This is the first of two posts about Alpha School. As a note, we drafted these over the summer before the renewed wave of reporting on Alpha School began. The purpose of these posts isn’t to justify or criticize Alpha or dive into specific details. The purpose is instead to use sound, predictive theory to understand the macro decisions those connected to Alpha are making and what they may portend.
Alpha School, the startup microschool network known for using AI to manage students’ academic content in just two hours a day, has been grabbing the limelight in education over the last year. But with newfound prominence has come a growing range of criticisms.
One line of critique says the model looks impressive only because it serves the children of wealthy, highly educated families; its results would never replicate for low-income students who lack the resources and support that Alpha’s families take for granted. Another, for example, says that whatever Alpha does for test scores, it shortchanges the deeper work of education—the building of genuine understanding of core content and its connection to skills—and produces students who can perform on an assessment without having been taught to think.
These angles of critique deserve serious consideration, particularly as Alpha seeks to expand its model. But the criticisms also share an assumption: that a good school is one that serves everyone well and attends to every part of a child’s education.
Judged by that standard, Alpha fails because Alpha has chosen to make trade-offs—to do a few things well and to neglect other elements.
One question worth asking is whether that standard—that a good school is one that serves everyone well—is the right one to bring to a school like Alpha, or, frankly, any school, in the first place.
The instinct to hope that all schools can serve all students equally well reminds us of the episode of The Simpsons in which Homer’s long-lost half-brother, a car executive, hands Homer the keys to a design studio and tells him to build a car for the average American. Homer, being the everyman, loads it with every feature he can imagine. The result is a bloated, incoherent, wildly expensive machine that bankrupts the company. The joke lands because no one is actually average along every dimension at once. Design for everyone and you build something for no one.
Different underlying logics
Public education has a structural reason to keep building Homer’s car. A district school is accountable to every student and their family that enrolls, to taxpayers, to school boards, to state legislatures, and to a long list of groups each with a legitimate claim on what schools owe children. One way public education progresses is through policy—and policy is the art of compromise among stakeholders who will never fully agree.
As a result, public education has defaulted, almost unconsciously, to a standard in which schools are expected to serve and honor the values of all students whose families have chosen and been able to afford to live within the boundaries of the district. That standard, even though it can produce schools that contain elements of incoherence and fail to be excellent in some respects, also has an understandable rationale for an institution that belongs to the public.
The trouble comes when we apply it, without noticing we are doing it, to a school that was never built on those terms.
Entrepreneurs, like the founders of Alpha, operate on the opposite default.
A startup does not begin by trying to serve everyone. It begins by narrowly defining one problem for one target customer, building the simplest product that solves it, and getting that product into the hands of the customers who feel the problem most acutely. It expects to be relatively bad, at first, at everything else. Only once it has won that first narrow market does it earn the capital, the credibility, and the operational room to expand into adjacent problems.
Amazon sold books before it sold everything, for example. The early narrowness wasn’t a flaw for which to apologize but the strategy itself. Even today, Amazon is clear about the principles around which it organizes and the trade-offs it makes. That’s why Amazon won’t provide you with an in-person, personal shopper anytime soon.
These two implicit assumptions about public education and entrepreneurs produce two completely different reactions to a school like Alpha.
Through the public-education lens, a school that does some things well and ignores others is a school with holes in it.
Through the entrepreneurial lens, a school that does a few things well and is candid about the rest is a company executing a sound early-stage strategy.
To be fair, there are educators inside districts quietly intrigued by Alpha. They see students moving at their own pace, reaching mastery before advancing, and coming home excited about school, and they wonder what it would take to get some of that in their own buildings.
Nonetheless, we get the wariness voiced by many educators. They have good reason to fear the next overhyped model that blows up in their faces. The field is littered with fads and new companies that proved too good to be true—including AltSchool’s well-funded flameout and Byju’s slide into allegations of fraud.
But Alpha is different in at least one important respect from a microschool like AltSchool. It has a clear and specific school model that has been developed over more than a decade. Its technology is purpose-built to serve that model rather than the other way around. And, despite the hype from its leaders, Alpha’s full school model was never designed to serve every student. So, in our parlance, what Job to Be Done is Alpha built to do, and what does it give up in order to do that Job well?
What is Alpha’s model?
Alpha’s model is, by now, fairly well known. After a school-wide morning rally, students spend the morning on a computer doing core academics and knowledge acquisition—the much-publicized “two-hour learning” block. Students work in focused bursts of around 25 minutes as they move through instruction, practice, and assessment inside Timeback, an AI-powered platform that stitches together a range of digital curricula and tracks each student’s pace, focus, and progress. Because the software meets each student at their level, leans on direct instruction, keeps them active, uses spaced repetition, and refuses to advance them until they have demonstrated mastery above a 90-percent threshold, it compresses into two hours some of what a conventional classroom stretches across a full day.
Those design choices deserve more credit than they usually get. Mastery-based progression, spaced repetition, and careful attention to cognitive load are among the better-supported findings in learning science, and conventional schools mostly do not act on them. A typical classroom moves a whole group through material that follows a fixed pacing guide regardless of who has actually learned it, circles back to content when the unit plan calls for it rather than when forgetting curves suggest, and routinely asks novice learners to hold more in working memory than they can manage.
The educators in Alpha schools are not called teachers, and they do not instruct. Alpha calls them guides. Their job is to meet with students, get to know them, track their progress, and, above all, motivate them. We will tackle the decision to deliberately strip instruction out of their role in our second post, because it turns out to be one of the more revealing tradeoffs Alpha has made.
The compression of learning is a central part of Alpha’s model, because it buys back the resource Alpha treats as most precious: the student’s time. What students do with the reclaimed afternoon depends on which flavor of Alpha they attend, but the throughline in most of the models is the cultivation of life skills that rarely show up on a transcript: teamwork and leadership, public speaking and storytelling, entrepreneurship and financial literacy, grit and the capacity to take honest feedback. In the flagship model, younger students take on projects that range from Tough Mudders to press conferences, while older students pursue a project of genuine personal interest. In the gifted-and-talented model, students simply dig deeper into academics. In the sports academies, they train. And in the entrepreneurial high school, they work to build a business that earns a million dollars before they graduate.
The deal Alpha strikes with students
Driving Alpha’s learning model is a focus on motivation, a flavor of which most educators would call, with some discomfort, extrinsic.
Alpha’s implicit premise is that core academics are not always intrinsically thrilling. Instead, they are often like the broccoli you eat because it’s good for you. The school essentially says to stop pretending it’s otherwise and instead strike a deal with students: do the focused academic work in the morning, and the afternoon, along with your time, is yours. Alpha sharpens the deal further with its own currency, sometimes called Alpha bucks, that students earn by meeting goals and can spend on things they want from a school store.
There is a counterargument, of course. A good deal of evidence suggests that academics can be intrinsically motivating when knowledge acquisition helps answer questions students find curious, when it’s woven into real-world projects, and when students progress upon mastery and tackle concepts in their zone of proximal development.
But Alpha largely sets that possibility aside, in part because anything resembling inquiry-based learning carries, by Joe Liemandt’s own account, a steep efficiency cost relative to direct instruction, and efficiency is the entire premise of buying back a student’s time. In fairness, there is real evidence behind the efficiency claim, even if we suspect the underlying picture is more situational than Alpha’s framing allows.
(Here’s the aside to our suspicion that you’re welcome to skip: There’s some truth to Alpha’s point, but it also misses a lot of underlying nuance that, in our view, suggests that these are not mutually exclusive categories and that a lot of the answer is circumstance-dependent on the learner’s prior level of understanding and the goals for the learning. Among the nuance: direct instruction is especially important for novice learners, but even they can benefit by making a lesson intrinsically more interesting by starting with a simple but perplexing question or problem and then drawing the student into the learning for direct instruction comprised of a teacher-led lesson, a guided example, and then independent practice; that limited version of “inquiry” can actually make learning more efficient; expert learners tend to benefit from more inquiry as they seek to apply their knowledge and build skills with the acquired knowledge—meaning the goals of the learning are different; a project can be part of that cycle, as it starts with a captivating question or problem or seeming paradox, moves to direct instruction, and, once a learner is no longer a novice, they can tackle the more complex project; and so on. In other words, this is almost certainly a false dichotomy. You can read more about this here and here, for example. Interestingly enough, Alpha’s leaders have stated on numerous occasions the value of being able to offer lessons modified by AI to be in areas of interest for students—meaning you could learn physics through examples based in baseball or dancing, for example. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has written both about the opportunities—and potential perils—of such an approach, but either way, Alpha would presumably be trading some efficiency for some intrinsic motivation if they pursued this.)
But set the pedagogy debate aside for a moment, because the more interesting fact is that Alpha has made a definite bet about what moves children to learn and committed to it without apology.
That bet is not as foreign to our own thinking as it might first appear. One of the central arguments of Disrupting Class, written by one of us nearly 20 years ago, was that the erosion of extrinsic motivation in a society tends to drag educational performance down with it, and that the remedy was to make learning more intrinsically compelling. Alpha is proposing something different but based on a similar diagnosis of the underlying problem: that a school can manufacture extrinsic motivation, build its entire model around it, and get results.
What Job do parents hire Alpha to do?
Here is the uncomfortable fact for the skeptics.
A set of parents are not merely curious about Alpha; some are relocating their families across the country and paying as much as $65,000 a year to enroll their children in it.
To understand why Alpha’s parents find it so desirable, it helps to ask what Job parents are actually hiring Alpha to do.
Our research on why families switch schools points to a possible answer. One group that enrolls in Alpha is likely doing so because their child’s academics are already strong enough; they want to create space for their children to explore and not miss out on areas of passion and potential and develop other facets of their character. A second group is likely seeking to escape from a school setting that was failing their kid, with some of those students bored or falling far behind academically and no longer loving school.
As families move to Alpha, test scores carry significant weight. It is a clear currency—a measure that parents believe they understand and can compare. The same goes for showcasing Alpha high schoolers gaining acceptance into highly selective colleges. It resolves the anxiety of choosing something this unconventional. It lets a parent tell skeptical relatives, in effect, that it is fine for their child to spend afternoons on Tough Mudders and startups because the academic results are right there on paper, and the kid is happy to be in school.
That combination—demonstrable achievement alongside a child who genuinely likes going to school—is Alpha’s real north star. Parents, sensibly, hold any school they choose to a do-no-harm standard, and on the test score measures that parents use to gauge that standard, Alpha reassures.
What Alpha gives up
None of this means the skeptics are wrong about what Alpha leaves on the table.
The academics, for all their efficiency, seem thin from the outside. There appears to be little-to-no Socratic discussion during core academics. While students do read books, there appears to be little room for debates over books or current events—the part of the traditional English and social studies curriculum in which messy collaborative argument can turn information into understanding and more nuanced views.
To the extent those experiences happen at all, they happen in the afternoon, walled off from the academic block. Core knowledge instruction in the morning—which, if followed, will help students ace English Language Arts tests, but also has the potential to actually help students build the so-called 21st-century skills and become informed citizens—may seep into the afternoon’s projects, but they aren’t explicitly connected. The projects aren’t designed to reinforce the tech-powered learning of core knowledge. The two halves of the day run on separate tracks by design, despite there being a credible body of research suggesting that the life skills Alpha wants to build transfer more reliably to other contexts when built in the context of doing demanding academic work, not in a separate container.
That apparent thinness likely makes some educators nervous in its own right—and goes to the point that Alpha’s model is not built to serve all students from all backgrounds. But the thinness also raises questions about purpose. What is Alpha actually optimizing for? What does it believe school is for?
One reading is that Alpha’s focus is forming young people who can act with agency and seize opportunity, economic or otherwise. In a world increasingly shaped by AI, it’s equipping them not to serve the system but to have real control and standing within it.
Another reading is less generous. It’s also likely what unsettles many educators. This reading of Alpha’s purpose sees the school’s treatment of the core academics as something just to get a test score—a teaching to the test that educators want to run away from and, it should be said, typically don’t ace. It expresses concerns about the role of AI in Alpha’s learning model—as part of an instructional tool in the morning, elevated above teachers, and a tool for student creations in the afternoon. And given public education’s role in serving society, not just the individual—to preserve America’s democracy and participate in a pluralistic society—it worries about the optimization for the individual over the civic and communal purposes of school.
Alpha as one option in a wider mosaic
So where does this leave us? If you believe a school has to be all things to all people, then every one of these tradeoffs is an indictment. Alpha stands convicted. But that standard, we have argued, is borrowed from a public system built theoretically to try and offer something for everyone. The track record is clear that that system doesn’t do this well—and it is also probably the wrong lens to understand what Alpha is.
The more useful way to see Alpha is as a single, distinct, internally coherent option in a widening mosaic of schooling choices. In a landscape where families can genuinely choose, Alpha does not need to be right for every child, because it does not need to be the only school. It needs to be the right school for the families whose plan for their child it is built to serve, and honest with everyone else about what it is not. Different schools can serve different Jobs, and that pluralism is a feature of a healthy ecosystem rather than a problem to be solved.
Which points, finally, to what we think the fair criticism of Alpha actually is. The problem is not that Alpha is narrow. Narrowness is what lets it be excellent at the Job it has chosen.
The problem is that Alpha does not always present itself as narrow. Its public message tends toward Alpha being categorically better than conventional school, full stop, rather than the more precise and more honest claim: if these are the priorities and values you have for your child, here is the specific Job we are built to do, here is the evidence we do it well, and here is what we deliberately leave to others.
Yes, there are advantages to the simpler message that Alpha trumpets. It has elevated the school’s profile. It has also lifted up the value of mastery-based learning and the fact that core academics don’t need to take all that long—concepts that we, along with many others, have tried to promote for a very long time.
But marketed as a better school for everyone, Alpha also invites the all-things-to-all-people scrutiny it can never satisfy. If it instead marketed itself as a sharp answer to a specific Job, it would be harder to find fault, and much easier to place in the mosaic where it belongs.
We still have other questions. In a companion piece, we’ll tackle one of them—whether the technology underneath Alpha, and the unusual business model funding it, add up to something genuinely disruptive to the wider education landscape. But that is a separate argument. For now, it is enough to say that a school built to do a few things well—and being honest about which few—doesn’t have to be something that is feared or loathed. This is what real choice is supposed to look like.
Stay tuned for the next post in this series, titled “Could Alpha School disrupt K–12 education?”
