Is Alpha School the future?

Alpha San Francisco, the city's newest K-8 private school charges $75,000 a year for two hours a day of tech-powered academics and an afternoon of "life skills" and creative projects, writes Ezra Wallach for The San Francisco Standard. By contrast, elite but conventional private schools in the city charges $50,000 a year.

Photo: Alpha San Francisco

Alpha, which is opening schools across the country, "says its methods lead to higher test scores and better academic outcomes," writes Wallach. Co-founder MacKenzie Price claims "Alpha students can learn 10 times faster than those in traditional education."

The schools employ "guides," who act as coaches rather than teachers.

Students earn "Alpha bucks" for completing assignments, Price told parents. They can use the rewards at a school store that stocks " everything from Taylor Swift sweatshirts to squishy penguins to Legos."

Most Alpha students come from well-educated, affluent families, but a location near Elon Musk's SpaceX headquarters in Brownsville, Texas charges only $10,000 per year, and enrolls a wider range of students, Wallach notes.

Alpha is "doing something remarkable," writes the anonymous parent of three gifted children on Astral Codex Ten. "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)."

The program is not exactly as billed, the parent writes. Most students spend more than two hours a day on academic learning. It's not really AI. The platform "is closer to 'turbocharged spreadsheet checklist with a spaced‑repetition algorithm'.”

Claims that Alpha is "teacher free" are misleading. The guides -- well paid and well qualified -- are critical to students' learning.

Could Alpha work for students who aren't gifted? For 30 percent to 70 percent of students, he estimates, an Alpha-like program "could radically change how fast they learn, and dramatically change their lives and potential."

Alex Mathew, an Alpha student in Miami, used the $1,000 he received for doing math homework to launch a startup, reports Laura Newpoff for the South Florida Business Journal. His AlphaX project was building Berry, an AI-powered plushie that tries to "help teens build emotional resilience and self-awareness."

Silicon Valley tech moguls are fascinated with high-tech microschools, writes Julia Black on Wired. "Many are autodidacts who struggled with the social expectations of a traditional school environment," she writes. "Others looked over their kids’ shoulders during Covid-era Zoom schooling and didn’t like what they saw."

They tend to have very bright children and an interest in leveraging technology to solve problems. The question is whether what works for their kids can be adapted for students with a range of abilities and motivations at a reasonable cost. I think that's a big unknown. And I still don't get how 30 minutes on a computer is the equivalent of a good English Language Arts class.