The Brownsville Experiment – The Future of Education in America?

 

The Brownsville Experiment – The Future of Education in America?

"They don't tell me the answers… They just give me resources…I want to figure what stuff are in the world that I don't know… I did get a science kit for Christmas. I got a real microscope, actually." 

Alpha School Kindergartner, Sarah Schipper

Back in 2015, before all the hype about artificial intelligence, I read about a new, experimental private elementary/middle school (AltSchool, tuition $20,875) in the South of Market district in San Franciso. It was wired, connected and financed … and digitized to the max. Each child had a computer terminal connected to a parallel font of experts and tons of linkage to information on steroids. “Founded in 2013 by former Google head of personalization Max Ventilla, AltSchool has poached high level executives from Google and Uber. It’s got users---in this case, parents---applying by the thousands. It’s actually making money [attracting] Mark Zuckerberg [who] became one of its largest investors.” Wired, May 4, 2015.

It was an experiment, with fewer teachers leading classes of self-exploring teachers backed by a massive adjacent “airy and open office with vaulted ceilings, sunlight streaming onto low-slung couches, and rows of hoodie-wearing employees typing away on their computers while munching on free snacks from the kitchen. And while you can’t quite be sure, you think that might be a robot on wheels roaming about…

“AltSchool is a decidedly Bay Area experiment with an educational philosophy known as student-centered learning. The approach, which many schools have adopted, holds that kids should pursue their own interests, at their own pace. To that, however, AltSchool mixes in loads of technology to manage the chaos, and tops it all off with a staff of forward-thinking teachers set free to custom-teach to each student. The result, they fervently say, is a superior educational experience.” Wired. That adjacent room was staffed by a litany of digital-friendly experts, tracking the students in their classrooms, serving as an information resource to feed the knowledge-hungry students. Experts who knew how to answer questions, even if it meant reaching into the rising universe of Internet accessible resources.

But that was then, ancient history in today’s AI-driven world. As education gets more complicated, information more detailed and based on layered, sequential learning, as classrooms become increasingly crowded with fewer teachers, and state and local public education is facing pressures to cut taxes and reduce expenses… as the Department of Education slated for Trump/Musk demolition with pressure to make public schools increasing locally run and funded… something’s gotta give.

With a cacophony of roughly 13,000 individual school districts, some prioritizing culture wars against “woke” lessons and books or like Oklahoma’s rewriting of US history (the 2020 presidential election was “stolen”) or Louisiana’s promulgating Bible studies as a part of history classes, student performance is US public schools continue to plummet as measured by international testing. We used to be first among even developed nations; today, depending on subject matter, we are somewhere between 19th and 38th. We must do better… and we can!

Even MAGA anti-woke boss Donald Trump sees the writing on the wall, even as the federal government cuts its financial support to state public schools. “[In late April,] President Donald Trump signed an executive order to integrate AI into K-12 classrooms nationwide, aiming to cultivate tech-related expertise in future generations. The directive also establishes the White House Task Force on AI Education and requires Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon to prioritize the use of AI in discretionary grant programs for teacher training.” Joshua Rhett Miller, writing for the May 1st Newsweek.

Oddly, red state and anti-woke leader, Texas, is way ahead of that directive. It seems that in just two hours of self-directed elementary and middle school education, an AI experimental school in Brownville has produced an excited, non-boring educational curriculum that is not reliant on teachers standing in their classrooms teaching their subjects. It’s called the Alpha School, founded in 2022, and you can just look at the faces of the students (above photo) to know they are not bored.

Miller continues: “The days of dodging class or suffering from a lack of motivation appear to be a thing of the past at Alpha School, a private pre-K through eighth grade institution that utilizes personalized artificial intelligence to teach an entire day of core academic lessons in just two hours.

“The tech-savvy students then spend their afternoons working on non-academic critical life skills like public speaking, financial literacy or even how to ride a bike. Staff — known here as ‘guides’ rather than teachers — say they strive to facilitate a sense of independence into each child while overseeing a supportive, nurturing environment like any attentive teacher in any solid school district in America… Once inside, it becomes clearer that whatever is happening at this school, it's unique. In kindergarten, the students show a palpable level of excitement as 6-year-old Sarah Schipper collaborates with a dozen other classmates to solve a simple logic game. In the lesson, students deduce the correct path by jumping on colored dots to find their way across six multi-hued rows. Wide smiles, upbeat pop music and gentle suggestions of where to hop next dominate the lively room.

“‘There's a little code and we aren't able to see it,’ the bubbly kindergartener said. ‘And we have to guess it — and people can cheer for us and give us ideas of how to win.’… Sarah and her classmates encouraged each other to make bold choices at each pass but had a sense of compassion for any wrong move. One girl suggested the cohort would ‘grow from losing’ while another boy kindly proposed a more collaborative approach — along with less shouting.

“The cooperative activity serves as a springboard into Alpha's AI-powered 2 Hour Learning platform, where students use laptops for 30-minute sessions in core academic subjects, including math, English, science and social studies. The personalized approach utilizes proprietary and third-party apps and allows students to master topics up to five times faster than traditional methods, Alpha claims… Sarah, who prefers Alpha's life skills workshops that come later in the day, said she wants to be a scientist and study ‘microscopic things,’ insisting the tech-laden model will help her attain that goal while honing an unabashedly self-sufficient educational perspective.”

Whatever else is said and done, it is clear that unless there is a major upgrade to public education in this country, as the United States seems to be untethering from the rest of the world, the United States just might spiral into a second-rate power, rather than the most productive on earth. The Brownsville experiment is actually no longer an experiment. It works! We just need to fund and support that methodology with everything we can. American children have the brains to succeed; we just have to fill those brains with necessary information. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and forget about “tax cuts” as the “job creators” (a thoroughly failed theory), and let’s just restore the American dream with what we absolutely know works: the best education we can give to rising generations.