I Pray That God Pops The Alpha Bubble
2025-06-21
The hype doesn't match the reality and everyone knows it
I need to say this while I still have the spiritual courage to tell the truth.
Alpha Schools is not the leader American education needs. The current trajectory is broken, and I can't pretend otherwise just because I'm still collecting a paycheck.
Here's what's actually happening: Joe keeps hiring mediocre people who depend entirely on this organization. These employees have real leverage—access to kids, knowledge of internal problems, the power to damage a hyped-up school's reputation. That makes the whole operation vulnerable to being held hostage by people who have nowhere else to go.
Poor hiring creates poor culture. Poor culture attracts more poor hiring. It's a death spiral disguised as growth.
The school structure itself doesn't develop the people America desperately needs—engineers, scientists, builders. Instead, it's churning out more hype men and presenters at exactly the moment we're drowning in hype men. We're solving the wrong problem.
Joe has set expectations that are impossible to meet without massive restructuring. But he won't restructure. So the gap between promise and delivery keeps widening, and everyone just hopes no one notices.
Most troubling: too many people there don't share the foundational values that make trust possible. When you're working alongside people who feel accountable to no one, political infighting becomes inevitable. Everyone justifies their poor behavior by pointing to someone else's poor behavior.
I signed an intellectual property agreement that gives Joe ownership of anything I create while employed. I can't put Dr. Alexander's work at risk by staying in a compromised situation. The opportunity to build something real with him is too important.
Staying for the salary would be cowardice. Tim knows it. I know it. God knows it.
The Alpha Schools bubble should pop because bubbles always pop eventually. Better to acknowledge reality now than let more families and kids get caught in the collapse.
Truth doesn't care about our marketing materials or our fundraising goals. It just is.
The remnant that rebuilds American education will come from somewhere else.