There's a lengthy, and quite good, deep-dive into Alpha School by a current parent here, for anyone interested. Spoiler, "AI" isn't that big a portion of what they're doing, but some of their insights and systems around student motivation are actually interesting and very effective.
I heard one of the founders interviewed on the Hard Fork podcast[1] (which confusingly is primarily concerned with AI, rather than crypto.) I went in with very negative expectations, but came away with a positive impression and optimism that they might be onto something. As you say, AI is not core to the project. Instead, the focus is on using technology to facilitate individualized learning. It is true that teachers are 'replaced', but by humans whose job it is to keep the students focused and motivated, rather than to convey information.
>Instead, the focus is on using technology to facilitate individualized learning. It is true that teachers are 'replaced', but by humans whose job it is to keep the students focused and motivated, rather than to convey information.
I have good news for you. Tell your kids to get into a few fights, or get caught smoking weed in school too many times. They will be sent to an "alternative school" as punishment that uses this same insight - let the kids sit in front of a computer all day "learning" while a teacher nags them to quit falling asleep. In fact, they can do it for around 6 hours a day, three times better than this charter.
I've had the same opinion since I was a TA. Most of the stuff the students learned was from the textbook. The value the instructors provide should above all be the motivation , the enthusiasm and the instilment of meaning into what the students are learning.
If your child took the MAP Growth test in Fall 2024 or Spring 2025, you can compare their RIT scores to the mean score of an Alpha School student in the same grade:
Assuming a normal distribution, this will indicate whether your child is above or below the median Alpha School student. This may be impact your view about how well Alpha School is doing vs whatever school your kid goes to.
Not to go against the OP, but that headline has to be one of the dumbest framings I've seen in a while.. why would you want to replace human teachers with machines? There are an estimated 250 million kids going without any kind of schooling in the world [1], if AI could provide even the most basic kind of education to them it would be a net benefit.
If you want to reach more kids with the same teachers, you need fewer teachers per student. Unbound has more teachers per student, so it's in the opposite direction from that.
Crazy, right? Doing a good thing that's a net positive for humankind is being punished by the market.. it's almost like markets don't foster beneficial long-term outcomes and we need other entities to enforce those.
The tech industry has played a big role in scamming society into changing education to conform to them, instead of the opposite. Nowadays, schools are trying to "educate" children to use technology and in the process they're making the other more important goals become secondary. Critical thinking, reading, writing, math skills, etc., are all going down because schools think it is more important to use the latest gadget and software.
Also kind of important to have teachers that can live within commuting distance of where they are teaching, so CoL ends up pretty important. Even more so if you want teachers that are older than, say, 22 and might have a partner and/or kids so won't want to live in a studio or have multiple roommates.
> - the fact that in another role they would have to work 25% more (50 weeks per year instead of 40 weeks per year)
Heh. I left teaching for three years to work in the private sector and the "25% more work" was honestly the best work life balance I've had in 20 years.
$150k is not that much for San Francisco, especially when it includes benefits. Two people earning that salary would not affort the median home in the area. In that sense, it's lower than the salary people generally expect from a middle class job.
Depends on where you teach. Some communities are much better than others.
I believe the majority of those reading this message have kids who respect their teachers (or if you had kids they would). You also live in an area where other kids respect their teachers if you have a choice (some of you don't, but if you have the choice and you will make that choice).
Near where I live there is an "inner city" school where the average teacher has been teaching for about 9 months - despite many teachers who have been there are 30 years. The typically teacher works just long enough to get some experience and then gets a job at a "suburban" school that pays less(!) but the students respect the teachers more.
> low-attention span of kids due to tech.
Kids have always been low attention span. Things are probably better than before because we have ADHD treatments that work that we just ignored in the past. Blaming tech is just the latest thing, but you can always find parents blaming low attention span on whatever the latest fad to blame it on is. Truth is kids are not really "designed" to sit in a classroom for hours every day - but it is still the best way we have to set them up for a modern life so we force it anyway.
I think it's a thing with regard to tik tok videos for example where they use split-screening (main content plays on top, and some car doing flips plays on the bottom)
Also when I was in school we didn't have smart phones, at least a slide phone with a full qwerty keyboard was the latest thing, can do a lot less than a full computer in your pocket/social media
The social structure of a typical American public school is prisoners and prison guards.
Why would any of the prisoners have respect for the prison guards?
Most of the prisoners aspire to be something higher paid and less degrading than a prison guard. They aren't role models, they are just captors.
Is the fundamental model of a school from one of the post-historical paradises of education, like Japan, Singapore, or Finland much different? If anything, schools from those countries are stricter and instill more discipline than do schools in the USA. I know people who work in education; if they fail to be more than a prison guard, it's not through lack of trying. They're just hamstrung by administration every time they try to actually teach.
Perhaps a better analogy would be lab techs and lab rats. The students are the rats. They have a battery of experiments performed on them by lab techs (teachers) overseen by scientists (administration) who also determine which experiments to run. The problem is, what's being practiced is not really a science but a form of alchemy: how to determine a repeatable process to refine the lead of incoming children into the gold of model citizens who make all the right decisions according to the latest knowledge of what "right" is? (This was called "Outcome Based Education" in the 90s and "Social Emotional Learning" today.) The missing bit is that learning is an active process which requires involvement of the child.
But anyway, woe betide the lab tech who arrogates to perform the experiment in a manner not prescribed by their betters with Ph.D.s (say, in a way that's been shown to get results)!
I feel like it'd be perfect if all these school replacements (home-school, charter school, online only schools) went after replacing the dearth of quality after school options.
Really the only options for after school activities after graduating from elementary school are competitive sports, competitive math, competitive music, competitive chess, etc. which are pretty much all zero sum in nature.
I'd love options for kids that let them gradually explore their interests to help them discover future vocational interests in a way that was beneficial to society such that they don't have an existential crisis when they hit senior year in high school and have to pick a college major.
I mean you just can't take a comment seriously when it lists music class as a zero sum competition. About the only time that's true is if you're dead set on first chair in a specific orchestra, or think a career any less successful than Mick Jagger's would be a failure.
Frankly I think that indicates the grandparent just didn't think very hard before leaving their comment.
This is a good article. Dan Meyer, like his PhD supervisor Jo Boaler, is very much in the camp that traditional classroom education is good, and that improvements come by working through school districts, administrators and classroom teachers.
I'm not saying this to cast doubt on any of the facts in the article. Just pointing out that Dan, in general, has a less optimistic view of AI in education, than I'd expect of the median HN commenter.
That said, I'll share my thoughts on Alpha School, based on everything I've read (both things published by the school, and things I've read from parents online and in private forums):
- the '2x growth' in their marketing is way oversold; their typical 4th grader isn't doing math at the level of a typical 8th grader.[0]
- the '2 hours/day' in their marketing is oversold; students often work longer than that.
- only 25% of their students use Math Academy. The rest use IXL or ALEKS.
- in their charter school application, the amount they proposed charging for their software platform was unreasonable, given the minor role it plays in outcomes (10% according to Matt Bateman, who works there)
[1]
- the core idea of their 'timeback' platform (that monitors student activity in realtime via video camera and screen recording) is good, but I have not seen it and have no idea whether it's real or how good it is
The intellectual pedigree actually explains everything. Jo Boaler is the one responsible for charging $5k/hr to advise schools to end middle school algebra. In an amusing confluence of concepts, Garry Tan (CEO of YC - whose site we're on) describes her as "infamous and disgraced"[0].
I don't know about that, but when I discovered that San Francisco schools weren't teaching algebra I was at first impressed that American children were doing Group Theory in 8th grade (something we only learn in the 12th standard in Tamil Nadu in India where I'm from) and figured moving that to 9th isn't a big deal only to find that they meant the basic stuff (linear equations and the like, what we learn in the 7th grade).
Honestly, I can't take anyone seriously who would try so hard to set back children from learning what is fairly basic Mathematics at that age. Children are capable of learning this. Or at least a sufficiently large amount are that we should be teaching them to a high standard.
For Alpha School, I think the Slate Star Codex review is likely more informative than this clearly polemic article.
Readit News
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/podcasts/hardfork-educati...
I have good news for you. Tell your kids to get into a few fights, or get caught smoking weed in school too many times. They will be sent to an "alternative school" as punishment that uses this same insight - let the kids sit in front of a computer all day "learning" while a teacher nags them to quit falling asleep. In fact, they can do it for around 6 hours a day, three times better than this charter.
https://joincolossus.com/episode/building-alpha-school-and-t...
I like the vision and believe in the good intentions. I don't know whether they've achieved much so far.
https://go.alpha.school/hubfs/MAP%20Results%20-%2024%2025/20...
Assuming a normal distribution, this will indicate whether your child is above or below the median Alpha School student. This may be impact your view about how well Alpha School is doing vs whatever school your kid goes to.
[1] https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/10/1156366
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Pay varies significantly between different states and cities.
There are elementary school teachers in San Francisco whose total pay and benefits in 2023 were $150k or more:
https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=Eld%20C...
And to compare those salaries to other jobs, you have to consider:
- the typical academic achievement of those teachers and the alternative roles available to them, and
- the fact that in another role they would have to work 25% more (50 weeks per year instead of 40 weeks per year)
In 2025 San Francisco we have ads on buses advertising low income housing to people making less than $185k/year.
https://x.com/Swizec/status/1972053995050119631
Heh. I left teaching for three years to work in the private sector and the "25% more work" was honestly the best work life balance I've had in 20 years.
Depends on where you teach. Some communities are much better than others.
I believe the majority of those reading this message have kids who respect their teachers (or if you had kids they would). You also live in an area where other kids respect their teachers if you have a choice (some of you don't, but if you have the choice and you will make that choice).
Near where I live there is an "inner city" school where the average teacher has been teaching for about 9 months - despite many teachers who have been there are 30 years. The typically teacher works just long enough to get some experience and then gets a job at a "suburban" school that pays less(!) but the students respect the teachers more.
> low-attention span of kids due to tech.
Kids have always been low attention span. Things are probably better than before because we have ADHD treatments that work that we just ignored in the past. Blaming tech is just the latest thing, but you can always find parents blaming low attention span on whatever the latest fad to blame it on is. Truth is kids are not really "designed" to sit in a classroom for hours every day - but it is still the best way we have to set them up for a modern life so we force it anyway.
Also when I was in school we didn't have smart phones, at least a slide phone with a full qwerty keyboard was the latest thing, can do a lot less than a full computer in your pocket/social media
Perhaps a better analogy would be lab techs and lab rats. The students are the rats. They have a battery of experiments performed on them by lab techs (teachers) overseen by scientists (administration) who also determine which experiments to run. The problem is, what's being practiced is not really a science but a form of alchemy: how to determine a repeatable process to refine the lead of incoming children into the gold of model citizens who make all the right decisions according to the latest knowledge of what "right" is? (This was called "Outcome Based Education" in the 90s and "Social Emotional Learning" today.) The missing bit is that learning is an active process which requires involvement of the child.
But anyway, woe betide the lab tech who arrogates to perform the experiment in a manner not prescribed by their betters with Ph.D.s (say, in a way that's been shown to get results)!
Really the only options for after school activities after graduating from elementary school are competitive sports, competitive math, competitive music, competitive chess, etc. which are pretty much all zero sum in nature.
I'd love options for kids that let them gradually explore their interests to help them discover future vocational interests in a way that was beneficial to society such that they don't have an existential crisis when they hit senior year in high school and have to pick a college major.
Frankly I think that indicates the grandparent just didn't think very hard before leaving their comment.
Didn't go so well in Pennsylvaniaa
State rejects application for cyber charter school with AI teacher and two hours of daily class
https://penncapital-star.com/education/state-rejects-applica...
I'm not saying this to cast doubt on any of the facts in the article. Just pointing out that Dan, in general, has a less optimistic view of AI in education, than I'd expect of the median HN commenter.
That said, I'll share my thoughts on Alpha School, based on everything I've read (both things published by the school, and things I've read from parents online and in private forums):
- the '2x growth' in their marketing is way oversold; their typical 4th grader isn't doing math at the level of a typical 8th grader.[0]
- the '2 hours/day' in their marketing is oversold; students often work longer than that.
- only 25% of their students use Math Academy. The rest use IXL or ALEKS.
- in their charter school application, the amount they proposed charging for their software platform was unreasonable, given the minor role it plays in outcomes (10% according to Matt Bateman, who works there) [1]
- the core idea of their 'timeback' platform (that monitors student activity in realtime via video camera and screen recording) is good, but I have not seen it and have no idea whether it's real or how good it is
More of my thoughts from back in April: https://x.com/RahimNathwani/status/1912571014107787730
[0] https://x.com/RahimNathwani/status/1971804784475996469
https://x.com/RahimNathwani/status/1971817857286803873
[1] https://x.com/RahimNathwani/status/1912586493086036148
I don't know about that, but when I discovered that San Francisco schools weren't teaching algebra I was at first impressed that American children were doing Group Theory in 8th grade (something we only learn in the 12th standard in Tamil Nadu in India where I'm from) and figured moving that to 9th isn't a big deal only to find that they meant the basic stuff (linear equations and the like, what we learn in the 7th grade).
Honestly, I can't take anyone seriously who would try so hard to set back children from learning what is fairly basic Mathematics at that age. Children are capable of learning this. Or at least a sufficiently large amount are that we should be teaching them to a high standard.
For Alpha School, I think the Slate Star Codex review is likely more informative than this clearly polemic article.
0: https://x.com/garrytan/status/1953654484997169443
tl;dr This is from the people who want to delay Mathematics education to later in a child's life (algebra to 9th grade onwards)
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