Why parents love a school with bogus numbers
Alpha School — a franchise of private schools advertising their ability to teach students more than traditional schools in vastly less time — are cropping up all over the country. There’s one in my neighborhood, and there’s another across the bay in San Francisco that charges $75,000 a year. Austin has a bunch of them, including the Texas Sports Academy — whose pitch seems to be that you can get your education out of the way as fast as possible so you can spend more time on athletics — NextGen Academy for gamers, Founders School for entrepreneurs, and Montessorium, which blends the Alpha model with Montessori teachings.
The commonality among all Alpha schools is the company’s “2 Hour Learning” technology, called Timeback. The idea is that every day, each student gets assigned two hours of activities to complete through a variety of edtech apps. These can include passages with reading comprehension questions, math lessons and practice problems, and recording apps to help students practice public speaking.
The work is individualized to the student’s current learning level. They’re supposed to get through their work as quickly as possible to free up the rest of the day for programs and workshops. And the company claims that, as a result, the kids learn much more quickly than kids at normal schools.
One of Alpha’s innovations is that the kids themselves are highly successful marketers for the program — alumni write articles about Alpha’s merits, and I see children constantly in short-form videos, showing off their checklists of skills to master before they move on to the next grade.
Alpha is quite specific about just how much faster its students learn. If you go to the website of Alpha Anywhere, the company’s homeschool/remote learning platform, it will tell you it offers “mastery-based learning tailored to your child, built for 2x faster learning in 2 hours a day, from anywhere.” If you look for their gifted and talented program, that one advertises “3-7x faster learning.”
