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I spend my time looking at ways to improve public schools. So why have I been fascinated by a private school charging $40,000 a year in tuition?

The AI-fueled Alpha program claims its students grow academically than twice as fast as the national average, with only two hours of learning per day. Initially, I was skeptical. But after I read a parent review and a profile of school founder Mackenzie Price and principal Joe Liemandt, and listened to Liemandt on podcastsI was intrigued both as a parent and as an education policy wonk.

Alpha started as a small private school in Austin, Texas, in 2014 but now operates a growing network of 18 locations. Its AI tools are also in use in specialized gifted and talented programs, sports academies and a Montessori-like elementary school. As the network grew, it drew the attention of Liemandt, an Austin tech billionaire, who not only decided to send his kids there but stepped away from the industry, became the school’s leader and now says he plans to spend $1 billion to transform education.

How? Mainly through its technology-enabled, personalized “two-hour learning” model.

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Alpha points to NWEA MAP Growth gains that are, on average, 2.6 times as large as other similarly scoring students make. In 2024-25 for examplethe main Alpha campus had, depending on the grade level, 67% to 90% of students meeting their growth targets in math and 65% to 100% of students meeting their targets in English.

These rates are high, but I find them plausible. Digital learning programs like i-Ready, DreamBox, Khan Academy, IXL and Zearn produce strong academic gains by combining, to varying degrees, the best of homeschooling (personalization) with instruction that leads kids’ through harder and harder content. They also incorporate lessons from the science of learning field, which has found that quizzes and practice that’s spaced out over time help students gradually store new content in their long-term memory.

Alpha uses artificial intelligence to tailor learning experiences for each student. For example, the school has catalogued the specific lessons a student would need to master, say, sixth grade math.

Then, the AI uses a child’s test scores or past work to determine what remaining lessons need to be completed. Eventually, the goal is to personalize the content, giving students who are interested in, say, baseball or fashion lessons about fractions or algebra that use examples from those subjects.

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The trick is to get kids to actually engage with the apps and persevere. Not many students can do that on their own.

Alpha takes this insight and supercharges it. It essentially promises that if kids buckle down each morning and get through their academic lessons, they can have their afternoons free to pursue their own interests and other life skills.

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The contours of its “TimeBack” model vary by student and location. Some will practice chess or play sports, but schools also use the afternoon to work on public speaking, entrepreneurship or outdoor education — real-world activities, not stuff you might learn in a book.

This approach — not chatbots — is what Alpha School means when it boasts that its students can complete their core academic subjects in just two hours a day. In fact, Liemandt has quite negative things to say about chatbots and warns that they lead kids to cheat, get distracted or outsource their thinking to the computers. He also hinted on a recent podcast that the school’s AI tools struggle with errors and hallucinations.

The ultimate goal is mastery of the subject matter. And when Liemandt talks about mastery, he literally wants kids to know 100% of the material in each course sequence.

In fact, he believes this lack of mastery is a key failing of the current educational system. Kids get passed along if they know 70% or 80% of the material in a given grade.

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But, Liemandt argues, if kids don’t know the other 20% to 30% — or don’t know it well enough — this deficit builds up over time and leaves students struggling as they get into harder material. This might explain why math proficiency rates tend to decline as kids get older.

When new students enter Alpha, Liemandt offers them a deal: They can earn $100 if they can ace the state math test. Sounds impossible, but the deal applies to any tested grade, from third on up. So, for example, those who enter Alpha as seventh graders are encouraged to go back and take the earlier-grade math tests.

If they can ace those, they get the $100. By offering the monetary reward in this way, Liemandt tries to trick kids into filling any knowledge gaps.

Alpha’s goal is to have kids who love school so much that they might even prefer it over vacation. That’s a super high bar (!), but Liemandt swears that a lot of Alpha students ask to keep going over the summer or holidays.

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To keep kids on track, Alpha gives each a set of personalized daily goals. These are based on the lessons students need to master, not the time it might take to complete them.

Kids also earn “Alpha bucks” that they can use to buy treats. And because most people can’t focus for hours on end, Alpha uses the “Pomodoro” time management technique to push kids to focus for 25 minutes before taking a break.

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Who is doing all the motivating? It’s not traditionally licensed teachers.

Instead, Alpha employs one “guide” — a sort of coach or assistant — for every eight students. The typical guide is a young college graduate who may be a former athlete or cheerleader — they’re good with children and high-energy, but their primary job is about support and encouragement than delivering pedagogy.

The original Alpha School in Austin charges $40,000 in tuition per year. An Alpha School opening near me in Virginia is going to charge $65,000 annually. The network is expanding rapidly and will be extending its model into public charter schools and much lower-cost private schools, including one in BrownsvilleTexas, that costs “only” $10,000 per year.

What do they use the money for? The AI costs are high, and Alpha has nice buildings, small classes and well-paid staff. It also uses the money to do things a typical school couldn’t afford, like offering financial incentives for acing exams and flying kids on a field trip to Poland.

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The families who can afford Alpha’s lofty fees are not exactly your run-of-the-mill public school parents. It’s worth a healthy dose of skepticism to question whether Alpha’s results will hold up to scrutiny or work as well as it claims for less advantaged students. Alpha has data suggesting that its model also works well for lower-performing students, but the sample size is small.

Still, it’s worth understanding which parts of the Alpha model are the most important and most replicable. Similar AI/ technology components, such as Khan Academy and Zearnare already being incorporated in schools to varying degrees.

Implementing an Alpha-style mastery approach would require schools to put students in classes based on ability level rather than age. That would be hard to do, given how most schools are organized. Still, some have made efforts to apply the same ideas.

Some of the motivation aspects are worth trying, although perhaps not at the same scale or boldness as what Liemandt is able to do. For example, research has found positive effects from paying students to show up to school and complete their homework on time. Many teachers already run their own mini-rewards systems, which they could focus on academics both in the classroom and at home.

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Mostly, I appreciate that Alpha School is pushing the frontier of what makes for a good school. No matter what else it accomplishes, its experiments with technology, student motivation and content mastery are good for the world.

*Disclosure: The author is a policy adviser for NWEA, the makers of the MAP Growth assessments mentioned in the piece.

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