This School Doesn’t Use Grades, Teachers, or Homework

I went looking for the AI story behind Alpha School. What I found was even more disruptive.

I first learned about Alpha School through an essay contest. In July, the New York Times ran a piece about Alpha and a month and a half later the San Francisco Journal published another. Then, a parent shared a podcast interview with Joe Liemandt, Alpha’s “product guy,” principal, and major investor.

All of these stories piqued my interest, but probably the real reason Alpha stuck with me is because the idea of a mastery based school - one where students couldn’t move on to more advanced concepts until they grasped the previous ones - was something I dreamed up years ago. Early in my career, I viewed learning like a climber scaling a wide open rock face: a new foothold wouldn’t appear until the last one held firm. From my first weeks in the classroom it was already clear that the one-sized fits all approach to education was sub-optimal. Some students could scale the wall much faster than others.

I had long forgotten about that vision until I started reading about how Alpha is actually trying to build it. But my biggest surprise about Alpha was not the AI.

Alpha’s Value Proposition

Promises of accelerated learning through technology are nothing new. K–12 schools have long been pitched products claiming to help students learn faster and easier. The rise of generative AI has only turbocharged these utopian fantasies.

But few schools are making claims as bold as Alpha, the private school founded in Austin, Texas in 2014 by McKenzie Price. Despite predating ChatGPT, Alpha has become a poster child for the AI-fueled future of education. Its core pitch is that students can achieve 2x learning in just two hours a day, with the saved hours dedicated to workshops built around teaching real-world life skills. As one parent states, Alpha’s three broad claims are that students will:

1. Love School

2. Learn 2X in two-hours per day (with no “teachers”)

3. Learn Life Skills

Your Review: Alpha School

Based on those first two claims, one can understand the skepticism and outright hostility aimed at a school designed strictly for speed: soulless screen time, no teachers, and academic gamification. As one tech writer observed:

“They’ve really leaned into all of this hype that AI is this magic wand that can do anything,” she [Audrey Watters] said. “It is, I think, snake oil.”

It’s the city’s new most expensive private school — and AI is the teacher, San Francisco Journal

The Pitch

Here’s a snapshot of Alpha from an August profile of Joe Liemandt:

… Alpha School: the teacherless, homeworkless, K-12 private school in Austin, Texas, where students have been testing in the top 0.1% nationally by self-directing coursework with AI tutoring apps for two hours a day. Alpha students are incentivized to complete coursework to “mastery-level” (i.e., scoring over 90%) in only two hours via a mix of various material and immaterial rewards, including the right to spend the other four hours of the school day in “workshops,” learning things like how to run an Airbnb or food truck, manage a brokerage account or Broadway production, or build a business or drone …

Class Dismissed by Jeremy Stern, Colossus (August, 2025)

It’s tempting to pigeonhole Alpha as another Silicon Valley moonshot, a rationalist attempt to re-engineer school from the ground up. I’d rather try to paint a fair picture to clarify what it actually is before stating my reservations.

Because, if their strategy actually has any merit, it may offer up some useful information about how radically rethinking school - with or without AI - can improve learning and reveal what’s essential for kids. Dismissing Alpha without actually understanding its methods, philosophy, and results is just as short-sighted as accepting their claims at face value.

Acceleration in Practice

Founded in 2014 - well before the generative AI boom - Alpha’s mission has always been acceleration: help students master more content in less time, then free up the rest of the day for broader learning with adult mentors, or “guides,” as they call them. (They intentionally avoid the word “teacher.”)

AI wasn’t central in its early years. Initially, Alpha didn’t even have a platform. It evolved by using off-the-shelf edtech tools, some of which may have included primitive AI features, but personalization and scaling were limited. Critics point out that many of those tools had been around for years.

Since 2023, AI has played a much larger role, which is the main reason Alpha is courting national attention. Unlike most AI headlines, however, Alpha’s model isn’t driven by AI integration through assistance or feedback on traditional assignments. In their system, AI doesn’t help students with their work (Alpha schools don’t assign homework) - it personalizes, tailors, and delivers instruction.

An instructive quote from Liemandt drives this home:

“AI is the instrument inflection for learning science,” he said. “Not chatbots. If you deploy ChatGPT to every student in America, we will become the dumbest country on the planet. Rather it’s the learning engine GenAI’s allowed me to build that can generate personalized lesson plans for every kid that are 100% engaging. It can track their knowledge graph [what they know and don’t know] and their interest graph, and dynamically teach curriculum by analogy to the things they care about.” [emphasis added]

On the podcast, Liemandt goes to great lengths to explain how their model is grounded in science. Their methods draw heavily on principles like Bloom’s 2-sigma problem (which showed that one-on-one tutoring can produce achievement gains two standard deviations above conventional classroom instruction), cognitive load theory (which emphasizes minimizing distractions to optimize working memory), and the zone of proximal development (the sweet spot between too easy and too hard). Other techniques like tight feedback loops, spaced repetition, interleaving, dual-coding, metacognitive reflection, and the importance of mastery-based advancement, are also baked into the model.

The enemy of Alpha is the traditional classroom. Not because great teachers don’t exist, but because every student doesn’t necessarily get one. Many of the techniques which enhance learning are virtually impossible to do at scale with one teacher and 25 plus students. This is what their specifically engineered platform is designed to address.

Timeback: Inside Alpha’s AI Platform

Their newest proprietary AI system, called Timeback, is designed to continuously assess, adjust, and scaffold student progress. The goal is both automation and personalization. Students are motivated to reach mastery-level thresholds (typically higher than 90%) and receive both digital and real-world incentives when they do. This is the “personalized learning” championed by Sal Kahn and other AI optimists who see AI as a democratizing force for good when it comes to education.

In reading and writing, where personalization is harder to scale, Timeback serves as an app store for other third-party tools. For early readers, TeachTales generates custom stories aligned to reading level and interest. Alpha’s own proprietary app, AlphaWrite, uses generative AI not to write for students, but to coach them through structure, grammar, and revision in real time.

This instructional design reflects a well-known triad from education research: mastery-based learning, spaced repetition, and 1:1 tutoring.

Alpha’s innovation lies in applying these techniques at scale through the help of AI. Because students progress only when they demonstrate expert level understanding, in theory, the Alpha method does something traditional classrooms cannot - equally serve learners at both ends of the spectrum. Using the platform, struggling students get extra support, while advanced students aren’t held back.

Workshops, Mentors, and Real-World Learning

With core academics taking up just two hours, the rest of the day is spent working on skills like public speaking, entrepreneurship, robotics, chess, and other activities designed by the Alpha “guides”.

The separation between “core” and “soft” skills is logistical, not philosophical. Both are fundamental to their approach and treated with equal rigor. The workshops are places where students can pursue their passions, get socialization and team-building exercises with their peers, and work with professionals in their given fields.

Not all workshops or “life skills” are so lofty, such as Five Impossible Things for second graders: “run a 5K in less than 35 minutes; present the news like a news anchor in front of the whole school; build your own drone and land it on your head; master the 50 most commonly misspelled words by adults and beat your parents in a spelling bee; and plan and organize your own play date.”

Motivation is Key

With those examples in mind, it’s easy to understand the importance of Alpha’s critical insight - motivation is inseparable from learning. Price calls it “90 percent of what creates a great learning experience.” Internally, it’s known as the school’s “secret sauce” - as essential as the AI tools themselves. If the two-hour academic block is the self-driving car, the school’s layered incentive systems are the fuel.

With lesson planning, assessment, and content delivery offloaded to its AI platform, Alpha frees up its adult guides to focus entirely on motivation and emotional support. Students earn internal currencies (such as “Alpha Bucks”) by completing daily academic minimums, with real-world value tied to tangible rewards. Point systems reinforce non-academic behaviors such as teamwork and perseverance. This behavioral structure is central to getting students, especially younger students who are highly susceptible to external rewards, to buy into the program.¹

To underscore the importance of enforcing all of Alpha’s high standards, Liemandt makes clear the guides are accountable (they are well paid relative to typical teacher salaries in the local markets):

“There are three commitments at Alpha,” he said. “First, kids will love school, and we measure that by their real, actionable answer to the question, ‘Would you rather keep coming to school or go on vacation?’ The second is, you’ll learn 2x in 2 hours; you’ll use the apps and be a self-taught learner and spend your afternoons on life skills. The third is, the key to every kid’s happiness is high standards; it’s a combination of high support and high standards. So the guides live the three commitments and are accountable for delivering them. If they don’t deliver on the three commitments, we fire them.”

Does it Work?

If this all sounds like overhyped marketing, you’re not alone.

When the school piloted the same AI software in a home school environment without the supporting structure and incentives, students only achieved 1x learning growth, demonstrating that the high acceleration rates observed on their actual campuses critically depend on the integrated motivational infrastructure.

This suggests that even the most powerful AI learning platforms cannot achieve lift off without those added incentives. Any parent who has paid for a subscription app which purports to improve math skills will not be surprised by these results. It’s one thing to have access to a learning tool and another thing entirely to get kids to use it.

Results

While Alpha still offers limited public data on its qualitative outcomes, according to measurements used by most state systems, such a standardized test scores, the results are impressive. Testimonials, such as the one captured in the parent essay, attest to its virtues.

Critics suggest these are largely due to “selection effects,” as the student body is primarily drawn from wealthier, well-educated families who can afford the high tuition.

Furthermore, the tests rely entirely on multiple-choice questions, leading to concerns that the model is simply “teaching to the test” and failing to assess vital skills such as expository writing and critical thinking.

The Alpha Backlash

Unsurprisingly, skeptics and critics abound.

For starters, with tuitions in the five figures (Alpha School is expanding rapidly, with new campuses opening across the country, including one that opened in NYC this fall), no teachers, and online learning, what exactly are parents getting for their money? What happens if kids can’t hit that 90%?

Critics raise questions about almost all the key premises that underlie Alpha’s educational model. From increased screen time to a lack of real “teachers” to the very notion that actual learning (as opposed to mere memorization) can be accomplished at 2x speed, any school where students are parked in front of a computer for their learning is likely to induce aneurisms in most faculty lounges. Alpha’s bypassing of teachers entirely is a shot across the bow of the entire profession.

What’s lost in terms of creativity, ambiguity, or unstructured thinking? What happens to open-ended inquiry, seminar-style discussion, or the unpredictable magic of a good classroom debate? How are research and longform writing really taught? What about deep reading of foundational texts? Science experiments? Foreign language practice with a native speaker (not just Duolingo)? Art? Music? Drama?

As reported in the San Francisco Journal piece:

Moreover, said Watters, the model of using only the intelligent tutoring system takes away from collective learning. “You learn when someone else gets it wrong, as well as when you get it right,” she said. The elimination of “a classroom where we learn to negotiate and navigate and learn together is not just damaging but, I think, kind of dangerous.”

The lack of human connection in the learning process - not just between teacher and student, but among students themselves and the socialization process that comes with real-time struggle and friction - is a unique experience in a lively classroom led by a seasoned teacher. Responding to prompts on a screen - no matter how engaging, interactive, or absorbing it may be - cannot replace what’s lost in face to face interactions. It’s one of the many reasons why COVID teaching was such a disaster.

Alpha learning feels like it’s reduced to an isolated and mercenary experience (the phrase “crush academics in just two hours” appears on its landing page), primarily focused on skill acquisition and content mastery.

Why It Matters

Alpha’s model raises every red flag for a traditional educator - and many of them are valid. Yet, despite these misgivings, what intrigues me most about Alpha is the sheer audacity of its existence.

Whether or not its AI platform delivers on every promise may be beside the point. Personalized AI tutors are almost certainly coming - if not as classroom replacements, then as standardized test trainers or supplemental learning companions.

And few would argue that education is not in desperate need of reform.

This is Howard Gardner, speaking recently at an edtech panel on AI at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education:

“The need to have everybody in the class doing the same thing, being assessed in the same way, will seem totally old-fashioned” …

By 2050, Gardner predicts, every child will need just a few years in the Three R’s — “reading, ’riting, ’rithmetic, and a little bit of coding.” After that, teachers will function more like coaches, exposing students to new ideas, guiding them toward passions and professions.

“I don’t think going to school for 10 or 15 years as we’ve done it makes sense” …

The Harvard Gazette

Sounds a bit like Alpha.

What Alpha Gets Right

The industrial model of schooling - the one most of us grew up in - was never designed to maximize every student’s potential. It was designed for standardization, efficiency, and crowd control.

Alpha’s real innovation isn’t simply 2x learning or AI driven lesson plans. It’s the willingness to question long-standing assumptions about how schools should work and the chutzpah to build a system with a laser-focus on teaching life skills with “high support and high standards” by cultivating motivation as the rocket fuel for student achievement.

In my experience, many of the most transformative “teachable moments” don’t happen in a classroom. They happen on a field, at a debate tournament, or consoling a student after a setback. They can only happen when students are challenged, held accountable, and taken care of when they fail.

While reading everything about Alpha I could get my hands on, the story that stuck had nothing to do with AI.

It was about a second-grade boy who cried so much he started getting teased.

On that list of “Five Impossible Things” was to run a 5K in under 35 minutes. By race day, he wasn’t just ready. He was one of the fastest kids in the class. He crossed the finish line in under 30 minutes, shouting “I didn’t cry the whole time!” while his parents and guide burst into tears.

Very few students will go to an Alpha school.

But every kid deserves a moment like that.

And while many schools and classrooms hope these moments happen - Alpha designs for them.

Whether Alpha scales or not, their design principles centered on tangible accomplishments through effort, challenge, and support - not just AI - is what more schools need.

---

Connect With Me

Beyond this newsletter, I work directly with schools, educators, and organizations navigating AI integration. Take a look at my website and reach out—I’d love to hear what you’re working on.

1. Alpha is hardly the first charter or independent school to implement these techniques. The Success Academy Schools have been doing this for years.