One day last fall, Kristine Barrios’ 9-year-old daughter got stuck on a lesson in IXL, the personalized learning software that served as her math teacher. She had to multiply three three-digit numbers without using a calculator. Then she had to do it again, her mom says, more than 20 times, without making mistakes.
At Alpha School, the private microschool the girl and her younger brother attended in Brownsville, Texas, she had been working a grade level ahead of her age in math, Barrios says. She could do three-digit multiplication correctly most of the time. But whenever she made an error in IXL, the software would determine she needed more practice and assign her more questions. She told her mom that she had asked her “guide,” the adult who supervised her classroom in lieu of a teacher, to make an exception and let her move on. She said the guide’s reply was that she needed to get it done, that it was expected of her.
Over the next weekend, Barrios says, she and her husband sat with their daughter for hours each day until she finished the multiplication lesson, even as she broke down and sobbed that she’d rather die than keep going. Ultimately, Barrios says she double-checked all the answers on a calculator before the 9-year-old entered them. But when the girl returned to school with the lesson completed, her mom says, she came back reporting crushing news: In the time she had spent stuck, she had fallen even farther behind her targeted goals.
Within a couple weeks, Barrios says, the school reported to her and her husband that their daughter wasn’t eating lunches. According to Barrios, Alpha said it was “because she would rather stay in and work.” The girl later explained to her parents that she was spending lunchtimes catching up on IXL. (In a statement to WIRED, IXL representatives wrote that Alpha School’s account was deactivated this past July and claims that it is “no longer an IXL customer due to violating our terms of service,” adding that IXL “is not intended—and we do not recommend its use—as a replacement” for “trained, caring teachers.”)
When Barrios’ husband brought their daughter to a previously scheduled checkup soon after, her doctor noted with concern that she had lost a significant amount of weight in a short time. Her dad then brought her to school with a note from the pediatrician, Barrios says, instructing her to eat snacks in between regular meals and saw her walk into school with it in her hand. She told her parents she delivered it to staff. Even though Alpha had asked parents in its handbook to “refrain” from sending in “midday snacks,” Barrios and her husband wanted to follow the pediatrician's recommendation, she says.
For the first few days, Barrios says, her daughter ate her snacks. Then one afternoon she returned with them still in her backpack, uneaten. Barrios, alarmed, asked if Alpha was providing different food instead. No, the 9-year-old answered. She told her mom that staff at the school said she didn’t earn her snacks and wouldn’t get them until she met her learning metrics.
“ As a parent, you're like, this is not OK,” Barrios recalls. She pulled both her kids out of Alpha School that November.
Barrios and her husband joined a growing group of families who had chosen to leave the school’s Brownsville campus. About two dozen kids were in the inaugural class in 2022, according to Paige Fults, the current head of Alpha School Brownsville. At least five families (including some with more than one child) have departed. That hasn’t stopped Alpha’s leaders from pointing to Brownsville as an example, in at least one white paper and in applications to open new charter schools, of how the proprietary model Alpha uses, 2 Hour Learning, can succeed in communities with “low SES" (meaning socioeconomic status).
With 2 Hour Learning, which is in use not only at Alpha but also a host of its private “sister schools,” students are meant to spend just two hours per day on “learning sessions.” Personalized learning software—or what the 2 Hour Learning homepage began referring to last year as an “AI tutor”—does the teaching. MacKenzie Price, one of the founders of Alpha and 2 Hour Learning, told WIRED: “ Our students are learning twice as much, our classes are top 1 percent across grades and subjects, and we're doing it all in a much, much shorter amount of time.” (Price’s claim is based in part on comparisons of standardized test data. While Price initially said that Alpha would share its data with WIRED, it has not done so.)
As the nation confronts a teacher shortage crisis, Alpha’s audacious promise has propelled it from a small Texas private school into a budding educational empire. It’s a darling of the Trump administration and the very wealthy. Joe Liemandt, a Stanford dropout turned tech founder whose billions come from selling automation software, is the school’s “principal.” This past summer, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman promoted the school on X and hosted a panel about it in the Hamptons. Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, has had Price on his podcast and has said on X that the “best news” is that Alpha’s AI tutor approach “can be a reality for every student, anywhere.” In September, US secretary of education Linda McMahon visited the original Austin campus and said the models presented there were “the most exciting thing I’ve seen in education in a long time.”
The school is in the midst of a national expansion, including roughly a dozen new campuses in Arizona, California, Florida, New York, North Carolina, and Virginia to add to the five already open in Texas. An “affiliate” charter school called Unbound Academy is enrolling students in Arizona. Although Unbound is independent from Alpha, its leadership team includes Price and her husband, Andrew, and some of the other initial members of its board either work at or have connections to Alpha. Unbound’s application to open in Arizona cited Alpha School Brownsville, saying that it “demonstrated how the 2hr Learning Model can effectively address educational disparities” and make “high-quality education accessible to all students.”
Certainly, the school has its fans: When Newsweek recently visited the Brownsville campus, one older student said she appreciated her time there so much that she was looking to found an upper school herself so that she and her cohort could continue with an Alpha-like model rather than attend the local public high school. “The Rio Grande Valley, Brownsville, and all the cities surrounding it are lagging behind in education in the US, so students going from a fast-paced environment like Alpha and then having to cut it off and go to a traditional school doesn't make sense," the 12-year-old said. (After offering in August to connect WIRED with this student, Alpha did not respond to subsequent requests to do so.)
But in interviews with WIRED, more than a dozen former employees, students, and parents say what they expected from Alpha School wasn’t what it delivered. Former “guides” from different campuses, many of whom requested anonymity because they fear negative consequences, say Alpha’s educational philosophy was driven by software metrics and, sometimes, Liemandt's whims. One guide said they believed Alpha wanted to prepare students for a hypercompetitive “late capitalism, dog-eat-dog” environment. Parents like Kristine Barrios say the school impacted their children, left them with glaring gaps in their education, and is now using them to sell a story of success. “They set her up for failure,” Barrios says, and then it felt like “they punished her for failing.”
In response to WIRED’s October 10 requests for comment for this story, Alpha School shared a Google Doc of partial responses six days later that it subsequently rescinded access to. On October 20, Alpha informed WIRED: “We possess records that materially contradict key elements of your current reporting.” After several extensions of the original deadline requested for response, WIRED received no further substantive replies from Alpha to the requests sent on October 10. Last Friday morning, October 24, WIRED received a letter from lawyers for Alpha seeking more time to respond and further information from WIRED, including “waivers” from individual students’ parents. That night, Alpha’s lawyers sent WIRED a statement reading, in part: “Allegations that Alpha has mistreated, punished, or caused harm to any student are categorically and demonstrably false. Alpha and its employees prioritize a safe and productive environment to accelerate academic mastery and allow students to thrive.”
When scientists want to condition lab animals to perform tasks repetitively, they may use a Skinner box, a device invented by Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner that rewards test subjects for responding to certain stimuli. In 1953, Skinner adapted the idea into one of the world’s first personalized learning machines. On parents’ day in his daughter’s fourth-grade class, he noticed that some students were bored waiting for the teacher to review their math work while others were struggling to keep up. Skinner got to tinkering and ultimately developed boxes that could accept questions on punch cards and two-digit answers via levers. When a student got the question right, the box would shine a light to let them know they could move on.
After the digital revolution, learning machines got more adaptive. Personalized software could present students with questions that changed in difficulty and subject matter based on previous answers. By 2014, a small group of wealthy families from Austin’s burgeoning tech scene—including entrepreneur Brian Holtz and MacKenzie Price—felt confident enough in the software and in their own backgrounds to bet their kids’ educations on a new model. They founded Emergent Academy, renamed Alpha School in 2019. Some of the earliest students included Liemandt’s kids. The core philosophy, says Graham Frey, the school’s CEO from 2017 until 2022, was “the only way we’re going to know if the apps work is if we let them do the teaching.”
As Alpha was getting off the ground in Austin, the tech world’s billionaire philanthropists were coming around to a similar vision of the future of education. In Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s 2015 “Letter to Max,” released with the launch of their nonprofit, they pledged to build a world of new opportunity for their firstborn child and her peers. “Our generation grew up in classrooms where we all learned the same things at the same pace regardless of our interests or needs,” they wrote. “You’ll have technology that understands how you learn best” and get “as much help as you need in your most challenging areas.”
Zuckerberg’s initiative committed to spending more than $100 million to support a learning platform called Summit. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also gave millions in grants to encourage the adoption of personalized, software-based curricula.
Up until 2022, Alpha had applied its models to groups of students from wealthy, largely white, mostly college-educated families in Austin. A guide named Brennan Wong says she felt “OK with experimenting on this group of students because all the students I taught were coming from very well-off families and were already a couple grades ahead.” With its Brownsville campus, Alpha would be expanding to a different population of students.
When Alpha began recruiting Brownsville students with generous scholarships, there was nothing else like it in the predominantly Hispanic city of about 190,000, which sits at the southernmost tip of Texas, just across the Rio Grande from Matamoros, Mexico.
Kristine Barrios, who had been homeschooling her children, says she was drawn to the vibrant mural in the new school building’s lobby and the unconventional seating options that encouraged kids to get comfortable while they learned, rather than sit rigidly in desks.
Jessica Lopez says she wanted her two daughters to learn at their own pace and was intrigued by the life-skills workshops that would fill up their afternoons at Alpha once the software-based academics were done.
Silvia Solis and Juan Jose Garcia, who had moved back to Brownsville a year before, were eager to get their children into a school with other kids from the neighborhood, and Alpha was opening about a mile down the road.
Other parents said they enrolled because they were fleeing bullying at previous schools or looking for a flexible schedule that could accommodate frequent doctor’s appointments.
For much of the school’s first year, parents said, the place was held together by a dedicated staff who managed to create a fun, albeit chaotic, learning environment. Lopez's older daughter, a confident, gregarious 13-year-old who was 10 when she first enrolled, says she was a motivated student who would ask her parents if she could stay up late at home to work on her Alpha apps in order to earn rewards. She was selected as one of the top students, and she told her mom that she got to sit in a special room, eat snacks, and listen to music while she worked.
A parent who requested anonymity to protect their child said that the school had regular week-long breaks to recharge, during which students weren’t allowed to bring home their laptops to work. They said they loved the school and spread the word to their neighbors.
Liemandt took over as principal around the same time Alpha School Brownsville was opening, and it was then, Price says, that “we got really, really committed to making sure we were providing academic rigor and showing great results.” Even before the change, Liemandt had been hands-on with operations in Austin, former staff said. He would engage with the guides in long meetings about curriculum, or how to best keep the students motivated, and would sometimes send emails outside of working hours asking for updates on individual students.
At the Austin campus, guides said, students benefited from various opportunities. In one workshop, students designed custom slide sandals, then got to order them from the company. In another, a student says they created a model city for Tesla and won a two-day trip to Disney World. For hitting their learning metrics, they could possibly earn hundreds of dollars over the course of a school year.
Toward the end of that first year, Barrios says, she got a message one day from Alpha saying that her daughter had been selected to be an “ambassador” and would need to stay after school. When Barrios arrived to pick her up, she found Liemandt there too. She says her daughter and other students were giving tours to prospective parents who worked at the newly opened SpaceX Starbase nearby.
Soon after, Liemandt held a brief question-and-answer session for parents. When asked why Alpha had chosen to open a school in Brownsville, parents say they recall that Liemandt responded: For SpaceX.
Price says Alpha chose to open its campus in Brownsville because of the influx of SpaceX employees into an “impoverished area” with what she alleges is a “really tough” public school district. (The Texas Education Agency has given it an overall rating of B for the past two years, the most common rating for public schools and charters in the state.) Price adds, “We thought it would be a great place to go and serve a population that was interested in something that was, you know, kind of innovative and then also see how it worked with the local population.”
Even after what parents say could be a rocky first year, Barrios and others still saw Alpha as a pathway to the future for their kids, the kind of opportunity that rarely comes along for working-class families in communities like Brownsville. Many of them had been homeschooling previously or came from charter or other nontraditional schooling backgrounds. They were used to less structure. They felt that together, they could build the school into the vision of it that Alpha had sold them.
That summer, the beloved head of the school left. When families returned the following fall, according to a memo obtained by WIRED, parents were told that Alpha would be debuting a new “version” of itself, called “Limitless,” that was the “culmination” of its “learning” from prior years. “This means we can sunset programs and thinking, and build something that takes us further with the same limitless concepts and thinking,” the memo said. As part of that effort, the school established goals “deliberately designed to cause a parent to think or say, ‘That sounds impossibly difficult for my kid,’” the memo said, in order to “demonstrate the limitless possibilities of their children.”
As Barrios sees things, “it switched from being about the kids to the metrics and the data and the numbers.”
Spend a day at Alpha Brownsville and it’s easy to see the school’s curb appeal. The classrooms are small and cozy, with beanbags to sit on, inspirational reminders of students’ “limitless” potential painted on the walls, and diffusers pumping subtle, calming scents into the air. As the school has grown, Fults said, the older students have started using a dedicated room a few miles away at the Children’s Museum of Brownsville, steps from the activities and exhibits.
There are hints of a corporate coworking space—like the soundproofed phone booths that serve as test-taking cubicles—and clear signs of the school’s tech-evangelist, entrepreneurial ethos. In the room for 5- to 7-year-olds, a large TV on one wall displays circle charts that update every minute with completion rates and other metrics from each student’s personalized learning software. Against the opposite wall is a display of toys with price tags listed in “Alphas,” one of many motivational awards students can earn by hitting various learning metrics. One Alpha is equivalent to 25 cents, and a small Fortnite Lego set costs 350 Alphas. (That’s about six times the retail price.) Students can also earn visits to local amusement parks, lunch at restaurants, or trips to the grocery store.
Lessons take place in an eerie hush—a dozen kids with headphones on, plugged into laptops, occasionally raising their hand to indicate that they’ve finished a lesson or are having technical problems with their app. The adult guides in every classroom “don't do any teaching,” says Fults, the current head of school for Alpha Brownsville. “Usually what it looks like when a guide helps is more like having the student read the question out loud, show where they have done their work, or show what resources they have already accessed and already used.” If a student really gets stuck, she says, they can book a call with an academic coach who is “part of” 2 Hour Learning.
A list of the 31 academic coaches Alpha provided for the 2023-24 school year, obtained by WIRED, includes LinkedIn profiles for 26 that show they have been employed, usually as “analysts,” by either Trilogy, Liemandt’s software automation company, or Crossover, another Liemandt firm, which has been described as the world’s largest recruiter for remote full-time work. At least 27 of the coaches live outside the US, from the Philippines to Colombia, according to their Linkedin profiles.
While some guides—the adults who are actually in the room with students—have previous experience as educators, others do not. Frey says that when he was Alpha's CEO, he often “targeted individuals without teaching backgrounds.” Guides told WIRED that while some of their colleagues had experience at other schools, they also had coaching, motivational, or entrepreneurial backgrounds.
At Alpha, the guides’ support and oversight is meant to supplement the technology—and not just the personalized learning system the school has dubbed an AI tutor. Alpha can also use an array of management surveillance tools, which it calls “basic and extended capabilities,” to flag “incorrect usage” of the learning apps. These “anti-patterns” can “help detect engagement and focus issues.” The school may record students’ screen activity and their mouse and keyboard usage. Alpha may employ eye-tracking programs. Using what it calls a “pro sports analogy,” Alpha compares these tools to “game film.”
While parents are asked to consent to these surveillance programs, the school’s handbook says that there is “no expectation of privacy” on campus. If parents want to restrict recordings of their children outside of the school, they have to manually opt out of the “anywhere” option—as Jessica Lopez learned midway through her older daughter’s second year at Alpha. The girl says she remembers sitting on her bed one night working on schoolwork when she received a notification that she’d been flagged for an anti-pattern. She says Alpha’s system sent a video of her in her pajamas, taken from the computer’s webcam, that showed her talking to her younger sister.
Neil Selwyn, an education professor at Monash University and author of Should Robots Replace Teachers?: AI and the Future of Education, says attempts to automate teaching usually underestimate how much the profession requires improvisation and adapting to a particular student’s needs. Alpha’s trust in software-enabled repetition and students’ self-motivation is often typical of education ventures started by people with backgrounds in tech who were self-taught and “then fix onto self-regulated learning or one-to-one tutoring as the way that one can learn math or science or engineering or coding most effectively,” Selwyn says. “But they didn’t tend to learn history, poetry, or archaeology, or any of the humanities” that way.
Some Alpha Brownsville students say that the software they used could adapt to what they were learning, but not how they learned it. In her second year at the school, Lopez's older daughter says she began to stress about meeting the goals for her math and English lessons. Some of her learning apps had “a video in the corner that you could click on” for further instruction, she says, but she felt that was it: “You just trial-and-error.” She became so frustrated at falling behind—not behind her grade level, but behind the rate of production she needed to complete her goals and possibly earn rewards—that she says she took it out on herself physically.
“I was pulling my hair out, ripping my skin off,” says the former student, who her mom says had had trouble with sensory issues and hyperactivity since before her time at Alpha. “I think at one point I didn’t eat for most of the day because I told myself I don’t eat unless I get something right. I have to do this. Rewards, rewards, motivation, everything became a reward.” When one of the guides noticed she was distressed, she says that person gave her a piece of paper to tear at instead. She told WIRED that they also gave her a plushie toy that she used as a punching bag.
Earlier this year, Lopez published some of her critiques of Alpha School on Substack. Price says that Lopez is a “loud example” of someone who has “a huge difference in philosophy” and that Alpha is not for everyone. “Students thrive when they're in an environment with high standards and high support, which our guides do,” Price said. “But not everyone believes that, right? There are so many parents who do not really believe in high standards. There are parents who don't believe in high support.”
As Price sees it, what 2 Hour Learning’s team of scientists and software developers have built—an AI system that can track students’ progress and match them with appropriate lessons—is “like being able to do a CAT scan of a child's brain to understand what do they know, what don't they know, and how can we go and fill in that knowledge to mastery?” Currently, Alpha defines “mastery” as correctly completing 90 percent of a lesson.
In its marketing, Alpha says its students should spend two hours a day completing their sessions. But parents and former guides told WIRED that in order to keep up with the rate of lessons required to earn rewards, their students felt they needed to regularly work late into the night at home. Brooks Wiley, an Austin parent, says his son received $2,000 over the course of academic years for scoring well on tests and reaching other goals. But at 13 years old he was reading at an 11th-grade level, Wiley says, making it harder to demonstrate mastery at the same 2x rate. “He felt stress and anxiety to meet rewards,” Wiley says. At the same time, he adds, “I don’t think that's a bad thing. That standard or frame of mind has helped him now.”
Another parent, who withdrew their son from Alpha Brownsville, says guides offered to buy him something from Amazon if he retook a standardized test and improved his score. But the parent says their son felt shame when he wasn’t completing enough lessons in his apps. “He went from a really happy kid, where school completely changed him that first year,” the parent says, “to just a work machine who would do whatever it took.”
Last year, the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools approved Unbound Academy’s application to open a public, online-only charter. The charter school governing bodies in at least two other states—Arkansas and Pennsylvania—rejected the school’s proposals, and Utah's board decided not to move forward with its application process. “Even my own home state of Texas rejected our charter application,” Price told WIRED, though the Texas Education Agency told WIRED it “has no record of Unbound Academy as a charter applicant.” The Pennsylvania Department of Education wrote in its denial that “the artificial intelligence instructional model being proposed by this school is untested and fails to demonstrate how the tools, methods, and providers would ensure alignment to Pennsylvania academic standards.” The department noted that the curriculum plan Unbound presented was vague and did not expressly include subjects like physical education, health, languages, or social studies.
Students and families from Alpha School Brownsville who spoke to WIRED say younger age groups at the school lacked a dedicated social studies or history curriculum, though older kids learned those subjects. Brownsville parents said they also saw other gaps in their kids’ educations. One parent says that when their son left Alpha as an 8-year-old, he could read words quickly but didn’t comprehend what he was reading. When he enrolled as a third grader at his new school, the parent says, he was writing at a kindergarten level. And when writing by hand, he would get to the end of a line and curve down into the margins, not knowing he was supposed to move to the next line. “All Alpha taught him was read fast, learn your vocabulary, and move on,” the parent says.
When Solis and Garcia had enrolled their kids at Alpha, they say they told the school that their youngest needed help with reading. Alpha staff had told them not to get a tutor and to trust the process, they say. (An information packet from a parent orientation night that year says: “We are creating self-driven, 2x learners and having a tutor spoon feed you help is the opposite of that.”) But with six weeks left in the school year, Solis and Garcia say, Alpha informed them that their son was so far behind in reading that he might not be invited back in the fall of 2023. They say Alpha gave them a large package of make-up work to be completed during the summer. “They were making us do the work that they had failed to do,” Solis says. (The family withdrew their two children from the school after that first year.)
Kristine Barrios, a pediatric occupational therapist by profession, noticed while her youngest was still at Alpha that he still had an inefficient pencil grip. After pulling him out, she found his writing struggles were worse than she’d realized. He didn’t even know to start from the top of a letter and move down, she says. His older sister, 9 at the time she left Alpha, also had an inappropriate pencil grip, Barrios says. She would frequently misspell words longer than three letters and she couldn’t distinguish between nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech.
Some Brownsville parents’ anger has been compounded by a feeling that while they say their children were suffering, Alpha used the school to sell its product to other families. “They’re using our people as bait,” Lopez says. “They’re sharing that they’re in Brownsville, and how they helped us grow academically in a 98 to 99 percent low-income Hispanic community, so yes, it works for everybody. I don’t want to be their statistic, the reason somebody else goes through this.”
Lopez’s daughters both attend public school now. The transition wasn’t without stress, she says, but her oldest has continued to excel academically, and her younger daughter has a newfound confidence in her studies. All she needed was “someone who could walk her through content that’s just not landing,” Lopez says.
Within weeks of leaving Alpha and returning to homeschooling, Kristine Barrios’ daughter began eating regularly again, she says. Regaining her interest in school was more of a struggle. “It’s taken the better part of this past year to get her back to baseline,” Barrios says, “that natural exuberance and love of learning and life.”
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