Recently within my alumni community there was a discussion of Founders School - a private for profit school which is a specialty school under the umbrella of Alpha School.

The deal is that at Founders school, tuition is $150,000 a year which is higher than the $30,00 to $75,500 for the other Alpha Schools but they're offering a tuition back guarantee if a student hasn't started a business that has returned one million dollars in gross profit by graduation.

Lots of red flags.

Why am I writing about this? Well, first off, Founders School is all about leveraging AI for tech startups and Alpha Schools is all about leveraging AI for "individualized learning."

I had to chuckle. It's just cybercharter and regular charter scams revisited.

Let's dive in.

To start, as one might expect, neither the founders of Alpha School nor the head of Founders School have any background in education. This just hearkens back to the Charter Schol boom under Bloomberg.

Next, their actual "model" while it's not all transparent it appears that the base model is that students spend 2 hours a day using "AI technology" for personalized learning. As best I can figure, it's using Khan academy type stuff - kids in front of screens to get the kids through the standardized requirements. The rest of the day is for whatever based on the individual school.

There's one Alpha School that labels itself as a Montessori school. Actually, that might be okay depending on what happens the rest of the day but I'm betting it would be even better without the 2 hours AI drill and kill. Then there's the sports academy, in Texas no less which smells to me of "we ain't come here to play school." They also don't hire teachers, they're all "guides."

Then there are others and Founders Academy.

In Founders Academy it's all about the startup. Given that they're expecting students to have a working business by senior year, I'm guessing arts, literature, growing up and being human aren't high on the priority list but then when educators aren't involved in designing education, what does one expect.

I guess the bottom line is will these schools succeed? In terms of standardized test scores, maybe, in fact probably. They're selective schools. As long as they can see enough parents on their quality and do the drill and kill, the kids will do well on those measures. I mean, Founders School is only looking for 20 kids for cohort 1 so I'm guessing they'll find 20 good test takers to accept.

Real well rounded education? I doubt it.

For the Founders School I'm highly skeptical of their own stated goal - the succesful businesses. What percent of each cohort has to succeed with that one million dollar business for the school to be a success? A venture fund to "succeed" it only needs maybe 5% or 10% of the companies it invests in to hit. For a school, that would be horrible. Y Combinator is considered best of breed and they get around a 10% success rate. If only 2 of those 20 kids in cohort one get that business, it would be a succeful incubator but I'd say a horrible school.

Are they really expecting to regularly outperform the best adult accelerators and incubators with high school kids? Think about it.

Why do I care about any of this? I mean, these are private schools after all.

On the one hand, why not let the rich families take the risks with these iffy experimental schools. They'll just close if they don't work and it'll only affect those rich families. Sounds good to me but it's not that simple.

Why not?

Vouchers for one. This doesn't affect Founders Academy in NY but this model could easily be used to exploit poor families in states where they've sold off public education to a voucher system.

The other is that private schools don't have to be good in order to stay open.

To start with, I looked up a few state requirements for creating and running a private school. Many states require you register with them but beyond that, not much. No specific accreditation, some basic attendence policies but not much more. For all the states I looked at, no license requirements.

Now, I know many of you will scoff at requiring certified teachers and indeed, that's a mixed bag at best, or at least it's been so since NCLB but at least they can provide for basics like a criminal background check.

So, anyone can start a private school. All they need to create is a steady stream of students and a good education isn't really a requirement.

Sure, I know many private school teachers and administrators who strive to provide the best education for their charges but that's far from universal.

Look at the Yeshiva scandal in New York City. A large number of ultra orthodox yeshivas were shown to not even be providing basic literacy and skills. Of course the politicians pushed it under the rug.

These private schools remain open even though they're doing harm to their kids. Well, not in their communities eyes but certainly if you talk to anyone who's escaped those communities.

I similarly have heard of private schools from other religions that act similarly.

Again, that's not to say that all private or in these cases religious schools do this. We all know that's not the case but let's not pretend that a private school needs to actually provide a good education to thrive financially.

So that's my alarm.

To wrap this up, one could make a case that the standardized measures we use are drek and the Alpha school model gets their population past it quickly to let them focus on what they view as important.

The thing is, what is important?

At the end of the day, it's a few hobbyists backed by a billionaire playing school.