went to the alpha schools pitch by joe liemandt in london yesterday and I have a lot of thoughts. mulling through and processing and getting them in order here. this is... thoughts in progress, I don't even know how much of this is moving pieces and will settle differently once I've had longer to think about it. it's obvious that joe is an incredible entrepreneur. he knows exactly how to pitch and exactly what his potential customers care about. the metrics, student stories and persuasive angles he was presenting were obviously very well selected and I found myself convinced and nodding along to a lot of it - student enjoyment being the number one metric! half of students would prefer school to vacation! 2000 low income families in texas chose alpha schools as the place to spend their school vouchers! so obviously all of this is me taking that rhetorical polish as a prior, and trying to read between the lines and work out how I really feel about the substance. so the epistemic status here is all extremely tenuous, it's my interpretation (or mis-interpretation) on my vibes (or mis-vibes) on reading between the lines on subtext my first slight ick was it was obviously an incredibly businessy way of running a school chain. which, like, gives sleazy vibes, but the point of business is that you have to be effective, and the alpha schools expansion model sure is effective. the "founding families" playbook (pitch high-tech high-end elite school, get families who want to send their kids to high-tech high-end elite school, pick only the ones who are massive fans and committed and have lots of energy, likely elites themselves, and leverage the parents' skills and connections to launch and scale the schools in that area) is obviously extraordinarily successful. I don't hate the hustle, it obviously works and the rate of buildout of the schools has astonished me considering the general status quo bias and inertia in education. and it may in fact be the *only* way that works - getting an influential enough group of parents to push past otherwise insurmountable political obstacles (i.e. get favours from businesspeople and sweet talk the politicians from close to home). but, optics, smell, taste, ick. I don't know how it will fare against british class sensibilities. the british academic and tech elite, no matter how wealthy, mostly consider themselves "middle class" and have a more equitable and meritocratic worldview, and many view themselves as opposed to the hereditary upper class "toffs" for whom this would be more their default playbook. of course it might work for alpha to attract the upper class first and foremost - after all they are pitching at the elite private school level - but then I don't know that that will be the forward-looking, technically-minded clientele that they might be used to in their US founding families. perhaps there will be enough international tech and business families who are not so british culturally to bridge the gap - in a place like london this may work well. joe does paint a clear picture of the price-flexibility of the alpha model - the "educational curriculum" component trends towards free, it's a hygiene factor. it's necessary, but it's not what gets the kids out of bed every day. what the money pays for is what happens in the other 6 hours of the day. if you don't have money you could go to a cheaper school and do sports, or farming, where all you need is a pitch or a field. if you have money you can have trips and international projects and go build schools in africa. in a sense this was already the deal, as it were, in that when people pay for private school what they pay for is better facilities and better connections and better opportunities. but that was always... not at the forefront of things, to the middle class british mind. the status quo is that those things comprise a minority of the day and most of the day is covered by curriculum activities - essays, art projects, design and technology - that one could at least be assured are more or less alike between private and state schools. (I attended state selective, mr c attended private, and, well, we ended up in the same place at the same time in the same social class doing the same thing by undergrad) I am aware that I have an international audience here and I'm implicitly comparing against the english state education system, whereas alpha's own marketing, and their existing fans and haters, are mostly american, and are comparing against a much worse state school baseline. even the non-elite alpha schools are blatantly obviously an improvement on the modal american schools. but the english education system... while patchy, it serves most kids very well, particularly around historically well-funded london. the curriculum is decent and varied (and includes art, music, design and technology etc). there is actually well functioning standardised testing. the phonics teaching works, middle school students generally can read - the literacy crisis is nowhere near american levels. alpha's compressed, multiple-choice based american curriculum is an obvious negative here, so the intention to drag-and-drop the american system in place initially is going to be a big minus academically until they can catch up to a more holistic curriculum. all surmountable problems, with the right enthusiastic parents. and there will always be enthusiasts, of course. and the whole point of the free school and academy system is to offer choice and a pathway to innovation in education. and the part of the sales pitch that is aimed at making the parents picture the kind of school that they wish they had attended works EXTRAORDINARILY well. both mr c and I did our share of self-motivated projects as teens - and if we had had the resources and school time and coaching to pursue them properly, it would probably have legit altered our life trajectories. not having to sit through classes of materials not pitched at the right level would have been even better. and who doesn't love the promise of always being happy at school! and no homework! but the main complicated feeling I'm left with is still about the intensification of the school choice problem on the cusp of an unknown future. the vibe I got from the alpha schools crowd is... kind of an implicit belief in techno-feudalism. the elite alpha schools exist to train kids in agency, so that they will be the ones using the AIs and running the businesses and controlling the means of production. of course there will be vocational schools. there will be sports schools, and ranch schools, and the schools for high tech mechanical engineering for going to space. but those aren't "our" kids, obviously. "our" kids will be the elites. "our" kids will be the "philosopher-builders" that the founders school freshman year syllabus page proudly declares they develop. and obviously everyone knows peer effects are some of the biggest factors in kids' outcomes. if you want _your_ kids to be the philosopher-builders in the ruling class of the upcoming ai-feudalism, better get them in the room now with the other kids who are going to be the philosopher-builders in the ruling class of the upcoming ai-feudalism. and if you want your kids in with those kids, you better get yourself in the room with the other parents who are raising the kids who will be those kids. fomo fomo fomo, grasp grasp grasp. do you really want your kid going to a state school. do you really want your kid training to be nothing more than an employee. do you really want ai-serfdom for your kid. this is not meant to be a dunk, by the way, there's a truth to this, but it's an unpleasant truth and I feel unpleasant about it so I put it in unpleasant words. that was always the private school bargain - socialise your kids with elite peers. but I'd never been that interested in the traditional english private schools because that's not the kind of elite I'm interested in and not the kind of elite that's going to be relevant. but this pitch is forward-looking. as a mum I don't want serfdom for my kid. my intellectual peers, here on twitter dot com, are already alpha parents. but the outcome of alpha schools at different price points that do different activities is a social stratification of child peer groups and child outcomes from an early age, and that has been... the antithesis of what the british state education system has been driving towards for decades, and something that offends the sensibilities of lots of british parents. so there's the lingering worry that the parents who choose this in spite of that are not going to be people whose values we share. so, for now, it's one big imperfect information co-ordinating game. pick in or out, try to hit the ingroup. what kind of person do I want lil captain to be. and why do I have to choose that when she is three years old. *** I'm feeling very fortunate that I still have a couple years before lil captain has to make school choices. it gives me the option of getting involved early, but without having to commit my child to the experiment. I'm sure there are enough families who will be really enthusiastic about that, to get things started. but if the alpha project is picked up by right-minded people on the london side, who work to improve and uphold and cultivate the alpha system to british standards and british sensibilities and british values, it makes me much more optimistic about lil captain's future school choices. perhaps the best of all worlds would be that alpha schools retains its quintessentially-american dna and operates its franchise of international schools, but its success moves the overton window, such that uniquely British schools modelled after its setup and with our own AI-native education stack could come into existence - with any luck, by the time lil captain needs it.