2- It seems like a big concern was “what they are doing is great, but I am worried about all this other stuff they are not doing”. I think that will always be an issue. The wonder of science you talked about would be amazing to learn. The history counter-factual and moral deliemas would be amazing. So great! When do you do that? Afternoon I guess. Okay. Either the school is doing it already (great!) or if they aren’t and one thinks it’s important, then what do they cut to do that instead? The cooking workshop? The public speaking? Debate? Ice skating / resiliency? The teamwork workshop / escape room? I think it’s a real challenge — there are an infinite number of things that would be good for kids to learn. And parents disagree on the stack rank order in which they should be prioritized. And unlike “kids should learn efficiently and should not waste their time” I don’t think there IS a “correct answer”
3- On science in particular- I think Joe should buy your company and you should build the entire Alpha science program and scale Egan through their org….
4- One more on science: the youngest kids at GT had two science workshops this year: Chemistry and magnets. Both were super hands on but ended with deep understanding. Chemistry used 3D buying blocks. My 6 year old daughter explained to me how molecules were built and how electrons jump between levels better than I understood before high school.
5- that said, I think something much better than IXL could be used in the morning for science. Imagine a short video on your apple/flower thing. Then you still do a series of (much better designed) questions to ensure comprehension. No reason they couldn’t do that with the existing model (like how they re-build reading and writing by building their own app rather than a third party). They need to get writing fixed first though before they dive into science. But maybe science becomes next on the list.
It does occur to me that Egan education might be a great fit for the afternoons. Imagine what kind of wonder you could build when kids have the strong knowledge foundations that the mornings could provide. It's not guaranteed to work but it would certainly be a tempting experiment.
I am curious to know if anyone here has used the STEM educational platform Brilliant.org. They sponsor many academic and/or science/math-oriented podcasts and cost about 100 Euros per year. It's an interactive platform which can be used by a single learner but also in a group of learners - such as in a classroom. I've used it for my own personal use (I'm an adult), but I have no idea if parents or educators have used it and found it useful.
I would be curious to know more about this and to know more about what constitutes the basics. My impression is that Brilliant.org might be suitable for maybe grade 5 and up to high school and even college level. I'm much less sure about the earliest grades for the most basic notions of arithmetic and so on which are basically assumed. There are some basic prerequisites.
I have done Brilliant both myself and with my son. It's good at breaking things down into manageable steps. My older son (who likes math and is very good for his age) got to late primary/early middle school math like graphing lines and circles using equations when he was first grade age in the US system. The problem was he eventually said it was too hard and wasn't motivated to continue. I've had this problem with another (even better, IMO) online math platform, Beast Academy, with both children.
I used Brilliant myself to learn basics of computer science and coding. I included some of the spaced repetition practice and basically that's the only stuff that sticks. Brilliant is very good for introducing concepts clearly but I think it needs more avenues for practice and rehearsal.
I wrote about this in my post on the Alpha Review, but the gist is that I think online platforms frequently lack social incentives that schools provide. I'm also open to the argument that naked incentives, as you call them here could help students build long term positive habits that persist even after the rewards have been removed.
My elder son is a classic low-structure learner. Everything in school is too easy for him but he needs the inertia of a structure around him to pull him along or he'll just overthink everything and anticipate that it'll be boring and never get anything done.
Both reviews made me feel more sure about something I already believed: that school exists to provide body doubling via other kids (who are not a reliable source for such, hence the bribes or the punishments or the required choral responses or whatever), because we don't have a culture of providing body doubling via enthusiastic adults who genuinely think even childhood academics can be worthy of their own attention and who can be a much more reliable source of body doubling AND a more reliable and organic way of creating kid to kid body doubling. I don't have a lot of hope for said adults being a solution that scales, because it's expensive and because in my experience such adults are rare. But it's pretty powerful at the individual level to make sure kids see you doing your own challenging learning, be enthusiast and not belittling about their learning, and expose them to other nerdy people who learn for the joy of it.
I'm not surprised that IXL science is uninspiring because it's my impression that most science curricula exist just to meet standards about teaching particular facts, ideas, definitions, etc. I don't think it's so much that they are bad at helping kids learn interconnected facts to create a robust mental model of the universe as that they have no aspirations to do that.
I'm also curious whether Alpha School does spaced repetition via a tool like Anki that kids could continue to use after they are no longer students there, whether they are supported in using spaced repetition for things they want to learn beyond the IXL material, and whether guides model using spaced repetition for their own learning. I really love the idea of using spaced repetition to demonstrate to kids that they can in fact learn things without forgetting them, but I don't know whether implementing it they way Alpha School does achieves that.
Anki specially is not used in the morning program, but it is used as the primary tool for the Quizbowl workshop in the afternoon at the GT school (for the older kids at GT, QB and Debate are the two highest priority workshops)
I don't think there was a single mention in the Alpha School review of how the morning program ties into the workshops, which I would expect to be a foundational principle. Though I see the logistic challenges of connecting the two halves (mainly rooted in personalization) in the context of Alpha, I suspect that keeping them separate carries a very underestimated cost in terms of quality of engagement.
Perhaps it's a reasonable sacrifice (of the integration of projects into academic curriculum), but it deserves a discussion.
A meta comment about the Alpha Review: the author is the rare type who is willing to relocate for a school, and yet, the vast majority of the review focuses on the morning part of the school (how to achieve general standards), and not the afternoon part (how to become a person). The assessment of Alpha would have been stronger if there was at least equal focus on the workshops component, instead of occasional asides about cool projects here and there.
Also, it appears nobody wants to mention (or is aware of) Acton academy (also established in Austin). I can't imagine that it had no influence on Alpha...
For those new the the world of Austin-based-school-networks-that-hire-guides-to-have-kids-on-personalized-learning-screens-in-the-morning-but-tackle-more-complex-and-social-projects-in-the-afternoon... Acton Academy is the other! I got the chance to fly down there a few years ago and tour it. From what I can tell, it's very similar to AlphaSchool — minus the focus on speed (and the raw incentives) but plus an explicit model of franchising (and opportunities to customize it).
I'd be interested in hearing the experiences of anyone who's had experience with both, or who can help untangle the causation between the two.
Hey there Brandon, I had this video open in my tabs for a long time and finally watched today because I didn't feel up for Twitter.
tl;dr am parent of 2 Alpha students who has gone to work for them recently. I also had a child attending an Austin-area Acton academy for a while.
You'll be interested to know that at some point fairly long ago now, like 6-7 years?, Alpha was itself an Acton. Speaking informally/non-officially, Alpha appreciates the Acton model as an improvement over conventional schooling but finds it still to lack ultimate accountability/standards regarding learning i.e. core academics.
To my knowledge, Actons use off the shelf apps a la carte, basically none of which require mastery for progression or fully deploy the known principles of learning science. Hence, the value of Alpha's unified platform which modifies or replaces problematic apps so that we always know, down to the level of each school day, what apps-based work a student completed, whether they're on track according to their own projected learning trajectory, etc.
There is some emerging opinion about this family of Austin-born schools, Forbes named it "intentional education" not too long ago: https://archive.is/ToQJy
Happy to answer any other questions etc as you like, appreciate your work here.
>> "You'll be interested to know that at some point fairly long ago now, like 6-7 years?, Alpha was itself an Acton."
Ha! You've just given me a "Rosebud" moment! That makes sense of so much of what I've heard about Alpha. Insofar as Alpha takes off, it also will be vindication of Acton-founders Jeff and Laura Sandefer's libertarian vision of building a platform for new sorts of schools.
Based on everything I've heard about Alpha (ACX, podcasts with founders, alpha student posts), there's a structural separation between the academic education in the morning and the experiential programming in the afternoon. Personally, I have a bias towards seeing the two parts integrated*. What is Alpha's outlook on such integration?
*Example of integration: if the afternoon project is running a digital marketing agency — the morning academics would be grounded in the mastery of skills, themes, history, etc. relevant to the project.
IMO it is fair to say that there is no particular integration between morning/core academics and afternoon/workshops beyond what is inherent to the endeavors, e.g. if you learned to count/add/subtract on your math apps then that will show up in e.g. financial literacy for the young grades like making change with money.
In my estimation, this is not a principled separation, it just happened that way, with them being semi-siloed. There probably *could* be more integration within this model, if enough people were convinced that it's a problem, but I have not really heard this complaint from within Alpha schools, just a few times from outside commentators.
There are some practical/logistical barriers to integration. The workshops rotate mostly on 6 week cycles (students attend Alpha on a non-standard calendar with fairly frequent week-long breaks between these short sessions). Most workshops are selected at the level level (a level is approximately 2 age grades combined), but students within that level are completing core academic work spanning 5+ conventional grade levels.
Moreover the workshops are not repeated on any fixed cycle, there are one-offs depending on guide interests, seasonality, etc. And, while we are working towards codifying the life skills standards for Alpha students, the actual substance of the workshops varies heavily across locations (GT students play chess, Waypoint the outdoorsy Alpha teachers students to build fires in the woods, etc).
Thus it would be pretty tricky to create synchronization between the apps work and the afternoon stuff. It would require significant top-down reconfiguring of the workshops and possibly also the app content and timing.
Thank you Pamela for the response. I agree with your take on practical/logistic barriers — in fact, I think you just scratch the surface. Perhaps Alpha's approach is the optimal one for a school.
Personally, I'm still in that top-down configuring place where "education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge" (Whitehead) is at the very top. And it's very hard for me to (philosophically) carve out academics as a separate class of learning.
Thank you again for such a thorough response. It really is super helpful.
Thank you Pamela. If you don't mind, I have a question about Alpha's approach.
Let's assume that we are both well-informed (and in general agreement) on the benefits, power, and promise of personalized/adaptive education.
In alpha's case — there seems to be a clear and rigid boundary between academic (morning) & experiential (afternoon). Whereas Acton seems to strive for an ideal of integrating the two.
I think that integrating the academic and experiential is critical, but recognize the challenge of bringing it to fruition, especially at scale or under constrained resources (i.e. not aristocratic tutoring).
Does Alpha share this ideal? Did Alpha decide to sacrifice it?
I would want to know more about their behind-the-scenes thinking about this (not so much the marketing talking points, which I am very much up to date on).
Hmmm... I'm not sure that I saw a particularly tight integration of morning & afternoon activities when I visited Acton. So I'd say that Alpha seems more in continuity, in this case.
I'm probably projecting onto Acton, and it's a mistake to ask my question about integration of academics and projects at Alpha in the context of a contrast with Acton. I'll recast my question and post it to the thread linked in Pamela's comment.
Long story but one of my children (happily) attended an Acton for a while, I agree with Brandon's general impression of lack of "particularly tight integration of morning & afternoon activities."
It could just be that Acton is sort of more values-forward overall that is giving that impression, with their focus on the Hero's Journey and character traits, an embedded deliberative democratic ideal (e.g. classes do restorative type discipline, create their own rules, etc).
As a parent, I see Alpha as being more socioculturally sanitized (for better or worse) with the explicit values more in the neutral direction of "grit" than, say, "courage." And the Alpha "life skills" curriculum does not have any flavor of classical education really .
(Personally, I know that it's not truly possible to sanitize or make neutral a school's stated or demonstrated values, and that the demonstrated Alpha values are probably essentially neoliberal - I use this non-perjoratively but understand the connotation. Nonetheless an institution may wish to give this impression for various philosophical and practical reasons).
Hey Brandon and Alessandro. I'm going to be in Austin in two weeks. I'm going to try and visit Alpha school. Do you have any specific questions you'd like me to ask them?
1) Afternoon School - Yes. Sign my kids up! Heck, can I join?
2) Incentives - This is exactly what my point was the other day regarding your conversation with the other educator! Kids need to be on board, but incentives are not the answer. Egan is the only one that makes any sense to me. Do I use incentives with my own kids? Yes, for short term things like potty training or practicing reading enough to overcome the hurdles of becoming a reader. My kids would not be allowed to attend a school that bribed them to learn for years on end. I would rather they just not learn.
3) Online programs - There are so many. My kids have briefly done a number of them including IXL. I hate them. My kids find being on the computer a novelty since they don't get a ton of screen time, so I let them use these program once in a while when they're free to us. If they ever say no thanks, I'm like, thank God. There are, however, two notable exceptions that I've discovered so far:
Smartick: That math program is really good. They limit kids to like 15 minutes of math a day, and they are very good at targeting what they need to work on in a way that builds conceptual understanding not rote memorization. I have 4 kids though, so even if they wanted to do it full time, it's cost prohibitive. I've signed my kids up over a couple of summers in the past (not this year). They do it for 2 months and enjoy it, mainly due to the built in incentives, but by the time summer ends, they want to quit at that point anyway. The incentives become less incentivizing over time.
Miacademy: I heard about this from a friend and my younger kids did it this year for a couple months. I don't hate it. From what I saw, the videos are colorful and engaging, they definitely didn't dumb down the content, and the kids could finish a day's worth of work in 2 hours for ALL subjects (like real 2 hours, not 8:30 to noon like Alpha School). They incentivize like crazy and it's all built into the program. However, my kids still opted to quit after like 6 weeks once the shiny wore off. This was perfectly fine with me. I would rather them be reading, playing outside, building with legos, drawing, or doing pretty much anything else than be learning academic skills for the sole purpose of digital rewards. If my choice were between 2 hours of Miacademy or 7 hours of public school though, I'd go with Miacademy. I don't know if they have data, but I bet it's at least as effective.
4) Efficiency - Efficiency in acquiring necessary knowledge so that my kids have time to enjoy life is what I'm all about. I made my kids' math, because I thought it was important but didn't want to waste their time. Personally, though, I'm not that impressed with a 2x in 2 hours claim. As long as you can get kids to enjoy reading (which I admit can be challenging - hence my use of incentives), then I feel like 10 hours of "academic instruction" per week feels excessive. And really, it's more like 8:30 am to at least noon everyday including breaks, so that's at least 17.5 hours per week in which kids are not using their imagination or being creative. That's not efficient as far as I'm concerned.
5) Standards - I mean, the whole reason why Alpha Schools are impressive is that they are able to get good standardized test scores. It sounds like you both agree that "it is good to have this knowledge." If you mean by that that children SHOULD have this knowledge, then I don't agree. My only real goal as a home educator is to not waste my kids' time. I believe in learning on demand when it comes to real life, so what my kids learn in their childhood is irrelevant as long as the stay creative, flexible thinkers and learn how to learn. I DO want my kids to have academic knowledge, but only because I personally believe it is inherently worth learning. In that sense, it is good. I agree with Egan though that it is useless knowledge. That's a great quote. 😂 I've never felt the need to test my kids on the Roman Empire for example, even though I'm eager for them to learn about it, because, who cares what they remember? I do appreciate Alpha School's transparency and their research focused mind-set, but honestly, I care very little about Alpha's test scores. I care more about what kids have lost by spending all that time on a computer, which is not being measured and is harder to quantify.
Yes, though I'm having a really hard time thinking of any situation in which I would pick public school, so that's not saying much. 😂 I take that back. I would choose public school over a computer-based program that took as many hours as public school regardless of how quickly they were making "progress." If Alpha school had them on the computer for 4 or 5+ hours a day, then I would probably be tempted to go with public school. Like I said, though, the afternoon program really does sound great, so I would choose Alpha School over public school if those were my only two options. Thank goodness they are not.
Great discussion. Some thoughts:
1- “mullet version of education” is a great quote
2- It seems like a big concern was “what they are doing is great, but I am worried about all this other stuff they are not doing”. I think that will always be an issue. The wonder of science you talked about would be amazing to learn. The history counter-factual and moral deliemas would be amazing. So great! When do you do that? Afternoon I guess. Okay. Either the school is doing it already (great!) or if they aren’t and one thinks it’s important, then what do they cut to do that instead? The cooking workshop? The public speaking? Debate? Ice skating / resiliency? The teamwork workshop / escape room? I think it’s a real challenge — there are an infinite number of things that would be good for kids to learn. And parents disagree on the stack rank order in which they should be prioritized. And unlike “kids should learn efficiently and should not waste their time” I don’t think there IS a “correct answer”
3- On science in particular- I think Joe should buy your company and you should build the entire Alpha science program and scale Egan through their org….
4- One more on science: the youngest kids at GT had two science workshops this year: Chemistry and magnets. Both were super hands on but ended with deep understanding. Chemistry used 3D buying blocks. My 6 year old daughter explained to me how molecules were built and how electrons jump between levels better than I understood before high school.
5- that said, I think something much better than IXL could be used in the morning for science. Imagine a short video on your apple/flower thing. Then you still do a series of (much better designed) questions to ensure comprehension. No reason they couldn’t do that with the existing model (like how they re-build reading and writing by building their own app rather than a third party). They need to get writing fixed first though before they dive into science. But maybe science becomes next on the list.
It does occur to me that Egan education might be a great fit for the afternoons. Imagine what kind of wonder you could build when kids have the strong knowledge foundations that the mornings could provide. It's not guaranteed to work but it would certainly be a tempting experiment.
I am curious to know if anyone here has used the STEM educational platform Brilliant.org. They sponsor many academic and/or science/math-oriented podcasts and cost about 100 Euros per year. It's an interactive platform which can be used by a single learner but also in a group of learners - such as in a classroom. I've used it for my own personal use (I'm an adult), but I have no idea if parents or educators have used it and found it useful.
The consensus seems to be that it neglects the basics, making it unsuitable as a full curriculum.
I would be curious to know more about this and to know more about what constitutes the basics. My impression is that Brilliant.org might be suitable for maybe grade 5 and up to high school and even college level. I'm much less sure about the earliest grades for the most basic notions of arithmetic and so on which are basically assumed. There are some basic prerequisites.
Brilliant.org has long been on my “I want to know more about this” list. If anyone has any person experience with it, I’d love to hear about it.
I have done Brilliant both myself and with my son. It's good at breaking things down into manageable steps. My older son (who likes math and is very good for his age) got to late primary/early middle school math like graphing lines and circles using equations when he was first grade age in the US system. The problem was he eventually said it was too hard and wasn't motivated to continue. I've had this problem with another (even better, IMO) online math platform, Beast Academy, with both children.
I used Brilliant myself to learn basics of computer science and coding. I included some of the spaced repetition practice and basically that's the only stuff that sticks. Brilliant is very good for introducing concepts clearly but I think it needs more avenues for practice and rehearsal.
I wrote about this in my post on the Alpha Review, but the gist is that I think online platforms frequently lack social incentives that schools provide. I'm also open to the argument that naked incentives, as you call them here could help students build long term positive habits that persist even after the rewards have been removed.
My elder son is a classic low-structure learner. Everything in school is too easy for him but he needs the inertia of a structure around him to pull him along or he'll just overthink everything and anticipate that it'll be boring and never get anything done.
https://open.substack.com/pub/aslowcircle/p/education-red-alert-astral-codex?r=lqm22&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Both reviews made me feel more sure about something I already believed: that school exists to provide body doubling via other kids (who are not a reliable source for such, hence the bribes or the punishments or the required choral responses or whatever), because we don't have a culture of providing body doubling via enthusiastic adults who genuinely think even childhood academics can be worthy of their own attention and who can be a much more reliable source of body doubling AND a more reliable and organic way of creating kid to kid body doubling. I don't have a lot of hope for said adults being a solution that scales, because it's expensive and because in my experience such adults are rare. But it's pretty powerful at the individual level to make sure kids see you doing your own challenging learning, be enthusiast and not belittling about their learning, and expose them to other nerdy people who learn for the joy of it.
I'm not surprised that IXL science is uninspiring because it's my impression that most science curricula exist just to meet standards about teaching particular facts, ideas, definitions, etc. I don't think it's so much that they are bad at helping kids learn interconnected facts to create a robust mental model of the universe as that they have no aspirations to do that.
I'm also curious whether Alpha School does spaced repetition via a tool like Anki that kids could continue to use after they are no longer students there, whether they are supported in using spaced repetition for things they want to learn beyond the IXL material, and whether guides model using spaced repetition for their own learning. I really love the idea of using spaced repetition to demonstrate to kids that they can in fact learn things without forgetting them, but I don't know whether implementing it they way Alpha School does achieves that.
Anki specially is not used in the morning program, but it is used as the primary tool for the Quizbowl workshop in the afternoon at the GT school (for the older kids at GT, QB and Debate are the two highest priority workshops)
Ah, a local expert! (Thanks, Ed!) Just for anyone reading, spaced repetition IS used in the morning program (just not with Anki).
Doesn't the GT school use mathacademy for math? That math program uses spaced repetition.
I don't think there was a single mention in the Alpha School review of how the morning program ties into the workshops, which I would expect to be a foundational principle. Though I see the logistic challenges of connecting the two halves (mainly rooted in personalization) in the context of Alpha, I suspect that keeping them separate carries a very underestimated cost in terms of quality of engagement.
Perhaps it's a reasonable sacrifice (of the integration of projects into academic curriculum), but it deserves a discussion.
A meta comment about the Alpha Review: the author is the rare type who is willing to relocate for a school, and yet, the vast majority of the review focuses on the morning part of the school (how to achieve general standards), and not the afternoon part (how to become a person). The assessment of Alpha would have been stronger if there was at least equal focus on the workshops component, instead of occasional asides about cool projects here and there.
Also, it appears nobody wants to mention (or is aware of) Acton academy (also established in Austin). I can't imagine that it had no influence on Alpha...
Yeah, nobody has brought up Acton, have they?
For those new the the world of Austin-based-school-networks-that-hire-guides-to-have-kids-on-personalized-learning-screens-in-the-morning-but-tackle-more-complex-and-social-projects-in-the-afternoon... Acton Academy is the other! I got the chance to fly down there a few years ago and tour it. From what I can tell, it's very similar to AlphaSchool — minus the focus on speed (and the raw incentives) but plus an explicit model of franchising (and opportunities to customize it).
I'd be interested in hearing the experiences of anyone who's had experience with both, or who can help untangle the causation between the two.
Hey there Brandon, I had this video open in my tabs for a long time and finally watched today because I didn't feel up for Twitter.
tl;dr am parent of 2 Alpha students who has gone to work for them recently. I also had a child attending an Austin-area Acton academy for a while.
You'll be interested to know that at some point fairly long ago now, like 6-7 years?, Alpha was itself an Acton. Speaking informally/non-officially, Alpha appreciates the Acton model as an improvement over conventional schooling but finds it still to lack ultimate accountability/standards regarding learning i.e. core academics.
To my knowledge, Actons use off the shelf apps a la carte, basically none of which require mastery for progression or fully deploy the known principles of learning science. Hence, the value of Alpha's unified platform which modifies or replaces problematic apps so that we always know, down to the level of each school day, what apps-based work a student completed, whether they're on track according to their own projected learning trajectory, etc.
There is some emerging opinion about this family of Austin-born schools, Forbes named it "intentional education" not too long ago: https://archive.is/ToQJy
Happy to answer any other questions etc as you like, appreciate your work here.
>> "You'll be interested to know that at some point fairly long ago now, like 6-7 years?, Alpha was itself an Acton."
Ha! You've just given me a "Rosebud" moment! That makes sense of so much of what I've heard about Alpha. Insofar as Alpha takes off, it also will be vindication of Acton-founders Jeff and Laura Sandefer's libertarian vision of building a platform for new sorts of schools.
Pamela, thank you for filling in the gaps.
If you don't mind, I have a question.
Based on everything I've heard about Alpha (ACX, podcasts with founders, alpha student posts), there's a structural separation between the academic education in the morning and the experiential programming in the afternoon. Personally, I have a bias towards seeing the two parts integrated*. What is Alpha's outlook on such integration?
*Example of integration: if the afternoon project is running a digital marketing agency — the morning academics would be grounded in the mastery of skills, themes, history, etc. relevant to the project.
IMO it is fair to say that there is no particular integration between morning/core academics and afternoon/workshops beyond what is inherent to the endeavors, e.g. if you learned to count/add/subtract on your math apps then that will show up in e.g. financial literacy for the young grades like making change with money.
In my estimation, this is not a principled separation, it just happened that way, with them being semi-siloed. There probably *could* be more integration within this model, if enough people were convinced that it's a problem, but I have not really heard this complaint from within Alpha schools, just a few times from outside commentators.
There are some practical/logistical barriers to integration. The workshops rotate mostly on 6 week cycles (students attend Alpha on a non-standard calendar with fairly frequent week-long breaks between these short sessions). Most workshops are selected at the level level (a level is approximately 2 age grades combined), but students within that level are completing core academic work spanning 5+ conventional grade levels.
Moreover the workshops are not repeated on any fixed cycle, there are one-offs depending on guide interests, seasonality, etc. And, while we are working towards codifying the life skills standards for Alpha students, the actual substance of the workshops varies heavily across locations (GT students play chess, Waypoint the outdoorsy Alpha teachers students to build fires in the woods, etc).
Thus it would be pretty tricky to create synchronization between the apps work and the afternoon stuff. It would require significant top-down reconfiguring of the workshops and possibly also the app content and timing.
Thank you Pamela for the response. I agree with your take on practical/logistic barriers — in fact, I think you just scratch the surface. Perhaps Alpha's approach is the optimal one for a school.
Personally, I'm still in that top-down configuring place where "education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge" (Whitehead) is at the very top. And it's very hard for me to (philosophically) carve out academics as a separate class of learning.
Thank you again for such a thorough response. It really is super helpful.
I am not sure if you will have been notified of my comment to Brandon below re: Acton, in case you haven't - https://www.losttools.org/p/entering-the-great-acx-education/comment/154865873
Thank you Pamela. If you don't mind, I have a question about Alpha's approach.
Let's assume that we are both well-informed (and in general agreement) on the benefits, power, and promise of personalized/adaptive education.
In alpha's case — there seems to be a clear and rigid boundary between academic (morning) & experiential (afternoon). Whereas Acton seems to strive for an ideal of integrating the two.
I think that integrating the academic and experiential is critical, but recognize the challenge of bringing it to fruition, especially at scale or under constrained resources (i.e. not aristocratic tutoring).
Does Alpha share this ideal? Did Alpha decide to sacrifice it?
I would want to know more about their behind-the-scenes thinking about this (not so much the marketing talking points, which I am very much up to date on).
Hmmm... I'm not sure that I saw a particularly tight integration of morning & afternoon activities when I visited Acton. So I'd say that Alpha seems more in continuity, in this case.
I'm probably projecting onto Acton, and it's a mistake to ask my question about integration of academics and projects at Alpha in the context of a contrast with Acton. I'll recast my question and post it to the thread linked in Pamela's comment.
Long story but one of my children (happily) attended an Acton for a while, I agree with Brandon's general impression of lack of "particularly tight integration of morning & afternoon activities."
It could just be that Acton is sort of more values-forward overall that is giving that impression, with their focus on the Hero's Journey and character traits, an embedded deliberative democratic ideal (e.g. classes do restorative type discipline, create their own rules, etc).
As a parent, I see Alpha as being more socioculturally sanitized (for better or worse) with the explicit values more in the neutral direction of "grit" than, say, "courage." And the Alpha "life skills" curriculum does not have any flavor of classical education really .
(Personally, I know that it's not truly possible to sanitize or make neutral a school's stated or demonstrated values, and that the demonstrated Alpha values are probably essentially neoliberal - I use this non-perjoratively but understand the connotation. Nonetheless an institution may wish to give this impression for various philosophical and practical reasons).
Hey Brandon and Alessandro. I'm going to be in Austin in two weeks. I'm going to try and visit Alpha school. Do you have any specific questions you'd like me to ask them?
I have thoughts...
1) Afternoon School - Yes. Sign my kids up! Heck, can I join?
2) Incentives - This is exactly what my point was the other day regarding your conversation with the other educator! Kids need to be on board, but incentives are not the answer. Egan is the only one that makes any sense to me. Do I use incentives with my own kids? Yes, for short term things like potty training or practicing reading enough to overcome the hurdles of becoming a reader. My kids would not be allowed to attend a school that bribed them to learn for years on end. I would rather they just not learn.
3) Online programs - There are so many. My kids have briefly done a number of them including IXL. I hate them. My kids find being on the computer a novelty since they don't get a ton of screen time, so I let them use these program once in a while when they're free to us. If they ever say no thanks, I'm like, thank God. There are, however, two notable exceptions that I've discovered so far:
Smartick: That math program is really good. They limit kids to like 15 minutes of math a day, and they are very good at targeting what they need to work on in a way that builds conceptual understanding not rote memorization. I have 4 kids though, so even if they wanted to do it full time, it's cost prohibitive. I've signed my kids up over a couple of summers in the past (not this year). They do it for 2 months and enjoy it, mainly due to the built in incentives, but by the time summer ends, they want to quit at that point anyway. The incentives become less incentivizing over time.
Miacademy: I heard about this from a friend and my younger kids did it this year for a couple months. I don't hate it. From what I saw, the videos are colorful and engaging, they definitely didn't dumb down the content, and the kids could finish a day's worth of work in 2 hours for ALL subjects (like real 2 hours, not 8:30 to noon like Alpha School). They incentivize like crazy and it's all built into the program. However, my kids still opted to quit after like 6 weeks once the shiny wore off. This was perfectly fine with me. I would rather them be reading, playing outside, building with legos, drawing, or doing pretty much anything else than be learning academic skills for the sole purpose of digital rewards. If my choice were between 2 hours of Miacademy or 7 hours of public school though, I'd go with Miacademy. I don't know if they have data, but I bet it's at least as effective.
4) Efficiency - Efficiency in acquiring necessary knowledge so that my kids have time to enjoy life is what I'm all about. I made my kids' math, because I thought it was important but didn't want to waste their time. Personally, though, I'm not that impressed with a 2x in 2 hours claim. As long as you can get kids to enjoy reading (which I admit can be challenging - hence my use of incentives), then I feel like 10 hours of "academic instruction" per week feels excessive. And really, it's more like 8:30 am to at least noon everyday including breaks, so that's at least 17.5 hours per week in which kids are not using their imagination or being creative. That's not efficient as far as I'm concerned.
5) Standards - I mean, the whole reason why Alpha Schools are impressive is that they are able to get good standardized test scores. It sounds like you both agree that "it is good to have this knowledge." If you mean by that that children SHOULD have this knowledge, then I don't agree. My only real goal as a home educator is to not waste my kids' time. I believe in learning on demand when it comes to real life, so what my kids learn in their childhood is irrelevant as long as the stay creative, flexible thinkers and learn how to learn. I DO want my kids to have academic knowledge, but only because I personally believe it is inherently worth learning. In that sense, it is good. I agree with Egan though that it is useless knowledge. That's a great quote. 😂 I've never felt the need to test my kids on the Roman Empire for example, even though I'm eager for them to learn about it, because, who cares what they remember? I do appreciate Alpha School's transparency and their research focused mind-set, but honestly, I care very little about Alpha's test scores. I care more about what kids have lost by spending all that time on a computer, which is not being measured and is harder to quantify.
> If my choice were between 2 hours of Miacademy or 7 hours of public school though, I'd go with Miacademy.
Wouldn't this imply you believe Alpha School, incentives and all, is still better than public school?
Yes, though I'm having a really hard time thinking of any situation in which I would pick public school, so that's not saying much. 😂 I take that back. I would choose public school over a computer-based program that took as many hours as public school regardless of how quickly they were making "progress." If Alpha school had them on the computer for 4 or 5+ hours a day, then I would probably be tempted to go with public school. Like I said, though, the afternoon program really does sound great, so I would choose Alpha School over public school if those were my only two options. Thank goodness they are not.
The only good way to find my own comments on Alexander’s substack is to do a search on the current page for my user name.