The scrollbar is completely absent in Firefox. I think this is the first time I've seen long-form content with zero visual indication where I currently am in the document. Crazy.
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.
This section reveals a lot about the difference between the hype and the practice:
> 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?
keep in mind this piece was 8 months ago (and probably starting to be written much earlier). I can see Alpha school being this genuine effort to offer an alternative education plan as well as slowly falling into the AI hype later on and pushing more generative content as it tries to phase out teachers.
Or, if it's being praised by this administration, it's doing so to gain political points.
> “All educational content is obsolete. Every textbook, every lesson plan, every test, all of it is obsolete because gen AI is going to be able to deliver a personalized lesson just for you,” Joe Liemandt, Alpha School’s “principal” and the founder of Trilogy, the company that owns many of the apps used by Alpha School, said in a podcast interview published last year.
I wonder if this fellow has ever read a serious book. I'm skeptical.
I have long conversation threads on highly specialized topics and I’ve never found learning about something so easy. He’s right but it has to not be self directed in some way because that takes motivation and you cant expect that from every student.
So they are trained to follow instructions from a computer, trained to be unable to function without a computer. 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.
The dream is clearly asking a student what they’re interested in, getting them to self direct on a project with guidance and deliver something you can evaluate. I would hazard that AI helps rather than hinders this.
These founders are careless and weirdly cruel. It's wildly unethical, immoral, wrong to do this to children.
"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."
The typical 5th grader at Alpha School has math achievement at the 85th percentile of 5th graders. This is not bad, but it's not remarkable.
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.
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.
AI is held to a much higher standard than the existing education techniques.
Even without AI teachers are implementing new techniques without any evidence of their effectiveness. In some cases, there is mountains of evidence that their techniques are not effective. From the prohibition on phonics in reading, learning styles, building thinking classrooms, or just the entire idea of constructivism. These are all worse than the techniques that they replace. AI systems at the very least are measured and have some kind of tracking of what works.
I'm not advocating for AI necessarily, but education is in the pre-scientific phase and it needs to start by implementing evidence based techniques, AI or no.
Is anyone shocked that the founder of Trilogy Software, Joe Liemandt, would take the lessons learned in creating a "bossware" enterprise software stack (Crossover) and apply them to his latest venture?
I think there is enormous opportunity in combining Ed Tech and Generative AI, especially if you can create a highly tailored tutor available 24/7 for every student, especially for those in low-income situations that have historically been locked out from gaining such guidance. It's just unfortunate that this so rapidly morphed to spying on students for data harvesting.
The follow on effects if this becomes pervasive could be so incredibly damaging for students. Anxiety from performance metrics are already a very real thing because of standardized testing and scoring to get into the best schools. Also, imagine all of this data "follows" a student as they transition into the work force. We're headed towards a future where entry-level employees will have to disclose their "course work engagement" KPIs on their resume.
24 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 45.1 ms ] threadEdit: 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.
> 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?
Or, if it's being praised by this administration, it's doing so to gain political points.
Usual rambling from a site that disables scrolling and nearly crashes Firefox.
Summary: the '2× learning' claims are overblown.
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.
"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.
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45443004
Even without AI teachers are implementing new techniques without any evidence of their effectiveness. In some cases, there is mountains of evidence that their techniques are not effective. From the prohibition on phonics in reading, learning styles, building thinking classrooms, or just the entire idea of constructivism. These are all worse than the techniques that they replace. AI systems at the very least are measured and have some kind of tracking of what works.
I'm not advocating for AI necessarily, but education is in the pre-scientific phase and it needs to start by implementing evidence based techniques, AI or no.
I think there is enormous opportunity in combining Ed Tech and Generative AI, especially if you can create a highly tailored tutor available 24/7 for every student, especially for those in low-income situations that have historically been locked out from gaining such guidance. It's just unfortunate that this so rapidly morphed to spying on students for data harvesting.
The follow on effects if this becomes pervasive could be so incredibly damaging for students. Anxiety from performance metrics are already a very real thing because of standardized testing and scoring to get into the best schools. Also, imagine all of this data "follows" a student as they transition into the work force. We're headed towards a future where entry-level employees will have to disclose their "course work engagement" KPIs on their resume.