When you walk into most schools, something doesn’t seem right. It had fluorescent lights, dry-erase boards, and the teacher looked around the room to see if anyone had raised their hand. The rhythm that the system is based on hasn’t changed much in the last 100 years. But a new school in Chicago thinks that will soon change everything, and it’s ready to pay $55,000 a year to show it.
Alpha School is a private school for kids ages K–8 that began in 2014 in Austin, Texas and now has more than 20 locations across the US. Its most recent move is to the Chicago campus. And what it’s selling is a simple idea carried out in a very different way: no traditional teachers. Instead, students use AI-powered adaptive platforms to work on math, reading, and science for about two hours every morning. It seems like there are “guides” in the classroom, but they’re not really teachers. The rest of the day is spent in workshops, doing things like public speaking, coding, and so on.
It seems like the pitch was carefully made for a certain type of parent. The tech or finance types who already put their money, music, and news feed in the hands of computers. Why not pay for their kids’ schooling? It was said that one parent called the model “the future” because of how quickly the kids move through the system. For some types of students in some types of homes, that might quite possibly be true.
But people who work in education aren’t sure. They don’t really care about the software. The software can’t do the things that a good teacher can, like noticing when a child is pulling away, reading the room and making adjustments, or the quiet social growth that happens between classes, not during them. Not as easy to code. It might not be possible to code at all.
The bigger picture of what’s going on in Chicago makes this more difficult. This week, the University of Chicago Law School across town said that first-year students would only be allowed to bring notebooks and pens to class and not phones or laptops. But Dean Adam Chilton made it pretty clear why: AI can help students quickly, but it can slow down real learning. The point isn’t to turn down technology. This is to make sure that the students can think without it first. The Chicago Teachers’ Union, on the other hand, wants to ban AI that interacts with students in elementary schools. They are especially worried about chatbots that pretend to be people for kids under 16.
Now, the Illinois State Board of Education is trying to find a middle ground by putting out guidelines to help schools use AI in a smart way while keeping teachers at the center of the process. That’s what institutions want to do: slowly add it, keep an eye on it, and make sure it doesn’t take the place of what’s most important.
Alpha School isn’t interested in that urge. The debate is over now. The fact that trips to Formula 1 races and summer programs in the Hamptons are covered by tuition tells you something about the type of person this school is trying to reach. It’s likely aware that this model isn’t right for everyone.
At the heart of all of this is a contradiction that’s hard to miss. In the city where one high-class school is getting rid of technology from classrooms, a school that has almost no teachers is opening. Both of them are guessing what learning really needs. In a narrow sense, both could be right. They can’t both be right about everything, though.
It’s not yet being talked about what will happen to the kids in the middle, who need more than an algorithm but whose families can’t afford the $55,000 experiment. It might need to be.
