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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   24832 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.

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.

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?

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.

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 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.

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

40K a year per child not an usually large amount of money to pay for a top ranked private school in many states.

But yes, this is all pretty stupid. My kids go to a public high school ranked in the top 10 in a demographically "desirable" county in my state and are turning out fine. Just get your kids into a good school district, stay engaged in their personal lives and what's happening at school, and the rest will work itself out.

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.

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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