Latest news with #AlphaSchool
Gizmodo
8 hours ago
- Business
- Gizmodo
MAGA Billionaire Is Latest to Champion Anti-DEI School, This One With More AI
Bill Ackman, the finance billionaire who has long espoused support for Donald Trump, has a new preoccupation: a network of AI-fueled private schools that teach students topics at breakneck speed, the curricula for which do not include any sort of troublesome social or political ideas. The Wall Street Journal describes the Alpha School as a 'fast-growing private school that eschews lessons on diversity, equity and inclusion.' The school's co-founder, MacKenzie Price, told the newspaper that the curriculum is designed to avoid any sort of 'political, social issues' that might get 'in the way' of students' education. 'We stay very much out of that,' she said. Alpha's educational model is quite unique: young K-12 students are taught subjects over the course of two hours using 'AI-enabled software.' After that, the rest of the day is parsed out through a variety of physically and socially engaging activities. The school's website mentions a variety of workshops, some of which are based around leadership, some of which involve business education, and some of which just seem to resemble playtime. The school, which was founded over a decade ago, has campuses spread throughout the country, and it plans to open a new location in Manhattan this year, WSJ reports. What is Ackman's role? He's largely a brand ambassador, according to the WSJ report. The outlet notes that Ackman became interested in it partially due to its 'stance on DEI and avoidance of concepts such as the gender continuum.' Over the past several months, Ackman has been 'hyping' up the school to parents he knows, and this week, he plans to appear on a panel alongside Price, the outlet writes. You can actually imagine Alpha's model working quite well for many subjects, but when you get to the humanities, that's when you run into trouble. Subjects like history, art, and literature are intrinsically subjective (they require an interpretive lens), which is why they have historically presented such thorny curricular dilemmas. One person's socially relevant tome on 19th-century race relations is another person's anti-American woke propaganda designed to ruin the minds of our nation's youth. How, exactly, do places like Alpha School teach children about the American novel without letting 'political, social issues' get 'in the way'? From the outside, that part is unclear. One thing's for sure: Ackman's support for Alpha is part of a broader trend in which billionaires (particularly tech billionaires) seek to platform alternative educational models. Bill Gates has long been a cheerleader for the charter school movement. Jeff Bezos founded his own network of preschools. And then there's Elon Musk, who, when his elite private school wasn't cutting it for his kids, launched his own school, Ad Astra, which he helped design (if you think about it, this is sorta like homeschool for billionaires). Since then, Musk has sought to expand the school and recently opened a campus in Texas. For decades, billionaires have also waged a not-so-secret war on America's public school system. The school choice movement—of which places like Alpha and Ad Astra are only the latest iterations—has largely been promulgated and funded by the 1 percent. At the same time, efforts have long been made to defund the public school system. Project 2025 (which many people believe has acted as a policy blueprint for the second Trump administration) has advocated for dismantling the Department of Education, and, earlier this year, while he was still helming the Trump administration's DOGE initiative, Musk claimed he supported abolishing the DOE. In February, DOGE purported to cut $1 billion in research contracts from the agency (most of DOGE's cuts have ended up being bullshit, however). It's unclear how the 1 percent envisions a majority of Americans paying for this style of private education, as reports show that tuition for, say, the Alpha School, costs about $45,000 a year. Such fee structures obviously preclude a majority of the U.S. population from participation. I suppose it's possible that the price of admission at these schools will drop eventually. Or, maybe, the plan is just to dumb the general population down with trade schools until we all become pliant, obedient workers, while the gilded class turbo-charges its offspring intellectually and weans them on an elitist worldview that precludes any sort of empathy for the have-nots. It's unclear what the ultimate endgame is here, although I can't say the view looks particularly rosy from the bleachers.
Wall Street Journal
16 hours ago
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
Bill Ackman's New Pet Project Is a School That Embraces AI and Rejects DEI
Billionaire Bill Ackman has a new fascination: a fast-growing private school that eschews lessons on diversity, equity and inclusion and uses artificial intelligence to speed-teach children in two hours. Alpha School is launching a New York City location in September, and the investor and social-media commentator has been acting as something of an ambassador for the institution, according to people familiar with the matter.
New York Times
27-07-2025
- Business
- New York Times
A.I.-Driven Education: Founded in Texas and Coming to a School Near You
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.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Business Journals
25-07-2025
- General
- Business Journals
Reimagining school: How MacKenzie Price is disrupting education with Alpha School's groundbreaking learning model
As a mom concerned about the quality of her child's education, MacKenzie Price had a wake-up call 10 years ago. That's when her daughter told her she didn't want to go to school because it was boring. The comment felt like a 'gut punch' to the mom of two and conjured up memories of her own childhood as a kid who hated school. At the same time, her children's experiences in the Austin, Texas, public school system had given her a firsthand look at the lack of personalization in the classroom. The model of a teacher standing in front of a group of 20 students and delivering instructions to all of them in the same way, regardless of how each child learned, didn't seem like the best way to get kids to excel. 'I saw the path my girls were on and couldn't see them spending the next several years of their lives playing that game,' Price said. 'It's a model problem. The teacher in front of the classroom is an inefficient way to learn.' Creating a new model for education Price likens the traditional six-hour school day to using a dial phone in the age of smartphones. Education, she thought, needed a revolution. That led her to create the '2-Hour Learning model' to empower students to focus on core academics in just two hours a day, freeing up the rest of the school day for them to work with their guides to pursue their passions and master life skills. Her vision became a reality with the launch of the first Alpha School in Austin in 2014. The private school network has since grown to eight locations, including one in South Miami-Dade at 8000 S.W. 56th St., which opened in August 2024. Ten more schools are expected to open this year, including in West Palm Beach. 'South Florida is a vibrant and growing area, and we're answering the call from families who want to have a new educational model that's more innovative in its approach,' Price said. 'When you combine the people who are native to the area with the many people who are moving here, there's a ton of intellectual vibrancy in South Florida.' The first Alpha School in Miami started with six students. This August, more than 60 will study there. Alex Kiser, the head of school for Alpha Miami, said in a recent Instagram video, that she was drawn to the school by a combination of two things she came to love during her time working at Google — innovation and experimentation. 'We have taken your traditional school day and shrunk it to two hours,' Kiser said. 'That leaves a lot of time to create exciting, engaging workshops for students.' An AI-powered model Alpha School, which received its accreditation from the nonprofit Cognia, was founded on three commitments. Kids will love school — Alpha's leaders believe that when engagement meets high standards, it nurtures a lifelong passion for learning. Guides, not teachers, make every student feel valued and motivated. Learn 2X in two hours — Through advanced technologies and mastery-based learning, students complete core subjects in just two hours daily. Alpha combines adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) for personalized one-to-one learning, mastery-based methods for deep understanding and time management techniques like Pomodoro to keep students focused and thriving. Life skills for the future — By focusing on more than just academics, Alpha prepares students for life by teaching essential, actionable skills. This happens via workshops that focus on public speaking, coding, entrepreneurship, outdoor education and financial literacy to build grit, creativity and adaptability. Marrying life skills to future-ready students will ensure they are ready for what they'll encounter when they enter the job market, Price said. AI is changing the state of work and transforming roles. Alpha students are trained on different AI tools to give them AI superpowers, and they've used the technology to develop film projects, land rovers and creative arts. Gauging success When comparing students' test scores to other students in a specific group, Alpha has achieved remarkable results. Students have advanced from the 31st percentile to the 86th percentile within one year, and on average, Alpha students are in the 90th percentile compared to their peers nationwide. 'The reason our model is so successful is that we have transformed the role of the teacher,' Price said. 'Instead of focusing on lesson plans and lectures, our guides are focused on motivational and emotional support and mentorship. They know every kid and what motivates them. They run our workshops in the afternoon and get to help them build these critical life skills. They're helping us create confident, capable and independent learners.' That includes a group of fifth and sixth grade students who, as part of their life skills education, started their own food truck business. They had to learn how to put together a budget, shop for and cook food, purchase supplies and a food trailer, secure necessary permitting and market the business. They also learned to work as a team of line cooks and order takers. Over one summer, after serving breakfast foods at car dealerships and different events around town, they also learned how to calculate a net profit of $4,000.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Duolingo CEO says AI is a better teacher than humans—but schools will still exist ‘because you still need childcare'
Duolingo's founder and CEO Luis von Ahn believes there's nothing a computer can't teach—but says schools won't go extinct because people need childcare. Speaking on the No Priors podcast, von Ahn said AI's precision knowledge and tricks the company has learned about human motivation make a case for 'scaling up' learning in a way that goes beyond humans. Language-learning app Duolingo has been leaning heavily into AI. The company with an owl mascot temporarily replaced its CEO with an AI avatar on an earnings call last year—and evenmore controversially, it announced last month it would permanently replace its contract workers with AI. Now the company has much broader ambitions. With a community of 116 million users a month, Duolingo has amassed loads of data about how people learn, accumulating tricks to keep learners engaged over the long term and even know how well a student will score on a test before they take it. According to founder and CEO Luis von Ahn, AI's ability to individualize learning will lead to most teaching being done by computers in the next few decades. 'Ultimately, I'm not sure that there's anything computers can't really teach you,' von Ahn said on the No Priors podcast recently. He predicted education would radically change, because 'it's just a lot more scalable to teach with AI than with teachers.' 'By the way, that doesn't mean the teachers are going to go away, you still need people to take care of the students,' he added. 'I also don't think schools are going to go away, because you still need childcare.' Host Sarah Guo jumped in to clarify. 'In your view, schools could be childcare but everybody's Duolingo-ing?' she said. 'I think it's going to be something like that,' von Ahn replied. The Duolingo model of teaching via quizzes and drills isn't suitable for all subjects, he said, noting that history might be a subject better taught with 'well-produced videos'—something AI can't currently do well. But he said he believes the problem of scale tips the balance on the side of AI. If 'it's one teacher and like 30 students, each teacher cannot give individualized attention to each student,' he said. 'But the computer can. And really, the computer can actually … have very precise knowledge about what you, what this one student is good at and bad at.' Duolingo's CFO made similar comments last year, saying, 'AI helps us replicate what a good teacher does'—things like helping a student 'learn material, stay engaged, know where your weaknesses are, where your gaps are.' Because Duolingo has acquired this data over many years and millions of users, the company has essentially run 16,000 A/B tests over its existence, von Ahn said. That means the app can deploy reminders at the time that a person is most likely to do a task, and devise exercises that are exactly the right amount of difficulty to keep students feeling accomplished and moving ahead. Some schools are already leaning into AI. Newsweek recently profiled Alpha School, a chain of private K-12 schools where students learn for just two hours a day with the help of AI. There, guides—the school's title for teachers—'provide motivational and emotional support rather than creating lesson plans, delivering lectures or grading assignments,' Newsweek wrote. With four locations and eight on the way, the school charges $40,000 to $65,000 a year in tuition, according to its website. With President Donald Trump recently signing an executive order to promote AI education, manymore schools could be seeing the technology. Von Ahn, at least, thinks the change won't happen for some years. 'I don't think you'll see a change where next year everybody's learning is completely different,' he said. When it comes to most education, 'it's like government—it's just slow.' This story was originally featured on
