Austin Scholar #153: How Alpha students learn 2.5x faster than public school kids
& your educational app cheat sheet
Hey, y'all!
This week from Austin Scholar...
Austin’s Anecdote: How Alpha students learn 2.5x faster than public school kids
Your educational app cheat sheet
Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…
The moment I felt myself get sick after getting back from Sahil Bloom’s book launch event, I knew I had to quickly turn things around. So, I decided to sleep for twelve hours. Every night. All weekend. And what do you know! Come Monday morning, I felt excellent – completely revived and prepared to tackle the second half of winter quarter. Sleep, I suppose, really is healing. It works for both your physical and mental health. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but my one of my favorite emotional check-ins goes like this:
If you feel like everyone hates you, take a nap.
If you feel like you hate everyone, have a snack.
If you feel like you hate yourself, take a shower.
If you feel like everyone hates everyone, go outside.
Honestly, nothing beats going back to the basics.
Austin’s Anecdote: How Alpha students learn 2.5x faster than public school kids
Last week, after I explained the atrocious NAEP results, I showed how you can use online, adaptive, AI-powered apps to transform your kid’s education.
This week, I’m proving my argument – and I get to have a little more fun talking about the good stuff: the solutions to all of the negativity and problems I outlined last week.
The results from Alpha’s last academic year have been released, and they are absolutely outstanding. Students are learning at an unprecedented rate in just two hours per day.
In fact, Alpha students learned 2.5 times more (2.5x) than students who sit in class for six hours each day and go home to slog through homework.
2.5 times more.
In two hours.
That’s crazy.
So not only do traditional classrooms not teach your kid anything, but even if they were teaching your kid everything they need to know, the six-plus hours of academic work a day would still be wasting time.
You don’t need six hours to learn the material. You just need two.
Online apps allow kids to learn efficiently – which means they allow kids to take back their childhoods.
Now all of the skeptics might be wondering, how do we measure that 2.5x learning?
Three times per year, Alpha students take the NWEA MAP test, a nationwide test that millions of students around the country take. It allows parents to see how their child is performing via nationwide percentile ranking.
That’s how we measure that 2.5x. MAP provides data on how much the average student learns in a year (spoiler alert: it’s usually not that much). Alpha doubles that number as our definition of “learning 2x.” For example, if you look at this NWEA grid, you can see that a 5th grader goes up four points in math between fifth and sixth grade. Alpha kids will go up eight points.
(MAP also allows us to see other insane facts, like, for example, that the 50th percentile twelfth grader and the 99th percentile third grader get the same score on the NWEA MAP math test.)
And because of the outstanding results Alpha has, a lot of X trolls try to argue that Alpha is a school just for gifted and talented students. This is absolutely not true. Alpha does not reject students based on their incoming academic profile.
However, we opened a new school 6 months ago, gt.school, that’s specifically for gifted and talented students. You must test in the top tenth percentile to be accepted.
Here are their initial, absolutely incredible results (each one of these numbers is how many times above the average rate our students are learning):
Yes, that’s an average of learning five times as much as a standard school student across all four subjects.
A lot of parents know that their gifted child is being held back by the structure of standard schooling. The bar is so low, they might not even realize by how much.
While these aren't year-over-year results, our academic team believes that we will set the gt.school standard at a minimum of 3x learning and possibly higher.
Don’t let your kid be dragged down by a system that won’t teach them basic reading skills or how to understand a graph. Online apps can transform your kid’s education – you just have to unleash them.
What apps should your kid use, then?
Well, here are the apps that every Alpha student is using to learn more than twice as much as they would in a standard school in just 2 hours every day: