Alpha School wants AI to teach a billion kids. Should it?
The fast-growing private-school network is handing much of instruction over to artificial intelligence. Researchers say the science is far from settled
When Carl Hendrick took his first ride in a Waymo, the self-driving taxi service, he thought it felt a lot like the future of education.
Hendrick is a senior learning scientist at Alpha School, a buzzy private-school company where he trains artificial intelligence models to teach students—a process, he says, that is not unlike training a self-driving car.
For such a car, “it was just thousands and thousands of miles, training itself on data, and not just on a linear path. The challenge is in all the different eventualities, like the cyclist who’s wobbling in the road, the kid running out,” he says. “I think, in five or 10 years, a similar thing will happen in education where we train AI models on learning and all of kids’ misconceptions and problems.”
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For Alpha School, the equivalents to the swerving bikes and unexpected pedestrians are more like misconceptions, learning differences or preteen classroom struggles. And the “cars” the company is testing have 10-year-olds in the backseat.
In theory, life at Alpha School looks like this: students spend two hours each morning—or more, if they don’t meet their benchmarks—working with an AI tutor that adapts to each student’s needs, assesses their progress and gives live feedback. Hendrick and the company’s other learning scientists work with software developers to train the models using the latest research and curriculum tools. In the afternoon, students work on “life skills” by attending workshops on topics that include coding, entrepreneurship and public speaking. Tuition at most campuses ranges from $40,000 to $75,000 per year.
And now Alpha is expanding. This fall the company plans to grow to roughly 50 campuses across the U.S., including 27 newly announced locations.
Joe Liemandt, Alpha School’s billionaire principal, wants to “reach a billion kids,” Hendrick says. Hendrick himself believes the approach could help solve problems facing educational systems today.
One in five U.S. students is chronically absent, and reading and math scores have been declining across the country for a decade. When used by a teacher, adaptive learning models like Alpha School’s have shown promise in improving student performance and understanding. Alpha takes the idea considerably further, handing over much of academic instruction to software.
Alpha School has not released the underlying data behind its claims. But Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, who saw the school’s math instruction model last year, says it resembles other, established adaptive-learning technologies such as IXL Learning. Those technologies and other AI tutoring models have been studied publicly.
In a 2025 randomized experiment conducted in an introductory physics course at Harvard University, some students used an adaptive AI tutoring model that the professors had trained, while others used in-class active learning strategies. When students used the tutoring model, the researchers found, their median learning gains were more than twice as high.
Kelly Miller, a Harvard professor, who co-authored the study, says Alpha School’s approach, which centers on active learning, is “better than what currently exists in K–12.”
“The future of education is adaptive learning,” she says.
Source: Read the original article on www.scientificamerican.com
