Elementary Learning Coach, Alpha - $100,000/year USD

"I got my time back, and I still get to be passionate and work with students."

— Christie, former school principal, now Alpha Reading Specialist

Alpha is hiring.

• $100,000/year salaried, paid weekly, with day-one health, dental, and vision benefits
• 40 hours/week, five days a week, on-site at one Alpha campus, with relocation support

You can hear a miscue and name the gap behind it: the vowel team she never locked in, the blend he guesses his way around. You will use that here every day. What's harder is the moment right after. When a six-year-old is stuck in front of you, close to tears, and the right move is almost never to hand them the answer.

That's because Alpha looks nothing like the school you trained in. Students finish their entire academic core in about two hours each morning, working independently on AI-adaptive apps — no lectures, no textbooks, no pacing guide. The rest of the day is spent on life-skills workshops. The adults here are called Guides rather than teachers, and that is not a euphemism: you are not delivering content. You are making sure your students actually do the work, want to do the work, and get unstuck when the app can't do it for them.

You are with the same students from morning launch to closing: core learning, workshops, lunch, recess, check-chart time. That much contact tells you things a running record won't. By the second week, you will know which student is faking fluency – reading the page smoothly because she memorized it Monday, not because she can decode it.

When you find the gap, nothing stands between you and fixing it. No referral, no committee, no waiting for a slot to open. You pull two to four kids and run a fifteen-minute workshop built for that exact error pattern — phoneme-grapheme mapping, blending drills, decodable text, whatever it calls for — check that it transferred, and send them back to work on their own.

You are not writing plans for two dozen children at 11 pm at night. Your planning is narrow and diagnostic: who needs you tomorrow, and what will actually move them. And you hold the daily goal without quietly lowering it, because parents see weekly data and will ask you to name the gap.

Alpha is opening campuses across the country, and the bottleneck is people who can do this well. The ones who prove it help hire and train the Guides who come next and write the programs other campuses run on. Some move into a lead role coaching a team, where the judgment behind the literacy work becomes the whole job. That path is earned, not handed to you on day one.

Your resume will not decide this. If what makes you good at this has never fit neatly on paper, that is exactly the point.

Role

We recruit nationally, so job boards may display this role in nearby cities that do not have a campus. Current openings:

• AZ - Phoenix and Scottsdale
• OK - Oklahoma City and Tulsa
• TX - Dallas, Fort Worth (Keller), Plano, and The Woodlands
• UT - Park City (Salt Lake City)

Interested in a different Alpha campus? Apply anyway, name your preferred location, and we will route you to the right opening.

What You Will Be Doing

• Running short structured-literacy workshops with two to four students — diagnosing a phonics or decoding gap from running records and fluency probes, teaching a sequence you designed for it, and checking that it transferred
• Coaching students through app-based core learning: seeing who has stalled, asking the question that unsticks them, holding the daily goal
• Leading morning launch, life-skills workshops, and check-chart activities that keep six-year-olds moving
• Driving students to their weekly app goals with school currency, leaderboards, and gamification pitched at their age
• Staying with your students through lunch, recess, and closing, meeting refusal and frustration with a plan built for that particular child

What You Won’t Be Doing

• Nightly full-class lesson planning is not part of this role. Your planning is narrow and diagnostic
• Running a pull-out caseload from a quiet intervention room. Reading groups are roughly a tenth of your week and happen inside the day, not beside it
• Delivering a published program with fidelity to someone else's scope and sequence
• Writing IEPs and 504 plans, chasing testing paperwork, or sitting on curriculum committees
• Handing your students off while you take a prep block. You are with them launch to closing

Elementary Learning Coach Key Responsibilities

Get every K-3 student to their daily learning goals, and close the reading gaps that keep them from getting there on their own.

Basic Requirements

• Willing to work on-site at one of the campuses listed above, with relocation support
• At least 3 years working directly with children ages 4-9: teaching, coaching, tutoring, camps, youth programs, children's theater, or similar settings where kids showed up because of you
• At least 2 years of that experience teaching reading in grades K-3, within the last 5 years
• Completed structured-literacy training: LETRS, IMSE, Orton-Gillingham, Wilson Reading System, Fundations, UFLI, CERI, Neuhaus, SIPPS, Really Great Reading, or similar; or a master's in reading or literacy
• Bachelor's degree in any subject. A teaching certificate is not required
• Comfortable spending about 90% of your day guiding students through app-based learning, workshops, and campus routines, and 10% on reading sessions
• Willing to work with all K-3 students, not only struggling readers
• Legally authorized to work in the US without visa sponsorship

Nice-to-have Requirements

• You can keep a room of six-year-olds engaged with nothing but your energy and a good activity
• Tired children kept coming back to your after-school or summer program
• Experience with reading platforms (Amira, Lexia, i-Ready) or diagnostic assessments (DRA, DIBELS, AIMSweb)
• You can name a specific child whose decoding you fixed, and say how you did it
• You have worked in a non-traditional school model: charter, micro-school, Montessori, or hybrid

About Alpha

Join the team building school around student growth

Alpha reimagines the school day around faster learning, stronger mentorship, and more time for students to build real-world skills.

Roles with real student impact: Alpha hires teachers (guides), operators, admissions experts, school & curriculum leaders, and remote team members.

Education work that pays like it matters: Alpha offers six-figure roles for people ready to help build a radically better school experience.

A culture built for builders: Alpha is fast-moving, ambitious, and student focused. It’s for people who want to improve the system, not maintain it.

Alpha is where you can do the most meaningful work of your career.

There is so much to cover for this exciting role, and space here is limited. Hit the Apply button if you found this interesting and want to learn more. We look forward to meeting you!

Working with us

This is a full-time, W2 employee position with immediate access to benefits (https://support.crossover.com/article/7581-w2-benefits-u-s-paychex-paid-only). All roles are year-long positions. The compensation level for this role is $100,000 USD/year. The payment period is weekly. Consult www.crossover.com/help-and-faqs for more details on this topic.

Crossover Job Code: LJ-4849-US-Phoenix-ElementaryLear.002