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Despite having all the resources in the world to offer their offspring a high-quality education, a cohort of wealthy entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are choosing to educate them using AI instead.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, a private school network called Alpha School is luring in rich parents across the country, offering them an eyebrow-raising education that includes hours of AI-based tutoring — for a searing $75,000 a year.
It also has a decidedly political tilt. The Trump administration has heavily promoted the private school network, which “rejects DEI” and avoids discussions of “hot-button social issues.”
The use of AI in education has sparked a major national debate over the future of learning and the role of human instructors amid a major teacher shortage crisis and collapsing education funding, with experts warning that the tech falls well short of a conventionally proven curriculum.
The Alpha School network has attracted some big names with its “personalized” approach, including billionaire Bill Ackman. Its new hybrid programs make heavy use of AI, including AI tutors and “interactive project-based workshops,” an approach that’s proven popular in Silicon Valley.
“We recognize that education is likely broken the way it is and there’s going to be entrepreneurs that try to fix it,” San Francisco-based venture capitalist Shaun Johnson, who plans to send his son to an Alpha kindergarten, told the WSJ. “You want someone to be able to think on their feet and navigate the world, not necessarily a recitation of facts in a particular discipline.”
But whether Alpha School’s approach actually works is murky. Given that it’s a private school network, it’s not required to report metrics to the state, making its effectiveness hard to evaluate, as the WSJ points out.
In February, 404 Media obtained internal documents showing that the network’s AI-generated, “personalized” classes were full of slop, from poor structuring to illogical multiple-choice questions.
The overall goal is to compress the equivalent of a public school education into “two-hour learning” sessions to prepare them for standardized testing, with the rest of the time being dedicated explore personal pursuits. But former workers at the school told 404 that students had to spend a lot longer than two hours a day and that many of them had to fill holes in their education before taking high school-level classes.
Worse yet, the publication found that Alpha School was collecting huge amounts of personal data on the students, including videos of them, and storing them in easily accessible Google Drive folders.
“Students are being treated like guinea pigs,” a former employee told 404.
In short, it’s a confounding reality for wealthy families, who can easily afford an education at well-established institutions with good track records for their children. The promise of a quick, AI-facilitated fix may be lucrative to Silicon Valley elites — but we’ll have to check in with their kids in a decade or two to see how the whole thing worked out in the long term.
More on AI and education: A Staggering Proportion of High School Kids Are Using AI to Do Their Homework, Which Is Probably Not Going to End Well
