Zane Shah arrives at school at 8:45 a.m., greets his friends and puts his backpack in the assigned locker. This could be any middle school morning. But one thing is different at Shah’s school: there are no traditional teachers.
Shah, 13, is an eighth-grader at Alpha School, a network of private, for-profit schools that opened its first campus in Chicago this fall for students in kindergarten through eighth grade. The adults in the building are called “guides,” and artificial intelligence manages all academic instruction.
When school starts at 9 a.m., students work on math, reading, writing, language arts and science on laptops, using adaptive software that Alpha says allows them to master core subjects in about two hours a day.
This mastery does not come cheap. According to U.S. News & World Report, attending Alpha Chicago costs $55,000 per year, about $8,000 more than the average annual cost of a private college.
Alpha was founded in Austin, Texas, in 2014 by MacKenzie Price, who became a vocal critic of traditional schooling. Alpha claims its students score in the top 1% on national standardized tests. The school also says it does not select applicants based on previous grades or test scores. Instead, they look for students who are coachable, motivated, and open to the learning model.
The school says students are only asked to leave due to behavioral issues and not for failure to meet academic standards.
“They get accepted to fantastic schools: Stanford, Northwestern, Rice,” said Brian Howell, dean of Alpha Chicago’s parent chapter and former anthropology professor at Wheaton College in Illinois.
Shah, who started at Alpha this year, previously attended traditional schools. Two hours of academic instruction a day is enough to accomplish everything he learned in a typical eight-hour school day, he told CBS News.
“I feel like I can be more focused instead of having 20 to 30 kids in a class all talking at once,” Shah said.
“Do not interact with chatbots”
Learning at Alpha focuses on the school’s proprietary educational software, which is used on all Alpha campuses and a handful of affiliated private schools. The system, called TimeBack, was developed by a research team led by cognitive scientist Carl Hendrick of the Academica University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands.
TimeBack is designed to adapt to students’ individual skills and abilities throughout the school year. For example, if a student repeatedly makes a mistake while tackling the same type of problem, the software returns to previous concepts to fill in the gaps in their knowledge, according to Alpha.
Alpha also leverages a learning science team of subject matter experts based around the world, including certified teachers, curriculum experts, or early childhood education specialists. They review student data daily, tracking each child’s progress and checking whether they have met their academic goals. The team also develops the curriculum and intervenes through remote coaching calls as a last resort if students get stuck and need additional help.
Alpha says their approach works more like a private tutor than a chatbot because the software doesn’t provide answers; instead, the system is designed to test students’ knowledge until it determines that they have correctly learned a given lesson. The technology is also “closed,” meaning it does not rely on information from an open Internet.
“It’s important to understand that they’re not interacting with chatbots. They’re not getting answers from AI,” Howell said.
Replace teachers with “guides”
Another unusual aspect of Alpha schools is that most guides have no background in education. A February analysis by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, a nonpartisan think tank, reported that only about a third of Alpha Guides have any training or degrees.
Carrington Haas, Alpha Chicago’s lead guide, told CBS News that school staff play a different role than traditional teachers.
“We don’t teach academics. The main part of our job is supporting students motivationally and emotionally,” she said.
When asked if the guides answered academic questions, Haas added: “No, the academic team has their support to be able to answer a coaching call.”
Yet Haas, who has a background in traditional education, including at Teach For America and a Waldorf charter school, rejected the idea that the school would be teacherless.
“I think it’s the future,” she said. “And it’s not without a teacher because we’re still here and we’re still teaching the life skills that they need.”
Howell described Alpha’s approach as mastery-based, meaning students don’t progress until they demonstrate understanding of a concept. When a student gets stuck, the guide does not immediately offer help; instead, it asks the student to reread the problem while relying on the adaptive software’s tips.
“Human beings look at this data. They look at the dashboards. They see where students are stuck, where are they moving faster?” » said Howell.
Although Alpha centers its pedagogy on computer-assisted learning, Howell also rejects any notion that the school’s educational approach amounts to parking children in front of a screen.
“This is not just some mind-numbing, on-screen zombifying project,” he told CBS News. “The AI does not make any decisions about what students learn. The AI does not control a student’s day, humans do.”
So far, Binoy Shah is encouraged by his son’s early experiences, noting that he quickly noticed a change in Zane’s commitment to his education.
“When I was 13, before you came, how was school? Good. How was your lunch? Good. What did you do today? Nothing,” Binoy said. “Now we have three to five minutes of conversation about what he did at school, and he’s excited about it.”
Experts question Alpha’s approach
Despite all the hype around artificial intelligence, education experts are not convinced by Alpha’s unconventional teaching methods and AI-delivered programs.
While affirming the value of teaching life skills, such as communication and leadership, Rebecca Winthrop, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution who has visited Alpha’s campuses, questions the school’s claims about its educational approach and results. She also urges families interested in the school to make sure they know what they are signing up for.
“Parents should be aware that this is an experimental model. There is no clear, externally validated evidence for the results they claim,” she said.
“Neuroscience says that deep thinking – the search for meaning, which schools often don’t spend enough time on – is really important for students’ learning and long-term outcomes,” Winthrop added.
Other experts are more openly critical of Alpha’s approach, accusing the school network of effectively financializing education.
“Alpha School is less an effort to expand educational opportunities than an experiment in getting the most out of schooling,” said Carol Corbett Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, a nonprofit advocacy group that supports public education.
Burris said Alpha’s founders implemented his model at Unbound Academy, a free public charter school in Arizona built on his TimeBack learning platform. She told CBS News that the institution performed “dismal” compared to Arizona public schools, “despite the promises submitted in its charter application.”
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