Scott Alexander, of Slate Star Codex / Astral Codex Ten fame, ran an Everything-Except-Book Review Contest 2025 in February. The prompt: “Submit an ACX-length post reviewing something, anything, except a book.” The submissions were collected anonymously in a giant 450-page Google Doc. I don’t think the winners have been chosen yet, but there is one essay that has been making the rounds and getting shared more, and that’s Alpha School and “2-hour Learning” powered by AI, a parent’s perspective on Alpha School, a set of “AI-powered” schools in Texas and Florida.
It’s worth reading the entire essay, but I wanted to excerpt a few points I found interesting:
After twelve months I’m persuaded that Alpha is doing something remarkable—but that almost everyone, including Alpha’s own copywriting team, is describing it wrong:
- 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
…Yet the core claim survives: Since they started in October my children have been marching through and mastering material roughly three times faster than their age‑matched peers (and their own speed prior to the program).
One of the surprises doesn’t come until Part 4 of the essay:
Incentives
People REALLY don’t like the idea of incentivizing kids to learn.
Roland Fryer, who has done extensive work on what works in incentivizing students, quotes a 2010 Gallup poll that found that only 23% of American parents support the “idea of school districts paying small amount of money to students to, for example, read books, attend school or to get good grades” (76% opposed the idea with only 1% undecided).
There are not many things that 76% of Americans agree on. Only 69% of Americans believe another Civil War would be a bad thing. Only 78% agree that American independence from Britain was the right choice. People REALLY don’t like paying kids to read books.
I hope that gives you enough of a hook to read the entire essay, it was quite good and provocative to many assumptions I’ve had about education.
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