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Also see this anonymous entry into an essay-writing contest by one of the parents: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school https://www.astral

Also see this anonymous entry into an essay-writing contest by one of the parents: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school

Animats 1y ago
Read both. This is fascinating. Notes: - 1 on 1 tutoring yields about 2 standard deviations of improvement, but costs too much. - The Alpha system is very effective but costs about $40,000/student. - It's not that complicated. 2-3 hours a day of intense computer-monitored study, about half using off the shelf tools, and the rest of the day is developed to less structured projects. This is a useful insight. Push kids hard for about 2-3 hours a day and then get to the fun stuff. - Works on ordinary kids. Strong claims in this area. Needs outside validation. - Lots of carrot, including cash payments for achievement. Not much stick. - Staff/student ratio about 1:5. No teachers from bottom quartile of teacher population.
- renewiltord 1y ago
  Amusingly, $40k is cheap for private school in SF so if they can bring the model here at the same cost...
  - kippinitreal 1y ago
    Their new SF campus charges $75k/yr!
    - renewiltord 1y ago
      Lmao typical. The other schools that charge that are pretty good too.
- 11101010001100 1y ago
  As noted in the article, for people who won't RTA, the original 2sigma observation of 1 on 1 is due to Bloom more than 40 years ago.
- alwa 1y ago
  The parent-essayist also mentioned tuition is $10K at the Brownsville TX school, and tuition-free at Alpha’s Arizona charter school.
- bsder 1y ago
  > - Staff/student ratio about 1:5. No teachers from bottom quartile of teacher population. This is the known formula to accelerate teaching and learning. Even the Gates Foundation (whom I loathe) documented this. Every single one of the successful programs that the Gates Foundation analyzed were declared as too expensive and shut down.
jeffbee 1y ago
That article mentions family income as possible confounder only once, while in an article of this extent I would expect it to appear dozens of times and be the central point. You simply cannot draw conclusions from comparing general populations and kids in schools that cost $500k for a 13-grade education, or that cost any amount. Students from low income households have so many headwinds. They don't come to school because their transportation is unreliable, because their teeth hurt, because they can't afford sanitary pads, they can't sleep because their neighborhoods are too loud, and so on. When this school opened in Brownsville and preferentially enrolled only the children of employed aeronautical engineers, that precluded any possible comparison of outcomes.
- skybrian 1y ago
  Yes, they are tiny and it has to be considered experimental and unproven as far as scalability goes. They are a long way from trying to educate millions of kids. But it will be interesting to see how far it scales up and into what demographics before it stops working and they reach their limits. So far, it seems they've had success with in-person schools and it didn't work (yet) remotely. Motivation seems like the key factor.
  - underlipton 1y ago
    Scalability is the issue, though, isn't it? Any number of esoteric pedagogical approaches have been tested, to great success, with the children of people wealthy enough to fulfill all of their scions' material needs and subsequently move onto purchasing immaterial things like "attention". You have to figure out something you can apply kids in spite of who their parents are. If not, you have to admit that there's no such thing as a meritocracy divorced from what the parents are willing or able to provide (which opens up questions of how much children deserve to have that deficit filled, it if happens to exist in any individual case).
    - skybrian 1y ago
      I don't know anything about private schools beyond reading a few articles, but I think that might be overstated. Even with the same kids and parents, it seems likely that some schools are better than others?

Also see this anonymous entry into an essay-writing contest by one of the parents: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school

Animats 1y ago

Read both. This is fascinating. Notes: - 1 on 1 tutoring yields about 2 standard deviations of improvement, but costs too much. - The Alpha system is very effective but costs about $40,000/student. - It's not that complicated. 2-3 hours a day of intense computer-monitored study, about half using off the shelf tools, and the rest of the day is developed to less structured projects. This is a useful insight. Push kids hard for about 2-3 hours a day and then get to the fun stuff. - Works on ordinary kids. Strong claims in this area. Needs outside validation. - Lots of carrot, including cash payments for achievement. Not much stick. - Staff/student ratio about 1:5. No teachers from bottom quartile of teacher population.

renewiltord 1y ago
Amusingly, $40k is cheap for private school in SF so if they can bring the model here at the same cost...
- kippinitreal 1y ago
  Their new SF campus charges $75k/yr!
  - renewiltord 1y ago
    Lmao typical. The other schools that charge that are pretty good too.
11101010001100 1y ago
As noted in the article, for people who won't RTA, the original 2sigma observation of 1 on 1 is due to Bloom more than 40 years ago.
alwa 1y ago
The parent-essayist also mentioned tuition is $10K at the Brownsville TX school, and tuition-free at Alpha’s Arizona charter school.
bsder 1y ago
> - Staff/student ratio about 1:5. No teachers from bottom quartile of teacher population. This is the known formula to accelerate teaching and learning. Even the Gates Foundation (whom I loathe) documented this. Every single one of the successful programs that the Gates Foundation analyzed were declared as too expensive and shut down.

jeffbee 1y ago

That article mentions family income as possible confounder only once, while in an article of this extent I would expect it to appear dozens of times and be the central point. You simply cannot draw conclusions from comparing general populations and kids in schools that cost $500k for a 13-grade education, or that cost any amount. Students from low income households have so many headwinds. They don't come to school because their transportation is unreliable, because their teeth hurt, because they can't afford sanitary pads, they can't sleep because their neighborhoods are too loud, and so on. When this school opened in Brownsville and preferentially enrolled only the children of employed aeronautical engineers, that precluded any possible comparison of outcomes.

skybrian 1y ago
Yes, they are tiny and it has to be considered experimental and unproven as far as scalability goes. They are a long way from trying to educate millions of kids. But it will be interesting to see how far it scales up and into what demographics before it stops working and they reach their limits. So far, it seems they've had success with in-person schools and it didn't work (yet) remotely. Motivation seems like the key factor.
- underlipton 1y ago
  Scalability is the issue, though, isn't it? Any number of esoteric pedagogical approaches have been tested, to great success, with the children of people wealthy enough to fulfill all of their scions' material needs and subsequently move onto purchasing immaterial things like "attention". You have to figure out something you can apply kids in spite of who their parents are. If not, you have to admit that there's no such thing as a meritocracy divorced from what the parents are willing or able to provide (which opens up questions of how much children deserve to have that deficit filled, it if happens to exist in any individual case).
  - skybrian 1y ago
    I don't know anything about private schools beyond reading a few articles, but I think that might be overstated. Even with the same kids and parents, it seems likely that some schools are better than others?