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Alpha School, the network of AI-driven private schools charging parents up to $75,000 a year, has won backers from Silicon Valley to the Trump administration. Its own data show most of its students aren’t reaching the model’s central promise.
Only 42% of Alpha students met the network’s goal of learning twice as fast in both math and reading, according to internal data first reported by The New York Times. The findings land as Alpha pushes into public schools, where districts are adopting its software in hopes of fitting more learning into less time.
What Alpha promises parents
Alpha has no traditional teachers. It employs what it calls “guides,” whose job, according to the company’s marketing materials, is to “make every student feel valued and motivated.” Guides don’t plan lessons or grade homework, Fortune reported in September.
The core of the pitch is that students will “learn twice as much as their peers in two hours of academics a day” using TimeBack, an app Alpha markets as an AI tutor. Cofounder MacKenzie Price says the app personalizes and accelerates learning for each student, freeing the rest of the school day for workshops on skills such as public speaking and relationship building.
The network has grown fast. A spokesperson told Fortune in September that Alpha had more than 1,200 students. The Times put the figure at about 1,500 across roughly 50 campuses, in line with the expansion plans Alpha announced in August.
That pitch has drawn AI optimists. “I definitely think using AI well is a skill in the future, if not the skill, so it’s kind of a disservice not to have that in school,” Sarah Cone, a venture capitalist whose 8-year-old daughter attends Alpha’s New York campus, told Fortune in September.
In September 2025, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon toured Alpha’s Austin campus and called its model “the most exciting thing I’ve seen in education in a long time.” LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman have both publicly backed Price and Alpha on X. Even the X account of Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder serving more than 11 years in prison for fraud, praised Price.
Where students are falling short
Math is the bigger gap. About half of K-8 students at Alpha’s private campuses missed the goal of learning math twice as fast, and roughly one in five missed their reading targets, according to the Times‘ review of the network’s data.
Students who started behind fared worse. About a fifth of Alpha’s private school students scored at or below the 50th percentile nationally in math last fall, and only 37% of that group met the network’s 2x growth goal by winter, the Times found.
The two-hour premise is also in question. Guides and parents told Wired that students worked late into the night to meet the school’s goals. One parent of a 13-year-old reading at an 11th-grade level said reaching those goals came with “stress and anxiety.”
Former employees told 404 Media that Alpha’s AI generated faulty lesson plans, which internal documents said sometimes did “more harm than good,” and that the company scraped other online courses without permission.
Alpha’s model is reaching public schools
More than 2,600 public school students in Texas and South Carolina now use Alpha’s platform, according to company documents reviewed by the Times. That is a tougher test: public schools can’t remove struggling students, the Times noted, and they lack the prize incentives Alpha uses at its private campuses.
The Houston Independent School District, the largest in Texas, is piloting the software at two schools. Superintendent Mike Miles told the Times that students spent more time on Alpha’s apps than planned, cutting into other activities. He still wants AI in the district’s toolkit, calling it an important tool for students to be “successful in a different world and workplace.”
Research points to a learning penalty
Alpha’s expansion comes as schools grapple with falling math and reading scores and growing evidence that how students use AI matters as much as whether they use it.
A study of 26,811 secondary students in central China found that homework scores rose 18% after students adopted generative AI tools, while closed-book exam scores fell 20%. The OECD’s latest PISA results found that daily AI users scored lower in science than nonusers, while moderate users performed about the same.
Professors have told Fortune that students who lean on AI summaries struggle with sustained reading. “Today, if you assign that amount of reading, they often don’t know what to do,” Timothy O’Malley, a theology professor at the University of Notre Dame, told Fortune‘s Preston Fore in June.
“It’s not even an inability to critically think,” Jessica Hooten Wilson, a professor of great books and humanities at Pepperdine University, told Fortune. “It’s an inability to read sentences.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
