Students Are Being Treated Like Guinea Pigs: Inside an AI-Powered Private School
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Too bad it takes a dubious idea for an AI school to surface that wisdom.
College felt like the last time I truly had "time freed up". 16 units of classes per quarter came down to ~8-10 hours of class time per week and the recommendation was 2 hour of study per class unit a week (e.g. a 4 unit class recommends 8 hours of study a week). So, typical full time work. But mostly on campus (aka a walkable community), close to peers, with no worries of future responsibilities.
now of course, the CS curriculum easily required double or triple that recommendation, but that speaks more towards the subject than the concept of college.
Edit: Actually the scroll-bar is there, but it's nearly impossible to see because of the low contrast with the background. I guess I can blame my user agent for this one.
> It isn’t genuine two‑hour learning: most kids start school at 8:30am, start working on the “two-hour platform” sometime between 9am-930am and are occupied with academics until noon-1230pm. They also blend in “surges” from time to time to squeeze in more hours on the platform.
> It isn’t AI in the way we have been thinking about it since the “Attention is all you need” paper. There is no “generative AI” powered by OpenAI, Gemini or Claude in the platform the kids use – it is closer to “turbocharged spreadsheet checklist with a spaced‑repetition algorithm”
> It definitely isn’t teacher‑free: Teachers have been rebranded “guides”, and while their workload is different than a traditional school, they are very important – and both the quantity and quality are much higher than traditional schools.
> The bundle matters: it’s not just the learning platform on its own. A big part of the product’s success is how the school has set up student incentives and the culture they have built to make everything work together
So in other words, they're trying to set up a generally high quality education system, but they have a marketer on board who knows how to capture headlines with controversial claims?
[1] https://en.khanacademy.org/khan-for-educators/
[3] How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education | Sal Khan | TED - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJP5GqnTrNo - May 1st, 2023
>When I asked the head of admissions how they found such good staff he told me their compensation was fully transparent. “Associate Guides” were paid $60,000/year (vs the $40,000 average for Austin teachers), “Full Guides” made $100,000 and the five “Head Guides” in the school each made $150,000. They were able to both poach the best teachers from other schools, but also bring exceptional people into teaching that would not have considered it otherwise. It also let them have very high expectations for teachers once they were hired.
Im not sure about this particular school, but i am greatly disappointed at baseline california core requirements for math and science in middle school and the parents choice is to either have your child be bored in school while complementing their education with RSM or Singapore Math after hours Or to choose a private school that will make your child more competitive with kids being educated by other countries systems.
I wouldn’t blame the system for poor standards. Their standards are actually decent for most children. The problem is that teachers are forced to spend a significant portion of time and energy on classroom management.
Couple that with the fact that most parents aren’t reading to their children at night, so those kids grow up falling behind the curve. Reading comprehension drops -> other subjects follow suit. Rinse and repeat each year, and you eventually end up with high-school seniors reading far below their grade level.
The teachers now have to scaffold all of their content. The kids who didn’t fall behind? They receive no attention from the teacher who is instead focused on helping the kid with a 3rd grade reading ability to try to understand the content.
An indirect tragedy of the commons, where parents are relying on public education to raise and teach children with no input of their own.
>i am greatly disappointed at baseline california core requirements for math and science
Don't look at the other states, then. I agree the standards are low, but they can't even meet those marks. You don't improve that by raising bar and expecting students to keep up. All while continuing to defund education.
For me, it was a matter that they identified me early on elementary and basically put me a year ahead in studies. By middle school they called it "honor students". And I only studied in public schools (well, a charter high school. But I was guaranteed in since I lived in the neighborhood).
Quick google search shows that my district has nearly a budget of $195,927,382 for years 2024-2025 serving 10,278 students. Thats nearly 20k per student. THe district employed 481(<22 student per teacher on avg) teachers and 480 admin staff.
Residents of my school district constantly vote for bonds to pay for capital school upgrades(thanks Prop 13) in addition to high amount property taxes. We dont have an issue of defunding the education here.
Our education is non-competitive with Asian and European ones not because we cant afford it, but because its mismanaged, incorrectly incentivised and often ideological (math is racist).
It's mostly signaling, but does reenforce that it's on the student to learn - not the teacher to force it into their brain.
Facts and memorization are important, but they need to be in service to actual learning and understanding.
Or, if it's being praised by this administration, it's doing so to gain political points.
Usual rambling from a site that disables scrolling and nearly crashes Firefox.
Summary: the '2× learning' claims are overblown.
Even without AI teachers are implementing new techniques without any evidence of their effectiveness. In some cases, there is mountains of evidence that their techniques are not effective. From the prohibition on phonics in reading, learning styles, building thinking classrooms, or just the entire idea of constructivism. These are all worse than the techniques that they replace. AI systems at the very least are measured and have some kind of tracking of what works.
I'm not advocating for AI necessarily, but education is in the pre-scientific phase and it needs to start by implementing evidence based techniques, AI or no.
I am not even suggesting in person teaching is the only solution either. I am currently dealing with, apparently, my kids teacher, who, well, kinda checked out, but as much I am happy for her being able to retire soon, I am not sure why my kid has to suffer academically.
What I am saying is, there is room for AI. What I worry about is, people are idiots and anything half-useful will be neutered and kids will have all the drawbacks of heavy surveillance and zero to show for it.
Constructivist teaching favors things like student-centered discovery, inquiry-based, minimal-guidance, "child-led" or "whole-language" approaches.
This is just a plain bad way to teach the basics, like reading, writing and arithmetic. People didn't just magically invent these ideas. Most of human history is pre-literacy. Why are we expecting a 5yo to spontaneously learn to read?
This has been studied extensively. Have a look at Project Follow Through (1968–1977). It's the largest study of its kind.
This U.S. government-funded study involved ~120,000 disadvantaged K–3 students across 20+ instructional models in multiple sites. It directly compared Direct Instruction (Engelmann’s scripted, explicit basic-skills model, e.g., DISTAR) against constructivist-oriented models (e.g., Bank Street child-directed, Open Education/EDC exploratory-discovery, cognitive-conceptual discovery approaches).
Abt Associates did an independent evaluation in (1977). Their findings
DI produced the highest gains in reading, math, language, and spelling—raising performance to near national averages. It was the only model with consistent positive effects across basic skills, cognitive-conceptual skills, and self-esteem/affective outcomes.
See page 311 fig1 for the plot of outcomes. https://andymatuschak.org/files/1988-Engelmann.pdf
For more recent evidence, have a look at the reforms in Mississippi and the UK. Mississippi has striking gains for under privileged students. Mississippi Columbus Municipal School District used the "Reading Mastery Signature Edition" DI program.
Demographics: 92% African American, 100% free/reduced-price lunch, 12% special education.
Results as measured by NWEA MAP and Renaissance STAR assessments:
MAP RIT gains: +15.96 points overall 43–45% of students met or exceeded expected growth; top performers gained ~20–28 points.
Similar results in: Baltimore City Public Schools (1996–2008) Arthur Academies (Portland, Oregon metro, 2007–2013) Rimes Elementary, Florida (2011) Gering Public Schools, Nebraska (2004+)
And that I agree with you about the others you listed; what happened with the war on phonics is like criminal levels of negligence and willful ignorance. (Anyone reading this, start with the Sold a Story podcast).
I’ll have to take the results at face value since I know almost nothing about the alternatives they’re comparing to.
I am also willing to believe that of all the methods tried, DI works better than constructivism approaches for < grade 5, even if that may not be true for older students.
I wonder if this fellow has ever read a serious book. I'm skeptical.
AI is going to disrupt the whole academia and it is infinitely better than a book or a teacher.
The student could move at his/her own pace and can ask questions if stuck which no book or teacher could deliver.
edit: to try and sound "nicer," would anyone seriously take any advice about software engineering from someone who uses a WYSIWYG editor? That's how the above comment reads.
why do you think that?
>The student could move at his/her own pace and can ask questions if stuck which no book or teacher could deliver.
You're assuming there's a driven student who already knows what they wish to pursue. Even in college I wasn't entirely sure what domain in tech I wanted to explore.
You're also assuming or dismissing the other factors a teacher offers. Networks, parental guidance, wisdom of how to navigate through college or a job market, or simply as emotional pillar in ways parents can't always be.
Most of all, teachers teach you to understand bias and expand your viewpoints past any one given source. That's why I read the parental review of this school on top of this piece. It seems against current coporate interests to offer that. There's no one clear answer to everything out there, but AI wants it to appear as so.
Hell, I'm coming up on 50 and still haven't figured it out... :shrug:
Whenever I need to learn a new topic I always try to buy a book on the subject because it so much faster to have someone do the scaffolding for you than trying to be 'self-directed' about it. It also give some confidence that you aren't leaving big holes in your understanding.
The textbook allows you to move at your own pace, acting as a structured reference and practice tool that you can review endlessly outside of class.
And the teacher can answer any questions you've confirmed you're not able to resolve on your own with the textbook. Some in class, some during office hours/before or after class, and some via email.
That's not lot, mate. Maybe more than the average American unfortunately, but I consider a year where I get through 2–3 books a slow one. And that's just reading I do outside of my job. What matters, of course, is both the quality and quantity of what you read. The short of it is, your attempt at building your ethos has fallen pretty flat here.
> AI is going to disrupt the whole academia [sic]
Yes, it has and it continues to. I'm not arguing against that. Joe Liemandt said that "all educational content is obsolete", which presumably includes not only textbooks like SICP or Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation (just listing some CS textbooks because I'm in CS) but also great works of literature and philosophy that are important texts like The Odyssey or A Tale of Two Cities. If he meant to exclude such texts from the umbrella of "all educational content", well, then that's telling too. :)
> …it is infinitely better than a book or a teacher.
Maybe for someone who struggles with literacy or who hasn't had the pleasure of a good teacher. If you really believe this I'd like to see you try to substantiate your claim.
> The student could move at his/her own pace…
The article is about a grade school kids who, most of the time, need a little pushing to reach their full potential.
> …ask questions if stuck which no book or teacher could deliver.
… you're saying that LLMs are better than teachers because you can ask LLMs questions and not teachers?! Also, asking questions isn't the only component of learning. A good teacher will know when to not answer a question (or ask one!) and let the student stew and think about it.
I'm not saying AI can help with education. It can—it helps me!—but no hallucinating stochastic machine will have the human insight that a good teacher has. It's not a replacement.
I think there is enormous opportunity in combining Ed Tech and Generative AI, especially if you can create a highly tailored tutor available 24/7 for every student, especially for those in low-income situations that have historically been locked out from gaining such guidance. It's just unfortunate that this so rapidly morphed to spying on students for data harvesting.
The follow on effects if this becomes pervasive could be so incredibly damaging for students. Anxiety from performance metrics are already a very real thing because of standardized testing and scoring to get into the best schools. Also, imagine all of this data "follows" a student as they transition into the work force. We're headed towards a future where entry-level employees will have to disclose their "course work engagement" KPIs on their resume.
Not this AI, today
No, you couldn't whip out a foundational model out of the box to do this, but we could likely engineer our way to guardrails to support this without substantial hallucinations (i.e. fewer than the 95th percentile of human teachers.)
Also in no way would this replace everything teachers do. I'm talking purely academic curiosity.
Sure. In that lens, anything is possible. We put people on the moon with tech less powerful than a modern graphing calculator.
Reality, however, is disappointing and not actually incentivized by bettering humanity.
Unbound Academy hasn’t replaced teachers with AI
I love the approach Alpha School is taking. And I believe that they're really trying to iterate to something that works really well. But I think many people are misled by the way Alpha School words claims about their achievement.
Alpha School's web site has this bullet point:
"99th Percentile: The majority of students consistently outperform national averages."
If you just glance at this, you may assume it means the majority of students perform at the 99th percentile.
But that's not what it's saying.
Alpha School's mean achivement score (across all students in a particular grade) puts the 'district' (collection of schools) at the 99th percentile of districts.
But that's not an amazing feat, because there are 10,000+ school districts in the USA. Most of those don't have the positive selection bias Alpha School has (due to the price and ideology). Moreover, most districts have adverse selection, as many academically-inclined parents will choose to send their children to private schools.
You can judge the results for yourself. Here is the school score report from Spring 2025: https://go.alpha.school/hubfs/MAP%20Results%20-%2024%2025/20...
Here is some of the data from the Winter 2026 school score report: https://x.com/jliemandt/status/2023011075029922131?s=20
This leads to the takeaway at the start of this comment: the typical 5th grader at Alpha School has math achievement at the 85th percentile of 5th graders.
I can't add images here, so I'll link to the evidence here: https://x.com/RahimNathwani/status/2023111922636476899
These seem like middling results, especially considering the socioeconomic situation of these students. $65k/yr is awful ROI.
Probably not exposed to humanities or arts so as not to weaken their utility as tech goons.
A new cadre school for Technocracy Inc.
>trained to be unable to function without a computer.
Where is this from? The article mentions a lot of issues with alpha school, but the implication that kids are glued to screens and are "unable to function without a computer" isn't one of them. There's the issue that finishing random ed-tech games don't prepare you for the real world, but I don't really see how that's different than the perennial complaint that the US education fails to prepare kids for the real world (eg. "school taught me that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell but not how to do my taxes")
>Let me guess that they are also exposed to hundreds of trolley problems so that they can make "difficult decisions" later.
???
>Probably not exposed to humanities or arts so as not to weaken their utility as tech goons.
See the review linked in my other comment. It might not be an unbiased account, but I'm reasonably confident that the average student there gets more exposure to "humanities or arts" and other extracurriculars, than the average public school student, who maybe gets a field trip to the science center once a year.
I say this as somebody who had to navigate the AMT rules for years in my 30s and hasn't used the standard deduction since college. In no way would I expect a high school to teach me personal tax law at the expense of a basic understanding of biology or literature.
Sure, they admin or government can ban a book or fire a teacher, but that takes energy and time.
Automating all that to have the administration tweak lesson plans to their will sounds like a cliche dystopian sci-fi plot. Oh how little I knew.
"My investigation into Alpha School also reveals that the massive amounts of data the company collects on students, including videos of them, is stored in a Google Drive folder that anyone with the link—even if they’ve left the company, or if it was sent to them—could access."
Prison. People need to go to prison for this.
For lax security, or monitoring students at all? I don't think you'll find anyone opposing the former, but what's the alternative to the latter? At the end of the day, they're kids, and they need supervision to keep them on task. I think remote schooling during covid showed that kids can't really be left to their own devices. The alternatives I can think of aren't great:
1. individual human tutors: insanely expensive, out of reach for even well paid programmers, or you have to home school
2. ed tech, without the monitoring: won't work because kids get distracted, and you can't expect the parents to do that when they have jobs
3. traditional schooling, with maybe small class sizes: see the review in my other posts. Seems like even with well funded private schools, the lesson plan isn't really individualized so you're catering to the lowest common denominator
If parents want to pay 65k per year to have some corporate entity track their child's every keystroke, I guess that's not my place to pry. I will call them stupid, though. This isn't 2007 anymore; we know what they can, have, and will do with such data.
> individual human tutors: insanely expensive, out of reach for even well paid programmers, or you have to home school
again, they're paying 65k for this curriculum. I'd wager public school and 600 hours of private tutoring @100/hr (as a high ball) would work out much better
So sounds like your objections are over data governance?
>again, they're paying 65k for this curriculum. I'd wager public school and 600 hours of private tutoring @100/hr (as a high ball) would work out much better
The problem with this setup is that you still have public school eating up 6-8 hours of your kid's time per day. If you add after school tutoring afterwards that doesn't leave a lot of free time. The value prop, at least according to one of the parents who has his kids there[1] is that you get through the standard curriculum stuff in a fraction of the time, so you can spend the rest of the time on whatever your kid's interested in.
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school
Primarily, yes. Teachers don't need the kind of oversight they employ, and any reasons for that are purely financial, not "to make sure they aren't distracted".
>still have public school eating up 6-8 hours of your kid's time per day.
Yes. And many parents call that a feature. We structured school times around when parents are expected to work.
It's hard to cut those hours without cutting worker hours or otherwise structuring schools to have longer recess periods. I'm fine with either, but AI doesn't really come into play there.
>so you can spend the rest of the time on whatever your kid's interested in.
And who's watching them? Works fine with one stay at home parent. Or even a private tutor being there in person. Not so much with a remote education.
I'm not against more free time. But this addresses none of the bigger reasons this hasn't been experimented with seriously.
FERPA is no joke, and a competent administration would successfully prosecute people, sending them to big-boy jail for severe violations of students' personal data.
What are the alternatives? Almost anything else. Not breaking the law. You can buy a lot of traditional schooling for $65k/yr.