I was recently walking around Austin, Texas. And a block from the new W Hotel, I passed Alpha School, housed in what looked like a tech office. Outside was a sign reading “Kids crush academics in two hours, build life skills, and thrive,” under a big photo of the founder.
I had heard of Alpha School, a private school billed as built on the latest AI technology and learning science and requiring no teachers. I chuckled and forgot about it. Then I saw the storefront and a braggadocious video pitch, and it struck a nerve. Disturbed enough to wonder whether I was just being a judgy Luddite, I went looking.
I’ve been around the education innovation block a few times, having started my teaching career in Silicon Valley in the late 1980s. I was one of the first teachers to pilot the Apple Classroom of Tomorrow when we thought HyperCard (an early stab at hyperlinked media) and laser discs could transform high school classrooms (not so much). I founded and ran the first Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound Charter School and helped support one of the first Edison Schools.
While I’m a natural skeptic about “revolutionary” school designs, I do think we need to rethink most of the traditional models of schooling with a teacher standing in front of a group of 20–30 kids.
As I read more about Alpha School’s design and its founder, MacKenzie Price, I was struck by how bizarrely similar it seemed to Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes’s Silicon Valley start-up, which claimed that with just a small finger prick, its sleek, Apple-like machine could describe everything needed to understand a person’s health. Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years for fraud and is now serving time in a federal prison in Texas.
Alpha School claims it needs only two hours of instructional time a day and no teacher, and that it does a better job of preparing students than any other public or private school. Alpha has “guides,” reportedly paid at least $100,000, who are not required to hold a teaching credential. By one account, only about a third of them hold degrees in education. I’ll admit that a model that pays unlicensed adults more than most principals earn and asks them to supervise rather than teach could be an interesting school business model if it actually works. But with the publicly available information, it’s impossible to tell.
Alpha’s boot camp for new high school students is an intensive eight-week course to orient them to the school and program. According to Benjamin Riley’s recent description of the boot camp, Alpha students described an astonishing list of accomplishments on the school’s X feed: scoring better than “most Harvard MBAs” at Harvard’s own Everest leadership simulation, posting a “98th Percentile Nationally on my SAT…As A Freshman,” and teaching themselves AP coursework in five days.
And then there is the heart monitor. Riley reports that students are wired up while watching recorded video of their own parents critiquing them, and must hold their heart rate within 10 percent of baseline to pass. Sounds like something from the dystopian movie Gattaca if it had a high school classroom scene.
Alpha School’s website makes the remarkable claim that its students are in the 99th percentile. It says most students consistently outperform national averages and that, with two hours of AI-supported instruction, they make, on average, 2.6 times the growth on MAP assessments compared to their peers. And it doesn’t end with academics: Elementary students are not only taught to swim by a former Navy SEAL but also to save a struggling teammate, persevere, and keep calm during a stressful “rescue.”
Like most snake oil pitches, there is a ring of truth and some things to like in the Alpha School program. Kids should get out into the world and tackle real challenges. They should learn to solve problems in the field with their peers and be pushed—while supported—to overcome obstacles they did not think possible. (I’m a big believer in programs like Outward Bound, and there is a large body of research showing these programs can be life changing for many students.)
Two things are worth noting about the school’s claims. The first is the simple math on learning time. As the education neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath has pointed out, if learning could really be accelerated at the rates Alpha claims, students would finish all of K–12 by the second year of elementary school. The second, and the bigger one, is the numbers themselves. The website is covered in figures suggesting that Alpha students are not merely doing better than students elsewhere but blowing the doors off them. No outside study supports any of it, and the MAP and SAT numbers are close to meaningless without knowing whether Alpha students are being compared with students of similar background. That comparison matters more here than usual: tuition runs as high as $75,000 a year, and every family in the building went looking for this school.
You would think the amazing Alpha results would lead to teams of researchers from Stanford and other research organizations comparing Alpha students with matched peers, trying to understand the school’s secret sauce. Instead, we have boatloads of Theranos-style marketing.
American kids do not need another quick fix to address the growing challenges in our kids’ academic and social development. We need more schools and programs filled with caring, skilled adults prepared to work with kids and their families to take on challenges in this complex 21st century. By the way, I don’t want my kids to “crush” academics or some test. I want them to be curious, kind, lifelong learners, and much more.
The problem is that there are few shortcuts to doing school well. There’s a rich body of research on what makes a quality school. Schools need to have a rich curriculum, an instructional focus (it’s not clear Alpha has one), high expectations, and know their students well. A school culture built around student success is often critical. AI can do many things and may yet be a useful part of a school design, but I have seen no evidence that it can replace a highly effective teacher. I will ask Claude for feedback on this essay. I would not ask it to write this essay.
While MacKenzie Price went to Stanford like Elizabeth Holmes, Price did not drop out of Stanford or wear the Steve Jobs turtlenecks. She is the far more disciplined operator of the two, which is what makes the rhyme particularly unsettling. Like Holmes, she asks the world to accept remarkable claims on evidence only she controls, and the people carrying the risk are children.
On top of everything else, the management structure around the school deserves a hard look. Alpha sits inside a ring of interlocking for-profit vendors (2 Hour Learning, Trilogy Enterprises, Crossover, and an administrative entity) with overlapping ownership and management and a board of the affiliated nonprofit, Unbound Academy, drawn from those same vendors. Its Utah charter application listed MacKenzie Price as board chair, her husband Andrew Price, chief financial officer of Trilogy Enterprises, as treasurer, and Alpha’s own K–8 director as vice chair.
Alpha’s charter school arm has been turned down in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Utah, and approved only in Arizona, whose authorizing standards are among the most permissive in the country. Pennsylvania’s denial called the model untested and faulted the applicant’s governance, noting that its board had never once met.
Not surprisingly, Alpha is now chasing public voucher funds. After the Texas State Board of Education rejected its charter bid in 2025, Alpha applied to the state comptroller’s voucher program, which checks four things: that a school operates in Texas, holds accreditation from an approved organization, has two years of operating history, and administers a standardized test. Nothing at all about results. Alpha was found eligible, quadrupled to more than 30 Texas campuses in a year, and is now among the largest private chains in the program.
Here’s hoping Alpha stays mostly in the independent school space, where families spend their own money and can walk away if it doesn’t work out (though I do think there should be limits on any school making unfounded claims about student achievement as there are for drug companies regarding the efficacy of their products).
Unfortunately, with the growth of state voucher and tax-credit programs that carry no accountability for results, Alpha is positioned to draw millions of tax dollars into its expansion.
I am happy to keep an open mind if Alpha opens its books and classrooms to outside researchers and independent evaluation. Until that happens, I hope public charter authorizers are not hoodwinked by unchecked Alpha claims and insist on documented results.
