A Post from David Perell – March 2025.
Modern education is a travesty. Costs are rising. Outcomes are falling. Kids are bored, parents are frustrated, teachers are over-worked and under-appreciated.
Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal profiled a potential solution to our education woes. It’s the most promising one I’ve seen, and it’s called Alpha School. Their results are so good that you’re not going to believe me when I share them with you:
- Alpha students are top 1% in the USA in every class and every subject (except for one: 5th grade math, where they’re “only” in the 93rd percentile).
- Alpha kids are learning 2.5x faster than the average American student.
- They crush standardized testing too. Only 2% of Texas students score above 90% on the Texas STAAR test. Every Alpha student scores above 90% and the majority of their students are over a grade level ahead.
- Alpha has more kids who score 100% on the Texas STAAR test than one entire school district of 100,000 people (Alpha has ~250 students).
And here’s the kicker: Alpha students only spend two hours on academics per day — just two hours from K-8 and three hours in high school.
The time they save gives kids back the rest of their day to learn life skills like socialization and public speaking instead of twiddling their thumbs during soul-crushing lectures or waiting for the bell to finally ring.
Sounds too good to be true, I know. So let me break down what they’re doing differently.
For starters, the founders simply took learning science seriously. They reimagined how a school could function instead of following the standard school playbook. The research showed them that maximizing learning outcomes means building something that looks nothing like our existing school system—which has basically stayed the same for 200 years.
Specifically, here’s what they’re doing:
- Mastery learning
Knowledge is like a Jenga tower. The higher blocks depend on the stability of the lower ones. If you pull a crucial block at the bottom, like knowing your multiplication tables, the whole structure can collapse. For example, good luck doing algebra if you don’t know your multiplication tables by heart.
The problem with traditional schools is that because every student in a grade has to move at the same pace, whether they know the material or not, kids end up with holes in their knowledge. This conveyor belt approach sets them back forever. Not knowing multiplication won’t just stop you from crushing algebra. It’ll stop you from crushing statistics and calculus, and entire career paths once you’re an adult.
Mastery learning simply means that you don’t move onto the next level until you know the material from the previous one. It’s the opposite of how schools work right now. In traditional learning, time is fixed (everyone gets exactly one school year for algebra) while learning is variable (some kids get A’s, others get C’s). In mastery learning, it’s flipped: learning is fixed (everyone masters the material) while time is variable (some finish in three weeks, others in three months).
- Personalized learning plans
If you want to learn fast, you need challenges that are tailored to your skill level. If the material is too easy, you’ll be bored; if it’s too difficult, you’ll get frustrated and quit. What you need is the sweet spot of content that’s challenging but doable. It’s the Goldilocks Principle for school: not too hot, not too cold.
Learning researchers call this the Zone of Proximal Development. It’s why 1-on-1 tutoring works so well. The problem with traditional lectures is that teachers need to teach to the average, which means that most students don’t get what they need.
Visit a struggling charter school and you’ll see this in action. Ask a 6th grade teacher what they’re teaching and they’ll say: “Sixth grade material. That’s my job.” Meanwhile, half the class can barely read at a 2nd-grade level. Teachers know this, but because going back to the basics could cost them their job, they plow ahead, which leaves students behind. The cost of these perverse incentives is showing up in the declining test scores we’re seeing across America.
- Change what teachers do
Picture the typical classroom: one teacher at the front, 25 kids of wildly different abilities, and 45 minutes to get through the material before the bell rings. Meanwhile, teachers are stressed during the day and overworked at night from all the papers they have to grade and lesson plans they have to write.
And for what? For 40 years, research has shown that passive lectures are just about the worst way to learn anything. It’s an established fact. But our education system is so fossilized that it’s incapable of adapting to new knowledge and the better way of doing things that we’ve already discovered.
So what does Alpha do? They’ve transformed teachers into coaches and motivators. The apps and AI handle the information delivery and customize it for each student, leaving teachers to do what they do best (and signed up for in the first place): connect, inspire, mentor, and motivate students.
The bottleneck isn’t information anymore. It’s student motivation. You can have the world’s greatest curriculum, but if the student doesn’t give a damn, they ain’t gonna learn squat.
Everybody will call EdTech a panacea, but it’s only part of the solution. Motivation plays a far more important role, which is why the people I know at Alpha are always asking: “How can we get kids to love school?”
The Science Behind Alpha’s Approach
These strategies are inspired by Bloom’s Two-Sigma Model, which is arguably the most important education finding of the past century. When researchers combined mastery learning with 1-on-1 tutoring, 98% of the tutored students outperformed the average student from a traditional classroom. Here’s the key point: Mastery learning, paired with 1-on-1 tutoring, is better for the very best students and the very worst ones.
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1-on-1 tutoring isn’t some futuristic approach. Descartes, Feynman, and John Stuart Mill all learned through tutoring. The problem with tutoring, of course, is that it’s always been reserved for the elite. It’s too expensive and there simply aren’t enough master tutors to go around.
Enter modern technology: AI and learning apps have changed what’s possible. Every student can have a personalized learning plan now. Digital tutors never get tired or cranky, and they’ll certainly never roll their eyes and say: “Come on, kid… we’ve gone over these fractions twelve times already!” They’ll work all night with a kid who wants to memorize their fractions or learn the capitals of every country in the world. With each question, the software develops a laser-precise understanding of what concepts each kid does or doesn’t know.
Once again, that leaves the teachers to focus on the human side of learning: motivating students and helping them when they get stuck.
Science fiction author William Gibson once said: “The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” And that’s exactly what Alpha School represents: a future of education that already exists, and not some pipe dream vision of a distant tomorrow.
I know because I’ve witnessed it first-hand. While running my own adult writing program, one of our paid editors raved about a participant’s killer writing skills. “Peyton has serious talent,” she wrote. That talented writer, Peyton, was a 15-year-old Alpha student at the time who was out-writing many of the adults in the program.
I’m obviously fired up about what Alpha is doing, but if the idea of kids learning through apps and AI makes you uncomfortable, I get it. But unlike our current one-size-fits-all system that’s failing millions of kids, Alpha isn’t trying to be the universal solution to education. Their message goes something like this: “We’ve built something that works very well but looks nothing like the school you went to. We’re not trying to be conventional. We’re trying to be effective, and that means doing unconventional things. If that resonates with you, great. If not, that’s okay too.”
There’s something here. The data speaks for itself. The most untapped resource on the planet is human potential, and transforming the education system is just about the best way to unleash it.
Have a creative week!
altLearners 