Alex Kiser, Head of School, Alpha School Miami
Alex Kiser, head of school at Alpha School Miami, spoke to Invest: about the innovative approach that the institution is taking to educate Miami’s children. She added that the school has found a receptive audience in the growing market of the region. “We’ve been really pleased by the reception here. There has been a lot of interest from families in Miami,” she said.
What have been some of the main highlights and key milestones for Alpha in Miami over the last year?
Alpha has been in Austin, Texas, for about 10 years, and we have a proven track record of success there. When we were thinking about expanding, we were thinking about cities that have a lot of innovation going on and where people are hungry for something new and something better. Miami was really a perfect fit for that. We announced we were opening our school in April, we got our building in May, which was well past the normal cycle. A lot of people had already committed to private schools by that time. That said, we still opened on Aug. 14 with about a dozen students, and things have been great so far. We’ve been really pleased by the reception here. There has been a lot of interest from families in Miami. We’re located in South Miami, but we’ve had students come from all over; one of our students lives in South Beach. People are commuting quite a distance to come here. In general, our hunch was accurate: that Miami was hungry for innovative private schools and a better education experience for students. Being here on the ground, that has proven true.
Why do you think the Miami market has responded so positively to the school?
People seem to want what we’re able to offer. We have found some wonderful families who are aligned with our model. What we’re generally looking for is entrepreneurial families, families that know their kids deserve something better, and families who want to make sure that their kids are set up to succeed, not just academically, but to actually succeed by developing the life skills that they need. We are growing quickly. We’ve got students joining us midyear because we have rolling admissions, and our admission cycle for next year is already underway.
How does Alpha strive for excellence in education and promote leadership values among its student base?
We are a high-standards, high-performance culture. We really hold our students to high standards in every part of our day. The easiest way to think about our day is that it’s split in two. In the mornings, we have our students learn their academics through AI tutors and adaptive apps. In just two hours a day using standardized national tests, our students are learning twice as fast as the national average. And we have high standards when it comes to academics because we have a mastery-based program. What does that mean? It means that you can’t do algebra if you haven’t mastered your multiplication tables. When a student starts at Alpha, our technology and our testing can find all of the holes or knowledge gaps they have; things that they should have learned in fourth grade, but they never quite got around to learning, and maybe they were doing well enough that a teacher passed them. Here, students have the chance to fill in those holes, and then they have to demonstrate mastery. We have high standards for test taking. Students have to score 90% in order to move to another grade level in a subject.
In the afternoon, we focus on developing life skills like public speaking, entrepreneurship, teamwork, and independence. Our guides, which is what we call our version of teachers, will design and run workshops that teach life skills. To maintain a high standard there, every workshop has a test to pass. A test to pass is an objective measure that a student has mastered a certain life skill. For example, I ran a rock climbing workshop in Austin. I led our fifth and sixth-grade team there, and the workshop was focused on trust-building and communication with peers. The test to pass was that students had to actually earn their rock climbing certificate in pairs. Normally, you would be able to earn that certification at 16 or 18. Our students were 10 to 12 years old, and they were good enough at communicating and trust-building that they worked in pairs to earn that certification.
That’s an objective measurement that they’ve worked on that life skill. We might use a Harvard Business Simulation or some kind of external assessment or expert, but for every single workshop, there’s a specific objective that students have to reach to prove mastery.
Employing mastery-based learning with external and objective measures is how we hold students to high standards.
Was this approach based on anything in particular, or is it completely innovative?
There are a lot of elements of our model that might seem similar to things that have worked before, like the Finnish system of education. But honestly, the model came out of our co-founder, Mackenzie Price. She was a mom with two daughters, and her daughters were coming home saying that they were bored at school and begging to not have to go the next day. And they were going to one of the best independent schools in the city of Austin. So honestly, our model came out of MacKenzie saying, you know what, I have girls who used to love school and love learning and their love of learning has disappeared in just a number of years. She sat down and thought about what a better way of doing school could look like. How do I prepare my children to succeed and to have the life skills they actually need? Out of that came the need to learn life skills; they also need to be able to learn academics and the school should have high standards for academics. So even though there are parts of the model that echo other models, there’s no direct inspiration. It really was just a mom who wanted something better for her girls.
