Wealthy parents pay $75,000 for Alpha’s two-hour AI school day. Half of its K-8 students missed the math target
About half of K-8 students at Alpha’s private campuses missed the goal of learning math twice as fast, and roughly one in five missed their reading targets, according to the Times ‘ review of the network’s data.
Key points
- Alpha School, the network of AI-driven private schools charging parents up to $75,000 a year, has won backers from Silicon Valley to the Trump administration.
- Alpha’s model is reaching public schools More than 2,600 public school students in Texas and South Carolina now use Alpha’s platform, according to company documents reviewed by the Times.
- Cofounder MacKenzie Price says the app personalizes and accelerates learning for each student, freeing the rest of the school day for workshops on skills such as public speaking and relationship building.
About a fifth of Alpha’s private school students scored at or below the 50th percentile nationally in math last fall, and only 37% of that group met the network’s 2x growth goal by winter, the Times found.
Additional details
- “I definitely think using AI well is a skill in the future, if not the skill, so it’s kind of a disservice not to have that in school,” Sarah Cone, a venture capitalist whose 8-year-old daughter attends Alpha’s New York campus, told Fortune in September.
- That is a tougher test: public schools can’t remove struggling students, the Times noted, and they lack the prize incentives Alpha uses at its private campuses.
- Guides and parents told Wired that students worked late into the night to meet the school’s goals.
- Education Secretary Linda McMahon toured Alpha’s Austin campus and called its model “the most exciting thing I’ve seen in education in a long time.” LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman have both publicly backed Price and Alpha on X.
- One parent of a 13-year-old reading at an 11th-grade level said reaching those goals came with “stress and anxiety.” Former employees told 404 Media that Alpha’s AI generated faulty lesson plans, which internal documents said sometimes did “more harm than good,” and that the company scraped other online courses without permission.
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