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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   27729 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 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.

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.

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