Curation: How to decide what to learn? (Part 1)

When you increase efficiency you can fight about how to divide the pie

The Freedom to Choose

The Sports Academy is an Alpha-affiliate school that uses the 2-hour learning “Timeback” platform in the morning, and spends the afternoon doing sports, sports strategy and tactics, and physical education. When it launched last year, the Sports Academy was the same size as the GT-School (where our kids go), but is now has a 4-5x larger student body (and accelerating).

The Sports Academy has found product-market fit very quickly.

The “standard” Alpha school took a little longer to find product-market fit, but it too is now rapidly expanding. In the last year they have launched twelve new Alpha campuses across the country, with more planned in the coming months. But the Sports Academy was not the only flanker-brand experiment that Alpha has launched. So far the flanker brands are:

• Sports Academy: Afternoons are focused on sports, fitness, and sport strategy and tactics with a goal of all kids getting D1 college scholarships

• GT School: The school selects for gifted and talented students and then does extra academics (2.5-3h learning), and workshops focus on academic competition. Goal is all kids will be national academic champions plus get perfect SAT scores and multiple AP classes before they start high school.

• NextGen Academy: Afternoons are spent studying and playing strategic video games

• Motessorium: Matt Bateman’s pet project to combine 2-hour learning with traditional Montessori school methods in the afternoon

• Nova Academy: Low price point version of Alpha

• Waypoint Academy: Afternoon’s are spent doing outdoor education (camping, rucking, archery, etc.)

The jury is still out on the product market fit for the other five flanker brands, but the Sports Academy is already the home run. Alpha has expressed their intention to launch 1,500 Sports Academies in the next few years (My Google skills are apparently not strong enough to find the announcement. If some finds it and shares it I will add it to the post with credit).

Why Alpha is optimistic on that outrageous number is a combination of supply and demand.

Demand for Education

Joe Liemandt’s vision for Alpha is to accelerate student learning. The 2-hour learning model allows students to learn and master ~2.5 years of traditional material every school year, plus free up half the day to do “other things”. The original marketing of 2-hour learning was “we can help you kids accelerate through traditional school!” It was 2x learning in 2-hours with a stress on the “2x learning”.

Some parents loved this. But they were the minority.

To find product market-fit Alpha pivoted. They kept the “2x learning in 2-hours” motto, but changed the focus to “only 2-hours!”.

It turned out that most parents did not care about academic acceleration, they just didn’t want their kids falling behind. They were happy with a program that allowed their kids to “do school” for two-hours to “crush academics”. Most would have been happy with 1.2x learning in 2-hours, they just did not want to worry about their kids not doing well. 2x gives them what they want with lots of cushion. But when parents at Alpha are asked what they like about the school, they generally talk about the workshops NOT the learning acceleration.

From a product-market-fit perspective the secret sauce of Alpha is not that the kids learn better, it is that they learn faster so they can get it out of the way to do “fun stuff” without the guilt.

A lot of ink has been dropped on how Alpha costs $40,000/year (or $75,000 in San Fransisco!), which makes it inaccessible for “normal” families. But a lot of that cost is NOT the learning platform — it is the cost of the flashy things the students do in the afternoon workshops. Last year the students spent a week sailing in the Caribbean! That was included in tuition! Our previous $40,000 private school we were at in Seattle charged us extra when they took the kids on a field trip to the local museum.

Joe’s initial vision for Alpha was something more similar to the GT-school model — push kids to see how far they can go. I think it is that vision, rather than economic reality, that is keeping the current GT school open. So far there are 24 kids studying at a single K-8 campus in Georgetown. There are clearly parents who want this model, but it is still unclear how big that market actually is. The last time I spoke to Joe he still had the vision of hundreds of GT-schools across the country, but clearly that is happening at some point after the expansion of the Alpha schools — and the Sports Academies.

(Right now the tuition at GT is $15,000 — the same as the “low priced” Nova Academy. I estimate salaries alone at the GT school cost ~$30,000/student)

If the demand for GT is uncertain and the demand for Alpha is considerable, the demand for Sports Academy is off the charts.

Parents love the idea of having their kids crush academics followed by 3+ hours of physical education. It is truly the “scholar-athlete” model that our society has always honored.

The open question is if the clear demand for the Sports Academy’s generalist program will carry over into more specialized programs. Is there similar demand for [academics + soccer] or [academics + tennis] or [academics + horse back riding] as there is for [academics + sports generalist].

Alpha is going to find out.

I have been told that the first Sports Academy expansion is going to be a martial arts school.

My understanding is that there is an existing karate dojo that is going to expand from a normal evening/weekend karate school into a full time K-8 program where the kids do 2-hour learning in the morning followed by karate all afternoon.

The pitch for the parents and kids is that they get an academic program that gets them through school at 2x speed, putting their kids in the top 2%, while at the same time giving their kids 5,000+ hours of karate training over nine years of elementary (the average time to earn a black belt is normally ~1000 hours over five years).

There likely is not demand for 1,000+ 2-hour karate schools. But there may be demand for 20 karate schools — and 20 soccer schools and 20 fencing schools and 20 tennis schools…

Which brings us to supply.

Supply of Teachers and Principals

I do not know the sensei at the new 2-hour learning karate school, but I expect he is likely a very good karate instructor as well as a good mentor and coach. He likely also has a following of people who work for him who are also strong in those two areas. Neither he nor his followers are likely great at teaching 5th grade science or 7th grade math or 1st grade reading. But the beauty of the 2-hour learning product is that it doesn’t need nor want traditional teachers with subject expertise. What it needs are coaches and motivators — the software has the content.

Now this karate teacher can leverage his strengths and partner with the software to help the kids learn the content.

And if the karate teacher can do that so can every exceptional sports coach across the country (at least any with an entrepreneurial bent). There are two obvious sources of supply:

1. Coaches who want to be their own bosses and open schools where they can do what they do best

2. Existing after-school sports programs who can expand to offer their own schools

Alpha doesn’t need to own any of these schools, they just need to provide the support and infrastructure. This is why they think they can expand the Sports Academies so much faster than the Alpha brand.

Where this could go

One flanker brand that I think Alpha is missing is the arts.

When you look at specialized school across the country the two most common seem to be the “STEM School / Gifted & Talented” and the “Arts school”. It seems like the Sports Academy model could also work in the arts. Just as there are many parents who would love to have their kids excel in soccer, there are also many parents who want their kids to excel in the piano or the violin. There are also programs for theater and visual arts.

I asked some senior people at Alpha why they haven’t launched and arts school yet and the answer was that so far flanker-brand expansion has been opportunistic. The latest school — the camping school, Waypoint — came about because one of the top guides at the main Alpha campus had a vision and wanted to launch the school. So they are doing it. I think the only reason there isn’t an Alpha music school is that there hasn’t been an existing guide raising their hand to volunteer to launch it — that gap is not demand, the gap is supply.

I would be shocked if one does not launch in the next few years.

And then once it does, I expect it will follow the path of the Sports Academies and expand, if not as fast as sports, faster than the core Alpha brand.

What to Learn?

The point of all this is that every sane person can agree that we should be as efficient with learning as possible. It is better to learn and retain more knowledge in less rather than more given amounts of time. The fact that schools have NOT been focused on that for generations is a real issue — something that Alpha and others are addressing.

But what happens after we have optimized learning?

Alpha is now claiming that “students learn 10x faster”, because they lear 2.6x faster in just 2-hours vs 1x speed in ~7 hours (and then they round up to 10x I suppose). But that assumes that

1. Students in normal school “learn” for seven hours (why do you count all the wasted time at normal schools, but not the “non-2 hour time” at Alpha schools?

2. Alpha students would continue to learn at 2.6x speed if they kept using Timeback for more the two hours

Justin Baeder challenged these claims:

I responded by explaining the [2.6 / 2 hours x 7 hours] source of the claim. He would rather use 5.5 hours for traditional schools (which would put Alpha’s learning speed 7.15x. But it is turning into semantics at this point I think)¹

But Justin’s overall question is one I get all the time: “If your kids really are learning at 2x or 3x, won’t they be done high school by the time they are 12 or 14? What do they do then?"

Justin asks this as if that result means the underlying claim must be impossible, but it is more often asked with confusion, like the result is a problem to be solved: “once you have learned all the things, what do you do in school?”.

Like there is a limited number of things to learn before you run out of learning in your life.

It shouldn’t take much thought to realize that students that finish the minimum high school curriculum haven’t “run out of things to learn”.

There are currently 38 AP courses. The average college student graduates from high school with eight AP credits. College admissions experts recommend twelve AP classes if you want to get into a selective college. The current record holder for most AP classes taken is Justin Zhu who graduated with 30. I expect the first GT high school graduate will break Justin’s record (assuming someone at Alpha doesn’t break it before that. Or this guy.)

It is also trivial to take college courses while still in high school.

There is no limit to learning.

What students (and everyone) are limited in is time.

That is why there seems to be a market for multiple flavors of Alpha. Once kids have passes some sort of minimum bar in academic understanding, there is a real question on how to spend the rest of their day.

What’s cool now though, is that we can have that discussion — and we can disagree, and that’s okay too! As long as we agree that learning itself is better than not learning.

For the next post I am going to go back to how all this applies to Quizbowl and History Bee. Once you have optimized how you learn, how do you decide what you learn?

Until then, keep learning,

Edward (and Everest)

1. Justin also claimed that he can see how the kids could learn math 7x faster, but that would be impossible for history. He writes, “I’ll grant that there’s room to learn twice as fast in math, but not other subjects. What, do the history teachers talk faster?” — I think readers of this publication can understand that it is possible to learn history faster than they teach it in public schools using effective tools.