This sounds right to me: the secret sauce is bribery, the test results are good, the software isn’t exportable outside their model, and they either don’t want to share or don’t know how to do careful research.
I’m curious about why their software (and ed tech generally) is still so shoddy after a supposed 100m+ investment. It’s 2026, Claude or Codex can build something polished if you have a clear vision and minor dev skills.
I think a big selling point is that no matter how bad Alpha School is, it only takes a few hours. If they only assign terrible AI generated books, you can give your child some good books yourself and they'll have plenty of time to appreciate them.
In the third world we achieve a similar effect much more cheaply in regular school, which for all its faults at least doesn't take all day like the first world version. The school day used to be so short that there was a morning shift and an afternoon shift that both could use the same classroom, because their schedules never overlapped. Nowadays school takes longer and I can tell that kids are much more strongly affected by whether or not their school is good. Not just in test scores or whatever but also their mood and happiness.
The hypothesis that school is so bad parents are willing to pay $75k per year to shrink it is interesting. Couldn't you pay a part time tutor half that for the same result?
That's how my parents did it. It was affordable even for a poor family because labor costs are very low in the third world, there were plenty of underemployed teachers to go around.
In the first world I think they pay the 75k because private tutors are already not cheap, you can't risk a random cheap tutor messing up your kid's test scores (famously the one thing Alpha School does care about) and also because of selection effects. If you want your kid to hang out with the kids of other excentric rich families, Alpha School is invaluable.
It feels like what a lot of people like about AlphaSchool is less that it’s proactively enacting some amazing set of outcomes, and more that it *lacks* a great deal of the self-imposed downsides of many other schools.
This sounds right to me: the secret sauce is bribery, the test results are good, the software isn’t exportable outside their model, and they either don’t want to share or don’t know how to do careful research.
I’m curious about why their software (and ed tech generally) is still so shoddy after a supposed 100m+ investment. It’s 2026, Claude or Codex can build something polished if you have a clear vision and minor dev skills.
Iirc they used a lot of off-the-shelf EdTech software for the first couple of years and have now moved to their own bespoke solution
I think a big selling point is that no matter how bad Alpha School is, it only takes a few hours. If they only assign terrible AI generated books, you can give your child some good books yourself and they'll have plenty of time to appreciate them.
In the third world we achieve a similar effect much more cheaply in regular school, which for all its faults at least doesn't take all day like the first world version. The school day used to be so short that there was a morning shift and an afternoon shift that both could use the same classroom, because their schedules never overlapped. Nowadays school takes longer and I can tell that kids are much more strongly affected by whether or not their school is good. Not just in test scores or whatever but also their mood and happiness.
The hypothesis that school is so bad parents are willing to pay $75k per year to shrink it is interesting. Couldn't you pay a part time tutor half that for the same result?
That's how my parents did it. It was affordable even for a poor family because labor costs are very low in the third world, there were plenty of underemployed teachers to go around.
In the first world I think they pay the 75k because private tutors are already not cheap, you can't risk a random cheap tutor messing up your kid's test scores (famously the one thing Alpha School does care about) and also because of selection effects. If you want your kid to hang out with the kids of other excentric rich families, Alpha School is invaluable.
It feels like what a lot of people like about AlphaSchool is less that it’s proactively enacting some amazing set of outcomes, and more that it *lacks* a great deal of the self-imposed downsides of many other schools.