Thoughts on Alpha School
It’s Sunday, so I thought about sharing some thoughts on a non-investing topic: schools for our kids.
Before we had our first kid in December last year, I was pretty firm on sending my kid to public school. However, since both my wife and I grew up in Bangladesh (we actually met in high school), we do not have much of a clue about schooling in the US.
I could pretty much summarize our knowledge about schooling in the US in two sentences: private schools are exceptionally expensive, so we can just eliminate that option. From the public schools, you can find pretty decent option if you live in a good neighborhood.
We leaned pretty heavily to public school and honestly I didn’t think much of this decision until I read this blog post three months ago about Alpha School.
For the uninitiated, Alpha School is a private school in the US that make three eye-popping promises about their schools: a) kids must love school, and b) kids can just do two hours of academic work everyday at their school and still learn at twice the speed, thanks to their AI-powered learning platform, and c) for the rest of the time, kids spend more time on learning life skills (think public speaking, or even running a business; some kids apparently even managed an Airbnb).
Joe Liemandt, the Principal of Alpha School and the youngest member of the Forbes 400 in the 1990s, did a podcast with Invest Like The Best where he outlined Alpha’s philosophy and vision in greater detail.
It’s easy to make these promises, but I was quite intrigued by the aforementioned blog post as they detailed their experience (both good and bad) of sending their kids to Alpha. Here are some excerpts from the very long blog post:
“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”
So, what are these incentives Alpha came up with to propel kids learn faster? Again, from the blog post:
Alpha schools have their own in-house currency. Alpha has “Alpha bucks”; GT (Gifted and Talented which is one of the versions of Alpha) School has “GT bucks”. My understanding is that they work a little differently on each campus, but the overall philosophy is the same. This review will focus on the details of the GT system since it is what I know best.
If the students complete their 2-hour learning “minimums” each day they earn about 10 GT Bucks. They get additional bonuses for every lesson they complete beyond their minimums. They also get a bonus if they finish their minimums within the scheduled time (vs going home and doing them later), additional bonuses if the entire class completes their minimums during the allotted time, and weekly bonuses for hitting longer term targets.
They only get credit if they both complete their lessons AND get 80% or higher on the problem sets within the lesson. If they get 79% they still move on (with the questions they missed coming back later for review), but they don’t get the GT bucks associated with the lesson (this stops gaming where the kids rush through the lessons just to get “bucks”)
A GT buck is worth 10-cents. So if they are really pushing a kid could be earning roughly $2 per day.
Once a kid has earned a collection of GT bucks they can spend those bucks at the GT-store. The Alpha store has a wide selection of offerings. The GT store, because it is a much smaller school, is more like a catalog. The kids can select what they want and the school will order it so it is ready when they earn enough “bucks”. Every kid has their own personalized incentive – do the school work and they will get their personalized prize.
As someone in the investing profession, I am aware of the power of a well designed incentives system. I was particularly drawn to it because of how simple it is. If this is a core reason for Alpha’s success (as the parent put it), that’s great news since it would be not that challenging to come up with your own version for your kid and implement it. Of course, we all know we are supposed to eat vegetables, and yet not many people do. So, I am not ignoring the implementation challenges, but it was encouraging to read that with some simple incentive tricks, you may be able to get some of the results Alpha is seeing in their schools.
After googling a bit, I came to know Alpha was actually coming to do an information session in a nearby city which is just 20 minute drive from our place. My wife and I both, along with ~50 other parents, attended the session a couple of months ago.
One of the things that really stood out to me from the session is how many of their ideas are incredibly simple and intuitive. In traditional schools, a kid who is in 6th grade learns 6th grade math, science, and language lessons. But isn’t it much more likely that if the kid is much more interested in math, they might be able to accelerate their learning to 8th grade level math while they may actually be in 5th grade language skill (or vice versa)? This was perhaps always the case, but in post-AI world, a lack of personalized learning pace seems awfully anachronistic to me. Alpha’s personalized learning platform just seemed “common sense” in today’s world. Unfortunately, I doubt public schools in the US have the capacity to change their learning environment rapidly to meet such demand.
To my disappointment, Alpha decided not to launch a school in the nearby city we visited. They didn’t provide any rationale, but my guess is it is due to lack of interest from parents. I do think many parents who attended the session were interested but may have been dissuaded by the price tag which was ~$50k/year. While such costs for private schools are quite common in NYC or Bay Area, private schools are hardly a thing in Sacramento. In fact, when I discussed this with a couple of my acquaintances, they were utterly shocked that I did not laugh at the price tag. As you know, it can be excruciatingly difficult to compete against “free” even if the “free” comes with potentially a large long-term hidden but uncertain cost.
Both my wife and I did pretty well in traditional school. Of course, schooling was dirt cheap in Bangladesh, and I pretty much excelled academically wherever I went both in Bangladesh and in the US. So, I’m not speaking from some deep seated negative experiences I personally felt, rather I believe given how the world is changing, it seems less than ideal for my kid to go through the same schooling experience we did.
I will end with what perhaps draws me to Alpha school the most. If my kid can learn at his own pace and finish his high school potentially faster, it may offer him some options to tinker with certain things before heading to college. Maybe he can take a year or two to pursue something he’s deeply interested in intellectually (teens are often underestimated by society how much they can intellectually accomplish), maybe he can start a business, maybe he can just travel with me to a bunch of countries and see the world, or maybe he can live in Bangladesh for a while and do nothing. Having options in life is valuable. Instead of staying in a well trodden path, sometimes you can get a much better idea about yourself and what you would like to do if you can afford to wonder and wander a little.
We haven’t made any decisions yet, but at the very least, I will perhaps implement some sort of incentive system to guide our kid’s learning.
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