Pay Attention to Alpha Schools
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By Jacob Pleasants
This year, my state of Oklahoma became the home to two new sites for Alpha School (in Tulsa and the Oklahoma City area). If you haven’t been following this story closely, here is the very short version:
It is a network of private schools that originated in Austin, TX. It has since spread to other states, albeit somewhat slowly.
The central premise of the school is that all of the core instruction is dispatched within ~2 hours via computer-driven instruction (sometimes billed as “AI-powered”). There are no teachers for this. “Guides” are there to motivate.
The remainder of the day is dedicated to other fare: field trips, making, entrepreneurship, etc. This is usually pitched as “the good stuff” that can finally get the focus it deserves when you don’t have to fritter away so many hours on “academics.”
It’s quite an interesting time to be launching such a tech-centric school in my state. Currently, school districts are scrambling to comply with a state law that requires all schools to have an AI policy in place that includes an opt-out provision. And like many other states, there is quite an upswell in advocacy against digital tech in schools. On the other hand, there have been some rather rosy writeups of Alpha Schools in such august outlets as The New York Times. Some parents, at least, are convinced enough to give it a try.
There has been plenty of excellent critical coverage of Alpha Schools, and I would strongly recommend reading what Dan Meyer has written. He’s been on the beat for some time. But today, I want to draw attention to a truly exceptional series of pieces written by Benjamin Riley. On September 8, he published a special report on his Substack that reveals some pretty jarring elements of the student experience. He then published several follow-up pieces, one of which provides perspectives from parents and school insiders.
The experiences that are described in these articles are truly distressing and fascinating. Please go read them, because they are worth your time. In this post, I offer up some commentary on the elements that have been rattling around in my head for the last week and a half.
Boot Camp
Riley’s reporting begins with a look at Alpha School’s “boot camp,” which appears to be a series of tasks and challenges that students complete upon joining the school. He reports:
The students share that, as part of boot camp, they are required to join Twitter and obtain at least 100 “authentic” followers by early October 2026. Most of the student accounts appear to have been created in August this year, when boot camp commenced.
Apparently, students are further required to make daily posts to Twitter. Not surprisingly, many post about boot camp itself, thus providing a window into what it entails. Some of the tasks include:
Receiving “critical feedback” from their parents while wearing a heartrate monitor; to pass, their heart rate must note rise more than 10% above baseline.
Cleaning bathrooms and other “dirty jobs.”
Teach themselves an AP unit in 5 days.
On a practical level, this is a pretty effective way to instill the values of an organization into newcomers, much like an actual military boot camp or series of fraternity rituals. What does it look like to be successful at this school? It’s an odd mixture of self-promotion, dubious business education principles, and particularly interesting to me, self-instruction. That challenge to “teach yourself an AP unit” is awfully telling.
Speed Running Academics
Alpha School’s ostensible “innovation” is its computer-delivered core academic instruction, which supposedly allows students to learn “10x” faster than “normal” classrooms. This system was formerly referred to as “2 Hour Learning” but is now “Time Back.” Because, you know, it gives students their time back to do all those other awesome things. Like make Twitter posts, build a personal brand, be an entrepreneur. By all reports, their digital platform is pretty run-of-the-mill stuff, basically little different from what you see from IXL or Lexia and others, but stripped of any remnant of humanity. Again, there are no teachers here, only “guides” who are explicitly not there to actual provide any academic assistance, just motivation. Those kids gotta develop grit, after all.
I can easily see why this school would want students who can teach themselves an AP unit. If you want to be able to claim that your school is successful, it’s a whole lot easier when you fill it with autodidacts.
It’s actually worse than all that, though. The guides aren’t just sitting back and encouraging students. There is, of course, a data analytics “dashboard” that shows student performance. The student is, essentially, the employee and the guide is the manager. Performance not up to par? Work harder!
It’s Taylorism come for schooling. It’s the logical endpoint of the project of the “push button” school. Perhaps most ironically, it is also the literal embodiment of what many parents fear is happening with devices in public schools.
Why We Should Care
It’s easy to look upon Alpha School as a foolish endeavor for the rich (it costs anywhere from $40,000-70,000 per year to attend), of little consequence to the vast majority of educational practice. For all of the attention that Alpha Schools have garnered, they enroll a minuscule fraction of students.
Indeed, Alpha School is not likely to revolutionize education on any significant scale. Perhaps it will be just another faddish private school that waxes and wanes with the cycles of hype.
I don’t think that Alpha deserves attention because of what it will do to education in any direct way. It deserves our attention because of the way that it raises and provides at least one set of answers to deep questions about what schooling is for. These are questions that, I think, underlie many contemporary educational debates.
What is the purpose of the “core curriculum?” Is it simply a prerequisite that is to be dispatched as efficiently as possible? A means to some other end? Or is it a meaningful endeavor in its own right?
Is the heterogeneity of the public school classroom a bug or a feature? Is the “personalization” offered by digital technology actually desirable?
What kind of people should our schools teach our students to be? Entrepreneurs? Creators? Influencers? Thinkers? Writers? Citizens?
Alpha School has answers to these questions. As dystopian as I find those answers to be, they offer a sort of clarity that some people evidently find appealing. What of our public educational institutions?