> the pitch is that students will “learn twice as much as their peers in two hours of academics a day”
Given a standard school day has 6 hours of learning, what they're actually claiming is that their product will teach kids 6x as effectively as normal schooling.
I do actually thing that AI-driven lessons are the future (I'd love to see a proper Young Lady's Illustrated Primer), but in my opinion the approach here is fundamentally flawed. The goal shouldn't be "less time spent learning", it should be to maximize the impact of the time spent.
The time spent learning is education in its own, and minimizing it to two hours a day will only teach kids to search for shortcuts and reduce their resiliance. You can certainly go too far with this (imo a Kumon-style 8am-8pm 12 hour day of learning overloads kids and doesn't give them time for creative thinking), but I do think it's important to teach kids that dedicated time spent on a problem is valuable in its own right.
Alpha's take is that this time is better spent on "real world" exercises and scenarios. From their site:
> Whether it’s solving a 45-second pit stop challenge or exploring the breadth of global art styles, our workshops teach students how to navigate the real world with confidence.
There is value in this iff the real world exercises are applications of the things they're learning. I was home schooled, and one of the most valuable things my parents did was give me things that were applications of what I was working on in my coursework. When I was learning geometry, one of my after school activities was calculating how much wood was needed for a deck that had a sine-wave curve and was made of 2x6 boards with a quarter inch gap. Once I did the calcs, we went to home depot, bought the wood, built the deck, and when I was a few boards short we talked through what I did wrong. It was a perfect way to reinforce how the geometry calculations could be applied. Alpha seems to focus more of their workshops on resiliance and leadership - ie can they bike all the way across the golden gate bridge, or can they do a ninja obstacle course (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vo16UaJ26o&t=197s). I don't see these activities reinforcing what the kids are learning that day, so I'm not surprised they're falling short of the claimed targets.
What they hinted at about the school not actually sticking to the two hours per day of schooling is slightly concerning. I would frankly be happy with parity provided the kids only needed two hours of schooling per day, but if they aren’t committing to that then this is a bad result.
Expensive correspondence school that sounds like hell on earth, maybe OK if you're otherwise training for the Olympics. Why do parents sign their kids up for this?
> One young child, who I believe was either a first or second grader, refused to focus on her computer for two hours — clearly, she wanted to move around and interact with other kids, and was growing very frustrated, and started to be non-cooperative. In response, her ‘guide’ placed her in what looked like a phone booth, alone, and closed the door. [...] When I asked the guide how she knew what to do, she said that she had ChatGPT’d it.
A study of 26,811 secondary students in central China found that homework scores rose 18% after students adopted generative AI tools, while closed-book exam scores fell 20%. The OECD’s latest PISA results found that daily AI users scored lower in science than nonusers, while moderate users performed about the same.
It's almost as if using AI only as a tool for execution rather than actual architectural decisions works out well. In HN universe this is the difference between an experienced architect using AI to write code vs a TikTok hipster to tell codex/claude to create an instagram clone for them so they can make a video about it "We dOn'T nEeD eNgiNeErs AnyMoRe"
"Only 42% of Alpha students met the network’s goal of learning twice as fast in both math and reading, according to internal data first reported by The New York Times. The findings land as Alpha pushes into public schools, where districts are adopting its software in hopes of fitting more learning into less time."
As someone who occasionally reads psychometric papers: WOW. That's an impressive result. That is equivalent to a very, very good teacher.
Maybe look at the school curriculum these days. It's really not an impressive result at all for that kind of money. In good areas, middle schools and high schools have "advanced pathways" which have the kids years ahead of the standards. It's not because they are geniuses. It's because the standards are incredibly low.
Although the title is obvious clickbait, I have to note that if you want to spend $75k and have your kid learn at twice the speed of the public curriculum, this is really not something you could not have accomplished before. This is a "live-in tutor" kind of money.
More generally, the problem is almost always motivation and discipline, not the availability of instruction. If you have a motivated kid, you can simply buy them some books.
If you want to use AI in public education, I guess the big question is whether it can help the kids who have parents who work two shifts, who get pulled into youth gangs, or play games all day and don't even show up to school. Helping talented kids from well-off homes is really not that much of a challenge.
> More generally, the problem is almost always motivation and discipline, not the availability of instruction.
This is completely wrong in the context of AI.
Lots of learning can be massively improved if someone can zero in on what specific misunderstanding someone has because of how they interpreted some information. You might have the books, but it doesn't help if it presumes you understand some other fundamental hidden in another book.
You can't constantly ask even direct teachers about these questions, because they're paid by the hour, and just asking the questions can take a quarter of an hour. The best mitigtation was basically having an excellent lifelong education at every step to make sure the gaps were mostly filled in and students ask the occasional question for the limited time teachers can afford them.
AI changes this completely. AI can teach you exactly what you need all the way back to the exact fundamentals, correct any misunderstandings, poor wording, show you 10 different examples until it clicks in the way that's best for your brain, draw diagrams and so much more.
And it does this for pennies, without judgement and lots of patience.
Only if it's in their self-imposed time limit, which it sounds like they aren't. "Twice as fast" could be measuring weeks or terms, rather than actual hours studying.
If the students are being pressured into working super-long days then that doesn't say anything.
What are the odds students whose parents can pay $75,000 a year for their child's education are going to outperform the national average at any school they attend anyway?
Given a standard school day has 6 hours of learning, what they're actually claiming is that their product will teach kids 6x as effectively as normal schooling.
I do actually thing that AI-driven lessons are the future (I'd love to see a proper Young Lady's Illustrated Primer), but in my opinion the approach here is fundamentally flawed. The goal shouldn't be "less time spent learning", it should be to maximize the impact of the time spent.
The time spent learning is education in its own, and minimizing it to two hours a day will only teach kids to search for shortcuts and reduce their resiliance. You can certainly go too far with this (imo a Kumon-style 8am-8pm 12 hour day of learning overloads kids and doesn't give them time for creative thinking), but I do think it's important to teach kids that dedicated time spent on a problem is valuable in its own right.
Alpha's take is that this time is better spent on "real world" exercises and scenarios. From their site:
> Whether it’s solving a 45-second pit stop challenge or exploring the breadth of global art styles, our workshops teach students how to navigate the real world with confidence.
There is value in this iff the real world exercises are applications of the things they're learning. I was home schooled, and one of the most valuable things my parents did was give me things that were applications of what I was working on in my coursework. When I was learning geometry, one of my after school activities was calculating how much wood was needed for a deck that had a sine-wave curve and was made of 2x6 boards with a quarter inch gap. Once I did the calcs, we went to home depot, bought the wood, built the deck, and when I was a few boards short we talked through what I did wrong. It was a perfect way to reinforce how the geometry calculations could be applied. Alpha seems to focus more of their workshops on resiliance and leadership - ie can they bike all the way across the golden gate bridge, or can they do a ninja obstacle course (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vo16UaJ26o&t=197s). I don't see these activities reinforcing what the kids are learning that day, so I'm not surprised they're falling short of the claimed targets.
https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/fourth-report...
> One young child, who I believe was either a first or second grader, refused to focus on her computer for two hours — clearly, she wanted to move around and interact with other kids, and was growing very frustrated, and started to be non-cooperative. In response, her ‘guide’ placed her in what looked like a phone booth, alone, and closed the door. [...] When I asked the guide how she knew what to do, she said that she had ChatGPT’d it.
https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/observer-of-a...
As someone who occasionally reads psychometric papers: WOW. That's an impressive result. That is equivalent to a very, very good teacher.
More generally, the problem is almost always motivation and discipline, not the availability of instruction. If you have a motivated kid, you can simply buy them some books.
If you want to use AI in public education, I guess the big question is whether it can help the kids who have parents who work two shifts, who get pulled into youth gangs, or play games all day and don't even show up to school. Helping talented kids from well-off homes is really not that much of a challenge.
This is completely wrong in the context of AI.
Lots of learning can be massively improved if someone can zero in on what specific misunderstanding someone has because of how they interpreted some information. You might have the books, but it doesn't help if it presumes you understand some other fundamental hidden in another book.
You can't constantly ask even direct teachers about these questions, because they're paid by the hour, and just asking the questions can take a quarter of an hour. The best mitigtation was basically having an excellent lifelong education at every step to make sure the gaps were mostly filled in and students ask the occasional question for the limited time teachers can afford them.
AI changes this completely. AI can teach you exactly what you need all the way back to the exact fundamentals, correct any misunderstandings, poor wording, show you 10 different examples until it clicks in the way that's best for your brain, draw diagrams and so much more.
And it does this for pennies, without judgement and lots of patience.
If the students are being pressured into working super-long days then that doesn't say anything.
> Only 42% of Alpha students met the network’s goal of learning twice as fast in both math and reading
If they managed to have almost half of students learning twice as fast, it's quite impressive.