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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30337 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.

This is pretty interesting.

All of the GT Workshops are focused on a measurable, legible output. They don’t learn “public speaking”, they learn how to craft and deliver a speech and then submit the performance to the Moth to be judged by external parties. The school’s “100% Money Back guarantee” is that every student who attends will be in the top 1% academically and win at least one national academic competition (for kids who start in kindergarten they guarantee 1350+ SAT and 5s on APs by 8th grade). This past year four kids placed in the top-8 in a global debate with more than 1000 entries, and two kids are competing at national championships in chess and an academic bee respectively, but not national champions yet.

Winning national academic competitions is a bold claim, but maybe there is that much alpha (ha!) to find versus conventional schooling.

Additionally

Airbnb: Maybe the most impressive one. The 5th graders learned about the economics of property management - from property sourcing, mortgages, interior design, taxes, marketing, photo shoots, etc. And then they actually bought and managed a small property as a class (yes, the 5th grade class manages an actual property with a P&L)

I find this fucking awesome. You're clearly not only paying for kids to practice Duolingo. Also, an Alpha School guy replied in the comments and said "We agree that Duolingo doesn’t work. The students wanted to try it last year at GT School for various reasons, but it’s not part of the platform."

Mostly, I just enjoy how willing they are to experiment and iterate even in the face of unpopular ideas. And apparently paying kids to read books is insanely unpopular?

Roland Fryer, who has done extensive work on what works in incentivizing students, quotes a 2010 Gallup poll that found that only 23% of American parents support the “idea of school districts paying small amount of money to students to, for example, read books, attend school or to get good grades” (76% opposed the idea with only 1% undecided).

There are not many things that 76% of Americans agree on. Only 69% of Americans believe another Civil War would be a bad thing. Only 78% agree that American independence from Britain was the right choice. People REALLY don’t like paying kids to read books.

So what do these parents think we should do instead? Mostly they believe that kids should just be “intrinsically motivated” and school should be about inspiring that internal motivation. Their concern is that if we provide external motivation for learning it will crowd out internal motivation. They worry that when the external motivation goes away (no one is going to pay a 30-year-old to read books), there is no internal motivation to keep learning happening. In this model “education” is not about educating per se, or even about teaching habits, it is about inspiring character.

The other option is that rather than use the carrot, you could use the stick. Fryer shares another poll from 2008 where 26% of parents think grade-school teachers should be allowed to spank kids (35% in the Southern US states!). As Fryer summarizes: “The concept of paying students in school is less palatable than the concept of spanking students in school”.

We homeschool our kid and while he is crushing it academically, we do notice his motivation sagging a bit in some areas. Our headline update from reading this entire post was not to move to Austin and send him to Alpha schools, but to try greasing him a bit.

We've been paying for online piano lessons because his mind was blown by Elton John videos and he seemed genuinely interested in learning how to play and we were like sure why not.

And he's been practicing pretty consistently with very little prodding from us for almost 18 months and plays really well. He's decent enough that the last Christmas party we went to he just played and kept it bumping while everyone else sang along. I find this impressive enough because I can't play piano for shit.

But! He hit this one module that has one song that he just doesn't like and his motivation to finish it fell through the floor. It's pretty surprising since it's not even a hard song, it just doesn't seem to satisfy him the way the other ones do. He's been stuck on it for months, just does not care at all to practice it. So... having just read this post we decided to offer him $1 to finish the song by Monday and he bunkered down and has been practicing it hard since.

Are we worried about ruining his intrinsic motivation entirely? Not really. There's some rationalization later about how bribing kids does not render them incapable of doing things without external motivation as adults, and indeed it might be a solid way to push them more towards having intrinsic motivation later.

They don’t learn “public speaking”, they learn how to craft and deliver a speech and then submit the performance to the Moth to be judged by external parties.

Maybe I'm just dumb, but trying to navigate The Moth's website makes me think this is just a Gen Z version of Toastmasters. I mean, yay for "public storytelling" but I doubt they're going to be very hard on a bunch of elementary schoolers and since they seem to be aiming for podcasters, well okay maybe yeah they are training the new generation of social media influencers who will be hosting podcasts as a career given that AI will take every other job by the time these kids have speedrun the national curriculum and are ready to join the world of work aged sixteen.

It's been around longer than gen z has. It's probably more well-known than the Toastmasters, as that Moth Radio Hour has been on various NPR stations for over 15 years, and while I'd never make a point of listening to it, late on a Sunday afternoon it's often the only thing on the radio worth listening to.

I guess I can see the appeal.

Our family skills are art and nature photography, and the daughter has become excited by the prospect of displaying her creations. She walked into a gallery and announced that she wants to have her work in a gallery. She made a figurine, and got all excited about the idea of selling it. It occurs to me that I don't have any sales and finding display space skills at all, I always gave things away, as did my mom. I think she tried selling her art once, and took my brother and I with, but even though she was next to her friend, it wasn't good enough for her to want to continue. It would be nice if I knew more about competitions or something.I always put stuff in the country fair, so maybe we'll do that in a few years.

I'm not sure what you're responding to exactly. Are you saying this seems inane and that school shouldn't focus on this, or that this doesn't seem like a hard academic competition to win. Is this even an academic competition?

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