Yet another Hacker News

Parents pay $75k for Alpha's AI school. Half of its students missed math target

36 points vrganj 1 hour ago 21 comments

spwa4 41 minutes ago | parent

"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.

contemporary343 35 minutes ago | parent

Composition effects...

uptrails 35 minutes ago | parent

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.

preommr 11 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

danielmarkbruce 5 minutes ago | parent

Do you have kids?

benmanns 33 minutes ago | parent

And one in five failed the testing target for reading… so 80% learned twice as fast in reading?

cyanydeez 31 minutes ago | parent

yeah, but can you imagine how stupid the parents must be, such that hereditary effects are confounding variables?

misnome 29 minutes ago | parent

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.

jbellis 15 minutes ago | parent

But they're not, and this is readily available if you spend just a few seconds learning about Alpha School.

neya 37 minutes ago | parent

    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"

TwelveEyes 31 minutes ago | parent

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.

rodarmor 30 minutes ago | parent

America's public schools spent $17,619 per student in 2024 and only three in ten students read proficiently.

inshard 28 minutes ago | parent

So half failed to learn at double the pace, meaning more learned at a faster pace than benchmark. What was that number?

napo 17 minutes ago | parent

yes, I'm confused about that part too.

> 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.

PostOnce 12 minutes ago | parent

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?

glpgeFwac 24 minutes ago | parent

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?

https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/fourth-report...

jacobolus 4 minutes ago | parent

From a different post on the same blog:

> 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...