I wonder if this fellow has ever read a serious book. I'm skeptical.
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.
Probably not exposed to humanities or arts so as not to weaken their utility as tech goons.
A new cadre school for Technocracy Inc.
>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.
Not this AI, today
"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.
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
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
Unbound Academy hasn’t replaced teachers with AI
gruez•1h ago
trinsic2•1h ago
Too bad it takes a dubious idea for an AI school to surface that wisdom.
johnnyanmac•6m ago
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.
recursive•38m ago
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.
vondur•23m ago
Aurornis•7m ago
> 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?