO.

Yes, you could, but you also won't learn much from reading them, which is the entire point of school.

I'd say I learned quite a lot from my readings of Pratchett. Perhaps not things that would improve my test scores, but in terms of real life relevance almost certainly more important than anything "Distilled Science Schoolbook vol 4" ever taught me.

I liked his books too, but let's face it, it's slop. The most valuable skills you learn in school is grinding and discipline, and reading slop is inherently not suited for that.

I would say Pratchett did so well because his books are almost unique in his genre for clearly not being slop. Agree with him or disagree, but he has a very particular perspective that he’s coming from and you’re going to end up grappling with his philosophy one way or another.

The entire point of school is to trick people into perceiving that you have learned something.

I did unschooling for middle school. I did in fact run out of Terry Pratchett novels before I ran out of time. Then I read ancient Roman and Greek epics. It wasn't balanced, but it was about as good as public middle school.

I went to a Montessori school from first through sixth grade, this wasn’t a completely unschooling experience (in first through third grade they made us learn how to read, learn basic arithmetic, etc. but 3rd - 6th grade is basically as you described, except that in addition to the library we had works (such as a board that used beads for doing long division etc.), which we could choose from). I learned a lot of roman history, played a lot of RuneScape and developed a love of gardening which I have retained to the present day. I had no trouble catching up when I entered a regular middle school for 7th grade (I actually tested a year ahead in my science and math courses). This experience has left me with a very strong belief that kids should be taught how to read, preform basic arithmetic and learn to socialize with others in elementary school and otherwise be left alone.

Reminds me of the old Moldbug quip about socialism working in Iceland because anything would work in Iceland.

For comparison, the average Catholic(best ranked school system in the US) high school tuition nationwide is around $10k, public high schools in the US average around $19k in per student spending, no correlation between spending and outcomes.

For common denominator education, I'd guess $10k a kid is pretty close to the minimum.

In the area I grew up in the Catholic schools at still at 8k per head, and this is a state with heavy regulation of even those. If you had a good regulatory environment I suspect you could get very competent schooling at around the 2-3k per head number.

Only if the schools were subsidized by the parish. If a school had to stand on its own two feet, $3,000 per head wouldn’t be sufficient to cover the costs of teachers’ salaries, staff salaries (janitor, cook, librarian, secretary, etc.), benefits, utilities, maintenance, insurance, books, supplies, equipment, furniture, and so on. You could probably get by with $3,000 a head if you were running some sort of homeschool co-op with no facility costs.

But you don't actually need most of that. 3k would be pretty bare bones. But you really just need 1 paid adult per 30 kids or so. A warehouse style aluminum building would work. Some open fields around it would be fine. One guy should be able to do all the janitorial & maintenance and grounds work. Support staff could be largely outsourced to one of the cheap HR companies. There will be significant upfront costs for supplies, but those can be stretched over 30+ year lifespans for the buildings, desks, etc. And the books can either be bought 2nd hand for cheap or be disposed of entirely based on your choices. Constantly cycling through new textbooks is a choice, and a wasteful one.

Homeschool coops with no facility costs are much cheaper than that.

Or, alternately, they are much more expensive, unless you consider the mother's labor to be completely worthless. If her labor is actually worthless, and the alternative is that she just sits at home watching TV all day, then she probably won't be very good as a homeschool teacher, either.

Apparently Arizona offers about $4,000/child.

Homeschooling moms are already housewives, though. Probably some would be in the corporate world if they sent the kids to public school instead but most of them are otherwise homemakers.

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I suppose a "good regulatory environment" is one where the nuns can teach for cheap, the children can bring their own lunches, and any children who don't do well under those circumstances can go to public school instead at much higher cost to the state. If there are still enough nuns.

If there are still enough nuns.

Therein lies the rub. Also, I’d argue that having a free teaching staff counts as a subsidy from the parish.

public high schools in the US average around $19k in per student spending, no correlation between spending and outcomes.

Is that true across public schools? I've often wondered if the extra funding thrown at Title 1 schools that typically underperform actually makes the correlation negative, but I've never found an actual dataset.

Abbott districts in New Jersey are one of the best sources of data for this. They're funded at (or higher than) the wealthiest districts in the state but still have dismal outcomes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district

I think high spending high performance blue states throw the correlation into something too crazy to be a correlation.

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