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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   26909 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.

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.

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.

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".

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