Alpha School is a chain of AI-centric private schools built around a program where academic subjects are all cut off from lunch, so kids can focus on life skills like “leadership” for most of the day. It’s expensive, and the pedagogy includes unconventional ideas like kids “earning money by doing academics so they can finance their passion projects.” Famously, Alpha School is largely app-based, gamified, and very little paper is used.
The Alpha site advertises “2x Learning,” in which students “learn twice as much as their peers in two hours of academics a day.” But according to a report by the New York Times, it is not the self-imposed academic goal.
According to “documents obtained by The Times”, internal reporting by Alpha shows that whatever promising things may be happening in the brains of its students, the wishes of parents for “2x Learning” do not seem to be coming true.
Last academic year, less than half of Alpha School’s K-8 students reached the “2x Learning” peak. One in five students did not meet the school’s reading target. And about 50% “didn’t live up to the promise of learning math twice as fast,” according to the times.
Anna Davlantes, a spokeswoman for the Alpha School, told the times Representatives of their company would not be interviewed, and that the company would not respond to “written questions”.