(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Alpha School: Using AI To Unleash Students And Transform Teaching [1] ['Ray Ravaglia'] Date: 2025-02-10 Alpha School divides the morning into four blocks of 30 minutes, during which time students work through core subjects led by AI tutors. Afternoons feature projects, life skills, and other high-value activities. paige wilks Alpha School represents a radical departure from traditional education. Their model is built around a bold claim: By leveraging AI-driven, adaptive learning technology, students can complete an entire day’s worth of academics in just two hours. The rest of the day is dedicated to life skills, passion projects, and co-curricular activities, creating a balance between independent mastery and communal engagement. This approach is designed to solve two persistent challenges in education: the inefficiency of one-size-fits-all instruction and the isolation of individualized learning. By allowing students to work individually at their own pace but within a shared environment, Alpha School preserves the social benefits of schooling while eliminating many of its traditional inefficiencies. How Alpha School Works Alpha School replaces traditional classroom instruction with AI tutors and adaptive learning platforms. Students spend their mornings engaging in a highly personalized curriculum in the core subjects: math, reading, science, and social science. The AI-driven system assesses their knowledge in real time, identifying gaps and ensuring they achieve mastery before progressing. This mastery-based approach allows students to advance far beyond grade level if they are ready or to fill in foundational gaps before proceeding. Teachers, now called “guides,” do not lecture or grade assignments in these core courses. Instead, they act as motivators and mentors, helping students remain engaged and on track. In the afternoons, students take part in workshops and collaborative projects centered on public speaking, leadership, entrepreneurship, and other practical skills. Afternoons can also include skill-building workshops, debates, coding projects, and creative endeavors, activities often squeezed out of the traditional school schedule. Older students can use this time to explore internships, research opportunities, or other substantive outside endeavors impossible to do within the confines of a traditional school. These activities ensure that learning is not solely about acquiring knowledge, actively or passively, but about exploring it and putting it to use while building confidence, enhancing communication skills, and honing problem-solving abilities. This hybrid structure of independent learning in the morning and substantive, in-person engagement in the afternoon is a key differentiator of the Alpha School model. While many online or independent programs allow students to learn at their own pace, they often lack the social and motivational aspects of a school environment. By bringing students together physically at school while preserving the efficiency of individualized learning during the morning block, Alpha School avoids this problem. MORE FOR YOU Alpha School Accelerates Education By Not Wasting Time Julian Stanley, a psychologist and pioneer in gifted education, championed the idea that students learn best when they are not forced to sit through material they already know. He argued that acceleration, rather than enrichment or repetition, was the best way to challenge bright students. His work laid the foundation for many gifted education programs that exist today. A key insight from Stanley’s research is that students should neither be forced to relearn mastered content nor be pushed into material they are unprepared for. Traditional classrooms struggle to maintain this balance as they must accommodate a wide range of abilities. AI-driven learning, however, addresses this issue by tailoring the pace and content to each individual student. AI-based instruction goes beyond traditional adaptive learning by assessing not just correct answers but the reasoning behind them. This allows the system to pinpoint conceptual misunderstandings and address them immediately. Alpha School’s model is a natural evolution of Stanley’s vision, one where technology makes personalized, mastery-based learning a reality for every student, not just the academically gifted. Is Alpha School Better? For students who thrive in the Alpha School model, the results are undeniable. By eliminating boredom and disengagement, Alpha School keeps students highly motivated. Traditional classrooms operate on a compromise: Pacing is set to accommodate the majority with a chief goal of minimizing the number of students who fall behind. Likewise for the age at which subjects are taught. In the traditional model, progression from one grade to another can be likened to a ship moving through the Panama Canal. Students start each grade with the primary goal of being ready to progress to the next grade. If they enter already above grade level, the teacher checks the box and moves her attention to the other students, leaving the student about grade level to entertain themselves. For students in the top 3% of the population, this can mean waiting three to four years before material is presented, which they would find challenging. Alpha School’s mastery-based model solves this problem by allowing students to advance as quickly as they are capable. That said, education is not just about learning content or about efficiency but about formation — developing the ways of thinking and habits of mind that are the hallmarks of the well-educated individual. (That education is not purely about content knowledge acquisition can be seen from the old saying that “an education is what remains when you have forgotten everything you have learned.”) A truly great education does more than teach content; it shapes a student’s way of thinking. The ideal educational experience still resembles Socrates in the Agora, engaging in dialogue with eager students. Alpha School’s model of individual work is not a replacement for this. Still, it provides a compelling alternative to an education system that often fails its most capable students. Alpha School’s first class just graduated, with students admitted to top colleges, including Stanford, Babson, Vanderbilt, and Savannah College of Art and Design. According to founder MacKenzie Price, Alpha graduates report feeling as well, if not better, prepared than their peers in college. They also note that they find it frustrating to spend hours sitting through traditional lectures when they have been conditioned to learn far more efficiently. Beyond college placement, Alpha School measures success through standardized testing. Students take NWEA MAP assessments, which track academic growth. Alpha School claims that its students, on average, experience 2.4 to 2.6 times the academic growth of traditional school students. Can Alpha School Scale? One of Alpha School’s most significant challenges will be scaling the activity while preserving the excitement of the initial schools. Education is filled with stories of projects that are wonderfully successful as prototypes, moderately successful with early adopters, and not discernibly different at scale. Alpha School is currently private, with tuition costs ranging from $25,000 to $40,000 per year. To expand its impact, the organization is working to launch charter schools in multiple states. A virtual charter school in Arizona will open in the Fall of 2025. However, efforts to open physical charter schools have faced resistance, with some education officials expressing skepticism. With such resistance, it may be that the best approach to scaling will be in the form of private micro-schools in states with educational savings accounts, provided that the costs can be controlled. Critics of Alpha School often express concern that students spend too much time on screens. However, Alpha students spend only two hours daily on academic screen time — less than many traditional schools where digital learning is integrated throughout the day. Alpha School’s model is particularly well-suited for highly self-motivated students. However, it remains unclear how well it will work for students who need more structure and direct instruction. The idea of replacing human educators with AI tutors is controversial, and some educators worry that younger students, in particular, may struggle with self-directed learning without the presence of a traditional teacher. Alpha counters that the role of the teacher has not been eliminated but transformed—guides serve as coaches and motivators, focusing on student engagement rather than content delivery. The Future Of Alpha School Alpha School is part of a broader movement exploring how technology can reshape education. Its success thus far indicates that personalized, mastery-based learning is a compelling alternative to traditional schooling. However, questions persist regarding its long-term viability and accessibility. If Alpha can effectively scale its model while maintaining quality, it could represent a significant shift in education delivery. However, whether it can replace traditional education or simply provide an elite alternative remains to be seen. Regardless, Alpha School prompts educators to reconsider what is possible. Demonstrating how students can learn twice as quickly while engaging in meaningful, real-world activities raises the question: If we were to design a school from scratch today, would it look anything like what we have now? [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rayravaglia/2025/02/10/alpha-school-using-ai-to-unleash-students-and-transform-teaching/ Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/