AI-powered private school set to open NC campuses

Alpha School, an “AI-powered” private school, is preparing to make its mark on Charlotte and Raleigh this year. 

North Carolina is part of an expansion into five additional states this fall for the private school company, which currently operates Texas and Florida. It plans to expand into Puerto Rico in 2026. 

How does the school operate, and what do education experts have to say about it?

Co-founder MacKenzie Price told Carolina Public Press a typical day at Alpha begins with a 15 minute exercise to get students excited for the day and encourage a growth mindset. These exercises are led by Alpha’s classroom guides — at Alpha, there are no teachers. Then students transition to a two-hour learning block where they split that time between core subjects like math, reading, science and language. This is conducted entirely via AI software and apps.

By lunchtime, students are done with their academic work for the day. The rest of the day is spent learning life skills like leadership, public speaking, financial literacy and entrepreneurship through workshops led by the guides.

Alpha utilizes a mastery-based approach to learning, so children in the same classroom could all be on different levels of the same lesson depending on how each child moves through the material. The AI “tutor” is designed to recognize what each student is grasping well and what they need more work on. 

“Let’s say you only need five repetitions of a concept to understand that concept,” Price said. “I teach you a basic lesson on fractions, and then I give you five problems, and you show ‘yeah, I understand this well,’ then you move forward to the next concept. 

“But if I need 15 repetitions to understand that, then I shouldn’t only get five or 10. I should be able to get 15. That’s the beauty of personalized learning — each child does have a tutor that is going at their pace.”

Executive Director of the North Carolina Association of Independent Schools Stephanie Keaney said this is a strategy known as differentiation, which teachers have done for decades. But instead of teachers or Alpha’s guides, it’s artificial intelligence.

While students are taught a standard common core curriculum, they aren’t being given traditional grades. K-8 students’ progress is measured three times a year through the Northwest Evaluation Association’s MAP assessment test. High school students’ success is tracked by SAT scores and Advance Placement exams. 

The North Carolina campuses each come with a $45,000 price tag and will offer K-3 for the first year of operation with plans to expand to K-8 during its second year. Price said students are already enrolled in Charlotte and Raleigh, and families are eagerly awaiting their first day at Alpha.

Krista Glazewski, the executive director of NC State’s Friday Institute for Educational Innovation, said there is a long history of AI in the classroom. It’s important to acknowledge the historical use of intelligent tutoring software to not cause confusion and to be clear about some of its limitations, she said.

“Some of the limitations are that they have a narrow area of scope,” Glazewski said. “Intelligent tutoring isn’t always going to be sensitive to the kind of learning that might be happening, so it certainly would not be the only thing that you would want to use in a learning environment. 

“Alpha’s not saying that’s their only instructional model. In fact, if I’m bringing my lens to what they’re doing, I think they would argue that they are able to select from some impactful instructional models. … I would say they’re probably choosing the best from different instructional pedagogical models and applying them in some thoughtful and seemingly creative ways.”

Glazewski has been researching AI in education for more than a decade, but she is also a parent herself, so she understands hesitancy and skepticism about using AI for learning. 

When implementing more technology into education, she said it’s important to ensure schools are using it thoughtfully to meet specific goals and for the purpose it was intended. Schools should also take steps to ensure student privacy is protected.

“We are now going to have a generation of learners that are going to have metrics and instrumentation about their learning that could follow them throughout their whole schooling career, so we want to make sure that the right day data privacy agreements are in place, that those agreements are held if companies either fold or are reserved into other companies,” Glazewski said. 

“We want to make sure that over a child’s life in schooling, that they are not being monitored in a way that parents haven’t consented to and that their information is not being used in ways that, again, parents haven’t consented to.”

As a parent, Glazewski said she would be wondering what the guides are doing to support her child’s social emotional growth, curiosity and development. Price said since the guides are not directly teaching the academics, they are fully dedicated to providing motivational and emotional support to students.

When people hear of AI in education, they often think of robots in front of a classroom teaching students, Price said. But she said the technology actually makes it so this is the opposite of true.

“What artificial intelligence is allowing us to do is create personalized learning programs that meet a student at the level and pace that is best for that student, and it allows our teachers to be able to focus on that emotional and motivational aspect of a student, which is critical to creating a successful learner,” Price said. 

“What it’s really enabling is our teachers to be able to do what only humans can do, which is connect with the child and get to know that child and help them develop their interests and growth mindset strategies.”

When it comes to innovation in education, Glazewski said it’s critical to explore promising creative approaches to learning. But that also means asking questions like how can we ensure everyone has access to innovative instructional models, what would this look like if it was implemented on a broader level and what metrics are we basing “promising” models on?

Alpha markets eye-catching statistics like its students’ ability to learn two times as much content in two hours as their peers do and consistently placing in the 99th percentile. Glazewski said parents should consider whether these results are tied to true academic progress or an inherent selection bias that comes along with the school’s hefty tuition.

“At that kind of price point, what we can readily infer is that that’s a very narrow demographic,” Glazewski said. “So I would be interested in the question of selection effects here, whether these outcomes are due to the program itself or the background and the abilities of the learners that they’re admitting.”

Price isn’t yet sure whether Alpha’s North Carolina campuses will be able to collect school vouchers, which have been the subject of controversy after recent changes to North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarships. She is personally a fan of school choice, however, and is hopeful Alpha will be able to participate in the program. 

It’s possible North Carolina is seeing a rise in new education options like Alpha because of the loosening of restrictions on school vouchers, Glazewski said. Being a private institution also  means more freedom to implement innovative approaches and cutting edge technology that would take much longer to approve and fund in public districts. 

While every independent school is different and has its own approach, many private schools and educators are leveraging AI to better their classrooms in some way, Keaney said. Because independent schools are consistently smaller than an entire public school district, they have the opportunity to be more nimble and offer more autonomy to teachers in the classroom.

Artificial intelligence sometimes scares people off, but Price said it’s the most exciting development in education right now because of its benefits to both students and teachers and the ability to give back the most valuable resource — time.

“There has never been a more exciting time to be a five year old than now because of what’s going to be available through artificial intelligence,” Price said. 

“I also think this is going to be the best era for teachers, because teachers are finally going to be freed up to be able to spend their time doing what they do best, which is connect with students, instead of having to plan time doing lecturing and lesson planning and grading papers and homework. This is a really wonderful time in education.”

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