Alpha School has been receiving an incredible amount of media attention recently. In fact, one of my children even asked me about it as part of their researching schools for our grandkids.

Today’s column is a guest post sharing one perspective on its future—a perspective that I happen to share.

I suspect I’m not the only educator hearing questions about it.

Alpha School Is Really Three Different Things

Benjamin Riley is the founder of Cognitive Resonance, dedicated to building human knowledge to stop AI hype:

Let’s talk about Alpha School. If you don’t know what it is, here’s a medley of what’s been written about it. And here’s a link to my latest investigative piece on it. Its main pedagogical claim to fame is something they call the “two-hour learning” model, where they have students spend two hours on a laptop every morning, using various ed-tech products to cover their core academics. In the afternoon, they spend four hours in hands-on, group-based “life skills” workshops.

Structurally, and importantly, I see Alpha School as really three different things:

• A network of small private schools, so small they are mostly microschools.
• A single public charter school in Arizona.
• An aspiring ed-tech company.

I’ve worked in education for two decades now and, at times, within the heart of the “ed reform” movement that has long championed charter schools and education technology and (more recently) school vouchers. My views have evolved significantly since the start of my career, but because of this experience, I think I can see Alpha School’s future, and it doesn’t look bright.

The private school version of Alpha School has been around for more than a decade and is based in Austin, Texas, where I live. It’s hard to know how many students are enrolled. In August 2025, one report quoted an Alpha School official saying there were all of 230 students nationwide, with 150 of them based in Austin (the flagship campus). You will find stories suggesting they are expanding to “50 campuses nationwide,” but many of these “campuses” are serving small numbers of kids. I’ve spoken with parents that formerly enrolled their children in Alpha School from across the country, and many describe programs with less than 10 kids.

There’s a reason the private school is small: It’s very expensive, usually to the tune of $40,000 to $75,000 in annual tuition in many places. Because of this, when students at Alpha School are done with their “two hours of learning,” they might physically go swim with Navy SEALs or compete for entrepreneurial funding in “Alpha Tank” or take a field trip to Poland. Obviously, the students attending the private school are coming from the upper stratosphere of the socioeconomic spectrum.

This means Alpha School is very limited in how big it can grow. Its leaders know this, because they’ve also tried to open charter schools under the “Unbound Academy” brand. This hasn’t gone well. Their charter applications have been denied in multiple states, including Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Utah. They are, however, trying to grow—at least in Texas—through the use of vouchers. How successful they’ll be is debatable.

But they did get chartered in Arizona and opened a school there last year. They promised in their charter to get kids to around 60% proficiency in math and English/language arts. Educator Dan Meyer did some sleuthing and found that in reality: “Unbound Academy projected 60% proficiency in math off a baseline of 34% and ended the year with 10% compared to an Arizona state average of 34%. They projected 65% proficiency in ELA off a baseline of 40% and ended with 28% compared to an Arizona state average of 42%.”

Not only is that below what Alpha/Unbound promised, it’s also far below Arizona’s statewide average. So the charter school route doesn’t look promising for Alpha Schools, either.

Here’s the real growth plan: ed tech. The private school’s “principal” is Joe Liemandt, a billionaire businessman who invests in software. He says he wants to reach a billion kids—literally—using AI-driven technology. Toward that end, Alpha has contracted with a few prominent names in the “science of learning” community that I know well, such as Carl Hendrick. Nowadays, Hendrick claims “you can’t scale good teaching” and also that “learning is governed by the same biological laws as digestion.”

This is mystifying. The entire idea behind public education is that every child deserves an education, regardless of background, and that there is a collective social obligation to provide this. Of course, we can scale good teaching, if we choose to invest in it. (I founded a nonprofit organization that’s working toward this goal, though I’m no longer working there.) And the idea that learning is like digestion is so far afield from what we know about cognition that I don’t know what to say other than good luck with selling that notion to any teacher with classroom experience.

What Hendrick really means is that teaching does not scale the way that technology can. That’s true. But humans prefer learning from other humans—it’s how we’ve culturally evolved. [Editor’s note: see Yes, It Is Possible To “Scale Good Teaching.”] Ed-tech evangelists simply cannot wrap their minds around this, so we keep repeating the same story over and over, whether it’s Alt School or Summit Learning Platform or Khanmigo, all of which have not lived up anywhere near to their originators’ lofty goals.

I predict Alpha School will one day join them. It’s not going to transform education, nor is it an aspirational model for the future. It rests on profoundly mistaken ideas about what education is for and what purpose schools serve in society.

Thanks to Ben for sharing his thoughts!