Dear Alpha School: I Hope You’re Right

An open letter to the founder and principal of Alpha School

Dear MacKenzie Price and Joe Liemandt,

In 2014, after Success Academy posted another year of astonishing results on New York State tests, I wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News asking a deliberately provocative question: “Is Eva Moskowitz the Michael Jordan of education reform—or Mark McGwire? I have no idea, and you don’t either.”

It wasn’t a cheap shot. It was a statement about evidence. Extraordinary results invite two equal and opposite temptations: belief and disbelief. I try to resist both. Rather than cheer or jeer from a distance, I ended up spending nearly a year inside Success Academy and writing a book about what I learned.

I didn’t emerge a convert, but I persuaded myself that its accomplishments were mostly genuine. But more important than any conclusion was the process. Moskowitz let me in and gave me nearly unrestricted access to classrooms, teachers, principals, school leaders—even disagreements among her own staff, all of it on the record. I had a similar experience at London’s Michaela Community School. Katherine Birbalsingh handed me a bell schedule and turned me loose to sit in on any class. “Go wherever you’d like,” she said. “They’re all excellent.”

That’s admirable confidence.

Today I find myself at a similar moment with Alpha School and claims which, if true, would represent arguably the most important educational breakthroughs of my lifetime: students mastering academics in just two hours a day, learning more than twice as fast as expected, and achieving at levels comparable to or exceeding America’s most elite schools.

I want badly for this to be true, so let me be clear: this is not a “put up or shut up” challenge. Quite the opposite. I’m rooting—hard—for you to be right. American education desperately needs genuine breakthroughs. If you’ve discovered a fundamentally better way to educate children, I want researchers to validate it, educators to emulate it, and policymakers to encourage more of it. I want you to be wildly successful, even rich. But rooting for you is precisely why I’m writing: we can’t just take your word for it.

Success Academy taught me that extraordinary results sometimes really are extraordinary. It also taught me that the interesting question is never simply whether something works, it’s what is doing the work. Her schools didn’t succeed because Eva Moskowitz discovered teachers were unnecessary. They succeeded because she is obsessively attentive to curriculum, pedagogy, coaching, school culture, and execution. No shortcuts or magic bullets, simply an institutional commitment to getting hundreds of small but important things right and consistent across dozens of schools.

Nor does it matter, frankly, that its accomplishments are not (in my estimation and final analysis) universally replicable. If a charter school network dramatically improves outcomes for thousands of children, that’s an achievement worth celebrating even if every district in America can’t immediately or fully reproduce it.

My concern isn’t about Alpha’s ambition, it’s your rhetoric. It’s not that Alpha criticizes traditional schools. I’ve made a career of doing that myself. Too often you speak as though generations of educators simply failed to notice obvious solutions. That’s not only implausible, but it’s also strategically unwise.

Most serious educators know the shortcomings of conventional schooling better than anyone. Many have devoted their careers to overcoming them. They don’t need to be persuaded that the system has problems. They need convincing that you’ve found a better answer, and that it can withstand independent scrutiny. Similarly, you often speak as though the academic part of schooling is something to be optimized, compressed, or dispatched as efficiently as possible so students can get on with the more meaningful parts of their day. That strikes me as a serious misunderstanding of what many educators—and many families—value about school. Literature, history, mathematics, science, music, art, and the disciplined pursuit of knowledge are not mere hurdles to clear before children arrive at the rewarding part of their education. For many, they are the rewarding part. They are among the richest expressions of human civilization. We don’t study them simply because they’re useful. We study them because they matter and are worth knowing.

When podcast interviews deride traditional education as a “factory” model aimed at producing “compliant citizens who would listen to instruction and do as they’re told,” or confidently proclaim “every textbook, every lesson plan, every test, all of it is obsolete, because GenAI is going to be able to deliver a personalized lesson just for you,” thoughtful educators stop listening—not because they’re threatened by innovation, but because the dismissive tone suggests you see a school as a mere content-delivery system. It leaves the people most capable of validating your work wondering whether they’re being invited into an inquiry or recruited into a marketing campaign.

School is more than that. School is a cultural habit. It’s an enduring social practice that persists not because no one has thought to improve or replace it, but because generations of people have found value in gathering children together to learn alongside one another under the guidance of adults. That habit encompasses academic instruction, certainly, but also routines, relationships, responsibilities, and the gradual formation of citizens.

None of that places traditional schools above criticism. Far from it. But schools endure in their familiar form not because educators are too hidebound to innovate. They endure because many families continue to value what schools are, not merely what they teach. If Alpha has found a better way to preserve those features while dramatically improving academic learning, then it will have accomplished something genuinely extraordinary. But that case still needs to be made.

The education profession has developed antibodies, even callouses, not because we oppose innovation, but because we’ve repeatedly been told someone has finally solved schooling. Every generation seems to produce another revolution announced with unshakable certainty. Some leave behind genuinely valuable ideas. More often they leave behind a profession that has learned to distinguish promising evidence from hype.

I’ll state it bluntly: confidence attracts attention; humility attracts allies. Alpha doesn’t need to overcome skepticism about AI. It needs to overcome skepticism about triumphalism, certainty, and over-confidence. The most persuasive and effective reformers eventually stop asking people to admire their vision and start inviting them to inspect their work.

Yes, Alpha has welcomed media visits and shared more data than many educational startups ever do. You’ve released aggregate MAP results, comparisons to national norms, and analyses suggesting extraordinary academic growth. That’s a welcome start. But you’ve largely published summaries of your conclusions rather than the evidence necessary for independent researchers to evaluate them.

Your signature claim, that students learn “2.6 times faster” than expected, is now central to your public identity. Yet researchers still cannot independently reconstruct how that figure was derived or test alternative explanations. How is expected growth defined? Who are the students? Does the rapid progress come from Alpha’s program or from its appeal to already strong, motivated families who can afford $40k+ tuition? Will “two-hour learning” work in regular public or lower-cost settings, not just in Alpha’s well-funded private campuses with extra incentives and guides? These aren’t “gotcha” questions. They’re simply the questions researchers and serious analysts raise whenever claims of extraordinary results are made.

Success Academy’s remarkable performance was visible on state reading and math tests that allowed direct comparisons with district schools. Alpha operates in private education, where no comparable public benchmarks exist. That raises the evidentiary bar—not because your claims are less credible, but because they’re less easily verifiable. That said, I’m not suggesting we need randomized trials before anyone takes Alpha seriously. I’m asking for something much more modest: enough transparency that independent researchers can answer the obvious questions without relying on Alpha’s interpretation of its own data.

The purpose of transparency isn’t to silence skeptics, it’s to make skepticism productive. This is in your self-interest: every dollar you spend on marketing—podcasts, videos, and social media—asking people to trust your conclusions is a dollar spent buying belief. Every dollar spent enabling independent researchers to verify those conclusions is a dollar spent making belief unnecessary. If your model truly represents a breakthrough, independent scrutiny won’t diminish your accomplishment. It will cement it.

Even if careful evaluation ultimately shows that Alpha succeeds because of a just-so combination of families, culture, leadership, technology, incentives, and execution, that won’t diminish the accomplishment one bit. That was one of my conclusions after studying Success Academy. Its model wasn’t infinitely scalable, but for families who embraced the schools’ culture and expectations, it was transformative. That’s more than enough.

And finally—please—tone down the rhetoric. The educational innovations that endure don’t succeed by declaring teachers obsolete or schools broken. They succeed by showing, patiently and transparently, that they’ve found a better way to do the work schools have always aspired to do.

I hope that’s exactly what you’ve done. And that your results stand up to scrutiny.