The Worst Argument For Alpha School (So Far)

Well, at least the photo accompanying a Mary Randolph Scientific American story about Alpha School captures how I feel upon coming across one more puff piece about Alpha School.

I feel you, kid.

Alpha School, if you've somehow missed the noise, is a private school chain created by Texas businesswoman Mackenzie Price, her husband, and a real rich guy. It leans on the idea that a child's basic core education can be fully conveyed by a computer program in about two hours a day: Alpha School is directly connected to 2 Hour Learning, because like many private school grifts, the company is one of many companies, wheels within wheels, all handing money to each other, and through each other ultimately to the owners. 

Alpha School is expensive-- as pricey as an ivy league prep school, but the buzz has been phenomenal and ongoing. If Price could do education one quarter as well as she does PR, the school might actually have something to offer.

The Scientific American piece is notable for some of the worst arguments I've seen made for Alpha School, by the guy currently employed as the "senior learning scientist" for Alpha-- Carl Hendrick, who really ought to know better. 

Carl Hendrick is an internationally recognized science of learning and instructional design expert. I'm about to favorably review a book he co-wrote. I have on occasion forwarded some of his substack offerings. People I respect, respect him. 

And yet, the Carl Hendrick in this piece is really out in the weeds.

First, he compares AI in education to Waymo on the road. See, the autonomous car has to learn to accommodate wobbly cyclists and kids running into the street and non-straight roads-- all the things that Waymo, with its limited training for very specific urban areas, still has trouble doing. Sometimes big trouble. But Hendrick predicts that in "five or ten years" AI will be trained on "learning and all of kids' misconceptions and problems."

Thus waving away one of the problems with AI instruction-- the AI can't analyze where the student has gone wrong, what the glitch in their thinking or process might be. Is Hendrick suggesting that AI can programmed with a menu of every possible student misconception and then programmed with a response to it. Because that seems... unlikely. What he's proposing is that the program need not understand why the student is doing what they're doing, just like Waymo doesn't need to know why the bicyclist is wobbling. It's a strictly behavioral approach-- we need the kid to spit out the correct response. 

Randolph slips past some issues. "When used by a teacher, adaptive learning models like Alpha School’s have shown promise in improving student performance and understanding." That sentence is doing so much heavy lifting. Used by a teacher? Models like Alpha School's? Promise? And she cites some objections from some academics. Talking to Kelly Miller, the Harvard professor who has worked in this area. Miller likes adaptive learning, calls it "the future of education." But:

But Miller uses AI and recorded lectures to cover basic material so that her in-person time with students can be spent on more complex work. If there’s no teacher-student relationship—like at Alpha School, where adults supervising students generally aren’t trained educators—“what’s the point?” she says.

Then it's all downhill from there.

Hendrick admits that Alpha School's model isn't perfect, "[b]ut he argues that most kids aren’t getting a good teacher or instruction grounded in learning science in a classroom anyway." So... their human teacher is probably crappy, so why not give them a crappy AI program instead? Hendrick argues that people would be shocked at the varying degrees of quality within schools. In other words, AI "educators" may be bad, but humans are worse-- or at least very inconsistent.

That’s Hendrick’s biggest argument for Alpha School’s model as a solution: “You can’t scale good teaching,” he says. Software, Hendrick argues, can be updated across classrooms at once as new curriculum and instructional research emerges and can give feedback far faster than a teacher grading assignments one by one.

Emphasis mine. Added while picking my jaw off the floor. You can't scale good teaching-- so let's scale mediocre-at-best teaching? And when it comes to feedback for students, which is more important-- being fast or being good? "I got feedback on my essay instantly. It's kind of dumb and useless and even wrong, but at least I got it back quickly."

Randolph nods briefly to the 404 Media report that found all manner of problems with Alpha School. It's not the first negative coverage (here's a Wired piece about unhappy Alpha parents in 2025). 

Randolph also allows one quote that questions the selection bias involved (families that fork over that kind of money for private school tend to be highly motivated). 

She also notes that the model will be tested in some public schools, which may show if the 2 Hour AI model works with a "broader" assortment of students, but we already have some data about that. But as this piece from The Conversation points out, much of the "data" we supposedly have is bunk. And as Dan Meyer showed, 2 Hour Learning has already been tested on general population students-- and it failed hard. 

The irony here is that we are not talking about a revolutionary new technology-- the idea of a teaching machine that can guide students to cough up proper responses is over a century old. Read Audrey Watters Teaching Machines. Alpha School is parked firmly within a forest of red flags, and guys who are learning experts ought to be able to see them all waving. 

TN: Hiding Voucher Failure

Tennessee launched a taxpayer-funded school voucher program in 2019, with a proposal that barely squeaked through the House and narrowly passed the Senate. The idea was, as usual, that it would rescue students from ailing schools, and that voucher-receiving schools would receive autonomy in exchange for accountability. 

Well, forget all that.

This year's result for the state's Big Standardized Test (TCAP) are in and--whopoopsies!-- ESA voucher students failed hard, with their success percentage not even half of what the public schools scored. Just 17% of ESA students met or exceeded proficiency marks in math, and only 24% managed to meet or exceed proficiency for English. (It was 40% and 42% for public school students). In fact, the gap between public and private schools has been widening (as reported by Vivian Jones for the Knoxville News Sentinel).

So of course the legislature moved to find policy levers that could push private schools to do a better job with taxpayer money. Ha! Just kidding. Instead, Tennessee will no longer require voucher students to take the state test. Because what could be a quicker and easier way to eliminate those unfortunate signs of failure? Voucher students will still take the national standard test of their choice (look for that unimpressive-but-unwoke Classical Learning Test to pick up some market share). 

As voucher expert Josh Cowen pointed out to Jones:

“When they stop admin­is­ter­ing the state exam, then the lobby groups and the voucher sup­port­ers can just yell about how great it is for every­one and no one calls them out on it any­more,” Cowen said.

“If these res­ults showed good things, they’d be the first out there in the press con­fer­ence yelling ‘score­board!’ ” Cowen said. “The reason they aren’t test­ing is because they don’t want to see the answer.”

To be clear, the TCAP and other state BS Tests are lousy measures of school success. Those voucher-receiving schools might have some virtues not revealed by TCAP (ditto the public schools of Tennessee).

But this is the game reformsters wanted to play. They promised a future in which parents navigated an open free marketplace rich with information designed to inform the choices of the education "consumers," not a marketplace in which the preferred vendors-- the private ones-- were freed of any measures that might make them look bad. 

I respect folks who are pro-choice on principle, who believe that parents should have a choice whether that choice provides a better result or not. I disagree with them, but I appreciate their principled consistency.

But this kind of thing is just an attempt to give private schools an edge in the marketplace, one more sign that the goal here is not choice for parents, but public tax dollars for private (religious) schools. If Tennessee wants to play the BS Test game, let everyone play it equally. But if legislators just want to play a fixed game so that private (religious) schools can profit from public taxpayer dollars, go ahead and say that part out loud--and let the voters show if they support it. 

Cancelling the TCAP for the private schools that are failing it just reveals that the whole program is a grift. 

ICYMI: Bad Week Edition (8/30)

Just as we were absorbing the loss of Dolly Parton and Tim Curry, the videos started to roll in from Nepal. I confess to watching them over and over as my brain tries to wrap around the sheer scale and horror that swept down upon those people so quickly. If it were rendered as a disaster movie, it would be dismissed as too unbelievable. The people who lost their lives, and the thousands upon thousands who escaped with their lives but lost everything else. The whole thing is horrific.

Meanwhile, school starts in my region this coming week, and there's plenty to read about in the education world. Here's the list.

28 Bills, Ten Commandments and 1 Source: A Christian Right ‘Bill Mill’

This is actually an old article from last year, by Mark Keierleber at The 74 (where their policies are bad but sometimes the journalism is good). At a moment when Ten Commandments laws are facing legal challenge, it's good to remember where they came from in the first place.

Own the Room

Great back to school piece for teachers from Andrew Ordover, reminding us how much teaching is performance-- particularly stand up comedy.

Fewer Teachers, Even Fewer Students: See What’s Happening in 9,500 Districts

I respect Chad Aldeman's ability to crunch numbers, even as I usually disagree what he concludes from them. This article collects a bunch of statistics to create a picture of student population trends compared to teaching staff trends. But the real reason to check this out is an interactive map that shows the trends for every single school district in the country. 

Why Does America Disrespect Our Teachers?

Andy Spears asks the question after looking at teacher pay trends for the last thirty years.

We already returned education to the states once. It was a catastrophic failure.

Jed Bookout at the Frazzled About Education site provides a history lesson in abolishing the Department of Education. It has been done before; it did not end well.

AI Bogus Ed Tech Scheme

Thomas Ultican looks at some of the warnings about AI in the ed tech world and he is not encouraged.

Moral Instruction Will Not Stop Cheating

At Inside Higher Ed, John Warner explains that "The way to stop cheating is to worry less about cheating and more about learning."

Why parents love a school with bogus numbers

That would be Alpha School. Kelsey Piper at The Argument points out that Alpha School's much-touted numbers are so thoroughly massaged as to be useless. Well, except for marketing purposes.

I Heart Mom Populism

Jennifer Berkshire with an important political story. Corporate Dems like Arnie Duncan and DFER insist that Dems have to get behind old school ed reform, but that's not actually winning elections. What is? Support for public education.

Maybe I’m Not A Unicorn

Sue Kingery Woltanski, an oft-elected Democratic school board member in Florida, provides her own example of what Berkshire is talking about. 

Band Kids. They’re the Best.

Retired music teacher Nancy Flanagan should know. So many go on to do great stuff.

Students should only use AI for things they already know how to do well.

Daniel Willingham makes the argument for at least some certain guardrails on AI. If you don't know what you're doing, how will you know what its doing?

When ‘Parental Rights’ Means Letting a Child Die

Bruce Lesley looks at the edges of parental rights law that deny children the right to life-saving health care.

The 50 Percent Problem

Benjamin Riley looks at that Chinese study of the effects of AI use on student learning (spoiler alert: it's not pretty). Some actual evidence to support what you already suspected was true.

Ohio Legislators Should Commit Over ½ Billion in Unspent Revenue to Serving Ohio’s Most Vulnerable Public School Students

Jan Resseger suggests that the Ohio legislature could actually spend some of its extra money on fixing their school funding crisis. Do not hold your breath.

Can AI replace traditional language learning? A new study says not yet

A look at some slightly wonky research about using AI to learn collocations.

A Classroom of Contradictions

Adrian Neibauer's classroom is built on the idea that maybe his favored pedagogical paradigm isn't right for every student.

Did anyone notice that more than 1/3 of Ohio Charter Schools are on the state’s lowest performing schools list????

Stephen Dyer would like to point out that Ohio charter schools are not exactly revolutionizing education.

The Light She Left Behind

TC Weber has some thoughts about Dolly and what she contributed to Tennessee.

Loving Dolly Was Easy. Understanding Her Was Hard.

Plenty of good pieces about Dolly this week, but this New York Times piece by Tressie McMillan Cottom belongs high on the list (gift link).

At Forbes.com, I covered the Economic Policy Institute report on the teacher pay penalty.

 Been listening to this a lot lately. She always brings it for live performances.

Asking SCOTUS To Soak Taxpayers For Private Special Ed

A couple of families in Massachusetts-- and fourteen anti-public ed states-- would like to have it both ways, and having lost their bid in lower courts, they would like the Supreme Court to back their play.

How did we get here?

Massachusetts does require public school systems to provide special education services for students with special needs, which is a heck of a gift to private schools to begin with. But because the state forbids the use of public funds for private religious schools, the rule comes with a requirement that the service be provided at the public school or at a neutral location. 

The plaintiffs are characterizing this requirement creates an undue burden. Students, they claim, lose instructional time, must miss instructional time during the day, and experience stigma for having to leave class (all of which would still be true if the services were provided at the private school). 

But the backers of the case also argue that this burden makes the rule "coercive." In the states' amicus brief, this line appears:

For opponents of school choice, that is the point—to leverage taxpayer dollars to coerce families into public schools by making private education the only setting in which benefits are forfeited,

There is, of course, a solution for this-- the private schools could hire their own special education teachers and provide the services themselves. But that would cost them money, so why not get the taxpayers to foot the bill instead. 

The irony of the states that have signed the letter of support is rich, because in many states, parents must waive their rights to any special education requirements in order to attend a private school. How they complain about rules that make "private education the only setting in which benefits are forfeited," is a mystery, because that is exactly what they allow at home.

A win for the plaintiffs would hit taxpayers not only with the bill for providing the services, but for whatever means are required to transport special ed teachers hither and yon to provide services. The plaintiffs, whose children have disabilities and attend Jewish day schools, find taking their children to get services "burdensome"; they would prefer that taxpayers and the public system bear that burden.

The case, Hellman v. Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, was decided back in March in the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that this rule does not "ban or penalize private schooling or deprive meaningful access to it." Further, it rationally fits with "the legitimate state interest of providing special education services while complying with the Massachusetts Constitution’s prohibition on aiding private schools." The court also rejected Equal Protection and Privileges or Immunities claims.

Lead attorney for the plaintiffs is David Hodges, the "educational choice attorney" at the Institute for Justice. The Institute is yet another libertarian legal shop, founded with Koch brothers money in 1991. They've been in front of the Supremes for several landmark education cases, notably Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue and Carson v. Makin, both of which helped promote the notion that religious folks can't freely exercise their religion unless taxpayers help finance them. 

If SCOTUS agrees to hear this and decides for the plaintiffs (both of which are not the far-fetched possibilities, I wish they were), the result would create some real challenges for a field that already suffers from trouble filling positions. How many extra staff would a district have to hire to cover the "traveling" workload, and how many people would want that job? Such decision would amount to a very expensive unfunded mandate from the court. One wonders what the court would do when a district had to throw up its hands and declare, "We cannot fulfill this requirement because the number of qualified personnel we need are not available to us." 

GA: Suing For More Religious Entitlement

In Georgia, a lawsuit has been filed that will require the state to admit its voucher program was founded on a fiction and to provide another entitlement to religious schools.

Georgia had some trouble passing a voucher law because rural GOP members correctly concluded that a taxpayer-funded voucher program would drain resources from the schools serving their constituents. Georgia privatizers finally got their bill in 2024, and from the very beginning, it was clearly not the law that was sold.

One piece was a bit of linguistic sleight of hand. While folks had talked about the bill's aim to rescue students from failing schools, the bill actually said that taxpayer-funded vouchers are available to any students who live in the attendance area of a failing school. In other words, if you were a high school student in the attendance area for a failing elementary school, you were entitled to a voucher. When this was revealed, some outlets wrote about this as if someone had "changed" something. Nope. The law said what it had always said; supporters just let the conversation continue as if the bill said something different. See folks? Reading is important. In this case, not reading led to a program the cost of which blew up far beyond predictions.

The new lawsuit goes after another piece of the law. The law says vouchers are only available for students who have previously attended public schools in a failing attendance area. But three Catholic families say that this requirement violates their religious freedom and is "coercive." They should be entitled to have their religious education paid for without any such attendance requirements.

In other words, the taxpayer funded voucher program is not supposed to rescue students from failing schools. It's supposed to require public taxpayer funds to support private religious schools.

As quoted by Sydney Stallworth at WRDW, Jamie Mann, founder of New Horizons New Directions Prep Academy said “I believe parents should decide how their child is educated." Mann left off the part that adds "And all the taxpayers should pay for it, no matter what."

Lead attorney is Nathan Loyd, of the Thomas More Society, one more right-wing Roman Catholic activist law firm funded by Donors Trust, the dark money billionaire laundering operation. They are also running a New Jersey lawsuit for Moms for Liberty against a school district accused of allowing school staff to conceal a student gender transition from parents (because parents have rights and students have none). They have been involved in litigation against the ACA's contraception requirement, helped defend clerks who opposed same-sex marriage, and even went after no-fault divorce law.  As a bonus, also active in supporting the January 6 insurrection. (Thomas More was himself a Catholic martyr and the guy who wrote Utopia) I cannot fault them for going plaintiff shopping to find some good Catholics to bring this lawsuit, because a huge number of important lawsuits are brought because some lawyers went plaintiff shopping for a face to slap on their cause. Not a great way to run a legal system, but that's a complaint for another day.

Extending taxpayer-funded vouchers is a way to make the program even more expensive. When you give taxpayer-funded vouchers to students who were never in public school, you are adding entirely new costs onto your state education expenditure. The money is not following the child because no money had ever followed that child into the public school in the first place.

But if your intent is simply to create a system where religious schools (well, you know, the ones that follow the correct religion) are entitled to taxpayer subsidies, then this lawsuit makes perfect sense. 

Certainly now is the time. The Supremes have made it clear that they are very open to the legal theory that religious folks can only fully exercise religious freedom if A) they get a taxpayer subsidy and B) they get to discriminate against whoever they wish to discriminate against. So I'll pay attention to this lawsuit, but I don't have any illusions about how it will shake out. 

Your Back To School Professional Development Menu From Hell

Welcome back, teachers, to another productive year. As you know, we here at the West Hell School District like to pack these pre-student days with lots of professional development because, here in the administrative offices, we believe deeply in looking like we're getting something done, and for these few days, the only people we can do things to are the professional staff. Here are some of the selections for the upcoming PD sessions.

Welcome Icebreakers

Some of you may think it's silly to play games to help you get acquainted with people you have worked with for years, but the real purpose here is to get you reacquainted with the feeling of being treated like a child instead of a grown-ass adult. 

New Procedures Overview

We have taken those internal procedures that you barely got used to last year and changed them again. You'll need to throw out the forms piled up in your desk and/or uninstall the software on your computer to make room for the new procedural materials. This is sure to be a labor-and-time saving new procedure, by which we mean it will save us time and labor in the office by shifting the time and labor to you. Let all that excitement about teaching students suffocate under the load of soul-crushing administrative minutia. 

New Software Platform Introduction

We have adopted a new software platform for use in the district because the software we promised you we would use forever just finished its free trial period over the summer. We have not tested this new software yet, so if you run into any problems, just forward a note to the office and we'll pass that along to the company and I'm sure we'll hear back from them some time. Please do not question the usefulness of ethical concerns that come with our tech overlords; in particular, don't try to ask about the ethical or educational issues involved in the AI we're forcing into your classroom. We have heard that it is inevitable and must be accepted. Besides, it's totally free.

Terrifying Legal Stuff

A lawyer will be in to tell you some terrifying stories of teachers who did seemingly ordinary things and ended up facing billions of dollars in fines and decades in a gulag somewhere. Just try not to touch students, hand students anything, or make direct eye contact with them and you'll probably be okay.

New Stupid Social Media Tricks

A law enforcement officer will be in to scare you with tales of the newest social media trends and how to spot trouble with them in your classroom. This would be scarier except that all of these trends ended weeks ago to be replaced with new ones.

Textbook Program Training

A publisher's rep will be in to tell you how to do your job, based on the two years they spent in the classroom before giving up because they couldn't take it any more and wanted to do something cushier like pimping for a publisher. The rep will refuse to answer any questions about how to adapt the program to your classroom, and will instead offer useful advice about how she would use it if she were a teacher, and how you can use a simple 90 minutes from your thirty minute planning period to prepare materials. 

Data Session

Teachers will hunch over computer screens and try to find something useful buried in the piles of test scores from the state. There will be charts and graphs, and lots of forms to fill in with numbers and stuff, but no answers to questions like "Exactly what was this question on the test that most students got wrong?" If we just keep finding new ways to process the weighing of the pig, we are sure it will get bigger. 

Some Damned Useless Thing

We needed to block out the data time for everyone who teaches reading or math, so here's some placeholder for everyone else, because we didn't have time to find something useful for you.

Discipline

Administration wants teachers to know that they have been heard on the issues of student discipline and teacher morale, and they plan to do implement an assortment of new acronyms and programs this year that continue to put all the responsibility on the classroom teacher. Administration wants you to know that you have their full support, as in they fully support the idea of you handling this stuff yourself and not asking them to do something useful. 

Morale

Administration has heard that some of you are unhappy, and administration would like you to just shut up about it. Also, because one teacher made a procedural error last year, the full staff will now be berated like disobedient children. Thanks a lot, Brenda.

At Least One Hour of Cognitive Dissonance

No day of PD is complete without a self-contradictory. A session about how you shouldn't just use direct instruction, delivered entirely through direct instruction. A session about questioning strategies that uses none of those strategies. "Don't just read off the Power Point slide," reads the presenter off the Power Point slide.

Cavalcade of Cliches

Do you remember your why? Have you got your grit and rigor packed? Can you focus on all this inspirational language, or are you just wishing you could get some work done in your classroom? Sometimes these really do stir the soul a bit, until some admin pops up at the end to scold everyone about copier use and getting your lunch lists in on time.

Classroom Prep Time

Teachers are invited to finish preparing their rooms for the students any time after 3:30. 

Suing To Eliminate All Public School

This lawsuit popped up on my radar a few days ago and I let it sit, thinking foolishly that maybe I was reading too much into it. But a Washington Post op-ed from Corey DeAngelis confirmed the worst-- privatizers are ready to try to eliminate public schools entirely. 

The New Civil Liberties Alliance has filed a lawsuit arguing that "Nebraska’s Educational Scheme Violates Parents’ Free Speech."  And by "scheme" they mean "public education system." Here's their argument for why public education is a violation of the First Amendment. 

Education is speech. The curriculum taught, the books assigned, and the values reinforced inside (and outside) of the classroom all convey a message. The Constitution has long recognized that parents—not the government—hold the paramount right to direct that message for their own children.

That's part of the argument. The rest is familiar as well.

Parents also have a legal duty to provide or arrange for educational speech.

In other words, I should not have to pay for a system that educates Other Peoples' Children. Their children are their problem.  

Nor is the suit merely about eliminating the public system. 

Nebraska’s scheme flips free speech on its head, mandating educational speech then penalizing viewpoints other than the government’s: parents who wish to exercise their right, whether by homeschooling or by choosing a private school, must forgo tens of thousands of dollars of educational benefits available to other families who acquiesce to the government’s viewpoints.

In other words, I should not have to pay for Other Peoples' Children to get an education, but taxpayers should absolutely help me subsidize the education of my own children.

I didn't read the DeAngelis op-ed because the presence of his op-ed in the Washington Post is precisely why I don't have a subscription to the Post any more. But I'm sure it's plenty incendiary and rage-baity. The very idea that public education violates the First Amendment is so destructive and counter-intelligent, but that appears to be where they want to go. The whole system is unconstitutional. 

Update: Okay, someone shared it with me. He used his big boy voice for the Post, but it's still an astonishing reach. "Universal school choice resolves the constitutional problem while preserving public support for education," he writes. Tear down public schools, end the promise to all students, and open up the unregulated free market. In many ways, I suppose this whole business is just the quiet part out loud-- this has always been the goal for some of these folks all the way back to Milton Friedman. 

The New Civil Liberties Alliance is one more dark money group from the usual gang of reactionary billionaires like Charles Koch and Leonard Leo. They are not bush league-- they helped take Chevron to court.

The libertarian Reason magazine is taking this seriously, which is not surprising. NCLA says that "Plaintiffs do not seek to end, defund, or influence public schools," and that's pretty clearly bullshit. What other effect can we expect from ruling the entire system unconstitutional? Maybe the idea is simple extortion-- give us a pile of money or we'll tear down your schools-- but the effect would be the same. Who knows how Nebraska's court will jump on this, and there's a whole counter-argument to be made that education (as folks on the right love to point out) is no business of the federal government; public education is a feature of state constitutions.

So it's easy to look at this suit and argue that it will likely fail. That's not really the point; folks on the far right have always been willing to play a long game and make legal and policy moves that slowly inch the Overton window over and move into courts until, voila! We get Dobbs.

So I'm watching this as the next front of the ongoing attack on public schools, the new argument that will be repeated ad nauseum. Pay attention, folks.