Dear Alpha School: I Hope You’re Right | American Enterprise Institute - AEI

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Dear Alpha School: I Hope You’re Right

Robert Pondiscio

by Robert Pondiscio

Senior Fellow

July 16, 2026

Commentary | The Next 30 Years

Education

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Dear MacKenzie Price and Joe Liemandt,

In 2014, after Success Academy posted another year of astonishing results on New York State tests, I wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News asking a deliberately provocative question: “Is Eva Moskowitz the Michael Jordan of education reform—or Mark McGwire? I have no idea, and you don’t either.”

It wasn’t a cheap shot. It was a statement about evidence. Extraordinary results invite two equal and opposite temptations: belief and disbelief. I try to resist both. Rather than cheer or jeer from a distance, I ended up spending nearly a year inside Success Academy and writing a book about what I learned.

I didn’t emerge a convert, but I persuaded myself that its accomplishments were mostly genuine. But more important than any conclusion was the process. Moskowitz let me in and gave me nearly unrestricted access to classrooms, teachers, principals, school leaders—even disagreements among her own staff, all of it on the record. I had a similar experience at London’s Michaela Community School. Katherine Birbalsingh handed me a bell schedule and turned me loose to sit in on any class. “Go wherever you’d like,” she said. “They’re all excellent.”

That’s admirable confidence.

Today I find myself at a similar moment with Alpha School and claims which, if true, would represent arguably the most important educational breakthroughs of my lifetime: students mastering academics in just two hours a day, learning more than twice as fast as expected, and achieving at levels comparable to or exceeding America’s most elite schools.

I want badly for this to be true, so let me be clear: this is not a “put up or shut up” challenge. Quite the opposite. I’m rooting—hard—for you to be right. American education desperately needs genuine breakthroughs. If you’ve discovered a fundamentally better way to educate children, I want researchers to validate it, educators to emulate it, and policymakers to encourage more of it. I want you to be wildly successful, even rich. But rooting for you is precisely why I’m writing: we can’t just take your word for it.

Success Academy taught me that extraordinary results sometimes really are extraordinary. It also taught me that the interesting question is never simply whether something works, it’s what is doing the work. Her schools didn’t succeed because Eva Moskowitz discovered teachers were unnecessary. They succeeded because she is obsessively attentive to curriculum, pedagogy, coaching, school culture, and execution. No shortcuts or magic bullets, simply an institutional commitment to getting hundreds of small but important things right and consistent across dozens of schools.

Nor does it matter, frankly, that its accomplishments are not (in my estimation and final analysis) universally replicable. If a charter school network dramatically improves outcomes for thousands of children, that’s an achievement worth celebrating even if every district in America can’t immediately or fully reproduce it.

My concern isn’t about Alpha’s ambition, it’s your rhetoric. It’s not that Alpha criticizes traditional schools. I’ve made a career of doing that myself. Too often you speak as though generations of educators simply failed to notice obvious solutions. That’s not only implausible, but it’s also strategically unwise.

Most serious educators know the shortcomings of conventional schooling better than anyone. Many have devoted their careers to overcoming them. They don’t need to be persuaded that the system has problems. They need convincing that you’ve found a better answer, and that it can withstand independent scrutiny. Similarly, you often speak as though the academic part of schooling is something to be optimized, compressed, or dispatched as efficiently as possible so students can get on with the more meaningful parts of their day. That strikes me as a serious misunderstanding of what many educators—and many families—value about school. Literature, history, mathematics, science, music, art, and the disciplined pursuit of knowledge are not mere hurdles to clear before children arrive at the rewarding part of their education. For many, they are the rewarding part. They are among the richest expressions of human civilization. We don’t study them simply because they’re useful. We study them because they matter and are worth knowing.

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