Zero-Sum School Reform

You should just say you don't care about most kids or most schools

Author

James Shanahan
February 26, 2026

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing and Fridays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

Author’s Note: Sorry this is going up Thursday.

Today’s post won’t be the first time I’ve written about moves among reformers and policymakers to make education more exclusive. Last year I asked what the alternative to an inclusive, welcoming classroom would be. If teachers can’t explicitly say that kids from every race and creed have a space in their classrooms, then who is the classroom for? Later on, I asked a similar question: do we care if everyone gets an education? One big tension I outlined there was that on one hand we want a more flexible pathway through school for kids who aren’t interested in selective colleges or who would struggle with advanced academics. On the other hand, when alternative pathways do become available people get upset with schools for reducing rigor, as we saw happen in California when they introduced a new math pathway. The tradeoff, of course, is kids disengaging from school in one way or another because they understand it’s a bad fit for them.

If school quality and rigor are seen as functions of how many kids fail out of advanced courses, sort of like how we view “cut” courses like organic chemistry or calculus based physics in college majors, then we do not have high expectations for most kids. Lots of kids need access to advanced coursework who can succeed! We should not be trying to lock advanced courses behind lottery admission magnet schools, in effect making access to these courses more scarce. Beyond that, I’m worried that no, we do not actually care if every kid succeeds. We need a plan for the kids who aren’t going to take AB Calc in high school. We need a plan for the kids who aren’t slammed with AP or IB courses. Average kids and below average kids also deserve an education. What is our plan for the kids who can’t?

Which brings me to today’s post. I think there’s a pretty big shift in the media, among reformers, and with some policymakers to simply leave kids behind but I really think they should just come out and say it like that so everyone can see what kind of argument they’re really making. What I also really want to point out is that this perspective relies on envisioning education as a zero-sum enterprise where any success is undergirded by necessary failures. This kind of thinking says that if some kids need advanced classes then other kids need to be excluded from them. If you want a career-tech pathway for academically average kids, then you are harming the chances of some “smart” kid to take calculus. From an even greater perspective, it views school reform as an effort to reduce public schools to poorly funded daycare centers while money and the “good” kids are shunted away using vouchers.

Zero-Sum Thinking: The Enemy of My Enemy…

When you can only think in zero-sum terms, you find you can rationalize choices that you might otherwise not entertain in a positive-sum world. Reformers may find themselves cozying up to people or movements that they personally find objectionable just because it helps them accomplish a larger goal. Education reformer Michael Petrelli wrestles with exactly this kind of choice in a recent post when he asks, Should Education Reformers Join the Resistance Against ICE? Now, I should be clear that Petrelli seems to come down on the side of yes. His titular question, though, is what troubles me because he’s channeling a kind of zero-sum thinking that says “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Because some reformers want to see public schools fail, they should stay quiet about ICE raids and how those damage public schools. Indeed, they should be happy if ICE raids drive families away from public schools, lower their scores on exams, or cause them to have spikes in absenteeism, because it would further the cause of privatization, vouchers, and choice. (Again, this isn’t Petrelli’s opinion, he’s just pointing out that some reformers would rather keep quiet than say anything in support of public schools.)

Lest you think I’m some kind of woke-scold out to badger people into speaking publicly at potentially great cost to themselves, that is not my point. Indeed, I recently wrote a post to that effect noting that public schools are not sites of resistance. I’m not saying that Petrelli or education reformers more generally are obliged to take a stand, though I’d imagine the cost of them doing so is far less than a public school teacher in Texas. Rather, I am here to interrogate the reasoning that says it’s good for bad things to happen to public schools because it furthers the cause of school reform. It’s good for bad things to happen to public school students because it furthers the cause of school reform. And, as Kelsey Piper recently noted, bad things are indeed happening to public schools and to their students:

All across the country, kids are staying home because of immigration enforcement raids. In California’s Central Valley, raids coincided with a 22% increase in daily student absences. Minnesota saw widespread reports of students missing school in the aftermath of the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. One study looking at administrative records in Florida even found that immigration enforcement has “reduced test scores for both U.S.-born and foreign-born Spanish-speaking students.”

Petrelli includes an email from a Minneapolis school reformer to provide some additional specific local context (and weigh in on the Yes side):

I cannot fully describe how terrified many of the families and staff of color are at all of these schools. The vast majority are U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, or legally entered the country through the asylum process, but the many credible reports and rampant rumors of federal agents detaining immigrants or people of color irrespective of (or without even requesting) identification has essentially trapped them in their homes.

I’ve heard multiple first-hand accounts from school leaders of their schools being frequently surveilled by federal agents, and of parents who have been taken as they arrive to pick up their children, staff taken in school parking lots, and students taken at bus stops. As a result, attendance rates have dropped dramatically (to as low as 35 percent) and all of these schools must now try to provide “remote learning” to many students and protect their staff who are unable to come to work.

If you haven’t heard about the above instances, the reason is that these schools are desperate to avoid publicity for fear that it will make them a target for federal agents, social media harassment, and hostile individuals taking video of their staff and students. (A trusted reporter I’ve known for two decades documents many examples in this January 20 article, but the reality is even worse than she describes.)

The only way you look at these things as a positive is if you do not believe in the idea that schools should serve all children, especially those targeted by ICE. The only way you think these raids have utility to you, as a reformer, is if you think that every penny spent, every seat filled, and every teacher employed by public schools comes at a cost to private schools. This lack of moral imagination flourishes when you see education as a zero-sum enterprise.

Zero-Sum Thinking: Less Academics, More Test Prep

Math Teacher Michael Pershan made some great points about Alpha School in a recent post. He argues the school is “built different” and that we should pay more attention to how they have a fundamentally different view of school and learning than high-prestige private schools or public schools. Pershan focuses in on the schools’ use of Timeback and the logical extension of that concept.

Alpha and Dylan agree that these apps aren’t the “secret sauce”—the key is Alpha’s motivational scheme, which monitors behavior and incentivizes students to hit their goals on the apps, and especially their new app “Timeback,” which orchestrates this learning.

Joe Liemandt, the software billionaire behind Alpha, is incredibly enthusiastic about Timeback. “The single best product I’ve ever built, in four decades, by far,” he says. The premise is literally that, thanks to the efficiency of the learning and their own focused efforts with personalized learning, kids get their time back. Time back for what? For biking, jogging, petting a horse, etc.

But listen, all I want to do is state the obvious: Alpha is not trying to provide the best, most ambitious math or ELA education possible according to conventional understandings of that term. If they were, they’d keep studying ELA/math in the afternoon. Instead, their goal is to minimize the time spent on core academics while maximizing skills.

This is unusual! This is not what most schools are trying to do!

The implication of Timeback (as well as its centrality to the whole Alpha School theory of learning) is that the actual school part of school is mostly unnecessary. Indeed, what they appear to be doing with that 2-hour academic window is almost exclusively test-prep.

Alpha claims that their students are making extraordinary progress on NWEA’s MAP exam. This is not a takedown, I’m not going to evaluate those claims, but here’s the thing—if they are making incredible growth on MAP, that might make sense, because most fancy schools aren’t trying to do that! Most schools, once students clear a certain threshold, try to expand out beyond basic skills. They’ll do a poetry unit. They’ll have kids write their own myths. A librarian will help them find a book that they might fall in love with. Alpha is unusually ambitious in one sense and unusually unambitious in another. They want to focus on skills as measured by MAP. That is of course their right—it’s certainly interesting—but it should also color our understanding of their results.

He goes on,

Most schools don’t do this! We instead tell kids that history is a way of understanding ourselves and others. Math, we say, can be an absolute joy, full of logical surprises. We tell kids that a good story can open up your heart and mind.

Alpha doesn’t. They aim to streamline and focus on the essentials for skill mastery. Maybe they are showing you can learn to comprehend challenging texts without reading books. Maybe a math education composed of examples and (mostly) multiple choice questions is, in reality, all you need to ace the SAT.

If it turns out they’re succeeding at this, it’s because they’re trying.

My comment here is that Alpha is engaged in zero-sum reasoning about school. They are perhaps a little bit right — we all only have so many hours in a day, in a life, time is not fungible. Yet, I think the tradeoff they’re making isn’t just about time, it’s about depth. Simply put, Alpha wants most of the academic learning kids do to be superficial and highly targeted at test outcomes. (Outcomes that are also conveniently a great source of PR and headlines for Alpha.) They want this because the rest of the school day is for learning “real” things like entrepreneurship. Going deep into core academic subjects would mean that Alpha’s students would not pursue grit or entrepreneurship or bike riding. It’s zero-sum, so crank up the test prep and minimize the academic learning.

And, look, it’s a private school. They can do whatever they want and if parents want to pay $45,000 a year for it, that’s their right (I, of course, don’t think we need public money spent on private schools). As an aside, this also makes it really weird when people argue Alpha is revolutionizing education and that all schools should be doing what Alpha does. They should be clear that they want less academic rigor, fewer hours spent in the classroom, and more time on non-academic extracurriculars (maybe that’s not entirely a bad idea).

Consider, though, a positive-sum view of education. What if academic learning helped you develop grit or become a better entrepreneur? What if an education with depth, that looked beyond testable skills, held benefits to your health and well being? What if it benefited society for kids to learn civics and history? When you only see learning as zero-sum, you only see more and more to not learn. And it’s not just Alpha school! Advanced Placement courses exist in order to help kids not learn subjects in college. High Point University is attracting “half of Wall St.” because they have a similar model to Alpha, where much of the focus is off academics and onto “soft skills”. If you only see these as tradeoffs rather than complimentary, you’ll only see things to cut.

Are You A Zero-Sum or Positive Sum Reformer?

At this point I really have to wonder if we’re not seeing school reform split into two camps, one that only sees schooling as a zero-sum game and one that sees it as positive-sum.

The zero-sum camp would look a bit like this:

  • Maximize exclusionary policies such as school choice, lotteries, and vouchers. Exclusivity means quality.

  • Lock advanced academics behind exclusive schools or rigid academic pathways. Exclusivity means rigor.

  • OR minimize core academics in favor of test prep and maximize soft skills.

  • Tacit support for policies that damage public schools or harm children who attend public schools as a means to promote alternatives.

  • A belief that only some kids are educable, and only some of those will achieve at high enough levels for an education to be worth delivering.

  • A belief that exclusionary policies and rigid pathways selects for the high achievers.

  • A belief that traditional public schools which accept all children cannot provide a quality education.

Meanwhile the positive-sum camp might be more like this:

  • Maximizing inclusive policies, such as enrolling all children regardless of wealth, race, creed, or ability. Inclusivity means quality.

  • Increasing access to advanced academics at all schools and offering flexible pathways for kids to pursue career and technical courses or get work experience. Inclusivity means rigor.

  • Tacit opposition to policies that damage public schools or harm children attending public schools.

  • A belief that all children are educable and worth educating even if they do not all achieve at high levels.

  • A belief that flexible pathways and inclusion allow for more kids to take more rigorous courses.

  • A belief that traditional public schools can provide a quality education.

When I look at, say, Kelsey Piper’s writing about the Mississippi Miracle, I think I’m reading someone who is fundamentally positive-sum about education. She may not even personally love public schools or send her kids there, but she believes that the right mix of policies, training, curriculum, and instruction can produce gains in reading and math for most children in public schools. Whatever disagreements everyone may have about the Mississippi Miracle or phonics, or retention, or standardiztion are secondary to the positive-cum view that public schools can get better and kids can learn better.

On the other hand, I look at someone like Chad Aldeman who is, I think, a very zero-sum thinker about education. Even when he pens an entire post arguing for Abundance in Education, Aldeman can’t help but call for more exclusivity and scarcity because scarcity is what makes something valuable to someone like Aldeman. The only way forward is to expand anything other than traditional public schools because, for Aldeman, a school is only good if it’s got a wait-list. A school that enrolls every student it’s zoned for can’t be good because it doesn’t exclude anyone. Sure, he might get more seats at charter schools in Massachusetts or more seats at a magnet school in Virginia but these are ultimately limited seats for a limited number of kids. The opportunities they provide are simply not available to everyone. But, if you’re zero-sum, that’s the point, isn’t it? It's a short jog from there to quietly hoping ICE raids further damage public schools.

Looking ahead, I think other connection I’d like to write about next week is the connection between zero-sum thinking in education and the public’s revolt against technocratic schooling in favor of majoritarian practices.

Thanks for reading!