In today’s Diary:
AI schooling is overrated
Paid for good grades
The two-hour school day
An extra 9 years of childhood
Maintaining motivation at home
I had a proud dad moment at 5:55 am yesterday.
As my four-year-old son was waking up, before his eyes were fully open, he whispered:
“Dad, can I tell you something…
I love school.”
I hugged him tight, and then wondered: How long will that last?
If you’re like me, you remember loving school as a little kid… and hating it by high school. School squeezes the joy of learning just when kids need it most.
Of all the breakthroughs we cover at Rational Optimist Society, I’m most obsessed with AI reshaping education. I have three personal reasons to deeply care (their names are Aubrey, Ri and George).
You already know how one-on-one AI tutors can lift almost any kid to the top of the class. Alpha School in Austin is doing truly astounding things with AI learning. Its K-8 students test in the top 1% in the US. The average SAT score for Alpha 11th-graders was 1535 (out of 1600).
It’ll take years for most schools to catch up to Alpha School, if they ever do. Which means it’s up to us to spread the word:
Look at what’s possible when we apply a little innovation to schooling!
And although AI gets all the headlines, it’s not the real hero.
What if we pay kids for good grades?
Blasphemy!
A 2010 Gallup poll found just 23% of American parents supported paying kids for good grades. 26% of parents think teachers should be allowed to spank kids.
You might not like it, but Harvard professor Roland Fryer proved paying kids for results works. In one experiment, he paid kids $2 per book read and boosted their reading by 40%. In another study, kids paid to attend class were 22% more likely to show up.
I don’t need a study to know paying kids works, though. I was kicked out of high school, not my finest moment, and landed in a high school for delinquents.
But they paid me to go to school—$38 each day I showed up.
I didn’t miss one day in three years.
To quote Charlie Munger, one of my favorite investors: “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome.”
As Alpha School principal Joe Liemandt points out: “The AI designing personalized lesson plans is huge. But it’s 10% of the solution. The real secret sauce is the motivation and incentives.”
Think about school today. We take curious five-year-olds, chain them to a desk for seven hours a day, add homework, and say: Hey kid, grind this out for 13 years. If you’re really good at grinding, maybe you’ll get into a good college. Then you can grind some more.
No wonder enthusiasm plunges after kindergarten. Not at Alpha School! Alpha kids…
Love school more than going on vacation
Their words, not mine.
Every six weeks, Alpha surveys kids. The results:
93–95% say they love school.
60–65% say they’d rather go to school than vacation.
Forget money as an incentive for a second. The most powerful motivator is time. Alpha kids know: “If I focus, I get my day back.”
Alpha kids do 25 minutes each of math/reading/science/ writing, with a short recess break between each. They can finish all their academics in two hours, then go do something fun and meaningful in the afternoon. Turns out that’s the ultimate motivator.
Afternoons at Alpha are spent on “life skills.” Fifth graders ran a food truck and made $4,000 in profit. Another class managed a real Airbnb. Some afternoons are robotics labs; others are chess tournaments.
This turns school from a prison sentence into an accelerator program not just for academics, but for valuable real-life experiences.
Alpha also makes the academics fun. It’s all done through an iPad with gamified learning apps. Every day, kids see three progress rings: accuracy and mastery. Complete them and they get to move on to the fun afternoon activities.
How fun can learning apps really be? ROS friend Austen Allred’s son goes to Alpha School. He says:
Then there’s the incentive nobody dares speak of
Money.
Alpha Bucks are the school’s internal currency, which kids earn for reaching their goals. They can then save up or spend them on real things like snacks, Taylor Swift sweaters, or pizza parties.
Build a fun app to squeeze academics into two hours, add some gold at the end of the rainbow, and voilà! You have the most powerful learning tool the world has ever known.
Alpha has achieved the holy grail of education: top 1% nationally while spending just two hours learning.
And AI is merely a minor reason for its success. AI without incentives is just another failed edtech experiment. The carrot of time and money is the real multiplier.
Won’t paying kids fry their real motivation?
The evidence says the opposite. When you use incentives to build good habits, the habits tend to stick long after the rewards are gone.
When Alpha pays kids and rewards them with time back, eventually the kids don’t just work for the bucks. They work because they’ve come to see themselves as good students.
I experienced this. When I was in regular high school, child protective services would ring up my mom, wondering why I was missing so many days. That all changed when I got paid to go to school. This instilled in me the pride of showing up and never missing a day.
We all agree educating our kids is one of the most important things in the world. Yet…
School has barely changed in 200 years.
We went from steam trains to spaceships, but a classroom is still one adult talking while 25 kids sit still.
America spends $1.4 trillion on education. And bluntly, it sucks and is getting worse. Grade scores and even basic measures like reading comprehension have been trending down.
It doesn’t have to be this way!
Alpha School’s greatest achievement may be making kids love school. Imagine the awesome future we’ll build when kids are free to pursue their ambitions.
“I started studying nuclear engineering in 3rd grade.”
“Cool, I wrote my first Broadway musical when I was 10.”
The Alpha playbook you can run at your kitchen table
I know several dads who send their kids to Alpha School, and they all rave about it. But not everyone can fork out $40k/year per kid or live near one of its campuses.
But you and I are rational optimists, which means we have agency. There are ways to inject Alpha’s magic into your home. Here’s my plan to do so for my 6- and 4-year-olds, on evenings and weekends, because they go to regular school.
1. Start with the “2-1-1” ritual.
Every morning, Alpha kids start with two minutes of movement: jumping jacks, burpees, anything to get blood flowing.
Then the guide (you) gives one short motivating cue. Finally, each child sets one specific goal for the morning.
Sounds corny, but Alpha found it focuses kids and motivates them to crush their academics. It gives kids the feeling that school is something they’re stepping into, not something being done to them.
2. Introduce the big carrot: time.
Tell your kid the deal up front: “We’re going to learn for 25 minutes, then we can build something fun together.
Let them choose the “fun thing” from a curated list. Building LEGO, learning how to swim, throwing a weekend pizza party for the family. No TV - the activity must produce something positive.
3. Mint “Family Bucks.”
Print little tokens worth 10¢ each. Enlist your kids (and AI image generators) to help design the money.
My kids will earn “McBride Bucks” when they finish that day’s schoolwork. But it has to meet a threshold. Alpha kids only get paid if they answer 80%+ right.
Then let them spend or save the money how they like. Encourage delayed gratification so they can afford larger items.
4. Create “Goldilocks” lessons.
AI allows you to easily do two things that were previously very hard.
#1: Design lessons that are not too easy, not too hard. If the material is too easy, they’ll be bored. If it’s too difficult, they’ll get frustrated and quit. Tell the AI to aim for the sweet spot of challenging but doable.
#2: Wrap a lesson in something they love. Fractions through fashion for my daughter. Teach my son storytelling by having him write (with my help) an Avengers‑style story where he’s the hero.
5. Stick “achievement charts” to your fridge.
My kids are competitive. They race to see who can get out of bed and get dressed first at 5:30 am.
Pick five concrete goals per kid, tailored to their level. Stick it on the fridge. First one to finish all five wins more McBride Bucks.
This also builds their identity: “I’m the kind of person who finishes hard things.”
One last tip I learned from Synthesis founder Chrisman Frank: “Let students hold the pen. Giving them the pen puts them in control. Humans learn best by doing.”
This means letting kids hold the book while reading or typing on the keyboard when using a computer.
School doesn’t have to be like spinach, something you choke down because it’s “good for you.”
AI + incentives = kids learn 2X faster, in a third of the time, while loving school.
That’s a civilizational-level upgrade!
AI schools are still in their nascent “Tesla Roadster” phase. Cost a ton, and only a few hundred families try them.
But rational optimists know technology gets better… faster… cheaper. This is the worst AI education will ever be. The faster it spreads, the better off our kids will be.
You know the public education system will be last to adopt AI. “Posh” private schools may be even more resistant, as they’ll see AI as cheapening their brands. Their loss.
For centuries, the best education was in the hands of private tutors and gilded prep schools. Now, the tools are available to all of us.
If you’re still skeptical, tell me why in the comments.
And please, help us spread the word by clicking “Like” and “Restack” below.
— Stephen McBride
With any luck Alpha’s price will come down, and Liemandt’s stated goal is to take the model global and make it widely accessible, in modified form. The refusal of the mainstream education establishment to pay attention to the data on financial incentives for achieving process goals (mostly Roland Fryer’s work) is terrible misfeasance, borne of some weird mix of fear of change and misguided belief that it will snuff out intrinsic motivation. Great ideas in this piece to bring the “high leverage” parts of the model into one’s own home and family. I do note that any parent willing to engage as thoughtfully with his/her children’s’ education as this author is already well along toward turning out kids who love learning and achieving, regardless of specific methods…
I am a guy and an engineer. As a boy, I was lucky to be able to be a feral kid often. That gave me the gift of experiencing a physical three dimensional world. I would have loved to have had a quicker way to get to the "real larnin'" I was supposed to do to be a good citizen and an employable human. This article makes great sense to me.