@Corvos comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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Gaashk 22hr ago

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.

Context

HereAndGone Gaashk 21hr ago · Edited 21hr ago

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.

Gaashk HereAndGone 12hr ago

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.

Corvos Gaashk 8hr ago

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.

BurdensomeCount —Your em dash is showing... Corvos 6hr ago

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...

HereAndGone BurdensomeCount 1hr ago

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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