Isegoria

Reading well is an endurance sport, Henrik Karlsson says:

I sometimes talk to people who want to become serious readers and so pick up Kafka’s The Trial or something like that—it is about as pleasant as running a marathon untrained. They often lose their enthusiasm for reading. You have to gradually ramp up your capacity to handle complex ideas and precise prose. I read a few hours a day, and I mostly read books that are comfortable for me to read, well within my range. It is more important to keep the reading experience easy enough that I keep going and going and going, than to always push myself to that edge. By reading within my comfort zone, I gradually build up my stamina and pick up more and more references, words, and patterns of thought, bringing more and more literature into my comfort zone. I remember reading Dostoevsky as a teenager, and I could do it, but it was a chore; these days his prose sounds like an email from a smart friend. It is thrilling when things that were beyond me become easy like that: the world cracks open. If you want to reach the deepest experiences literature provides, you have to put effort into building the stamina and conceptual understanding necessary for complex writing to become transparent to you.

Pamela Hobart provides a quick history of grade levels:

Andrew Carnegie was concerned that college professors were having to work far into their dotage, so his Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching created a pension system for them.

However, in order to participate in the Carnegie professor pension plan, colleges would be required to standardize both their admissions process and degree offerings. High schools would provide transcript information denominated in “Carnegie units,” each representing 120 hours of class spread over the academic year. Colleges would offer degrees similarly organized around 120 “credit hours,” with most courses equating to 3 credits (approximately 3 hours of class meetings plus ~6 hours of additional work per week, for a ~15-week semester).

Although secondary schools and colleges did naturally use exams to advance and graduate their students, these were not standardized like the mastery tests available today and so they could not serve the function of homogenizing admissions and degree criteria. The few parties advocating for mastery at this time were drowned out of the debate.

[…]

However, by 1938, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching had administered comprehensive exams to college students and found that units taken correlated poorly with actual educational attainment. Rather than demonstrating a smooth progression in educational attainment throughout college, a good chunk of freshmen scored at the expected senior level (and vice versa…). By the way, the stagnant score situation in high school is about the same, even today. Seat time simply doesn’t equal learning.

In a foreword to that 1938 Carnegie report, “The Student and His Knowledge,” a commentator predicted that American education would soon migrate to the next level, some system “based upon the attainments of minds thoroughly stored and competent.” Yet, 87 years later, this still hasn’t occurred.

By the end of this past school year, Daniel Buck realized that rigorous education is far less popular on the ground than many policy wonks believe:

Of course, everyone pays lip service to high academic and behavioral expectations in general. But when it comes to the particulars, many people — parents, teachers, and administrators alike, most kids, too — bristle at what rigorous education means in practice.

I noticed it first with parents. Working mostly in schools of choice, it was easy to sell prospective parents with rhetoric about academic rigor, challenging curriculum, and the like. But those nodding heads at enrollment meetings often turned to disgruntled emails as the year began. Nightly homework? Demanding tests for which students would need to study for hours? Stressful academic gauntlets? The occasional bad grade or negative disciplinary report? You won’t give full credit for late assignments even if they’re good? No thank you. Give my child straight A’s, don’t mess with my evenings and weekends, and tell me all is well.

It’s odd what “high expectations” means in mainstream education, because I don’t think anyone would expect to maximize learning by spending 9-to-5 at a typical school and then doing homework all evening.

And it’s clear why high school students and their parents want easy A’s; they’re judged against students from other schools, on the same scale, but with little regard for what constitutes an A from class to class or school to school.

After twelve months, an anonymous parent (who follows Scott Alexander) is persuaded that Alpha School is doing something remarkable — but that almost everyone, including Alpha’s own copywriting team, is describing it wrong:

It isn’t genuine two-hour learning: most kids start school at 8:30am, start working on the “two-hour platform” sometime between 9am-930am and are occupied with academics until noon-1230pm. They also blend in “surges” from time to time to squeeze in more hours on the platform.

It isn’t AI in the way we have been thinking about it since the “Attention is all you need” paper. There is no “generative AI” powered by OpenAI, Gemini or Claude in the platform the kids use – it is closer to “turbocharged spreadsheet checklist with a spaced-repetition algorithm”

It definitely isn’t teacher-free: Teachers have been rebranded “guides”, and while their workload is different than a traditional school, they are very important – and both the quantity and quality are much higher than traditional schools.

The bundle matters: it’s not just the learning platform on its own. A big part of the product’s success is how the school has set up student incentives and the culture they have built to make everything work together

Yet the core claim survives: Since they started in October my children have been marching through and mastering material roughly three times faster than their age?matched peers (and their own speed prior to the program). I am NOT convinced that an Alpha-like program would work for every child, but I expect, for roughly 30-70% of children it could radically change how fast they learn, and dramatically change their lives and potential.

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Normally in school you do your work, submit it, have it graded, and get it back some time in the future – if you are lucky after you finish a full problem set, if unlucky a week or two later. With Alpha 100% of the time you get feedback immediately after you answer each question. If you are wrong you both get to find out right away and find out what you did wrong so you won’t repeat the mistake on the next question.

[…]

When a student finishes all the lessons they need for a grade level subject they take a grade-level mastery test that covers all the material they were supposed to learn. If they get a high enough score on that test they move on to the next grade level (all of the questions they missed will still come back for later review though so they don’t move on with gaps). If they do not pass that test then they keep working on more lessons on the grade they are currently on with a focus on closing the gaps they need to pass next time.

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Most schools are set up in traditional ways, and then adjust the best they can within that structure to serve the needs of their unique students the best they can. What is impressive about the Alpha program is that is seems to be built from the ground-up around three of the most powerful learning principles:

1:1 learning: It’s not really 1:1, but in practice every kids is working on stuff at the edge of their ability, rather than the median of a group.

Spaced Repetition: The system brings back topics on a regular basis “just before” the student forgets, so it is more likely to encode in long term memory.

Mastery: In most education settings school students learn some percentage of the material and then move on. This can work for a while, but eventually students who missed something will struggle because they don’t have the tools to learn the next thing on the ladder. This is particularly noticeable in mathematics, but it can be a problem anywhere. With “mastery learning” the kids are not allowed to move on without mastering the subject. If there is something they miss, the system will bring it back again and again until they have mastered it. Liemandt in particular thinks this is a very big deal, and believes it is a significant driver of Alpha’s success (and the reason many kids are failing in traditional schools).

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People REALLY don’t like the idea of incentivizing kids to learn.

Roland Fryer, who has done extensive work on what works in incentivizing students, quotes a 2010 Gallup poll that found that only 23% of American parents support the “idea of school districts paying small amount of money to students to, for example, read books, attend school or to get good grades” (76% opposed the idea with only 1% undecided).

There are not many things that 76% of Americans agree on. Only 69% of Americans believe another Civil War would be a bad thing. Only 78% agree that American independence from Britain was the right choice. People REALLY don’t like paying kids to read books.

So what do these parents think we should do instead? Mostly they believe that kids should just be “intrinsically motivated” and school should be about inspiring that internal motivation. Their concern is that if we provide external motivation for learning it will crowd out internal motivation. They worry that when the external motivation goes away (no one is going to pay a 30-year-old to read books), there is no internal motivation to keep learning happening. In this model “education” is not about educating per se, or even about teaching habits, it is about inspiring character.

The other option is that rather than use the carrot, you could use the stick. Fryer shares another poll from 2008 where 26% of parents think grade-school teachers should be allowed to spank kids (35% in the Southern US states!). As Fryer summarizes: “The concept of paying students in school is less palatable than the concept of spanking students in school”.

I am less interested in the philosophy of “what is right” and more interested in “what works”. If bribing kids gets them to learn more while they are kids that seems good. If it causes them long term motivation issues, that seems bad. My instinct is to try and quantify both effects and then understand what the trade-off is to make a decision on what we should do (and my ingoing hypothesis is that it likely depends on the kid, so you need a big enough “n” to distinguish different types of kids).

Fryer is the leading researcher in this field, at least in the short term impact of these programs. This paper has a nice summary of his studies where he finds that providing direct monetary incentives to kids works to drive behavior if that behavior is easy for the kid to understand and execute on. When he paid kids $2 for each book they read, they read a lot more books (+40%). When he paid kids to show up to class and not be late, tardiness dropped 22% versus the control group. But when he tried targeting the end goal and paying students more for higher test scores he saw no effect.

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Combining Ericsson and Fryer we get the success equation:

Incentives → Motivation

Motivation → Time spent on deliberate practice

Time spent on deliberate practice → Mastery

Unfortunately we have an education system that doesn’t “follow the data” on how to best educate, and the general population hates the idea of incentives, so no one is pushing the education system to change in that dimension.

Alpha HAS followed the data. They have built deliberate and extensive incentive systems. But Alpha also knows what the general population thinks of incentives, so they don’t talk about it.

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My kids are gifted. They love learning. They compete in academic bees and chess tournaments and musical productions for fun. But the GT incentive system has turbo-charged their academic learning well beyond that inborn desire to learn.

We decided to join the GT school in July, but, for logistical reasons, we could not start until October. For the 3.5 months I signed the kids up to iXL – the tool that Alpha students use for 80% of their academic work – including almost all of their Language, Math and Science lessons. I wanted to get the kids used to using it over the summer before they started school.

It did not go well.

We tried getting the kids to work on it for about an hour per day, but it was a fight every time. It was the same content they would be doing at GT, but without the GT structure, and it did not work.

But once the kids started at GT, those same iXL lessons became a game for them. I remember taking the kids to the park one day after school. They asked me, “Instead of playing can you set up a hotspot so we can do a few more lessons? I want to earn more GT-Bucks!”.

Was it bad that they were being bribed to do lessons? 76% of Americans would think so. But it definitely worked.

My middle daughter – who is the most driven by money – has completed more than two full grades of school in ~20-weeks (60% of the school year), and shows no signs of slowing down.

I have not noticed any reduced interest in learning outside of school. My oldest daughter does not like the idea of incentives at all. She doesn’t need the incentives and she thinks other kids shouldn’t need to be incentivized either. But the incentives are helping with her younger siblings, and, even if they aren’t pushing her to go harder, they definitely don’t seem to be hurting her internal drive.

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Unlike Alpha I have not found any elite school who has shared the MAP improvement rate for the students at their school.

I expect these elite schools are very good for all the reasons the selective private school I sent my kids to before GT was good: They have a select group of peers, they have great teacher:student ratios, and they have incredible resources. I also expect most of these schools do NOT accelerate (I could very well be wrong here and would be happy to be corrected). If they are like the schools I am familiar with they allow their students to advance through the material at the “normal” pace, with the normal pedagogy, but, because those kids are so bright, that leaves them plenty of time for enrichment.

Older generations continue to surrender moral authority, Rob Henderson notes, to the most naive, narcissistic, impulsive, and dishonest age group:

In his appearance on Bill Maher’s podcast Club Random, physician and media personality Drew Pinsky described ongoing generational conflicts between older and younger adults: “When we were young, we didn’t want to be ‘The Man.’ It wasn’t cool to be The Man. Our generation [baby boomers] grew up not wanting to be the adult. Now college administrators refuse to be the adult because they remember when they were in college and were demonstrating against their college administrators, and they don’t want to be like them.”

I can’t help but think of “Homer Goes to College”:

As author and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist observes, “In the old days young people went to university to learn from people who were perhaps three times their age and had read an enormous amount. But nowadays they go in order to tell those older people what they should be thinking and what they should be saying.”

A social-class element may be at work here. Growing up in a dusty working-class town in California, I noticed that adults paid little attention to what children thought. Not that this is always a great thing—parents and guardians were often neglectful or totally checked out. School-bus drivers regularly told kids to shut up. Teachers had little time for kids’ interests. One teacher in one of my elementary schools in 2000 knew what Pokémon was—he didn’t pronounce it “Poe-Kee-Man”—and by default, that made him the “cool” teacher.

Many poor kids grow up with negligent parents, but many wealthy kids are overprotected by helicopter parents. Parents in this educated class care too much about what young people think.

For better or worse, the educated class largely molds the culture. I witnessed this firsthand shortly after I was honorably discharged from the U.S. Air Force and went to study as an undergraduate at Yale. I was at a breakfast with some fellow students. Our guest was a former governor and presidential candidate. He was gracious and spent most of his time answering questions from us. His answers were often variations of the same response: “We screwed up, and it’s up to you guys to fix it. I’m so happy to see how bright you all are and how sharp your questions have been because you will fix the mistakes my generation made.” This mystified me. This guy was in his sixties, with a lifetime of unique experience in leadership roles, and he was telling a bunch of 20-year-olds (though I was slightly older) that older adults were relying on them?

In the military, we thought of those senior to us as the leaders. Feedback was encouraged, and commanding officers would regularly consult lower-ranking and enlisted members to see what was working and what could be improved. But that occurred only after getting through the filter of the initial training endeavors.

I remember in the first week of basic training, our instructor declared, “I don’t want any of you [expletive] thinking you are doing anyone a favor being here. I could get rid of all you clowns and have your replacements here within the hour.” (This was 2007, well before the recruitment crisis.) My 17-year-old self heard that and thought: he’s probably right. I thought of the busloads of other ungainly young guys I saw waiting in the endless processing lines.

Then I got to college and learned that, even though any seat—at least at selective schools—can be filled immediately with another bright applicant, students seldom get expelled for showing disrespect to professors, or anyone else. In the military, the first message was: you are a peon, less than nothing, and we can easily replace you (this changes, at least to some degree, as you advance in rank). In college, the first message was: you are amazing and privileged and a future leader (though, for some, also marginalized and erased), and you will never lose your position here among the future ruling class. That feeling of whiplash will forever linger in my mind.

Older people are now reluctant to say that they have accrued some knowledge and have some wisdom to impart. Yet young people have a massive hunger for this wisdom. Part of the reason they behave so erratically, I think, is to test where the line is, and to see what knowledge older people can share to steady their anxieties.

Older adults are also reluctant to exert such authority. They might want the prestige that comes with having power, but they don’t want the responsibility of exerting it when challenged by a bunch of naive and pampered kids who have experienced zero percent of real life and its attendant hardships.

Why should older generations reclaim their authority and leadership? Because everything we know about the brain and behavior shows that they are more responsible, reflective, and stable than the young. In his classic text Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, published in 1966, the sociologist Helmut Schoeck observes: “In the United States cases of vandalism involving the children of the middle and upper middle classes are becoming more frequent…. [T]he culprits may be turning against too perfect an environment which they did not themselves help to create. They are trying to see how much grown-ups are prepared to stomach.”

In other words, young people act out to see what they can get away with.