Yes, they are tiny and it has to be considered experimental and unproven as far as scalability goes. They are a long way from trying to educate millions of kids.
But it will be interesting to see how far it scales up and into what demographics before it stops working and they reach their limits.
So far, it seems they've had success with in-person schools and it didn't work (yet) remotely. Motivation seems like the key factor.
Scalability is the issue, though, isn't it? Any number of esoteric pedagogical approaches have been tested, to great success, with the children of people wealthy enough to fulfill all of their scions' material needs and subsequently move onto purchasing immaterial things like "attention".
You have to figure out something you can apply kids in spite of who their parents are. If not, you have to admit that there's no such thing as a meritocracy divorced from what the parents are willing or able to provide (which opens up questions of how much children deserve to have that deficit filled, it if happens to exist in any individual case).
I don't know anything about private schools beyond reading a few articles, but I think that might be overstated. Even with the same kids and parents, it seems likely that some schools are better than others?
But it will be interesting to see how far it scales up and into what demographics before it stops working and they reach their limits.
So far, it seems they've had success with in-person schools and it didn't work (yet) remotely. Motivation seems like the key factor.