A School With 2-Hour Days and Zero Teachers

Imagine finishing school before lunch and learning twice as much—with no teachers anywhere. That's the promise of Alpha School, a fast-growing private school network that's opening a campus in New York City this fall, the Wall Street Journal reports. The cost is steep, at between $40,000 and $65,00 a year. Students use AI-powered software to master core subjects in just two hours a day, freeing afternoons for hands-on activities, hobbies, and life skills. The goal is to give students the ability to learn more efficiently while avoiding hot-button topics they might encounter with human teachers —like diversity, equity, and inclusion. "We do not let anything—political, social issues—come in the way," said Alpha co-founder MacKenzie Price. "We stay very much out of that."

Alpha's model flips traditional education on its head. Teachers are called "guides," and many don't have standard teaching degrees. Students work through personalized AI lessons in math, reading, and science, and the school claims they "learn twice as much" as peers in conventional classrooms. Afternoons are for enrichment like five-mile bike rides "without stopping" for kindergartners and AI-generated plans that help kids dive deep into personal hobbies. Price, who co-founded Alpha more than a decade ago, speaks out against traditional education to nearly a million Instagram followers. Billionaire Bill Ackman, a vocal critic of DEI, discovered Alpha earlier this year and, although he's not an investor, he's become a "de facto ambassador," notes the Journal.

While Alpha already has campuses in Texas, Florida, and California, with new schools opening this year in Arizona, North Carolina, Virginia, and Puerto Rico, the New York Times reports not everyone is sold. "Students and our country need to be in relationship with other human beings," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. "When you have a school that is strictly AI, it is violating that core precept of the human endeavor and of education." Others warn that racing through core subjects misses the other important aspects of school. Justin Reich, director of the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT, says, "If you think of the purpose of schools as to prepare people for the roles of citizenship and democracy, there's a lot of places where you aren't trying to get kids to race as fast as they can."