This section reveals a lot about the difference between the hype and the practice:
> It isn’t genuine two‑hour learning: most kids start school at 8:30am, start working on the “two-hour platform” sometime between 9am-930am and are occupied with academics until noon-1230pm. They also blend in “surges” from time to time to squeeze in more hours on the platform.
> It isn’t AI in the way we have been thinking about it since the “Attention is all you need” paper. There is no “generative AI” powered by OpenAI, Gemini or Claude in the platform the kids use – it is closer to “turbocharged spreadsheet checklist with a spaced‑repetition algorithm”
> It definitely isn’t teacher‑free: Teachers have been rebranded “guides”, and while their workload is different than a traditional school, they are very important – and both the quantity and quality are much higher than traditional schools.
> The bundle matters: it’s not just the learning platform on its own. A big part of the product’s success is how the school has set up student incentives and the culture they have built to make everything work together
So in other words, they're trying to set up a generally high quality education system, but they have a marketer on board who knows how to capture headlines with controversial claims?
It sounds like they are trying to replicate Asian style rote learning and cram school in a way that's more palatable to western audiences. Rebranding rote learning and force feeding as spaced repetition and surges. Typical SV bull.
The fact that they've rebranded teachers gives me concern that they're trying to further devalue teaching as a profession (if that's possible) and remove some of the professional expectations and protections that teaching still has.
>When I asked the head of admissions how they found such good staff he told me their compensation was fully transparent. “Associate Guides” were paid $60,000/year (vs the $40,000 average for Austin teachers), “Full Guides” made $100,000 and the five “Head Guides” in the school each made $150,000. They were able to both poach the best teachers from other schools, but also bring exceptional people into teaching that would not have considered it otherwise. It also let them have very high expectations for teachers once they were hired.
They're copying one of Khan Academy's implementation models [1] and rebranding it as AI. It's certainly not new besides the "help yourself to AI" part (which, full disclosure, Khan Academy is working on as well with their "Khanmigo" assistant [2]). Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, did a TED talk [3] on this.
The scrollbar is completely absent in Firefox. I think this is the first time I've seen long-form content with zero visual indication where I currently am in the document. Crazy.
Edit: Actually the scroll-bar is there, but it's nearly impossible to see because of the low contrast with the background. I guess I can blame my user agent for this one.
I really, really hate the modern trend of scrollbar design. I guess it makes some amount of sense if you're aiming for a mobile phone factor, where real estate is somewhat limited, but changing the scrollbar from a widget that lives functionally outside of the content it is scrolling to a translucent show-only-on-hover widget that overlays the content (and can thus become functionally invisible if the content is just the wrong color) is a real step backwards in UI design.
keep in mind this piece was 8 months ago (and probably starting to be written much earlier). I can see Alpha school being this genuine effort to offer an alternative education plan as well as slowly falling into the AI hype later on and pushing more generative content as it tries to phase out teachers.
Or, if it's being praised by this administration, it's doing so to gain political points.
Holy crap that is a long article. In my view, the only important point is time freed up which should be a part of normal education. If students had more free time to think and contemplate one wonders what kind of world we would live in.
Too bad it takes a dubious idea for an AI school to surface that wisdom.
Well people who are evangelically praising AI for writing code seem to be converging on established, well-known software practices for "making the AI work better" so seems like AI is great at making people rediscover the practices they didn't feel like putting effort into before AI.
>the only important point is time freed up which should be a part of normal education.
College felt like the last time I truly had "time freed up". 16 units of classes per quarter came down to ~8-10 hours of class time per week and the recommendation was 2 hour of study per class unit a week (e.g. a 4 unit class recommends 8 hours of study a week). So, typical full time work. But mostly on campus (aka a walkable community), close to peers, with no worries of future responsibilities.
now of course, the CS curriculum easily required double or triple that recommendation, but that speaks more towards the subject than the concept of college.
> “All educational content is obsolete. Every textbook, every lesson plan, every test, all of it is obsolete because gen AI is going to be able to deliver a personalized lesson just for you,” Joe Liemandt, Alpha School’s “principal” and the founder of Trilogy, the company that owns many of the apps used by Alpha School, said in a podcast interview published last year.
I wonder if this fellow has ever read a serious book. I'm skeptical.
I'm highly skeptical of someone bragging about barely reading a book year to then say AI is going to disrupt education as an authoritative voice. Do you honestly know any teachers or have children in public education? These takes are truly baffling. It's right up there with believing InfoWars as sound politics.
edit: to try and sound "nicer," would anyone seriously take any advice about software engineering from someone who uses a WYSIWYG editor? That's how the above comment reads.
>and it is infinitely better than a book or a teacher.
why do you think that?
>The student could move at his/her own pace and can ask questions if stuck which no book or teacher could deliver.
You're assuming there's a driven student who already knows what they wish to pursue. Even in college I wasn't entirely sure what domain in tech I wanted to explore.
You're also assuming or dismissing the other factors a teacher offers. Networks, parental guidance, wisdom of how to navigate through college or a job market, or simply as emotional pillar in ways parents can't always be.
Most of all, teachers teach you to understand bias and expand your viewpoints past any one given source. That's why I read the parental review of this school on top of this piece. It seems against current coporate interests to offer that. There's no one clear answer to everything out there, but AI wants it to appear as so.
I have long conversation threads on highly specialized topics and I’ve never found learning about something so easy. He’s right but it has to not be self directed in some way because that takes motivation and you cant expect that from every student.
The typical 5th grader at Alpha School has math achievement at the 85th percentile of 5th graders. This is not bad, but it's not remarkable.
I love the approach Alpha School is taking. And I believe that they're really trying to iterate to something that works really well. But I think many people are misled by the way Alpha School words claims about their achievement.
Alpha School's web site has this bullet point:
"99th Percentile: The majority of students consistently outperform national averages."
If you just glance at this, you may assume it means the majority of students perform at the 99th percentile.
But that's not what it's saying.
Alpha School's mean achivement score (across all students in a particular grade) puts the 'district' (collection of schools) at the 99th percentile of districts.
But that's not an amazing feat, because there are 10,000+ school districts in the USA. Most of those don't have the positive selection bias Alpha School has (due to the price and ideology). Moreover, most districts have adverse selection, as many academically-inclined parents will choose to send their children to private schools.
This leads to the takeaway at the start of this comment: the typical 5th grader at Alpha School has math achievement at the 85th percentile of 5th graders.
I went to a private school costing 1/3rd of this that had higher test scores. The majority of students were two grade levels ahead in math and reading by middle school iirc.
These seem like middling results, especially considering the socioeconomic situation of these students. $65k/yr is awful ROI.
I wish NWEA (which administers MAP Growth) would publish all district-level and school-level score reports. But that would probably drive away most of their customers :(
So they are trained to follow instructions from a computer, trained to be unable to function without a computer. Let me guess that they are also exposed to hundreds of trolley problems so that they can make "difficult decisions" later.
Probably not exposed to humanities or arts so as not to weaken their utility as tech goons.
As opposed to before where they were trained to follow instructions from a book or from a teacher? Also the dogma around "the humanities" is so bullshit it's barely funny anymore. Go train more dictators or whatever.
Teachers are opinionated, as are books. And they all are a checks and balances between them and administration. Admins make sure there's a core curriculum driven by the proper literature. Teachers work off that base to teach and offer their own personality with it. Books tend to be a neutral ground to pull on making any given person too opinionated.
Sure, they admin or government can ban a book or fire a teacher, but that takes energy and time.
Automating all that to have the administration tweak lesson plans to their will sounds like a cliche dystopian sci-fi plot. Oh how little I knew.
Holy crap, quite bit of extrapolations in your comment.
>trained to be unable to function without a computer.
Where is this from? The article mentions a lot of issues with alpha school, but the implication that kids are glued to screens and are "unable to function without a computer" isn't one of them. There's the issue that finishing random ed-tech games don't prepare you for the real world, but I don't really see how that's different than the perennial complaint that the US education fails to prepare kids for the real world (eg. "school taught me that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell but not how to do my taxes")
>Let me guess that they are also exposed to hundreds of trolley problems so that they can make "difficult decisions" later.
???
>Probably not exposed to humanities or arts so as not to weaken their utility as tech goons.
See the review linked in my other comment. It might not be an unbiased account, but I'm reasonably confident that the average student there gets more exposure to "humanities or arts" and other extracurriculars, than the average public school student, who maybe gets a field trip to the science center once a year.
The dream is clearly asking a student what they’re interested in, getting them to self direct on a project with guidance and deliver something you can evaluate. I would hazard that AI helps rather than hinders this.
hot take: if all models stopped improving today, we could get there with today's technology.
No, you couldn't whip out a foundational model out of the box to do this, but we could likely engineer our way to guardrails to support this without substantial hallucinations (i.e. fewer than the 95th percentile of human teachers.)
Also in no way would this replace everything teachers do. I'm talking purely academic curiosity.
These founders are careless and weirdly cruel. It's wildly unethical, immoral, wrong to do this to children.
"My investigation into Alpha School also reveals that the massive amounts of data the company collects on students, including videos of them, is stored in a Google Drive folder that anyone with the link—even if they’ve left the company, or if it was sent to them—could access."
>These founders are careless and weirdly cruel. It's wildly unethical, immoral, wrong to do this to children.
For lax security, or monitoring students at all? I don't think you'll find anyone opposing the former, but what's the alternative to the latter? At the end of the day, they're kids, and they need supervision to keep them on task. I think remote schooling during covid showed that kids can't really be left to their own devices. The alternatives I can think of aren't great:
1. individual human tutors: insanely expensive, out of reach for even well paid programmers, or you have to home school
2. ed tech, without the monitoring: won't work because kids get distracted, and you can't expect the parents to do that when they have jobs
3. traditional schooling, with maybe small class sizes: see the review in my other posts. Seems like even with well funded private schools, the lesson plan isn't really individualized so you're catering to the lowest common denominator
[delayed]
Besides the coverage from fox news/new york times that the article mentions, there's also a much more extensive review from a parent who had his kids in alpha school: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school
This section reveals a lot about the difference between the hype and the practice:
> It isn’t genuine two‑hour learning: most kids start school at 8:30am, start working on the “two-hour platform” sometime between 9am-930am and are occupied with academics until noon-1230pm. They also blend in “surges” from time to time to squeeze in more hours on the platform.
> It isn’t AI in the way we have been thinking about it since the “Attention is all you need” paper. There is no “generative AI” powered by OpenAI, Gemini or Claude in the platform the kids use – it is closer to “turbocharged spreadsheet checklist with a spaced‑repetition algorithm”
> It definitely isn’t teacher‑free: Teachers have been rebranded “guides”, and while their workload is different than a traditional school, they are very important – and both the quantity and quality are much higher than traditional schools.
> The bundle matters: it’s not just the learning platform on its own. A big part of the product’s success is how the school has set up student incentives and the culture they have built to make everything work together
So in other words, they're trying to set up a generally high quality education system, but they have a marketer on board who knows how to capture headlines with controversial claims?
It sounds like they are trying to replicate Asian style rote learning and cram school in a way that's more palatable to western audiences. Rebranding rote learning and force feeding as spaced repetition and surges. Typical SV bull.
The fact that they've rebranded teachers gives me concern that they're trying to further devalue teaching as a profession (if that's possible) and remove some of the professional expectations and protections that teaching still has.
From the article I linked:
>When I asked the head of admissions how they found such good staff he told me their compensation was fully transparent. “Associate Guides” were paid $60,000/year (vs the $40,000 average for Austin teachers), “Full Guides” made $100,000 and the five “Head Guides” in the school each made $150,000. They were able to both poach the best teachers from other schools, but also bring exceptional people into teaching that would not have considered it otherwise. It also let them have very high expectations for teachers once they were hired.
That's a legitimate concern, but the "Guide" terminology actually comes from traditional Montessori schools.
They're copying one of Khan Academy's implementation models [1] and rebranding it as AI. It's certainly not new besides the "help yourself to AI" part (which, full disclosure, Khan Academy is working on as well with their "Khanmigo" assistant [2]). Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, did a TED talk [3] on this.
[1] https://en.khanacademy.org/khan-for-educators/
[2] https://www.khanmigo.ai/
[3] How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education | Sal Khan | TED - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJP5GqnTrNo - May 1st, 2023
The scrollbar is completely absent in Firefox. I think this is the first time I've seen long-form content with zero visual indication where I currently am in the document. Crazy.
Edit: Actually the scroll-bar is there, but it's nearly impossible to see because of the low contrast with the background. I guess I can blame my user agent for this one.
I really, really hate the modern trend of scrollbar design. I guess it makes some amount of sense if you're aiming for a mobile phone factor, where real estate is somewhat limited, but changing the scrollbar from a widget that lives functionally outside of the content it is scrolling to a translucent show-only-on-hover widget that overlays the content (and can thus become functionally invisible if the content is just the wrong color) is a real step backwards in UI design.
So not really AI, but a well run private school with high achieving students. Looks like they do optimize the learning strategies.
keep in mind this piece was 8 months ago (and probably starting to be written much earlier). I can see Alpha school being this genuine effort to offer an alternative education plan as well as slowly falling into the AI hype later on and pushing more generative content as it tries to phase out teachers.
Or, if it's being praised by this administration, it's doing so to gain political points.
Holy crap that is a long article. In my view, the only important point is time freed up which should be a part of normal education. If students had more free time to think and contemplate one wonders what kind of world we would live in.
Too bad it takes a dubious idea for an AI school to surface that wisdom.
Well people who are evangelically praising AI for writing code seem to be converging on established, well-known software practices for "making the AI work better" so seems like AI is great at making people rediscover the practices they didn't feel like putting effort into before AI.
>the only important point is time freed up which should be a part of normal education.
College felt like the last time I truly had "time freed up". 16 units of classes per quarter came down to ~8-10 hours of class time per week and the recommendation was 2 hour of study per class unit a week (e.g. a 4 unit class recommends 8 hours of study a week). So, typical full time work. But mostly on campus (aka a walkable community), close to peers, with no worries of future responsibilities.
now of course, the CS curriculum easily required double or triple that recommendation, but that speaks more towards the subject than the concept of college.
> “All educational content is obsolete. Every textbook, every lesson plan, every test, all of it is obsolete because gen AI is going to be able to deliver a personalized lesson just for you,” Joe Liemandt, Alpha School’s “principal” and the founder of Trilogy, the company that owns many of the apps used by Alpha School, said in a podcast interview published last year.
I wonder if this fellow has ever read a serious book. I'm skeptical.
I have. Around 20 non-fiction and technical books in about 15 years and I agree with this Joe guy.
AI is going to disrupt the whole academia and it is infinitely better than a book or a teacher.
The student could move at his/her own pace and can ask questions if stuck which no book or teacher could deliver.
I'm highly skeptical of someone bragging about barely reading a book year to then say AI is going to disrupt education as an authoritative voice. Do you honestly know any teachers or have children in public education? These takes are truly baffling. It's right up there with believing InfoWars as sound politics.
edit: to try and sound "nicer," would anyone seriously take any advice about software engineering from someone who uses a WYSIWYG editor? That's how the above comment reads.
>and it is infinitely better than a book or a teacher.
why do you think that?
>The student could move at his/her own pace and can ask questions if stuck which no book or teacher could deliver.
You're assuming there's a driven student who already knows what they wish to pursue. Even in college I wasn't entirely sure what domain in tech I wanted to explore.
You're also assuming or dismissing the other factors a teacher offers. Networks, parental guidance, wisdom of how to navigate through college or a job market, or simply as emotional pillar in ways parents can't always be.
Most of all, teachers teach you to understand bias and expand your viewpoints past any one given source. That's why I read the parental review of this school on top of this piece. It seems against current coporate interests to offer that. There's no one clear answer to everything out there, but AI wants it to appear as so.
Maybe the school system failed him.
Hell, why learn History? The AI can just make a personalized History for you!
Ugh, don't give the AI or wanna-be authoritarians ideas.
I have long conversation threads on highly specialized topics and I’ve never found learning about something so easy. He’s right but it has to not be self directed in some way because that takes motivation and you cant expect that from every student.
We should only accept life damaging educational malpractice from public schools.
The headline reads as though it was written by the head of public school teachers' union.
The typical 5th grader at Alpha School has math achievement at the 85th percentile of 5th graders. This is not bad, but it's not remarkable.
I love the approach Alpha School is taking. And I believe that they're really trying to iterate to something that works really well. But I think many people are misled by the way Alpha School words claims about their achievement.
Alpha School's web site has this bullet point:
"99th Percentile: The majority of students consistently outperform national averages."
If you just glance at this, you may assume it means the majority of students perform at the 99th percentile.
But that's not what it's saying.
Alpha School's mean achivement score (across all students in a particular grade) puts the 'district' (collection of schools) at the 99th percentile of districts.
But that's not an amazing feat, because there are 10,000+ school districts in the USA. Most of those don't have the positive selection bias Alpha School has (due to the price and ideology). Moreover, most districts have adverse selection, as many academically-inclined parents will choose to send their children to private schools.
You can judge the results for yourself. Here is the school score report from Spring 2025: https://go.alpha.school/hubfs/MAP%20Results%20-%2024%2025/20...
Here is some of the data from the Winter 2026 school score report: https://x.com/jliemandt/status/2023011075029922131?s=20
This leads to the takeaway at the start of this comment: the typical 5th grader at Alpha School has math achievement at the 85th percentile of 5th graders.
I can't add images here, so I'll link to the evidence here: https://x.com/RahimNathwani/status/2023111922636476899
I went to a private school costing 1/3rd of this that had higher test scores. The majority of students were two grade levels ahead in math and reading by middle school iirc.
These seem like middling results, especially considering the socioeconomic situation of these students. $65k/yr is awful ROI.
I wish NWEA (which administers MAP Growth) would publish all district-level and school-level score reports. But that would probably drive away most of their customers :(
Paying more for a 3rd grade education than a state college and hearing rumors of it still trying to cut corners with shoddy AI certainly is a choice.
So they are trained to follow instructions from a computer, trained to be unable to function without a computer. Let me guess that they are also exposed to hundreds of trolley problems so that they can make "difficult decisions" later.
Probably not exposed to humanities or arts so as not to weaken their utility as tech goons.
A new cadre school for Technocracy Inc.
As opposed to before where they were trained to follow instructions from a book or from a teacher? Also the dogma around "the humanities" is so bullshit it's barely funny anymore. Go train more dictators or whatever.
Teachers are opinionated, as are books. And they all are a checks and balances between them and administration. Admins make sure there's a core curriculum driven by the proper literature. Teachers work off that base to teach and offer their own personality with it. Books tend to be a neutral ground to pull on making any given person too opinionated.
Sure, they admin or government can ban a book or fire a teacher, but that takes energy and time.
Automating all that to have the administration tweak lesson plans to their will sounds like a cliche dystopian sci-fi plot. Oh how little I knew.
Holy crap, quite bit of extrapolations in your comment.
>trained to be unable to function without a computer.
Where is this from? The article mentions a lot of issues with alpha school, but the implication that kids are glued to screens and are "unable to function without a computer" isn't one of them. There's the issue that finishing random ed-tech games don't prepare you for the real world, but I don't really see how that's different than the perennial complaint that the US education fails to prepare kids for the real world (eg. "school taught me that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell but not how to do my taxes")
>Let me guess that they are also exposed to hundreds of trolley problems so that they can make "difficult decisions" later.
???
>Probably not exposed to humanities or arts so as not to weaken their utility as tech goons.
See the review linked in my other comment. It might not be an unbiased account, but I'm reasonably confident that the average student there gets more exposure to "humanities or arts" and other extracurriculars, than the average public school student, who maybe gets a field trip to the science center once a year.
Related previously:
Unbound Academy hasn’t replaced teachers with AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45443004
https://archive.ph/8kzwr
The dream is clearly asking a student what they’re interested in, getting them to self direct on a project with guidance and deliver something you can evaluate. I would hazard that AI helps rather than hinders this.
AI might one day be useful for this
Not this AI, today
hot take: if all models stopped improving today, we could get there with today's technology.
No, you couldn't whip out a foundational model out of the box to do this, but we could likely engineer our way to guardrails to support this without substantial hallucinations (i.e. fewer than the 95th percentile of human teachers.)
Also in no way would this replace everything teachers do. I'm talking purely academic curiosity.
[delayed]
These founders are careless and weirdly cruel. It's wildly unethical, immoral, wrong to do this to children.
"My investigation into Alpha School also reveals that the massive amounts of data the company collects on students, including videos of them, is stored in a Google Drive folder that anyone with the link—even if they’ve left the company, or if it was sent to them—could access."
Prison. People need to go to prison for this.
Whether a link requires login or not is irrelevant when everyone has the same password: https://x.com/RahimNathwani/status/1900199324279333115
>These founders are careless and weirdly cruel. It's wildly unethical, immoral, wrong to do this to children.
For lax security, or monitoring students at all? I don't think you'll find anyone opposing the former, but what's the alternative to the latter? At the end of the day, they're kids, and they need supervision to keep them on task. I think remote schooling during covid showed that kids can't really be left to their own devices. The alternatives I can think of aren't great:
1. individual human tutors: insanely expensive, out of reach for even well paid programmers, or you have to home school
2. ed tech, without the monitoring: won't work because kids get distracted, and you can't expect the parents to do that when they have jobs
3. traditional schooling, with maybe small class sizes: see the review in my other posts. Seems like even with well funded private schools, the lesson plan isn't really individualized so you're catering to the lowest common denominator