Good day, CharterFolk.
I start noting that Beijing has gone full “thou shalt” on AI instruction in all schools.
Meanwhile, there’s much more ambivalence stateside.
I just got back from keynoting in Pennsylvania. There, many districts remain in a “thou shalt not” mode.
The school that everyone is talking about these days is Alpha, which claims kids can learn twice as fast while spending only two hours a day on AI-driven skills work.
It’s an assertion bold enough to spark both New York Times …
… and Wall Street Journal articles.
Not to mention podcasts galore.
Scott Alexander wrote his long review this summer, having moved his family to the Alpha site in Austin.
It’s partly about the school, partly about the lifestyle of people who can afford $40,000-a-year private schools.
He’s generally positive, but he interrogates the hype.
Kids spend more than two hours on the platform.
It’s not really AI.
Class sizes are tiny.
Teachers are generally good.
And the “accelerated learning” claim he finds hard to deconstruct.
Most interesting, he zeroes in on incentives.
Kids who hit certain learning targets earn ski trips and even trips to Europe, all covered by tuition.
Apparently, there’s enough margin in $40K to make motivation part of the model.
In Arizona, they’re opening a campus in Prescott.
They’re also launching a virtual charter school: Unbound.
Maybe we’ll learn something about whether the Alpha approach actually works outside rarified air.
But without the ski trips and the whole in-person experience that Alpha offers everywhere else?
Maybe we won’t.
It looks likely to leave us in a place of not knowing whether Alpha really has something to offer at scale.
It’s a place, of course, that the charter school movement was born to occupy.
We spend most of our energy focused on the underserved.
Rightly so.
But that also means we take our eye off other balls.
Like how unsatisfying education is proving for nearly everyone, even those with every advantage.
Alexander’s section about Bay Area private schools – families paying top dollar for school experiences they consider mediocre at best – was as important a part of his review as anything else he wrote.
And then there’s Bullis Charter in Los Altos.
Right in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Wealthy people move to the school district for what they hear are great schools.
Then they get there and realize they aren’t that great.
So they apply to Bullis, which really is great. I’ve been there several times and always come away greatly impressed.
Over the years, Bullis has grown and grown. It thrives. It has massive waitlists. If it had enough facility, it could probably double in size again tomorrow.
Which terrifies the district.
So they go “thou shalt not,” too.
Just like LA Unified trying to close down Gabriela by taking away its building …
… Los Altos Unified is attempting to do the same to Bullis.
Unfortunately, CharterFolk, motherhood and apple pie aren’t only on the chopping block in the City of Angels.
Just up the peninsula from Los Altos, a local writer has been digging deep into school performance data in the City of ChatGPT and Claude.
Again and again, the outliers are charters.
Look at the KIPP schools and Mission Prep – way above the line.
Schools serving the most vulnerable, nailing it.
It’s our bread and butter.
But then there’s the New School, serving a more affluent population, also far above the line.
Not so long ago, San Francisco Unified – the school district serving the community that is giving birth to the global AI revolution – turned down a proposed English–Mandarin dual immersion charter school.
The juxtaposition of “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” couldn’t be more stark.
On the one hand, a potential revolution in education unleashed for those who can afford it. Tuition at the Alpha flagship in San Francisco is $75K/year.
On the other?
Being forced to live with “thou shalt not.”
It is, of course, entirely fitting that we continue to overweight our efforts toward those who have been historically underserved.
But offering better education to all families, even those with great advantages who find themselves increasingly disappointed by the options available to them?
It may be the biggest opportunity for “thou shalt” in front of us right now.
One that could result in the national charter school movement going truly Alpha.