A private school that’s opening campuses from New York to California uses AI bots to teach kids their academic subjects in just two hours a day – claiming its Silicon Valley methods could shake up the future of US education.
Alpha School – a chain of private and charter schools founded in Austin, Texas in 2014 – opened its campus in downtown Manhattan’s Financial District last fall. In California, it opened schools last summer in San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Lake Forest in Orange County. There are no teachers, no homework – and tuition can run a stiff $65,000 a year.
Inside, students spend just two hours a day learning language, math, science and other key subjects like history – clicking through lessons on tablets and laptops with the help of human “guides” that roam classrooms. The rest of the day is devoted to “life skill workshops,” which can mean climbing 40-foot rock walls, assembling a piece of IKEA furniture or solving a Rubik’s Cube.
The company is led by MacKenzie Price – a 49-year-old, Stanford-educated entrepreneur who regularly churns out videos to her 1 million Instagram followers, claiming Alpha can teach students twice as fast as conventional schools.
Price speaks the language of disruption, warning that traditional schools have “poisoned” young minds. Alpha staffers, she says, strive to instill a “growth mindset” – a hustle-culture phrase often used by tech bros – as they encourage kids to set their own goals and challenges.
“Teachers aren’t going to be replaced, they’re going to be transformed, and it’s such an exciting time for them,” Price told The Post in an interview.
Some critics are wary of Alpha’s placement of screens at the center of its daily program versus conventional teachers, questioning whether it amounts to a high-tech experiment that could put kids’ mental health at risk.
Doctors and psychologists warn that overuse of technology can have damaging effects on young kids – and make teens more likely to suffer from social anxiety, low self-esteem and depression.
“I believe it’s dangerous to wipe teachers from classrooms,” said Joe Vercellino, a Detroit Teacher of the Year and founder of The Lion Heart Experience, which brings mental health programming to schools. “What I worry about is what it will take away from our human development.”
Price – who last summer schmoozed with billionaire hedge funder Bill Ackman at a Hamptons event and has appeared on LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s podcast – leans heavily into tech startup culture.
In a recent Instagram post, she wrote: “Report cards are basically useless at this point. Instead, we put students in charge of their own accountability process.”
“I don’t think there’s been a more exciting time to be a 5-year-old than there is right now,” Price told The Post.
On her Instagram account, a 10-year-old Alpha student boasts he is a successful Airbnb manager, while a teenage girl announces she has founded her own app.
Alpha is quickly growing. Its new Financial District campus opened its doors in September, just weeks after its three California campuses. There are about a dozen additional sister schools in cities like Miami, Austin, Texas; Scottsdale, Ariz.; and Charlotte, North Carolina.
In August, Ackman encouraged his nearly two million followers on X to contact Price about enrollment, calling it a “truly breakthrough innovation.”
Price and a rep for Ackman declined to comment on whether Ackman has a child enrolled at Alpha. Price said he is not an investor in Alpha and has not discussed plans to invest.
Alpha’s Austin, Texas, campus got a visit in September from Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who hailed the innovative use of AI and argued it “will be critical to … preparing students for tomorrow’s workforce.”
At Alpha schools, students can work anywhere in the building, lounging in bean bags or sitting together at long tables.
Peeks inside Alpha’s campuses also have sparked alarms – including a video on Price’s Instagram last May that showed middle-school-aged boys curled up with laptops inside a row of cramped, phone booth-like enclosures the school calls “pods”.
“We started putting these boys in pods for 2 hours every day at school,” a caption on Price’s Instagram reads.
Social media users were aghast, with one calling the images “terrifying,” saying Alpha appeared to be “isolating the students in a freaking pod while having them intersect with an AI.”
“This is almost inhuman, even if it’s for two hours a day,” the user added.
Alpha told The Post it is up to students where they want to work, and some prefer the pods because they are quieter with fewer distractions.
The school claims its K-12 students learn twice as fast at its schools and score in the top 1% to 2% on MAP testing, a nationwide measure of growth in reading and math. The school hasn’t shared student scores on state standardized tests.
Alpha said its AI algorithm enables students to succeed with highly individualized learning plans. An app spits out a unique series of questions, which they need to answer correctly to “graduate” to the next grade – meaning kids can learn at different paces in the same classroom.
“Our apps allow us to say, ‘OK, Susie actually needs to go back to second-grade math,’” said Tasha Arnold, 43, head of Alpha’s New York City school and a longtime public school teacher.
Students who get questions wrong more than three times are prompted to review past lessons or watch a video on the topic. But they can’t raise their hand to ask the teacher, since there isn’t one.
Instead, Alpha employs “guides” – many of whom have no professional training in education, instead coming from careers as sports coaches or tech founders – and pays them salaries of roughly $150,000.
“I’m not there to try to teach them fractions or capitals. I’m there to help them find ways to find answers themselves,” Liam Stanton, 34, an Alpha guide who taught at international schools in China and Colombia for a decade, told The Post.
The guides are placed in classrooms to help motivate students – but they’re not there to help with specific questions about academic material. Asked what happens when a child is truly struggling, Arnold said that’s when an “academic expert in that topic will jump on a call with you.”
Alpha claimed this happens in less than 5% of cases. When it does, guides will set up a call with a “scholar” at TimeBack – Alpha’s software development arm, which employs education experts and programmers who work on its “2 Hour Learning” model.
A list of the 31 Alpha scholars provided for the 2023-24 school year included at least 27 who live outside the US, from the Philippines to Colombia, according to Wired.
Alpha declined to comment on this list, though it said 21 of its current 31 academic coaches live outside the US.
Price has grown Alpha School with the backing of Joe Liemandt – a Stanford dropout worth $6.6 billion, according to Forbes. After enrolling his own kids at Price’s school, Liemandt joined the staff as a principal and brought on his company, Trilogy Software, to help develop Alpha’s AI-driven curriculum. Alpha has since pivoted to its own development team at TimeBack.
“We’ve been able to develop this school, my partner and I, have been able to do this so far on our own,” Price told The Post when asked about Alpha’s funding, referring to Liemandt.
While AI-driven efficiency may have some advantages, removing the in-person, human element from the core of the process could have consequences, Vercellino warned. An important part of school, he argued, is learning to ask for help from teachers – even ones you might not like – and scooting your chair over to help a fellow student with a problem.
“As I often tell families, education is not a race to condense, it’s a journey filled with relationships, self-discovery,” said Kirsten Horton, an education consultant in Raleigh, North Carolina, where an Alpha school is slated to open this fall.
“For tuition of $40,000–$75,000 a year, families should expect not just efficiency, but the richness of a full ecosystem: drama departments, sports teams, counselors and a web of human relationships that guide children into adulthood,” Horton told The Post.
“Our program is really focused on what is best for children,” Arnold said in response to such concerns. “It’s not about what’s best for teachers or teacher’s unions, it’s not about what makes parents necessarily feel nostalgic about the way they learned.”
Alpha says its guides spend at least 30 minutes of one-on-one time with each kid weekly, helping them set personal goals or discussing troubles in their personal lives. Guides are also required to pass an FBI-level background check and score 90% or higher on the CCAT, a pre-employment test that measures problem-solving abilities.
“Unlike in the traditional teaching industry, where teachers are leaving the field in droves and they’re struggling to find high-quality candidates, we’re not having this problem,” Price said.
Despite warnings from health professionals, laptop and screen use has continued to soar in schools across America, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic.
US students in grades one through 12 now spend an average of 98 minutes a day on school-issued devices during the school year – reaching a peak at two hours and 24 minutes daily in sixth grade, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Alpha pointed to this statistic repeatedly as proof that its two hours of daily screen time isn’t so outlandish.
“Our students actually get more time to connect with their peers as well as their teachers than students in a traditional school environment do,” Price told The Post.
But traditional schools spend an additional five or six hours on academics from a human teacher – while Alpha students squeeze their academic studies, like reading novels and completing math lessons, into that daily two-hour blast on tablets.
They follow a time-management system known as the Pomodoro Method: studying on the apps for 25 minutes to earn a 5-minute break, then another 25 minutes for a 15-minute break, and so on until they hit two hours.
Wade Driscoll, 19, now a student at Parsons School of Design, graduated from Alpha’s Austin campus and said his classmates used the full two hours of learning time most days.
“A lot of times I found that [we] would get really into the subject and work and work through that five-minute break,” Driscoll told The Post.
Alpha students learn language, math and science on the AI apps. Other subjects that would typically require a standalone class, like history, are folded into the reading program. Alpha said this is because the standard history curriculum takes less time to teach.
It also personalizes reading material. If a third grader is reading at an eighth-grade level, they’re “still reading about unicorns, but it’s complex vocab. If they’re fifth grade but need a lower level, it’s still age appropriate,” Arnold told The Post.
The AI algorithm can also plug in information to make material more interesting for students, so they can learn math via the sales of Taylor Swift’s latest album instead of baseball stats, for example.
When asked whether students ever read off real pages, Alpha said its kindergarten and first-grade classrooms are full of bookshelves and physical books, but they’re not part of academic requirements.
Its unusual tactics have drawn attention online, including a currency the school has developed for rewarding high test scores it calls “Alphas.” Each Alpha is worth about a quarter, but it appears they quickly stack up – redeemable for arcade-like prizes including stuffed animals or a Nintendo Switch.
This “2 Hour Learning” model is also used at the company’s other non-Alpha schools, including some virtual charter schools and NextGen Academy, a private middle school in Austin with a curriculum that includes video games like Fortnite and Rocket League.
Alpha markets itself as an alternative school for kids who struggle in traditional environments, whether they’re far more advanced than their peers or struggling to keep up.
About 25% of students across the Alpha system are on scholarships, which are funded through a combination of tuition dollars from other families and donors, the school said. While a family in Brownsville, Texas, might pay $500 a year and have the rest of the $10,000 tuition bill covered, the New York school is not yet offering aid for its $65,000 tuition.
Driscoll, the Alpha alum, said he switched to the AI school after unsuccessfully trying new school after new school.
“In public school, I felt really held back by the other students,” he told The Post. “I used to, like, tell my mom every day that I was feeling sick.”
But once he started at Alpha, “there was an immediate shift,” said Erin Driscoll, 51, Wade’s mom.
“All of a sudden he had something to work for. He could be as challenged as he needed to be.”