Scottsdale school says kids can learn core skills in AI-powered lessons 2 hours a day — for $40K

As summer winds down and students head back to class, some parents are enrolling their kids in a brand-new school in Scottsdale. It’s called Alpha School, and it runs on an education model called “two-hour learning,” which claims that students can master core lessons in just two hours a day through personalized, AI-powered online instruction.

At Alpha School, students spend two hours a day in the classroom on individual laptops. In the second part of the day, they’re led through collaborative life skills activities by what Alpha Schools call “guides.”

Scottsdale’s Alpha School is currently enrolling students from kindergarten through 8th grade — annual tuition is $40,000.

The first Alpha School opened in 2014 in Austin, Texas. It’s the brainchild of a podcaster named Mackenzie Price, who also developed the two-hour learning idea.

Pooja Salhotra recently profiled Price and the Alpha School program for the New York Times. Salhotra joined The Show.

Pooja Salhotra

Full conversation

POOJA SALHOTRA: Yeah, so Mackenzie Price is a woman who lives in Austin and she's a mom. She worked in the mortgage business. And, she has two daughters, and she tells this story where one day her daughter was in elementary school at the time and came home and said she didn't want to go to school the next day.

And her mom was just kind of devastated and saw the problem, not as a problem with, you know, her daughter or with anything like that, but with the actual model itself and the way that education was working. And she said that she, she didn't see that there was another school out there that would kind of help students cultivate this love of learning, so she decided to make it herself.

SAM DINGMAN: Do we know how she came up with this hybrid approach that she's taking? Where there's a combination of sitting with a laptop, doing some lessons and then doing collaborative exercises the rest of the day. How, how did she come up with that?

SALHOTRA: So she said that she, you know, knew about personalized learning, which was this big movement a couple of decades ago, where the idea is that students shouldn't have to be all going at the same pace, like students learn at different paces, so why are schools not tailoring education to each student.

So she wanted to have that as the model. And she felt like if students are sitting in front of the screen or or in the classroom all day long, like that will suck the love out of learning. So she wanted it to be something where it combined other sorts of activities.

DINGMAN: So one of the other interesting differences about these schools is that there's no traditional teacher in the classroom, but there is what they call a guide. What do the guides do, what function do they play?

SALHOTRA: They're kind of walking around the room when you have kids on their laptops, and they're offering support. So keeping students on task, offering emotional support.

What Mackenzie told me is that she was describing one student who, this young girl who loves Taylor Swift, but couldn't stay focused. So like, if she completed her assignment, she would then like get a little break where she would go with the guide, and they would like play a Taylor Swift song and dance for like 30 seconds and then get back to work.

So they try to have these guides get to know each student, what motivates them, what they don't like and don't like, and kind of use that to their advantage. And then they do sort of run the show during the afternoon sessions when they do those workshops.

DINGMAN: Are the guides that Alpha School is hiring, generally speaking, people with education backgrounds?

SALHOTRA: Some of them do, but not all of them. The ones that I met were all quite young. One who I spoke with in-depth, he had actually worked at the NBA before and was like a coach for various teams and basketball players. So he very much was all about motivating and coaching and mentoring. I talked to one who was a lawyer before, so it's really all kinds of things.

It seems like they're really focused on finding people who are dynamic and empathetic and like can connect with students more than having like a subject matter expertise.

DINGMAN: Speaking of people like lawyers doing this, one of the other really striking details from your article about this was the salaries that the guides are being paid.

SALHOTRA: Yeah, so they all make a minimum of $100,000 a year, which is obviously, you know, much higher than your traditional school pays and it's kind of, you know, shocking when I've told teachers who I know, because these people don't have to have gotten an education degree or a teaching license. So that really is quite a remarkable number.

DINGMAN: Yeah, and kind of dovetailing with that, the tuition to go to an Alpha School is also pretty hefty, right?

SALHOTRA: Yeah, so in Austin, it is $40,000 a year. I believe it's different depending on what city you're in. So the Brownsville campus in Texas is, is a lower price point. New York City is a higher price point.

They are trying to offer some financial aid. I think when they first start, what Mackenzie told me is that aid will not be available like when a school first opens, but after a few years, there might be some scholarships.

DINGMAN: And does McKenzie have any background in education?

SALHOTRA: You know, she, she went to Stanford. She wasn't a teacher before or anything. So not, not really, no.

DINGMAN: OK, you did speak to it for your piece, a couple of folks from the more traditional world of education. Like you spoke to Randi Weingarten. What was their reaction to what Alpha is doing?

SALHOTRA: Yeah, I would say overwhelmingly those outside of the Alpha world who I spoke to were highly critical. People were generally critical of this idea of removing teachers.

A lot of people were specifically worried about the social aspects of school that kids might be missing out on if they're just interacting with the computer instead of with a teacher and with peers, things like the discussions that you have, if you read the same book.

Even other things with a smaller school like this, you don't necessarily have like traditional sports teams, you don't have student council maybe or prom or some of those kind of events that we think about when we think about like an American school.

DINGMAN: Oh, interesting. So even though there are these collaborative projects that the students do in the second part of the day. Some examples of which you cite in your piece, like make a documentary film, make a food truck, learn how to cook an egg. It sounds like other than that, there isn't that larger after school activity, extracurricular infrastructure that you would get at a more traditional school.

SALHOTRA: Yes, I think that's right. The people from Alpha like Mackenzie say that because there's only two hours of academics, you have so much more time in the normal school day for those more social activities, and they say they don't even need to assign homework, really. They can get it all done during the school day and then kids can use the evening to do whatever they want.

DINGMAN: Presumably we're dealing with a pretty well to do base of parents here who, if they can afford this $40,000 a year tuition.

SALHOTRA: Yeah, another thing, you know, a lot of the critics point out is like you were saying, to go to a $40,000 a year private school, you have to be fairly wealthy, well connected, and so some of the results, it can be hard to kind of disentangle. Is it just that these students are very privileged and coming from families where their parents maybe spend money on test prep and things like that, or is it really the school that is producing these results?

I think that's really hard to see. I think that as the school expands, you know, we're seeing it open in Arizona this year as a charter school, so you'll see a wider variety of students enrolled there. It'll be interesting to see kind of how they end up and what their test scores look like.