Chicago is about to see a major shift in the classroom as The Alpha School brings its controversial AI-based model to the city.
For $55,000 a year, K-8 students at this private institution don’t have traditional teachers. Instead, they spend their mornings on laptops and tablets, letting adaptive software lead the way.
Founded by MacKenzie Price, Alpha School aims to cut out the “boredom and inefficiency” she believes exists in standard schools. In this model, apps handle the heavy lifting of core subjects, adjusting the difficulty in real-time. The adults in the room, called “guides,” aren’t required to be experts in any specific field. As Price puts it, “Our teachers don’t need to be subject matter experts.”
This high-tech approach has already won over parents like Blake Mohseni. Working in finance, Mohseni sees AI as an unavoidable reality and enrolled his four-year-old daughter to ensure she stays ahead of the curve. “I’m a firm believer that this is the future,” he said. “At the end of the day, the writing is on the wall, and you gotta evolve or be left behind.”
Beyond the screens, the school offers a lifestyle that matches the steep tuition. Students get to go on luxury trips to places like Poland and the Hamptons. Sarah Cone, a venture capitalist with a child in the New York branch, says the results speak for themselves. “She’s learning at this insane pace. She’s really growing quickly and accelerating,” Cone noted. “I sound like I’m a cult convert or something, but I genuinely am just a parent that loves Alpha School.”
But not everyone is convinced that a computer can replace a human mentor. Critics argue that education is about more than just data retention. Joe Vukov, a professor at Loyola University Chicago who looks at the ethics of AI, is wary of the change. “I worry that you’re changing the nature of what learning and education, at its best, has always looked like,” he explained.
Stanford associate professor Victor Lee also pointed out that because the school serves high-income families, the students are already likely to succeed, making it hard to prove if the AI is actually better. He remains skeptical that technology can ever fully match the intuition of a real person. “There’s just so much that teachers are doing that is well-beyond what even the most sophisticated language models can do,” Lee said. “Right now, the evidence just is not there.”
