Alpha School’s AI teaching model is expanding. Does it work?
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.”
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.
