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I disagree with Alpha School's approach on some stuff but my agreement on this is very very strong and getting this right is important enough to cover for many other mistakes

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MacKenzie Price

@mackenzieprice

Jul 9

I don’t think we’ve ever had a kid whose knowledge level matched their grade level across every core subject. That’s why fixed grade levels don’t work. A kid should be allowed to do 7th grade math and 4th grade writing at the same time. x.com/turing_hamster…

4:45 PM · Jul 9, 2026

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Justin Baeder, PhD

@eduleadership

Jul 9

I disagree strongly because courses (should) mostly have specific content that ~none of the students already know, and ~all of them can benefit from, regardless of their skill level. Variations in skill level are not the problem they’re made out to be.

I don't think this makes any sense. There are skill-based prerequisites for most classes - literacy, numeracy, and some background world knowledge. It is a huge issue to try to teach an English class to kids at widely varying levels of ability to read.

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Was going to ask what your disagreements with Alpha School look like…but really would just love to read an essay on your major views of education if that exists.

Big picture: I think "kids should be learning at their actual level"is the most foundational belief I have about education. It doesn't serve kids to pass them on when they haven't mastered something or to make them tread water when they have. I believe something like 'kids are

What do you disagree with the most?

Very very little reading of real books. They use this reading app, which sounds terrible:

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Kelsey Piper

@KelseyTuoc

Jun 10

After the last time we had TeachTales discourse I made an account to try the app. My prejudice going in was that this is obviously a really terrible idea. Real books have texture, background detail, vocabulary, and emotional complexity that AI-generated on-demand fanfiction never x.com/mackenzieprice…

man. do you have any advice for arguing in favor of tracking? i know a guy for whom it isn't a sore subject but it is an article of "this will hit the disadvantaged most" faith and the obvious "meet kids where they're at" points are deemed insufficient

EdReal

@Ed_Realist

23h

Oh, lord, you're so absurd. As I responded in that thread, apart from immigrants, there are vanishingly few kids who are below average in one topic and above average in all the rest. Most kids who are top in one area are top in all, at least until high school. And there are

I signed my son up for Math Academy, and even though I expected it I've been amazed at how quickly he's learning. I nevertheless remain very leery about using AI to teach humanities.

Yeah. This is one of the chief benefits of homeschooling, but teachers can never seem to wrap their heads around it. For all that they deal with kids in groups (far better than I could, let's be clear), they never seem to understand children as individuals.

To what extent is this really plausible? When I was in school a million years ago, "Honors" math/science was basically just one grade up, and "Remedial [or whatever it was called]" was basically one grade down (though in both cases you were still with people in your grade, but

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Aristocratic Educator

@TradamWest

Jul 9

It’s cynical but this approach won’t work for political reasons: grifters and certain kinds of republicans won’t be able to spend their time bashing kids and schools for not being on grade level anymore. They’ll never let their cottage industry disappear.