Alpha School Loses Its AI Vendor as Parents Pull Out

IXL, the software that Alpha School was using for the bulk of its math, language and science instruction, deactivated the private school's account in July for violating its terms of service, according to a Wired investigation by Todd Feathers. The vendor told Wired its product is 'not intended—and we do not recommend its use—as a replacement' for 'trained, caring teachers.' That is more or less the pitch Alpha's two-hour-a-day AI model has been built around. Two experts in our Who's Who directory shared the Wired piece, a sign it is circulating beyond the ed-tech beat.

Alpha, a chain with tuition running from about $10,000 to $75,000 a year and backed by tech investor Joe Liemandt, promises children can finish all academic work in two hours on adaptive software, then spend the rest of the day on life-skills workshops and 'masterpiece' projects.

Of 31 coaches Wired identified as listed for the 2023–24 year, 27 were remote workers in the Philippines and Colombia, employed by Liemandt's other corporate ventures rather than credentialed classroom teachers.

The monitoring reached into students' homes by default, with parents having to manually opt out of home webcam recording. Wired reports that one student was sent a video of herself from her laptop's webcam when the system flagged an 'anti-pattern.' A 9-year-old with a doctor's note requiring snacks was told she had not earned them until she hit her learning metrics.

Across more than a dozen former employees, students and parents interviewed, the recurring complaint is that dashboards looked clean while children were stuck in software loops or gaming the points system, and families discovered months later that their kids had fallen behind. Alpha declined to share underlying test data with Wired or the Boston Globe. Its Brownsville, Texas campus, one of the newer sites, has seen an increasing number of families leave.