Alpha School's Massachusetts public-school push stalls

The Springfield pilot never launched. A single classroom at Kiley Prep, a middle school inside the Springfield Empowerment Zone, was slated to install Alpha School's AI-driven learning software on 30 district computers at no cost. Most families first heard about it from an August 23 email sent the night before the school year began, as WBUR reported.

Alpha is a for-profit company whose private campuses, including new sites in Beacon Hill and Jamaica Plain opening this fall, charge tuition exceeding $50,000. Its pitch: students spend roughly two hours a day on core academics via AI-powered software, then fill the rest of the day with public speaking and entrepreneurship. The company claims its students learn twice as much as peers in traditional schools.

Massachusetts Secretary of Education Stephen Zrike had been pushing the model behind the scenes. In a June 10 email to Matt Brunell, co-executive director of the Springfield Empowerment Zone, Zrike wrote: "While the model is not without controversy, I have attended several sessions with the Alpha team and found their approach thought-provoking." Two days later he circulated an invitation to superintendents for an Alpha presentation.

Brunell leaned on the district's numbers. "With 86 percent of students not proficient in reading and math, we cannot leave any stone unturned," he said. Riley Hernandez, president of the Springfield Education Association, saw it differently: "Does he represent the interests of educators...Or does he represent the interests of ed tech, the interests of corporate profits, the interests of Alpha?"

The draft data-sharing agreement, which an Alpha representative said on August 28 was "almost over the finish line," never settled whether screen recordings, webcam monitoring, microphone recordings, or biometric collection would be permitted. All four methods appear in Alpha's own privacy policy. Andrew Liddell of the EdTech Law Center framed what parents should have been told: "This is all the information that we are collecting about your family...Here are the risks of how it could be misused."

A September cyberattack across the district halted what remained of the pilot. Alpha has since confirmed it runs no public-school programs in Massachusetts and has "no plans to launch any in the near future." Burlington Superintendent Eric Conti, one of several who declined, put it plainly: "Superintendents tend to be very interested in making sure we meet the needs of all learners, and we're not just cutting out certain types of kids."