This entire exercise felt so weird and data-driven and not kid-focused until the very last lines where he points all the time this gives back to the kids. That's kind of a compelling thesis, that...
This entire exercise felt so weird and data-driven and not kid-focused until the very last lines where he points all the time this gives back to the kids.
That's kind of a compelling thesis, that kids could explore more if they learned the basics after. But it also felt kind of non-genuine based off the rest of the article. I tend to lean towards a more "montessori, follow the kid's interest" space but it's definitely sitting with me.
When I was fixating on sending my kids to the perfect pre-school I spoke to a teacher who explained that "you can pay for education, you can't pay for outcomes". And that's something that really...
When I was fixating on sending my kids to the perfect pre-school I spoke to a teacher who explained that "you can pay for education, you can't pay for outcomes". And that's something that really changed a lot of how I think about this subject since, because it's telling of how different schools and programs sell themselves.
So when i looked into the local high-end kindergartens, it's all marketing about the type of high school and university opportunities that will open up. This program seems very fixated on that "2x more effective". Both are value for money propositions. But it has this unspoken implication that if the kid does not take to these methods, then the child failed the system. Especially since you're not getting that money back.
Anyway, just skimming through this and some resources from Alpha, it's fascinating to me. Especially since it's very corporate-cult feeling. The essay feels like someone pitching a techbro MLM. Add its all based on two-sigma methods that were not reproducible. And the AI stuff. So many bad vibes but the guy did say it has an image problem.
I'll probably look into it latet and post my thoughts.
I worked in education research for five years, and while I agree with other commenters that the image and marketing of “Alpha School” seems off-putting, many of their techniques are obviously...
I worked in education research for five years, and while I agree with other commenters that the image and marketing of “Alpha School” seems off-putting, many of their techniques are obviously pulled from educational research.
Immediate feedback on exercises, one of the critical talking points, is pretty much essential for meaningful learning. Even the educationally up-to-date classrooms are maybe only doing immediate feedback a few times per lecture. Building an entire education platform around immediate feedback surely helps. Gamification of the platform and the incentives structure they talk about probably helps given the kids are young, and likely helps doubly so since attention-wise, they are competing with social media which is gamified. Their platform reintroduces material regularly so that it gets into long-term memory; again, very few classrooms are trying this, even fewer in a way that is consistent with the literature.
Lastly, they seems to be getting active data while the students are learning and using that to iterate on their own teaching methods. The best teachers all do this; they have an ability to monitor the effectiveness of their lecture literally while they are giving it, and can iterate. Using technology to do that for an entire platform really only exists in opt-in edtech platforms, not in traditional classrooms.
Our educational system is pretty bad, and in America, especially bad considering the resources we could put towards it. Frankly, I would not be surprised if a school that puts lots of effort into improving their education has the insane results advertised. And they do seem to be putting in effort.
Finally, there is a huge selection bias going on here. The parents involved all care about their child’s education. For lots of these parents, this means checking in on what their schools are doing, helping supplement when their kid is struggling, and working with the school to get the best outcomes of their kids. If you browse horror stories on teacher forums, you can see for yourself that the issue is less the kids being awful students, and more that the parents do not care that their kids are awful students. Alpha School selects for parents that are willing to (a) invest a ton in their child’s education and (b) invest that money in a program that is educationally radical. I’m sure this gets rid of both parents that don’t care and parents that want to “pay and forget”, which would yield better educational outcomes even if the schools weren’t different at all.
Take a positive interest in your kid, and allow good teachers do actually teach. It sounds so simple but society and the education system right now make these really difficult to actually happen....
Take a positive interest in your kid, and allow good teachers do actually teach. It sounds so simple but society and the education system right now make these really difficult to actually happen. Parents are overworked during the day and too busy chasing their own their own relaxation after, and teachers are stripped of proper pay, rest, and ability to iterate on their own methods receptively.
This is a long article about an unusual and very expensive private school in Austin, Texas, by a parent who enrolled their kids there for a year. The author is anonymous (it's an entry in an...
This is a long article about an unusual and very expensive private school in Austin, Texas, by a parent who enrolled their kids there for a year. The author is anonymous (it's an entry in an essay-writing contest), but they seem pretty unusual themselves.
After twelve months I’m persuaded that Alpha is doing something remarkable—but that almost everyone, including Alpha’s own copywriting team, is describing it wrong:
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.
…Yet the core claim survives: Since they started in October my children have been marching through and mastering material roughly three times faster than their age‑matched peers (and their own speed prior to the program). I am NOT convinced that an Alpha-like program would work for every child, but I expect, for roughly 30-70% of children it could radically change how fast they learn, and dramatically change their lives and potential.
Class Dismissed (Colossus Review) This is a very long magazine article about the people who run Alpha School. It's well-written, but I don't trust it. Some parts seem a little too story-shaped,...
This is a very long magazine article about the people who run Alpha School. It's well-written, but I don't trust it. Some parts seem a little too story-shaped, and other parts too hyped up. It reminds me of Wired Magazine back in the dot-com era.
It starts out with a story about the childhood of the woman who started the school:
On her father’s wheat, corn, and cattle farm outside Minot, MacKenzie Larson loved riding horses. There were several on the farm, but her favorite was Flare, an American Quarter Horse. There was plenty else to love about the gritty tomboy farmlife, like riding motorbikes, or driving the pickup truck standing up to the neighbor’s farm, which she did while Mr. Larson worked. But riding Flare was MacKenzie’s happy place, which as time went on was a diversion she couldn’t stand to lose.
There's a long section about Joe Liemandt's career, eventually getting to Alpha School:
The bigger point is the way in which Liemandt’s evolution from Stanford to Trilogy to ESW and Crossover solidified his worldview: record, capture, and minutely measure all the data possible; feed it into a system which operates and compounds on logic and predictability; continually abstract people from the system; precisely define what should and shouldn’t be done by the people that remain; promote and pay the overachievers well; and cut or replace the rest.
It’s a worldview that is many things. It’s one that Jack Welch would approve of. It’s one with a conspicuous absence of any spiritual element. It’s one that requires deep disagreeableness, indifference to social mores, and comfort with living for decades in the shadows, quarantined from public attention. It’s one that has made Liemandt, now 56, worth more than 10 times what he was when he appeared on the Forbes 400 nearly 30 years ago. It’s the kind of worldview that is likely required to one day, seemingly on a dime, pivot from the difficult problem of configuration to the even more impossible problem of education.
“When GenAI hit, I thought, ‘Oh, neural nets, it’s finally here,’” Liemandt said as we rode in his Cybertruck across Lady Bird Lake to MacKenzie Price’s Alpha School, where for the last three years he’s been able to capture an enormous amount of data. “So I went to my Trilogy team, who’ve all been with me for decades. And I’m like, ‘For 25 years you guys have been telling me you could run this place better than me. Let’s see. Good luck. I’m out. I’m going to go be a school principal.’”
...
Like many philanthropic billionaires, Liemandt also spent years sinking money into nonprofit education reform efforts that went nowhere. And like many parents, Liemandt and Price both initially decided to give their children the schooling experience they themselves hated: Liemandt put his in a Catholic school, while Price put hers in public. Both schools were highly ranked in Austin. Both drove Liemandt and Price insane.
...
Like Liemandt’s eldest daughter, Price’s was also a precocious reader. By kindergarten she was reading chapter books, but would come home from school with worksheets that said things like A is for Apple, B is for Ball, etc. By second grade, when Price attended a parent-teacher conference, her daughter’s teacher delivered the good news that she was reading at a second-grade level.
“That’s strange,” Price said. “At home she’s reading Harry Potter.”
“Oh she’s way past second-grade level,” the teacher said. “We’re just not allowed to teach beyond grade level.” Price went to the school’s principal and asked what could be done about this. “I understand your frustration,” the principal said. “But we’re steering the Titanic here. It just can’t be changed.” When her daughter woke up one morning and asked if she could stop going to school because it was boring, Price, too, saw red.
“That was when I knew I couldn’t watch another 10 years of this,” she told me. “I knew at that point that it wasn’t about going to another public or private school. It was about the model of a teacher in front of the classroom, teaching in a time-based model where they have a certain curriculum they have to stick to and the kids, regardless of their different interests and capabilities, are stuck in it no matter what. So I’m thinking, okay, we gotta start something else.”
So, finally getting to the school:
Over the first two years, Price kept encouraging Liemandt to send his daughters to Alpha School, not least because she could have used his help. After moving the students from Holtz’s house into a rental property, they were served an eviction notice due to neighbor complaints about the abrupt appearance of a school in their midst. They then moved the students into another parent’s house for two weeks before using a parking garage. At one point Price was closing on a deal to obtain space in a real building when the real estate agent in charge of selling the property pulled up outside of school one day and asked Price to get in her car. “I have the Holy Spirit gift of discernment,” the centrally cast Texas realtor told Price, who sat in her passenger seat with all the windows closed and doors shut. “I am very good at seeing and understanding evil spirits. And I believe that you are of the devil.”
Nevertheless, Alpha students were starting to approach the 2x in 2 hours target by self-directing coursework on apps. More importantly, despite the lack of an actual schoolhouse to occupy, they had started to plead with Price and Holtz to keep Alpha running during winter, spring, and summer breaks, preferring to stay in school rather than go on vacation. The signs were good that Price was onto something.
Still, at that point, Liemandt was unimpressed. “I was like, MacKenzie, I’m not sending my kids to your weird, janky school,” he told me. “It was in a dude’s garage. I was like, no way. I went to Catholic school and my kids are going to Catholic school. I didn’t want to do it.”
...
The Liemandts’ Catholic school got out in May, and the girls had a couple weeks before summer camp began in June. The Price girls convinced them to come shadow at Alpha School for a week before camp. “If you want to go to a school instead of vacation,” Liemandt told them, “that’s crazy, but go ahead. It’s your break.”
After their shadow week, they sat their parents down for a talk. “We’ve decided we’re not going to summer camp this year,” they informed Liemandt and his wife. “We want to go back to Alpha.” That summer, he grudgingly took his kids out of Catholic school and put them in Price’s weird, janky school.
Apparently Liemandt wants to throw AI at the problem, even though it doesn't seem to have much do with Alpha School's early success:
The lab is staffed by about 300 people, consisting of longtime Trilogy programmers and what Liemandt calls “probably the biggest, best team of learning scientists in the world.” Like past Liemandt ventures, the project suffers a bit from too-many-brands disease. But it can be summarized, roughly, as follows:
Liemandt’s core generation engine is called Incept, which is like a custom-tailored large language model. At the heart of Incept are third-party, general purpose LLMs (OpenAI’s GPT-5, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, etc.), each of which is best at a particular function, like generating math problems or learning videos. The core, off-the-shelf LLM is then wrapped in various proprietary tools to ensure curriculum alignment, generate the correct images and feedback, and inject strong points of view about learning science, including direct instruction, spaced repetition, eliminating extraneous information, mastery-level advancement requirements, and teaching by analogy. With continual tweaking by the Trilogy programmers and learning scientists, it also, over time, has driven hallucinations down close to zero. (It’s important that in the World War II curriculum, for example, the Nazis are not Black.)
...
Perhaps the most enticing example is Liemandt’s own stealth project, in which he’s invested an additional $100 million to build a suite of video games on the Timeback engine—including a game currently being designed by the team that built one of the most played and profitable video games in history. “Solve the motivational problem for kids outside Alpha School’s buildings,” was the brief Liemandt gave them.
Getting back to the actual school:
“Oh yeah,” said Faith, “that was one of our Five Impossible Things for second graders last fall. They were: run a 5K in less than 35 minutes; present the news like a news anchor in front of the whole school; build your own drone and land it on your head; master the 50 most commonly misspelled words by adults and beat your parents in a spelling bee; and plan and organize your own play date.”
Not sure where to start, I asked how it was physically possible for seven- and eight-year-olds to run over three miles, regardless of speed.
“You should have seen them on day one,” said Liemandt. “Faith said, ‘Raise your hand if you think you can do it.’ Not one hand, including the parents. So she was like ‘Alright, I’m going to teach you to do the impossible.’ The parents were like, ‘Are you insane?’”
“Yep,” said Faith, who was previously co-captain of the University of Texas cheerleading squad. “We started in August by just walking around the track, and so we established, okay, everyone’s capable of finishing it. Then we ran a quarter lap and walked the rest, then a half lap, three-quarters, etc., until they all ran it. I signed them up for the Austin Jingle Bell 5K in December and they all ran it in under 35 minutes.”
Everyone’s favorite story from that day involved a second-grade boy who’d been struggling with emotional regulation and was starting to get teased for being a crybaby all the time. Faith worked with him that fall not just on running the 5K but on finishing it without crying. On the day of the Jingle Bell, he was one of the fastest kids, finishing in under 30 minutes. “I didn’t cry the whole time!” he yelled as he crossed the finish line, where his parents and Faith burst into tears.
This entire exercise felt so weird and data-driven and not kid-focused until the very last lines where he points all the time this gives back to the kids.
That's kind of a compelling thesis, that kids could explore more if they learned the basics after. But it also felt kind of non-genuine based off the rest of the article. I tend to lean towards a more "montessori, follow the kid's interest" space but it's definitely sitting with me.
When I was fixating on sending my kids to the perfect pre-school I spoke to a teacher who explained that "you can pay for education, you can't pay for outcomes". And that's something that really changed a lot of how I think about this subject since, because it's telling of how different schools and programs sell themselves.
So when i looked into the local high-end kindergartens, it's all marketing about the type of high school and university opportunities that will open up. This program seems very fixated on that "2x more effective". Both are value for money propositions. But it has this unspoken implication that if the kid does not take to these methods, then the child failed the system. Especially since you're not getting that money back.
Anyway, just skimming through this and some resources from Alpha, it's fascinating to me. Especially since it's very corporate-cult feeling. The essay feels like someone pitching a techbro MLM. Add its all based on two-sigma methods that were not reproducible. And the AI stuff. So many bad vibes but the guy did say it has an image problem.
I'll probably look into it latet and post my thoughts.
I worked in education research for five years, and while I agree with other commenters that the image and marketing of “Alpha School” seems off-putting, many of their techniques are obviously pulled from educational research.
Immediate feedback on exercises, one of the critical talking points, is pretty much essential for meaningful learning. Even the educationally up-to-date classrooms are maybe only doing immediate feedback a few times per lecture. Building an entire education platform around immediate feedback surely helps. Gamification of the platform and the incentives structure they talk about probably helps given the kids are young, and likely helps doubly so since attention-wise, they are competing with social media which is gamified. Their platform reintroduces material regularly so that it gets into long-term memory; again, very few classrooms are trying this, even fewer in a way that is consistent with the literature.
Lastly, they seems to be getting active data while the students are learning and using that to iterate on their own teaching methods. The best teachers all do this; they have an ability to monitor the effectiveness of their lecture literally while they are giving it, and can iterate. Using technology to do that for an entire platform really only exists in opt-in edtech platforms, not in traditional classrooms.
Our educational system is pretty bad, and in America, especially bad considering the resources we could put towards it. Frankly, I would not be surprised if a school that puts lots of effort into improving their education has the insane results advertised. And they do seem to be putting in effort.
Finally, there is a huge selection bias going on here. The parents involved all care about their child’s education. For lots of these parents, this means checking in on what their schools are doing, helping supplement when their kid is struggling, and working with the school to get the best outcomes of their kids. If you browse horror stories on teacher forums, you can see for yourself that the issue is less the kids being awful students, and more that the parents do not care that their kids are awful students. Alpha School selects for parents that are willing to (a) invest a ton in their child’s education and (b) invest that money in a program that is educationally radical. I’m sure this gets rid of both parents that don’t care and parents that want to “pay and forget”, which would yield better educational outcomes even if the schools weren’t different at all.
Take a positive interest in your kid, and allow good teachers do actually teach. It sounds so simple but society and the education system right now make these really difficult to actually happen. Parents are overworked during the day and too busy chasing their own their own relaxation after, and teachers are stripped of proper pay, rest, and ability to iterate on their own methods receptively.
This is a long article about an unusual and very expensive private school in Austin, Texas, by a parent who enrolled their kids there for a year. The author is anonymous (it's an entry in an essay-writing contest), but they seem pretty unusual themselves.
Here's a New York Times article about the school:
A.I.-Driven Education: Founded in Texas and Coming to a School Near You
https://archive.is/25VQT
Class Dismissed (Colossus Review)
This is a very long magazine article about the people who run Alpha School. It's well-written, but I don't trust it. Some parts seem a little too story-shaped, and other parts too hyped up. It reminds me of Wired Magazine back in the dot-com era.
It starts out with a story about the childhood of the woman who started the school:
There's a long section about Joe Liemandt's career, eventually getting to Alpha School:
...
...
So, finally getting to the school:
...
Apparently Liemandt wants to throw AI at the problem, even though it doesn't seem to have much do with Alpha School's early success:
...
Getting back to the actual school: