No Grades, No teachers, No School Lunches: More 'AI Schools' Coming To Bay Area: Report

SAN FRANCISCO, CA —No grades, no teachers, no school lunches. Just an AI-powered classroom for teens powering away on their lessons. Instead of teachers, there are guides. That is the footprint an AI school wants to expand in the Bay Area.

Alpha School, which opened this academic year in San Francisco's Marina district, plans to expand to Palo Alto and the East Bay, according to KGO. Rather than grades, teachers, or cafeterias, students complete two-hour individualized 'focused learning' sessions using laptops, each working independently with AI-based instruction.

"I'm doing my math right now, and I'm working on percentages," said June Rockefeller, an Alpha 8th grader, told KGO. The 14-year-old Rockefeller convinced her parents she should enroll at Alpha.

Alpha School was founded by MacKenzie Price. She launched the first Alpha School in Austin, Texas. Since then, the business has expanded nationwide, with 13 campuses built on "one-to-one mastery-based tutoring," according to KGO.

"The adults in the building are able to do what they're passionate about and what they love, which is mentoring the students, providing emotional support, and providing motivational support," Carson Lehmann, San Francisco Alpha School Lead Guide, told KGO.

Price said the impetus for Alpha came from her own child's boredom at school.

The two-hour learning block, which includes both instruction and breaks, is followed by lunch and hands-on workshops in the afternoon. Rather than traditional grades, students track progress on check charts that cover skills like reading, writing, math, teamwork, grit, and independence. The school uses incentives called "Alphas," which can be spent at the Emporium, as well as awarding real money, to motivate learning, KGO reported.

Students who get a perfect score get $100, Rockefeller told KGO, which comes from the academy's $75,000 a year tuition. An Alpha school graduate now a student at Stanford University told KGO that she was in 4th grade when she last had a teacher.

Alpha has been criticized for students' reliance on screen time, tuition costs, and the level of human interaction involved, which runs counter to current pedagogy. As Alpha School continues to expand, Price said she expects tuition to become more accessible and affordable over time. But it is not clear how public school education will be affected, or how children would be cared for during working hours.

Price told KGO that several states rejected her application for charter status. But the model also attracted high-level attention.

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon recently visited Alpha School in Austin, Texas, and said she was impressed by what she saw, according to KGO. “I do think AI is going to need guardrails, but I have witnessed AI firsthand,” she said, according to KGO. “The AI is really acting as an individual tutor for those students—allowing students who move faster to do so, while giving extra reinforcement to those who need to catch up.

McMahon's comments reflect the way that Alpha's aggressive push of its model — and by extension, AI itself — into Bay Area schools coincides with a swarm of predictions about the technology and its uses amid deep cuts to education, growing class sizes, and pressure on educators to use AI for conflicting purposes.