The Alpha School uses AI to teach core subjects and school leaders are working to create a model that other schools can replicate.
AUSTIN, Texas — The U.S. Secretary of Education was in Austin on Tuesday, visiting a private school that’s using new technology to teach kids.
Linda McMahon stopped by the Alpha School in South Austin to spotlight the importance of artificial intelligence in education.
The Secretary toured the school and participated in a roundtable discussion on AI literacy and the evolving role of technology in education. The school utilizes AI learning in conjunction with life skills courses. The school doesn’t have teachers but instead uses what it calls “guides.”
“The key to our success is not the artificial intelligence system. It’s not the learning platform,” Alpha school cofounder MacKenzie Price said. “It is the fact that we have transformed the role of the teacher in our classroom to be able to focus on motivation.”
It is not a traditional classroom, and the school day looks different than what it is for most other students across the country.
To learn core subjects, the students work one-on-one with artificial intelligence for the first two hours of the day. It’s app-based AI tutoring.
They use AI to create personalized lesson plans, take assessments on what a student knows and what they don’t know, and then build lesson plans so that a student can go through that at their own pace.
It goes as far as AI-created historical figures explaining their own histories with basic comprehension quizzes.
“We have to make sure that those kids are being taught the skill of learning, how to learn, and not using AI as a crutch,” Price said.
Price said the lessons are customized for every student to make sure they are being challenged.
“The real benefit of AI is giving personalized learning experience that make sure that a student is getting fifth grade material for math, and ninth grade material for reading, and seventh grade material for science, and that the student sitting right next to her, who’s the same age is on a completely different learning journey that goes where they’re at,” Price said.
Price said the apps can also deliver information using topics students are interested in to keep them involved.
If the AI feels the student isn’t comprehending a portion of a lesson at a particular level, it will review that material with the student.
Senior Alex Matthew said he used to attend a traditional magnet school and spent two to three hours on homework each night after an eight-hour school day.
“I literally went from spending, you know, 12 hours doing schoolwork and trying to cram in all the things that I was really passionate about in the afternoon, getting no sleep, to now doing three hours for the high school,” he said. “It’s literally fourth at the time at the same rigor, just much more efficiently and at the level that I need to be.”
Price said that in their two hours of learning core material, the students learn twice as much as standard schools do in six hours.
The other six hours of the day are set aside for learning life skills like public speaking, overcoming rejection, grit and robotics.
Matthew said he is building a company with an AI-powered plushie.
“This is the intersection of what you really love doing, your passion, your purpose, and talents, and what the world needs.”
Tuition is $40,000 a year, so for many families it is out of reach. In 2023, the private school told KVUE that 75% of its students were on some form of financial aid.
This visit happened as the State Comptroller’s office is working to roll out Texas’ Education Savings Account program, which allows families to use taxpayer money to help pay for private school. The money will be available next school year.
The $1 billion program is expected to help between 80,000 and 100,000 students in its first year. The idea is to give families who cannot afford a school like Alpha the chance to send their kids to the school.
“What’s happening at Alpha School is made possible in the private sector. Then that can then go and be shared in the public sector,” Price said. “I believe that the tide will rise as a result.”
Alpha has five campuses across Texas, and four more nationwide in San Francisco, Scottsdale, Miami and Palm Beach.
Other locations in Charlotte, Raleigh, Washington D.C., Tampa, Houston and Puerto Rico are slated to open in roughly the next year.
This all comes as Secretary McMahon has been vocal about dismantling the education department, saying that would give states more control of their own educational systems. Formally shutting down the department would take an act of Congress.
Secretary McMahon said she wants to look at ways to incorporate what Alpha is doing into public schools.
While she does not want to mandate that other schools adopt the things Alpha is doing, she does want other schools to look at what Alpha is doing and see how it could help their school districts, saying it could go a long way in improving education.
“There is so much opportunity that I’m just seeing here. I’m so excited,” McMahon said. “I want to run to about 50 schools and say, get your people together, pack your bag, come up here and see what they’re doing because I just think this is amazing.”
McMahon said she believes it would empower teachers as well.
“Whether we call them teachers or guides or motivators, when they have that ability to be innovative in their classroom and to teach and not have to be, spending 47% of their time on regulatory compliance and paperwork for the government, then those schools can be incredibly more successful,” McMahon said.
Alpha is working on transforming its approach into a public model for other schools across the country and around the world to utilize.
“We always have this holistic approach for helping and reaching students, and so this allows us to do that. This allows us to say, This is what the student needs when I have time to sit with the student and understand what they need here. I think that’s really what we want to bring out,” Gaston Griffin said. “We want districts to pilot with this so they can see and experience this incredible opportunity and solution for themselves.”
They are already working with 1500 students in more than 50 districts across the country.
Griffin said with some reallocation, it is possible to put in this AI personalized learning platform that compresses the amount of time that kids need to spend in class and then do things like band, football, robotics, or performing arts the rest of the day.
“We really want to educate them on how we’re implementing here and how we can bridge the gap on what we’re doing here, on what they’re doing in their district,” Griffin said. “It really does come to us sitting down and having that conversation and understanding where the district’s at.”
At Alpha School, part of the motivation can include experiences like attending an F1 race or traveling to Italy to learn about the olive oil industry. It doesn’t have to be that expensive or extravagant.
“The kid who says, I want to go spend my afternoon doing theater or playing baseball,” Griffin said. “If you said, give me two hours of what we call productive struggle in the morning to get your academics, and when you hit your goals, that earns you the ability to go spend the rest of the day doing something you love. Suddenly, you’ve got part of your motivation.”
Alpha School leaders want to make the model more accessible in Texas. Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath says he’s looking at how to bring aspects of it to Texas’s 5.5 million public school students.
That could come as part of the implementation of a bill finally passed last week that would replace the state’s STAAR exam with a series of three tests administered over the course of the school year.
House Bill 8 would eliminate the STAAR as an end-of-year exam beginning in the 2027-28 school year. In its place, students would take assessments at the beginning, middle and end of the academic year. Results would be returned within 48 hours.
“The law requires us to build it adaptively so that the way that analysis is done, that diagnosis is done on the student over the course of the year, adjusts to the level of knowledge of the individual student,” Morath said. “Several of the concepts that you heard today are actually part of the new system that we will be deploying in the 27-28 school year in Texas.”
Price said the methods that the staff at Alpha use strike a balance between preparing students for academic and everyday success. Now they are looking to spread their technology and techniques to give more students a brighter future.
“It’s not just about this school,” Price said. “It’s really about inspiring change for all of the schools around the country and eventually the world.”
