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Your Review: Alpha School
She invited a small number of neighbourhood kids (including her two) into a makeshift microschool that ran two intense, teacher‐led academic “sprints” each morning, then “life‐skills” projects after lunch.
Anonymous ACX Reader • Your Review: Alpha School
Education as cottage industry, which I can appreciate as soon of a Montessori teacher
In November 2020 we had a meeting with the head of our kids’ original elite private school for the gifted.
Anonymous ACX Reader • Your Review: Alpha School
Goes to show self-selection. Rich, private-school population
While other private schools in the area had moved back to full time in-person learning on campus, ours continued to stream YouTube yoga for P.E.
Anonymous ACX Reader • Your Review: Alpha School
Have to admit, this belief was correct. And I would have fought against it at the time.
They reminded me of the staff you run into when visiting Disney World.
Anonymous ACX Reader • Your Review: Alpha School
Someone who believes that having tour guides be like Disney is a good thing when talking about education decisions is living in a different world than me.
and a great deal of anxiety every time I left the water running while I was brushing my teeth
Anonymous ACX Reader • Your Review: Alpha School
For a guy interested in optimizing his kids’ education in ways that are highly experimental and presumably involved little decision-making power from the kids, he’s not interested in examinations of his own behavior when they become the target of new evidence.
You can make the morning ultra-personalized, but if the goal of the afternoon is socialization that you are missing in the morning, you need to have some sort of alignment on how to spend that afternoon.
That challenge led to Alpha’s 2024 expansion into specialty schools.
That challenge led to Alpha’s 2024 expansion into specialty schools.
Anonymous ACX Reader • Your Review: Alpha School
Splitting kids by sports, gifted academics, and video game design? Weird that skilled labor is not included here. But in light of my late realization that trade school might have been best thing post-high-school for me…could be a good idea
The school’s “100% Money Back guarantee” is that every student who attends will be in the top 1% academically and win at least one national academic competition (for kids who start in kindergarten they guarantee 1350+ SAT and 5s on APs by 8th grade).
Anonymous ACX Reader • Your Review: Alpha School
Going to disappear once they scale. Basically an early-adopter’s perk. You can’t promise everyone top 1% performance or you’ll mathematically be refunding a majority of families.
Roland Fryer, who has done extensive work on what works in incentivizing students, quotes a 2010 Gallup poll that found that only 23% of American parents support the “idea of school districts paying small amount of money to students to, for example, read books, attend school or to get good grades” (76% opposed the idea with only 1% undecided).
Anonymous ACX Reader • Your Review: Alpha School
I’m pretty opposed to this myself, on the basis of SDT findings. I guess the question is whether real-life situations add variables not controlled for in the SDT experiments.
practice every kids is working on stuff at the edge of their ability, rather than the median of a group
Anonymous ACX Reader • Your Review: Alpha School
I could see where this might have been beneficial to me.