alt Hacker NewsBesides the coverage from fox news/new york times that the article mentions, there's also a much more extensive review from a parent who had his kids in alpha school: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school
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Here's another Alpha parent responding to that review: https://naimoli.com/peter/posts/2xlearning/
Summary: the '2× learning' claims are overblown.
The scrollbar is completely absent in Firefox. I think this is the first time I've seen long-form content with zero visual indication where I currently am in the document. Crazy.
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.
So not really AI, but a well run private school with high achieving students. Looks like they do optimize the learning strategies.
So this Astral Codex external submission is what? Did Scott Alexander verify that these parents are real?
Usual rambling from a site that disables scrolling and nearly crashes Firefox.
Holy crap that is a long article. In my view, the only important point is time freed up which should be a part of normal education. If students had more free time to think and contemplate one wonders what kind of world we would live in.
Too bad it takes a dubious idea for an AI school to surface that wisdom.
keep in mind this piece was 8 months ago (and probably starting to be written much earlier). I can see Alpha school being this genuine effort to offer an alternative education plan as well as slowly falling into the AI hype later on and pushing more generative content as it tries to phase out teachers.
Or, if it's being praised by this administration, it's doing so to gain political points.
This section reveals a lot about the difference between the hype and the practice:
> 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?