Pooja Salhotra, A.I.-Driven Education: Founded in Texas and Coming to a School Near You, NYTimes, 7.27.25.
In Austin, Texas, where the titans of technology have moved their companies and built mansions, some of their children are also subjects of a new innovation: schooling through artificial intelligence.
And with ambitious expansion plans in the works, a pricey private A.I. school in Austin, called Alpha School, will be replicating itself across the country this fall.
Supporters of Alpha School believe an A.I.-forward approach helps tailor an education to a student’s skills and interests. MacKenzie Price, a podcaster and influencer who co-founded Alpha, has called classrooms “the next global battlefield.”
“I’ve seen the future,” she wrote on social media, “and it isn’t 10 years away. It’s here, right now.”
To detractors, Ms. Price’s “2 Hour Learning” model and Alpha School are just the latest in a long line of computerized fads that plunk children in front of screens and deny them crucial socialization skills while suppressing their ability to think critically.
“Students and our country need to be in relationship with other human beings,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, a teachers’ union. “When you have a school that is strictly A.I., it is violating that core precept of the human endeavor and of education.”
But it’s not strictly A.I.
Alpha officials and guides say the various A.I. programs they use tailor instruction to each child’s level instead of teaching to the average student. That frees teachers to attend to students’ emotional needs.
It is not a “screen school,” argued Ms. Price, who had grown dissatisfied with her daughter’s public school education. Students at Alpha spend the majority of their school day in workshops where they collaborate with other students, Ms. Price said in an interview. The A.I.-led lessons free up guides to focus on motivating students instead of on time-intensive tasks like lesson planning and grading, several guides said.
Much later in the article:
But Alpha isn’t using A.I. as a tutor or a supplement. It is the school’s primary educational driver to move students through academic content.
In the afternoons, students focus on projects that require interaction with other students, such as wilderness training, cooking and sports. For example, fifth and sixth graders last year decided to create a food truck. To accomplish their goal, they learned how to budget, form a business plan — with the help of a chatbot — and to cook eggs.
“When we were all in the kitchen, it would get really stressful,” Byron said. “Working through that calmly and together is something I really improved on.”
Resistence:
To the tech weary, Alpha’s pitch is shopworn. Education technology companies and philanthropists have pushed computers in classrooms for decades. Those experiments have had mixed results and proved difficult to scale. For example, a Silicon Valley-based program called Summit Learning, funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, has been resisted by public school students from New York to Kansas.
Alpha’s endeavor for Unbound Academy has been met with skepticism. State boards of education in Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Arkansas and North Carolina all rejected the program, some citing a lack of evidence that it works.
“The artificial intelligence instructional model being proposed by this school is untested and fails to demonstrate how the tools, methods and providers would ensure alignment to Pennsylvania academic standards,” the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s decision read, citing “multiple, significant deficiencies.”
Although Alpha says it offers students opportunities to collaborate, some have decided to leave after middle school to embrace a high school experience with team sports, student council and prom night. Byron, the rising seventh grader at Alpha, said he was not sure whether he wants to go to high school at Alpha.
“If you think of the purpose of schools as to prepare people for the roles of citizenship and democracy, there’s lot of places where you aren’t trying to get kids to race as fast as they can,” said Justin Reich, director of the Teaching Systems Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the book “Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education.”
Masterpieces:
Several Alpha high school students said their favorite part about the school was working on what Alpha calls their “masterpieces,” a time-intensive project coinciding with the student’s passion. For such projects, students have built a chatbot that offers dating advice, an emotional support teddy bear and a 120-acre mountain bike park, now the largest in Texas.
To complete the projects successfully, students said, they must surpass A.I.’s knowledge base and come up with a “spiky point of view,” or unexpected and novel perspectives.
“To be a useful person in the age of A.I., you have to have unique insights that A.I. doesn’t really agree with,” said Alex Mathew, 16, a rising senior at Alpha High School. “That’s the real differentiator,” he continued. “We are trying to beat A.I.”
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