Hey, y’all!
This week from Austin Scholar...
Why Alpha’s three commitments are the core of its success
How to replicate the magic of Alpha’s three commitments at home
Before we get into this week’s newsletter, I have a quick ask for you. I’m working on something new for parents, and I want it grounded in the nightly reality you’re living. So: what is the hardest part of weeknights with your kid right now? Homework, dinner, screens, the time between activities and bed… whatever it actually is. Hit reply and tell me in one sentence.
Twelve years ago, Alpha was MacKenzie Price, a lead guide (Brian), and a very small group of kids in a garage in Austin. Today there are campuses across the country, proprietary apps, expansive programs, and hundreds of guides. When people hear that arc, they assume the interesting part of the story is the scale. I think the more interesting part is what didn’t change, because that’s the whole reason any of it works. When I enrolled it was less than thirty students, then we moved to a bigger campus, then split into two campuses, then opened a location in Brownsville, then Dallas, San Francisco, Miami, and the rest is history.
The building got bigger. The number of guides went up. The cities, the tools, the programs… most of what you see when you tour an Alpha campus today is new. But the thing that never changed is the three commitments that existed before the first kid ever walked through the door:
Kids love school.
Kids learn twice as fast in two hours a day.
Kids build life skills.
That is the entire model. I know that doesn’t sound like much to support an entire school. But every other decision (campus design, hiring, schedule, currency system, even what’s for lunch) is a downstream consequence of those three commitments, and the discipline of refusing to renegotiate them is the reason Alpha works.
I’m going to walk through each commitment, share the research that says they aren’t arbitrary, and then give y’all a framework for running the same structure at home.
Where this came from
I have to start by saying that the commitments are not marketing language. Any kid at Alpha will tell you the same three lines without hesitation, because they’re a core part of the student experience.
One of the investing books I read last summer was Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. They spent years studying what separates companies that last from companies that don’t, and the finding was kind of counterintuitive: the most adaptable organizations are the ones with the most stable core ideology. 3M and Disney preserved a fixed set of values while everything else around them was free to evolve. The companies that tried to update their core values to chase whatever was trending fell apart.
Alpha understands that. The garage-to-nationwide arc looks like a growth story, but the actual story is about what we refused to let change.
Commitment 1: Kids love school
The first commitment tends to get dismissed as the soft one. Nice if you get it, but not really the point. I think that’s completely backwards, and the research agrees.
In 2000, psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci published what became one of the most cited papers in educational psychology: “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being,” in American Psychologist. Their core finding was that a kid’s intrinsic motivation to learn depends on three basic psychological needs being met at the same time: autonomy (I have some choice in what’s happening), competence (I’m getting better at something I can measure), and relatedness (someone here sees me and cares). When all three are present, engagement isn’t a struggle. When any one of them is missing, motivation degrades, often without anyone noticing why.
The hard part for traditional school is that it violates all three at once. The schedule is fixed, the pace is fixed, the content is fixed, and the adult-to-kid ratio makes real relatedness almost impossible.
Alpha has been mastering intrinsic motivation for the last twelve years. Here are some of the things that made me love Alpha back when I was in fourth grade and that are currently fostering a love of school in thousands of students:
Kids can vote at Town Hall on new rules, new traditions, and anything they want to change about the school itself (that’s autonomy).
They get specific, clear academic reports at the end of every session, and three times a year every Alpha kid takes the NWEA MAP test and gets to see their own growth, which is wildly more motivating than a letter grade (that’s competence).
And the guides’ entire job is to know your kid, motivate them, and connect them to the material (that’s relatedness).
This love-of-school commitment worked in the original Alpha School in Brian’s garage, it works at the downtown Austin campus, and it works in the new schools launching across the country, from New York to Miami.
Commitment 2: Learn 2x in two hours a day
The second commitment is the one that gets the headlines: two hours a day for academics. Kids spend roughly two hours each morning on their laptops, working through adaptive apps that meet them exactly where they are.
The portability of this commitment is the part I love most. I did the two-hour day in Brian’s garage. Later I did it in a house, then in a wedding venue Alpha rented while we waited for a new campus to open, then on a Ninja Bus while we were traveling. The environment kept changing, but the two hours held. As long as that block was protected, the rest of the day could become almost anything (see the examples in the life skills section).
That’s the point. The two hours are what makes the love-of-school commitment and the life-skills commitment possible, because they free up the time and attention everything else requires.
Commitment 3: Kids build life skills
Alpha doesn’t teach life skills by lecturing students about grit. It builds situations and projects where kids have to actually practice the things most adults wish they had practiced earlier, like public speaking, giving and receiving feedback, leading a team, and solving a problem with stakes attached.
The workshops themselves change all the time. The commitment that they happen, every day, doesn’t. When I first showed up at Alpha ten years ago, I was learning how to be an expert and how to problem-solve by building trebuchets that had to launch a grapefruit 60 feet, and I was practicing public speaking and critical thinking in a Model UN workshop. Today, Alpha students are running food trucks, training for Spartan Races, and pitching businesses.
The locations, ages, and workshops differ, but the commitment is the same.
A framework for the three commitments at home
Most families have values and goals, but if you ask a parent (or a kid) what their three non-negotiables are for how learning and growth happen in this house, most people won’t have a clean answer.
The question I want to ask is: what are the two or three things about how your kid learns and grows that you refuse to let any circumstance change? What stays true whether it’s a hard semester or an easy one? Whether your kid lands a great teacher or a terrible one? Whether it’s the first week of summer or the middle of finals?
Here are examples of what a family’s three commitments might look like (pick two or three, not all nine):
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