What they hinted at about the school not actually sticking to the two hours per day of schooling is slightly concerning. I would frankly be happy with parity provided the kids only needed two hours of schooling per day, but if they aren’t committing to that then this is a bad result.
What are the odds students whose parents can pay $75,000 a year for their child's education are going to outperform the national average at any school they attend anyway?
Expensive correspondence school that sounds like hell on earth, maybe OK if you're otherwise training for the Olympics. Why do parents sign their kids up for this?
A study of 26,811 secondary students in central China found that homework scores rose 18% after students adopted generative AI tools, while closed-book exam scores fell 20%. The OECD’s latest PISA results found that daily AI users scored lower in science than nonusers, while moderate users performed about the same.
It's almost as if using AI only as a tool for execution rather than actual architectural decisions works out well. In HN universe this is the difference between an experienced architect using AI to write code vs a TikTok hipster to tell codex/claude to create an instagram clone for them so they can make a video about it "We dOn'T nEeD eNgiNeErs AnyMoRe"
"Only 42% of Alpha students met the network’s goal of learning twice as fast in both math and reading, according to internal data first reported by The New York Times. The findings land as Alpha pushes into public schools, where districts are adopting its software in hopes of fitting more learning into less time."
As someone who occasionally reads psychometric papers: WOW. That's an impressive result. That is equivalent to a very, very good teacher.
Although the title is obvious clickbait, I have to note that if you want to spend $75k and have your kid learn at twice the speed of the public curriculum, this is really not something you could not have accomplished before. This is a "live-in tutor" kind of money.
More generally, the problem is almost always motivation and discipline, not the availability of instruction. If you have a motivated kid, you can simply buy them some books.
If you want to use AI in public education, I guess the big question is whether it can help the kids who have parents who work two shifts, who get pulled into youth gangs, or play games all day and don't even show up to school. Helping talented kids from well-off homes is really not that much of a challenge.
Only if it's in their self-imposed time limit, which it sounds like they aren't. "Twice as fast" could be measuring weeks or terms, rather than actual hours studying.
If the students are being pressured into working super-long days then that doesn't say anything.
What they hinted at about the school not actually sticking to the two hours per day of schooling is slightly concerning. I would frankly be happy with parity provided the kids only needed two hours of schooling per day, but if they aren’t committing to that then this is a bad result.
So half failed to learn at double the pace, meaning more learned at a faster pace than benchmark. What was that number?
yes, I'm confused about that part too.
> Only 42% of Alpha students met the network’s goal of learning twice as fast in both math and reading
If they managed to have almost half of students learning twice as fast, it's quite impressive.
What are the odds students whose parents can pay $75,000 a year for their child's education are going to outperform the national average at any school they attend anyway?
America's public schools spent $17,619 per student in 2024 and only three in ten students read proficiently.
Expensive correspondence school that sounds like hell on earth, maybe OK if you're otherwise training for the Olympics. Why do parents sign their kids up for this?
https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/fourth-report...
"Only 42% of Alpha students met the network’s goal of learning twice as fast in both math and reading, according to internal data first reported by The New York Times. The findings land as Alpha pushes into public schools, where districts are adopting its software in hopes of fitting more learning into less time."
As someone who occasionally reads psychometric papers: WOW. That's an impressive result. That is equivalent to a very, very good teacher.
Although the title is obvious clickbait, I have to note that if you want to spend $75k and have your kid learn at twice the speed of the public curriculum, this is really not something you could not have accomplished before. This is a "live-in tutor" kind of money.
More generally, the problem is almost always motivation and discipline, not the availability of instruction. If you have a motivated kid, you can simply buy them some books.
If you want to use AI in public education, I guess the big question is whether it can help the kids who have parents who work two shifts, who get pulled into youth gangs, or play games all day and don't even show up to school. Helping talented kids from well-off homes is really not that much of a challenge.
Only if it's in their self-imposed time limit, which it sounds like they aren't. "Twice as fast" could be measuring weeks or terms, rather than actual hours studying.
If the students are being pressured into working super-long days then that doesn't say anything.
But they're not, and this is readily available if you spend just a few seconds learning about Alpha School.
Composition effects...
And one in five failed the testing target for reading… so 80% learned twice as fast in reading?
yeah, but can you imagine how stupid the parents must be, such that hereditary effects are confounding variables?