Parents Fell in Love With Alpha School’s Promise. Then They Wanted Out—Wired Magazine
Netflix: Going Varsity in Mariachi
Montgomery County Schools Corollary Sports
Full Transcript:
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Welcome to the Eduleadership Show. I’m your host, Justin Baeder, and in this episode we will talk about Alpha School and perhaps unrealistic claims that are being made about how fast students learn under its AI driven, teacher free model. We’ll talk about earnest striving and varsity mariachi, and we’ll talk about varsity pickleball and corollary sports in one Maryland school district. Let’s get to it.
First up, wired magazine released something of a bombshell investigative report on Alpha School, the Texas private school chain that is getting a lot of headlines that is being pushed pretty hard on Twitter these days. And the headline of their article is Parents Fell in Love with Alpha School’s Promise then they Wanted out. And I have to give some kudos to wired for some in-depth reporting on Alpha School because I’m hearing about this all the time. I’m seeing incredible claims made about how fast students learn under Alpha’s model and Wired’s reporters just did their homework to a really remarkable extent.
(01:18):
Now, if you’re not familiar with Alpha, this is a school network that has been founded in Texas by some very, very wealthy people, billionaires, people who are behind tech companies, and a lot of what they do in their businesses is create the software that is powering the Alpha School model. And Alpha is unambiguous and unapologetic about the fact that they do not have teachers. This is entirely AI driven instruction for two hours a day. And the idea is you come in in the morning, spend about two hours doing various apps and get all of your academics that way, and then you spend the rest of the day working on fun projects, different workshops, group activities, things like that to get the social interaction. And as a model, I am not ready to throw this out. I don’t think it is a terrible thing to try.
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This actually came up on my Dr. Phil episode. We talked a little bit about models like this, and I think there’s some promise here. There are some things that we can learn from models like this. I don’t like that it’s teacher free. I don’t like that. Students have to basically open a support ticket to talk with someone who has some expertise in their subject area because the guides on campus are not supposed to help with academics. So I think there are some very strange things about Alpha and some very basic mistakes that the people running Alpha are making. But what I wanted to concentrate on and what the Wired article does, I think great reporting on is the claims about academics. And to put these claims in context, you got to understand that Alpha is $40,000 a year. It’s a private school, and the tuition is $40,000 a year at their Austin campus and I think other locations.
(02:53):
And then they have a campus in Brownsville, Texas where there is a SpaceX Star base. And on the Brownsville campus tuition is $10,000 a year. And the Brownsville campus is what the Wired article focuses on. And what’s interesting about the claims that are being made about Alpha is that initially Alpha was making some claims about how fast students were learning under their model. You have two hours a day to sit down on a computer with their AI apps and get all of your learning done. And I believe to a certain extent that students can learn fairly efficiently in that way. Now, whether we want them to, whether we think that’s a good thing, is a different question, but I think students probably can learn, okay, on a computer for two hours a day. But when given the chance to prove their claims and to demonstrate how much their students were learning and how fast their students were learning, alpha repeatedly declined to provide Wired Magazine with any evidence for those claims.
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And I’m seeing those claims and more outlandish claims being made on Twitter. I saw a tweet and did a video about it in which someone affiliated with a different school that’s using office technology said that kids are learning 10 times faster. Again, I’ll grant that with good technology, kids could learn a little bit faster. I don’t think they’re going to learn 10 times faster though. One of the main reasons I don’t think that is that motivation is going to play a huge role after a while. And I would encourage you to read the Wired magazine story to hear a little bit more about how Alpha School attempts to motivate kids without teachers. And I think this is a little bit grim and a little bit indicative of what you’re left with after you take teachers out of the equation. They have points, they have a store, they have apps that they’re required to earn a certain number of points on, and there’s a lot of reliance on extrinsic motivation and a lot of just grinding through computer-based activities that frankly does not seem super pleasant to me.
(04:44):
And I think, again, there’s promise here because we’re not talking about a whole ton of the school day. We’re talking about very efficient learning, but this does not sound great to me, and it certainly doesn’t sound worth $40,000 a year, and it certainly doesn’t sound like it could result in students learning 10 times faster. I think if anything, it’ll end up producing kind of similar results to traditional schools. It’s just a different way to approach things, but it’s certainly not going to get students to learn 10 times faster. Now, we’ll talk about this on an upcoming episode of the Edge of Leadership Show, but I want to point out that it is very, very difficult to assess how effective private school models are for one simple and impossible to ignore reason. And that is tuition. When you are charging $40,000 a year, you’re going to attract a very different student population that is going to respond very differently to instruction, and that’s going to make it difficult to compare your particular model to any other model of school, right?
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There are not a lot of public schools with traditional enrollment doing Alpha’s model, and it’s very, very difficult to study it. And when you have students who can afford $40,000 a year tuition, you’re probably working with students who aren’t going to be super dependent on your instructional model. Those students are probably going to do fine. They’re probably going to get into elite colleges because of their family wealth. So I think it’s very difficult to study this kind of thing, but I’ll share with you some research next week on how researchers are attempting to do that and what we can learn from their efforts so far.
Next up, I wanted to highlight a very interesting story in the publication Persuasion, which normally focuses on political science, but has a very interesting article this week called In Defense of Striving, which was written by Quico Toro, who I believe is a Canadian citizen living in Japan.
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And bear with me on the line of thought here. He talks in this article about what we can learn from Texas high school Mariachis, and he came to some of these conclusions after watching a Netflix documentary that I’ll tell you about in just a little bit. But he connects it in what I think is just a fascinating essay to a Japanese concept called Majime. And he, as I mentioned, is Canadian, but lives in Japan and has kids that go to school in Japan. And he says, one of the hardest things to explain about what it’s like to live in Japan has to do with a single word mame. It means something like earnest striving or wholesome seriousness. That’s easy enough to understand. What’s harder to wrap your head around is the role it plays in Japanese society where majime attitude is the default setting for social interaction.
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And he contrasts this with the typical American attitude of the detached teenager, the Gen X cynicism, that some of us grew up with the idea of being too cool for school. And at a societal level. I think it’s quite possible to think that that holds us back, that our lack of earnest striving holds us back as a society. And that’s something that probably is a cultural asset of Japan. But on a flight, he found a documentary, the author Qui Toro found a documentary that highlighted an example of earnest striving in American culture, specifically in Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. And there was a documentary that talked about the culture of high school competitive varsity mariachi bands. You may not have known that those existed. I didn’t know that there was competitive varsity mariachi in Texas, but there is a documentary about it going varsity in Mariachi.
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And he says, if you follow the stories of some of these students, you see that earnestness. You see that desire to really work hard and achieve a great thing. And I think we can often find that in some of our student activities that you may see students not really caring that much in their academic subjects, but you can see some real striving when students work together in a subject like band and in a particular subject like competitive varsity mariachi. So check that out over at Persuasion, and let me know what you think. Lastly, a school district in Maryland is adding varsity pickleball as one of three corollary sports. And I found this very interesting and very encouraging Education Week reports that the Montgomery County School District in Maryland has added pickleball, bocce ball, and softball as competitive interscholastic sports that combine basically general education and special education students, students with disabilities and students without disabilities working together in corollary sports.
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And what I love about this is that it is still competitive. You are still playing against other schools in the district, but the competition does not take the front seat, right? You’re playing against other people. It’s a real thing, but it’s not only for those who can compete at the most elite level. And I think if I had, one thing that I could complain about with sports in the United States is that we push the competition so far that we lose a lot of what’s good about it, and we lose the opportunity for a lot of kids to participate at all. I think when sports becomes merely a vehicle for elite status reproduction, right? Like when you are a leading family in town and you can put your kids in all the elite sports and you can pay for the travel teams and the camps, well, that doesn’t really create the kind of opportunity that supposedly we have athletics in schools to create, right?
(10:11):
I think a lot of the rationale for having sports be school-based programs is that they create opportunity for students. They can get college scholarships and lots of good things can happen that create mobility and opportunity for students. Well, if those opportunities are closed off to many, many, many students, then I think a lot of that rationale disappears. But I think an alternate rationale is, Hey, it is a good thing to be part of a team. It is a good thing to be a part of a physical activity. It is a good thing to develop a lifelong fitness habit and passion that you can take with you after school. So I don’t think they’re going to win state. I don’t think there’s going to be a state tournament in pickleball. Maybe there will be, but I think this is probably a good thing. Their head coach says, this is what it’s all about, getting them to feel like they belong and they’re part of something.
(11:00):
And I feel like if we can get more kids to feel like they belong and are part of something, we will have more learning. We will have fewer kids dropping out, and we will have better outcomes at the societal level. Lemme know what you think. Lastly, I want to highlight some of our other shows that we produce here at The Principal Center. One that just launched is called The Teaching Show, and I’ve had the opportunity to publish at this time, three great interviews with educators about different aspects of teaching and different pedagogies that come up in different content areas. So we’re not shying away from specific content areas in the teaching show. And I would love to have your feedback on the episodes we’ve dropped so far, as well as your input on who I should talk to and what we should cover in upcoming episodes of the teaching show.
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You can subscribe completely for free at teachingshow.com. I also want to make sure you know about my long running podcast Principal Center Radio. We’ve done about 500 episodes of that over the past decade, and you can subscribe in your favorite podcast app or at Principal Center dot com slash Radio. Principal Center Radio is a book focused long form podcast. So we typically record for 20 to 25 minutes and go in depth on a single book with the author or authors. And I’ve had the privilege of speaking with just some incredible people, some of the luminaries of our profession, people who are household names, and you can hear from them firsthand on Principal Center Radio. Now I have one more show. We do a total of four shows a week currently, and the last show is the Instructional Leadership Show, and this is our members only show that is specifically on instructional leadership strategies for school administrators. So we talk about how to get into classrooms, how to have feedback, conversations with teachers that change their practice, how to integrate your classroom walkthroughs into your school improvement work and much more. And you can learn more about the Instructional Leadership Show and our Instructional Leadership Association membership at Principal Center dot com slash join. That’s it for this episode of The Eduleadership Show. I’m Justin Baeder, and I’ll see you next time.
