How Alpha School Teaches Writing

Its writing app closely resembles The Writing Revolution, except for one key element: what students write about.

Photo by Vlad Deep on Unsplash

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Alpha School, as I discussed in a previous post, is a fast-growing network of private schools that relies on AI-powered “tutors” to deliver academic learning in just two hours a day, with the remainder of the school day devoted to “life skills workshops” that students choose. Alpha claims its students learn 2.6 times faster than average, as measured by standardized tests that track the progress of millions of students across the country.

There’s a big debate going on about Alpha School’s model, one that seems to have divided the “science of learning” community. I’m not going to rehash that debate here (see my previous post), although I will note that doubt has recently been cast on Alpha’s claim that its model can work for virtually all students, not just the ones whose parents can afford the pricey tuition.

I’m going to focus on one area of Alpha School’s model that I’ve learned more about since my last post on the topic: how Alpha teaches writing.

Alpha has developed its own instructional app, called AlphaWrite, which appears to have been used for the first time during the 2025-26 school year. At the time I wrote my previous post, I had no access to AlphaWrite, but I noticed, based on a screen visible in an Alpha promotional video, that it seemed to resemble a method of writing instruction I’m very familiar with: The Writing Revolution.¹ I’m the co-author of a book describing the method, which was created by my co-author Judith C. Hochman.

I still don’t have access to AlphaWrite, but a recent post in a Substack newsletter called Austin Scholar, written by a recent Alpha graduate, provides a detailed description. The post is a response to my own previous post about Alpha, where, in Austin Scholar’s words, I expressed “confusion around how Alpha teaches the humanities, writing included.”

An App Built on The Writing Revolution Method

I’m still confused about how Alpha teaches the humanities, but Austin Scholar is quite clear about where its approach to writing instruction comes from—and it turns out my hunch was right.

“AlphaWrite,” she explains, “is a mastery-based writing tutor built on the same evidence base as The Writing Revolution’s Hochman Method: explicit instruction from sentences to paragraphs to essays, embedded in content that matters to students.”² (I’ve added that emphasis, which I’ll come back to in a moment.)

To say the tutor is “built on the same evidence base” as the Hochman Method is an understatement. To a large extent—but with one crucial omission—AlphaWrite is a copy of the Hochman Method.

The app starts students on sentence-level activities drawn from the method and then moves on to guiding them through outlining paragraphs and essays in basically the same way that the method does.³ As the method requires, the app also gives them lots of guided practice and prompt, targeted feedback—almost certainly, as Austin Scholar suggests, more individualized practice and feedback than most teachers with classes of 25 or 30 students would be able to provide. (For a brief description of the method, see this article.)

According to Austin Scholar, the switch to AlphaWrite in some Alpha schools during the last school year produced dramatic gains. “This year,” she writes, “students who used AlphaWrite grew 3.6x in language and 3.3x in reading—compared with 1.8x and 2.2x for students at the same campuses who didn’t use it.”⁴

Personal Interests Rather than Curriculum Content

It’s possible that AlphaWrite could do a good job of teaching writing. But the app’s creators have overlooked a crucial component of the Hochman Method: it’s designed to be embedded in curriculum content. AlphaWrite, in contrast, is—as noted above—“embedded in content that matters to students.” And the model assumes that the content that “matters to students” is anything but the content of the curriculum.

Instead, AlphaWrite encourages students to write about their personal interests. “If kids only ever write five-paragraph essays about topics they don’t care about,” Austin Scholar argues, “they probably won’t be able to fall in love with writing (or, at the very least, it will be more difficult).”

She herself loves “Harry Potter, Ironman, and the beach,” so all of her writing lessons involved those topics.⁵ If students aren’t as clear as she is about their passions, AlphaWrite helpfully provides suggestions. The list, as reproduced in Austin Scholar’s post, goes like this: Fortnite, Harry Potter, Social Media, Video Games, Basketball.

Regardless of whether the topic is generated by AlphaWrite or the student, the app then provides suggestions for an angle that’s manageable as an essay topic. If a student chooses “Video Games,” AlphaWrite might suggest, among other options: “Explain how video game consoles have evolved over the decades and their impact on the gaming industry.”

Once students have “mastered the mechanics,” Austin Scholar says, they can use their new writing skills “on things that matter to them.” That appears to take place in Alpha’s afternoon life skills workshops, where, she says, they might write “social posts, scripts for videos, pitches for businesses, and even publishable articles.” Or they might write creatively in “storytelling-heavy workshops.” But not, apparently, about anything in the academic curriculum.

The Limits of Personalization

Except for the AI element and the life skills workshops, all of this should sound familiar. The twin mantras of personalization and student choice have dominated education orthodoxy for a long time. And sure, we need both of those things to some extent. But Alpha claims to be departing from education orthodoxy in ways that align with cognitive science. And encouraging students to write only about their personal interests conflicts with cognitive science.

In typical classrooms, one problem is that if students are writing about 25 different topics of their own choosing, it’s hard for teachers to give effective feedback. That’s because a teacher probably won’t have enough knowledge of each topic to recognize when students are going off the rails. Maybe that’s not a problem with an AI tutor, which can store a lot more information than a human being (although who knows if all of it is accurate).

But the other problem with personalization is that it can prevent kids from learning about things they need to know. As education writer Lisa Hansel has noted, there are two kinds of personalization. One kind gives all students “personalized pathways to mastering a well-rounded curriculum,” which could be terrific. The other, though, involves “personalized content,” which, Hansel warned over a decade ago, could be “the next flood of snake oil.” It’s that latter kind of personalization that AlphaWrite facilitates.

“If allowed to choose my own content in elementary school,” Hansel wrote, “I would have become an expert in princesses and dogs.” Instead, she got exposure to lots of content she didn’t choose, and by the time she got to high school, her interests “were as broad as [her] elementary curriculum had been.”

Writing About Curriculum Content Boosts Learning

Alpha School might respond that they are providing students with a well-rounded curriculum; it’s just in the area of writing that kids choose their own topics. I have yet to see evidence that Alpha does a good job of covering social studies and literature. But even if they do, separating writing instruction from the content of the curriculum is still problematic.

For one thing, the theory behind AlphaWrite is that if students master writing skills on topics they love, they’ll be able to transfer those skills to whatever else they want—or need—to write about. If students build a “love of writing” through AlphaWrite, Austin Scholar says, they’ll be more likely to write “their literary analysis on their own instead of with ChatGPT.”

Maybe. But will writing essays about video games and social media enable them to write “literary analysis”? Writing skills are transferable to some extent, but not entirely. Plus, in the real world, not to mention college, people do often have to write about topics they don’t already love. It’s not a bad idea to get some practice doing that.

Beyond the issue of transferability, though, writing isn’t just a set of skills. Ideally, it’s a way of learning. Studies show that when students write about texts they’ve read, or content in any subject area, it generally enhances their learning. Evidence from cognitive science suggests that’s because writing provides opportunities for retrieval practice, which enables students to access information readily in the future, and for elaboration, which can deepen comprehension.

The decisionmakers at Alpha understand that if students outsource the writing process to generative AI, they’ll miss out on the learning that writing can enable. Alpha co-founder MacKenzie Price has called chatbots “cheatbots.”⁶ But it’s equally true that if you attach the writing process to content that has nothing to do with the curriculum, as AlphaWrite does, students also miss out on a lot of learning.⁷

It may be easier to motivate students to write about things they already love, just as it’s easier to get most kids to eat ice cream than to eat vegetables. But most of us don’t feed our kids a steady diet of ice cream, because we know that’s not good for them. And sometimes, if you introduce kids to well-prepared vegetables, they actually develop a love for them.

A Strain of Anti-Intellectualism

I still haven’t visited an Alpha School, although I hope to—and I’m trying to keep an open mind until I do. But now that I know more about AlphaWrite, it seems to be in line with a troubling strain of anti-intellectualism that is baked into the Alpha ethos.

At Alpha, kids are encouraged to get through the necessary academic work with their AI-powered tutor in just two hours, so they can get “time back” for the fun stuff—as though academics itself could never be fun. The life skills workshops have nothing to do with academics, apparently on the assumption that the abilities to understand history or analyze a novel aren’t life skills. And AlphaWrite is based on the premise that kids can learn to love writing only if they write about basketball or Fortnite—not about To Kill a Mockingbird or the American Revolution.

I’m not saying we need to turn all children into intellectuals. But I’ve seen schools and classrooms where kids do get excited about academic content—and yes, excited to write about it. At the very least, educators shouldn’t be communicating the message that such a thing is unlikely or impossible.

Instead of assuming that literary and historical topics don’t “matter” to students or can’t inspire “love,” how about teaching the subjects in a way that enables students to become enthusiastic about them? From what I’ve seen, guiding kids to write about those topics, using a method like The Writing Revolution, can be a great way to do that.

1. According to a post I found online, the AI company that built AlphaWrite “based [it] on the Common Core curriculum for Alpha’s students.” That’s an odd claim, because the Common Core is (a) not a curriculum, and (b) doesn’t include any of the activities described in the post, which are all aimed at the sentence level. In fact, the Common Core writing standards say nothing about sentence-level writing skills.

2. I am referring to Austin Scholar as “she” because I communicated via email with Alpha’s PR and communications representative, who referred to Austin Scholar as “Kate.”

3. Actually, students can and should work on outlining while still learning sentence-level strategies; it’s not clear if AlphaWrite is structured to allow them do that.

4. As with all of Alpha’s claims about learning, that one is based on standardized MAP Growth tests. The MAP Language Usage test measures “growth in grammar, mechanics, and elements of writing,” according to the company’s website.

5. Austin Scholar writes as though she has actually used AlphaWrite, but it’s not clear how that’s possible if the app was adopted only this past school year, 2025-26. Austin Scholar identifies herself as a “Stanford student,” which suggests that she graduated from Alpha before AlphaWrite was implemented. But even if she graduated in 2026 and is entering Stanford this fall, her post says AlphaWrite is used by students in grades three through eight—not by high school seniors, which is what she would have been last year. Nevertheless, somehow, Austin Scholar seems to have detailed knowledge of how AlphaWrite is constructed and used.

6. Austin Scholar echoes Price’s concern. Her post is titled “AI is killing student writing. Here’s how Alpha is using AI to save it.”

7. In a post that appeared after the one I focus on here, called “Why learn to write in the age of AI?,”Austin Scholar does an excellent job of summarizing the reasons that writing boosts analytical thinking and learning. But she doesn’t connect that to the fact that by separating writing instruction from the content of the curriculum, AlphaWrite is cheating students out of a lot of potential learning.