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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   26714 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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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.

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.

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