What is it like to be a student in Alpha School’s high school boot camp?
This is one of the strangest accounts of what, I would call, widescale academic child abuse I have ever seen. Alpha School, naturally, is a big believer in both genAI and x.com, America's two largest fascist propaganda networks.
Numerous students report that they are currently experiencing what Alpha School calls “boot camp,” which is not something I found described anywhere on Alpha’s official website, or anywhere else. The students share that, as part of boot camp, they are required to join Twitter and obtain at least 100 “authentic” followers by early October 2026.
The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information — or "cues" — to identify words as they are reading.
It has been a constant refrain among my friends that when someone egregiously misinterprets something online, there is a real possibility that they literally do not know how to read. This is a bit of a joke, but also it's not, given the prevalence of three-cueing techniques used in American schooling. I recommend everyone read (REALLY READ) this page. They are not teaching 'reading'! It's guessing!
There are examples on this page of educational tools that tell kids to skip words that are hard! This is not teaching reading! This is teaching skimming!
Margaret Goldberg, a teacher and literacy coach in the Oakland Unified School District, remembers a moment when she realized what a problem the three-cueing approach was. She was with a first-grader named Rodney when he came to a page with a picture of a girl licking an ice cream cone and a dog licking a bone.
The text said: "My little dog likes to eat with me."
But Rodney said: "My dog likes to lick his bone."
AAAA!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't actually read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to guess. One little boy exclaimed, "I can read this book with my eyes shut!"
"Oh no," Goldberg thought. "That is not reading."