2 Hours With AI Versus 6 With Teacher: Inside Alpha School, a Texas-based program using algorithms and video monitors to teach children

A growing private school system replaces the typical 6-hour school day with 2 hours of personalized, AI-assisted education. 

What’s new: Alpha School, which teaches 250 preschool-through-high-school students in Austin, Texas, uses an AI-powered method that presents challenges that are tailored to a student’s level of mastery, doubling the speed of learning, the company claims. Students typically rank in the top 2 percent nationally on standardized tests including AP, MAP, and SAT, and last year, 11 out of 12 members of its first graduating class enrolled at universities that include Howard, Northeastern, Stanford, and Vanderbilt. In the coming year it will open locations in a dozen cities, The New York Times reported.

How it works: Alpha School doesn’t rely on teachers to deliver instruction. Instead, software leads students through 2 hours of academic exercises in math, science, reading, other language skills such as speaking and listening, and academic skills — a method the founders call 2 Hour Learning. The software automatically selects exercises to match students’ current level, and it allows them to progress to a new level only after they have demonstrated mastery of the previous one.

• Alpha School has shared few details about its AI. It does not use chatbots because they can encourage cheating. An anonymous writer who claims to be a parent of Alpha School students, and who is happy with the education they received, likened the instructional technology to a “turbocharged spreadsheet checklist with a spaced‑repetition algorithm,” referring to an educational technique that presents learning challenges repeatedly at particular time intervals.
• A proprietary platform delivers instruction, administers tests, tracks progress, and evaluates students’ degree of engagement via video camera. It presents lessons using applications from IXL, Khan Academy, and Trilogy Software, and the school’s own engineers.  
• The system aims to maintain student performance between 70 percent and 95 percent to keep lessons challenging but achievable. It also tracks time a student may waste by entering irrelevant input, guessing, or being away from the computer.
• Students spend the remainder of the school day collaborating with colleagues on projects that build teamwork, leadership, and personal skills; for instance cooking, sports, and, in one case, building a food truck. They also pursue individual projects of their choice.

Yes, but: Boards of education in California, Pennsylvania, and Utah rejected charter-school applications submitted by Unbound Academy, an offshoot of Alpha School, on the ground that they failed to meet mandatory standards. Critics argue that the effectiveness of 2-Hour Learning is not supported by rigorous evidence.

Behind the news: MacKenzie Price, who has a degree in psychology, founded Alpha School in 2014 along with her husband Andrew Price, who serves as CFO of the educational software developer Trilogy. The school shifted to AI-assisted education in 2022. It’s one of several U.S. efforts to apply AI to education.

• In Florida, Miami-Dade County outfitted high schools with chatbots and trained more than 1,000 educators in how to use them.
• Public schools in New Jersey and private schools like Silicon Valley’s Khan Lab School are testing Khanmigo, an AI-powered tutoring program developed by Khan Academy. Based on GPT-4, the program answers student questions with further questions meant to encourage critical thinking.
• Kira Learning aims to implement personalized learning at scale by integrating agentic AI into educational workflows including lesson planning, instruction, grading, and bringing struggling students up to speed. (Disclosure: Kira Learning is an AI Fund-portfolio company chaired by Andrew Ng.)
• The American Federation of Teachers plans to build a national AI training center for teachers.

Why it matters: Primary and secondary education are among the great opportunities for AI. Alpha School has built a method and infrastructure for delivering personalized academic education in a way that enables students to learn efficiently, freeing up time for social learning and personal development.

We’re thinking: The press has spilled much ink on how to keep AI from helping students cheat. Instead, let’s focus on how AI can help students learn.