These founders are careless and weirdly cruel. It's wildly unethical, immoral, wrong to do this to children.
"My investigation into Alpha School also reveals that the massive amounts of data the company collects on students, including videos of them, is stored in a Google Drive folder that anyone with the link—even if they’ve left the company, or if it was sent to them—could access."
>These founders are careless and weirdly cruel. It's wildly unethical, immoral, wrong to do this to children.
For lax security, or monitoring students at all? I don't think you'll find anyone opposing the former, but what's the alternative to the latter? At the end of the day, they're kids, and they need supervision to keep them on task. I think remote schooling during covid showed that kids can't really be left to their own devices. The alternatives I can think of aren't great:
1. individual human tutors: insanely expensive, out of reach for even well paid programmers, or you have to home school
2. ed tech, without the monitoring: won't work because kids get distracted, and you can't expect the parents to do that when they have jobs
3. traditional schooling, with maybe small class sizes: see the review in my other posts. Seems like even with well funded private schools, the lesson plan isn't really individualized so you're catering to the lowest common denominator
>I don't think you'll find anyone opposing the former, but what's the alternative to the latter?
If parents want to pay 65k per year to have some corporate entity track their child's every keystroke, I guess that's not my place to pry. I will call them stupid, though. This isn't 2007 anymore; we know what they can, have, and will do with such data.
> individual human tutors: insanely expensive, out of reach for even well paid programmers, or you have to home school
again, they're paying 65k for this curriculum. I'd wager public school and 600 hours of private tutoring @100/hr (as a high ball) would work out much better
>This isn't 2007 anymore; we know what they can, have, and will do with such data.
So sounds like your objections are over data governance?
>again, they're paying 65k for this curriculum. I'd wager public school and 600 hours of private tutoring @100/hr (as a high ball) would work out much better
The problem with this setup is that you still have public school eating up 6-8 hours of your kid's time per day. If you add after school tutoring afterwards that doesn't leave a lot of free time. The value prop, at least according to one of the parents who has his kids there[1] is that you get through the standard curriculum stuff in a fraction of the time, so you can spend the rest of the time on whatever your kid's interested in.
>sounds like your objections are over data governance?
Primarily, yes. Teachers don't need the kind of oversight they employ, and any reasons for that are purely financial, not "to make sure they aren't distracted".
>still have public school eating up 6-8 hours of your kid's time per day.
Yes. And many parents call that a feature. We structured school times around when parents are expected to work.
It's hard to cut those hours without cutting worker hours or otherwise structuring schools to have longer recess periods. I'm fine with either, but AI doesn't really come into play there.
>so you can spend the rest of the time on whatever your kid's interested in.
And who's watching them? Works fine with one stay at home parent. Or even a private tutor being there in person. Not so much with a remote education.
I'm not against more free time. But this addresses none of the bigger reasons this hasn't been experimented with seriously.
For conducting unethical experiments on children. For criminally negligent protection of student data.
FERPA is no joke, and a competent administration would successfully prosecute people, sending them to big-boy jail for severe violations of students' personal data.
What are the alternatives? Almost anything else. Not breaking the law. You can buy a lot of traditional schooling for $65k/yr.
"My investigation into Alpha School also reveals that the massive amounts of data the company collects on students, including videos of them, is stored in a Google Drive folder that anyone with the link—even if they’ve left the company, or if it was sent to them—could access."
Prison. People need to go to prison for this.