There's a whole wing of the edu-wonk world pre-occupied with "high-impact tutoring," whatever that is presumed to be. The field serves as a successor to the notion of "accelerated learning," the idea that learning gaps could be closed by teaching the students who were behind by teaching them more, faster, than the other students-- an idea that stunk for a variety of reasons.
What all of these ideas have in common is that they are super-appealing to techbros anxious to sell some version of AI tutoring. Lauraine Langreo over at EdWeek took a look at some studies about the various ways AI can be deployed for tutoring, and she opens with what has been the guiding principle for all of these operations.
"Has been heralded" is doing a lot of work here, but the idea that it takes a lot of humans spending a lot of time (and wanting to be paid for it) is spot on. That crucial fact about tutoring smells a lot like money to AI companies. "However," as she notes, "research on the effectiveness of AI tutoring models is limited and still emerging."
Well, that's kind. Sal Khan has taken a good hard look at his own products and discovered that-- surprise--when you plunk a young human in front of a screen and say, "Go ahead and use this program to teach yourself math," by far the most common response is "I wonder if I can get regular Youtube on this thing." Students simply don't use it.
SCALE, part of Stanford's Accelerator for Learning (yes, that again), has a brief out that looks at the ways AI can be used, and well...tutoring by a human has a "robust evidence base." After that, every evidence base is "emergent," a research term that means roughly "there is no actual evidence of this in sight, but we kind of smell the possible concept of a piece of the beginning of a sprig of evidence just about to appear, but it's not here yet."
SCALE likes a human tutor with AI supporting the tutor behind the scenes, which they call "potentially as effective, or more effective" as an actual unaided human. This would, of course, depend on the human. But if Human plus AI gets you the same results as Human alone, that suggests at the very least that the extra cost of AI is a waste of money. If the problem your leaders are trying to solve is "How do we incorporate AI into our program," maybe this looks not so bad, but if the problem you're trying to solve is "How do we best tutor these young humans," then adding AI seems like a non-starter (even before we start considering, as SCALE does not, the various negatives associated with AI.
"AI tutoring with human support," which has been the model of computer-powered schools, from Summit to Altschool to Alpha School-- the emergent evident here suggests that implementation matters, because it's only a shade removed from AI-only tutoring, which SCALE declares has "unknown effectiveness." Sad news for everyone who thought they could just swap out an actual human tutor for some AI program and get "high impact" results.
Look, we know the most effective means of tutoring-- one teacher, one or two young humans, repeated a few times a week. It's not a mystery. But there are two longstanding responses to this. One is the eternal education response from leaders and taxpayers: "That sounds nice and I can see it would make education better, but I don't want to pay for it." The other is corporations looking at it and thinking, "I bet we could make money pretending to fix this problem."
But if you want to get some actual tutoring done, you are going to have to hire a knowledgeable human being to do it, not a bot.
At last we are seeing some of the press that Alpha School actually deserves. Lexi Churchill, in a joint Texas Tribune and ProPublica piece, shines a spotlight on the Texas emperor's wardrobe. You should absolutely read the article, but I want to underline and expand on a couple of points.
First, the switcheroo. As it has in every other state (except, of course, Arizona), Alpha failed to get approval for its attempted charter school launch in Texas. That's Texas, where the state board of education crew is not known for its rigorous standards. This is not a surprise; Alpha School's educational bona fides are still limited to puffed up unproven baloney. As Churchill notes, several journalists have now tried to verify Alpha's claims of magical success with just two hours of screen time a day, and so far, evidence has proven elusive.
But to get into the Texas voucher program as a vendor, a school just needs approval from the state comptroller's office. For that approval, a school need only show that it operates in Texas, that it’s accredited by an approved organization, that it’s been in operation at least two years and that it administers annual standardized tests. Alignment with state education standards? Proven student success? Evidence-based program administered by qualified personnel? None of that is needed.
It's worth remembering that Alpha is by no means the only school playing this game of switching back and forth between charter and voucher status based on whichever category will let them keep the money flowing in with the least possible accountability. If your state has both charter schools and vouchers, I guarantee that there are schools picking whichever designation will keep their owners happiest.
And if you wonder what exactly is the aim of Alpha school and the husband and wife team of MacKenzie and Andrew Price, there's this reminder.
At least two state education boards also took issue with Alpha’s plan to keep Price and her husband on the charter’s oversight board while the school simultaneously paid their companies, which provide services like the two-hour learning platform. The Prices acknowledged the conflict of interest and repeatedly promised to correct it.
There's Unbound Academy, which is the charter arm of Alpha School itself. Both tout the 2 Hour Learning program, which is set up as separate business. The proposal in the PA Unbound application said “In support of its operations, Unbound Academy will collaborate with 2hr Learning, Inc. to deliver its adaptive learning platform, while Trilogy Enterprises will manage financial services, and Crossover Markets, Inc. will assist with recruiting qualified virtual educators."
Trilogy Software is owned by Joe Liemandt, the billionaire techbro who backed all of this and is currently the principal of Alpha School; Andrew Price is the CFO. Crossover (an internet employment hub currently advertising a job as Director of Academics fore 2 Hour Learning at $400K) is supported by ESW, Joe Liemandt's personal investment company; their main client is Trilogy. Crossover has a proprietary tool called WorkSmart, which surveils employee work on their computer and was promised for the PA Unbound school. Crossover Markets and 2 Hour Learning share the same Austin address. It appears that Andrew Price was also linked to Crossover, but I find no clear current evidence.
The PA application also noted that the general and administrative service provider would be YYYYY.LLC, a company whose director, president, and principal are Andrew Price.
So Alpha School comes with a whole big web of companies that it "hires" to run the various aspects of the operation, and which in turn funnel all of that money back to the Prices. As Dan Meyer noted regarding that Arizona Unbound charter, "Ultimately, MacKenzie Price, Unbound Academy’s board president, will need to decide whether MacKenzie Price, founder of 2 Hour Learning, Inc, has set a fair price for those curriculum and resource materials. Arizona taxpayers await her decision."
Also worth noting-- Alpha School has ridden a wave of buzz mostly generate by MacKenzie Price's willingness to plug her operation to any media outlet that was willing to be impressed. And yet, according to Churchill
None of the Alpha leaders named in this story, nor the company’s press office, agreed to interviews, nor did they answer most of the newsrooms’ questions, including about their test scores. An Alpha spokesperson provided an emailed response only to questions about previous reporting by other news outlets.
So, feeling a little shy suddenly.
But hey-- so much synergy. Synergy between Alpha's lazy charter school and Texas's lazy voucher rules. Synergy within the web of money-scrubbing corporations. Who cares about weaving a tangled web if it's a profitable one.
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 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.
McMahon's particular brand of passionless functionary was on display Sunday morning for a dozen minutes with Dana Bash. The interview kicked around a few topics, and featured one moment that highlight's McMahon's lack of understanding. I've watched it so you don't have to: here are the topics of the day.
The cost of going back to school. Bash opened with the cost of supplying a child for school. $175 for school supplies! "Packing a school lunch is up more than 10%," said Bash. "What do you say to parents" struggling with the costs and economic strains?
Good soldier and millionaire McMahon sticks with the party line of denial. There may be some price "upticks," but "the general economy is strong" and doing so well. Also, parents have a lot to look forward to because the administration has done work "to make sure that parents are more in charge of the education that is going on in the states" etc etc. So McMahon offers parents denial followed by changing the subject. Which leads directly to the department's hot new talking point--
Sex stuff. Expect to hear repeats of the statistic that one in ten students will have been sexually molested in school. McMahon manages to suggest that faculty are the main problem here and the administration is really working on that. She singles out California as place that shuffles teachers. Bash interrupts to ask if McMahon just pulled that stat out of her butt and McMahon says no the department did a study, based on some data-- "the general education statistics that were afforded to us." It should be pointed out that the California issue is a real thing, as reported by KQED and ProPublica, and the whole subject deserves attention (though this administration may not be the folks to do it). She says they have "really been cracking down on that as well" though how, exactly, is unclear. But it's two minutes into the interview and you already forgot that this started with a question about the high cost of sending a kid to school.
But God bless her, Bash did not forget and responded that sure some economic indicators are better "but the affordability crisis is real." McMahon offers a kind of half nod which could be a grudging acknowledgement of the point or a simple "Well, played, Dana."
AI in the classroom. Bash notes that McMahon issued guidance saying schools should evaluate AI tools based on evidence of effectiveness and learning outcomes. But, notes Bash, the tools haven't been around long enough for any such evidence to have been collected, yet Google and OpenAI are already shoving tools toward students. "Are you concerned that students are effectively becoming sort of guinea pigs for chatbots?"
McMahon (who has learned the difference between AI and A1) goes with the talking point that says we should watch out for screen time but make our caution based on good screens and bad screens. This launches her tale of going to Austin to see Alpha School in action. She was, of course, impressed.
The first couple of hours every day, students really have on headphones, they're in front of their computers, they're getting their subjects fed to them
Yup, that's how education works-- you just pour the knowledge into the brains of young humans and voila!! Instant smartitude. McMahon talks about "teachers" at Alpha School monitoring what's going on, but Alpha School doesn't use actual certified teachers for the job of "coach." McMahon says the beauty of the 2Hour Learning model is that "a student almost has a one-on-one tutor." They do not. AI is not a tutor for so very many reasons, not the least of which is that the AI cannot analyze where the student went wrong and guide them past that bump in the learning road. She describes how the teacher can see if the child is behind and therefore "repeat information" or see the child is ahead and speed things up-- all of which is what the magical AI is supposed to be doing, so I'm pretty sure McMahon comprehends zero parts of this whole set-up.
McMahon says with AI we should look at "who's going to get it, how long are students going to be exposed to it, what is the outcome," and that would be great for Alpha School, which carefully selects its students. We know, by comparing Alpha School outcomes with the outcomes of Unbound, their bargain cyber-charters that don't cream students, that their outcomes suck (see this invaluable Dan Meyer post).
McMahon agrees that AI products should be checked for effectiveness (not that she imagines a role for her department in doing so, because the MAGA concept of federal oversight is that there should be none and let the chips fall on those who deserve to be chip-burdened, so who exactly is checking these program for effectiveness or doing the pulling out is important, but not clear here). Anyway, she thinks Alpha School is so shiny, she supports "AI with guardrails," and again-- who is putting up these guardrails?
Bash asks if she thinks Alpha School is a proper model and she says, "Well, the PR pitch I received was convincing." I'm paraphrasing. She does note that it seemed effective at these schools for these students and she's not saying it would work everywhere, which is smart because we already know it doesn't.
AI opt out. Bash asks if parents should be able to opt out of AI, and the TL:DR answer is, "Yes." The school should make its case.
AI versus human. Bash kind of fumbles this question, but the upshot is "Is the swellness of AI tutoring outweighed by the loss of human interaction with teachers?" Even with a coach there, it's not the same as learning from a human being. Are you concerned about that. The TL:DR answer is, "No, that's not our problem." But she'll also allow that human vs. AI instruction requires a balance, as with any other new tool. Nothing can replace human interaction, both between students and teacher and between student and student. She's not wrong.
School phone bans. Does McMahon think they're a good idea. "Bell to bell no cell," she says. She's a fan. Then she's back to screen time balance, recreational vs. tutoring. This is a good a place as any to mention that McMahon was born in 1948.
CTE and College. Bash gets CTE education, but wonders if pushing career tracks in elementary school is a bit much. Of course, in MAGA world, where Certain People are destined for meat widget status and might as well get started early (see: every state that has weakened child labor laws). McMahon's quote here has some real layers:
I think what we can do is look at students. What are their interests? How do we direct them down a pathway that they're going to have an interest, you know, in school and I believe that children need a well-rounded education, but I think we have focused for too long for just that four year that path to a four year university and sometimes we ignore what the actual skill sets of those students are.
Note the idea that we are supposed to direct students down a pathway rather than, say, letting them choose a path on their own. Note also the notion that students' "skill sets" should determine their paths. I don't disagree that we have over-emphasized college, but the whiff of one of those systems where we sort students into future career paths early on, regardless of what the students themselves want-- well, that's a very stinky whiff.
McMahon cites middle school partnerships with community colleges, and Bash says, well, maybe that's debatable, but elementary school??!! Maybe get some critical thinking taught and leave specific trades till later. Nah, do both at once, says McMahon. But then she flips back to "we can't direct that from DC." Because each community and its school might "need" different things. This seems really close to the notion that poor communities need to teach students to be meat widgets, and wealthy communities don't. Certainly there is nothing in her formulation of education about providing opportunities or, ironically, actual choices for students. But she's right back to "and that's why we really want to return education to the states, because we shouldn't have to make sure students all have equal opportunities no matter their zip code." Okay, I added that last part.
Higher ed free speech. Bash brings up the letter McMahon sent to universities calling for more open admission and more free speech. Bash wants to know if the Trump administration will back that up with cuts of federal funds. McMahon's reply starts with "Well, we're certainly always going to monitor what our universities are doing" which is both creepy and also contrary to sending education back to the states, but she then cites an "incredible positive response" and argues that she's all about open debate by folks on both sides of the aisle. She cites Ron DeSantis saying that Florida is all about those open two-sided debates in higher ed, so clearly that's totally working.
Look, it's a foundational belief of MAGA that the dirty Lefties captured institutions, including higher education, and that to set the country aright, those institutions must be recaptured. Chris Rufo has talked about it repeatedly; somebody has a whole book coming out about it. That's the project. Anything else is a smokescreen. McMahon's call for a "collision of ideas" can't be taken seriously.
That's pretty much it. McMahon mostly snoozed her way through the interview. As usual, McMahon strikes me as someone who is perfect for the task of doing away with her job because it's a job that doesn't seem to interest her very much at all. Honestly, I'm not sure why she's here. Betsy DeVos wanted to bring kingdom rule, but McMahon is old and wealthy and seems like she's out of effs to give. She may want to watch the world burn, but I imagine she would not stick around long to bask in the glow.
You can watch it all if you want, but don't bother to make popcorn.
