brendan halpin

Last week, Alpha School had an informational meeting for prospective parents in Boston. If you don’t feel like clicking, Alpha School is “reinventing education’ with the help of AI, something something disruption, something something personalizaton, “crushing” academics, etc.

Now, Alpha School is a private school charging between 40k and 70k a year, so at least they’re not trying to tap into public money. Yet. More on this later.

But there are a number of HUGE red flags about this place that folks should know about. I mean, apart from the whole “The magic of AI will transform school” nonsense, which would be a red flag for many people. If you want to read what this looks like in practice, here’s a Wired article from last year. It’s kinda harrowing stuff. (And here’s an article about the article, expanding on some extremely problematic stuff that’s only mentioned in passing in the Wired article).

But even if that doesn’t convince you that Alpha School is a bad idea, dig this:

The school was co-founded (and presumably funded) by billionaire Joe Liemandt. It should by this point be axiomatic that billionaires are people of low moral character, but in case you think Liemandt is an exception, here is an article from Forbes about how Liemandt’s second career was starting a “digital sweatshop.” Yep, he made his money by firing tons of people and replacing them with low-cost overseas workers who he subjected to constant digital surveillance.

The only way you become a billionaire is by treating people like things. Achieving billionaire status indicates an empathy deficit that is most likely pathological. Such people are simply not to be trusted around other people’s children.

Note—I am not saying Liemandt is in the Epstein Files (he’s not—I checked); I’m saying that it is extremely unlikely that he is capable of viewing Alpha School students as human beings rather than as numbers on a spreadsheet, and this cannot be good for them.

But maybe you still want to pay tens of thousands of dollars for your kids to go to a school run by a probable sociopath. Well, consider this. Speaking at the info session were Liemandt and a guy named Michael Horn that the Alpha Boston website identifies only by “Harvard GSE.”

Which is technically true, but he’s an adjunct at Harvard GSE. His main career is thought leader huckster. He is the founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, which is apparently a real thing, though it’s certainly giving “Montgomery Burns Award For Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.’ Anyway, listing his only affiliation as Harvard GSE is techically true but also kind of deceptive, which is a bad way to start a relationship with parents.

In search of more red flags, I looked up Alpha School’s Form 990 to see how much they’re paying people and where their money comes from. And guess what? There isn’t one! That’s because each Alpha School is incorporated as a for-profit entity in the State of Texas.

This has several really bad implications. One is that these schools’ primary purpose is to generate a profit. So when doing what’s right by students conflicts with making a profit, students will lose every time.

The other, possibly even bigger concern, is the complete lack of transparency that a private LLC affords. Nobody outside the company can see the financials. But it’ll probably be fine! What could possibly go wrong?

Since the ed reform grift has been always primarily been about getting access to that sweet public money, it’s a little odd to me that the new grift seems to be setting up private schools that are “disruptive innovators.” But I think this is really just a long con.

Here’s how it works. Since the SAT primarily measures household income, people who can pay 40-70k per year will probably have kids who score pretty well on it. So then the private, for-profit schools can take that data and go, “Look, our disruptive AI-centered teaching leads to high SAT scores!” and credulous local politicians will presumably fall for it and start writing them checks to run public schools. Especially since none of their other data will be public. How many kids leave the school? How many are suspended? How many English Language Learners and students with disabilities does the school serve? The public cannot know the answers to these questions, so all we’ll have is smooth talking hucksters and some anecdotal evidence in the form of testimonials.

It’s kind of funny how the “data driven education” people are now deliberately obscuring their data. Presumably because they’ve figured out that their disruptive innovation doesn’t actually work very well.

Which, of course, doesn’t matter. Because these schools are in business to generate a profit. So it ultimately doesn’t matter if the product is good, as long as you can get the marks to keep lining up to buy it.