KEY POINTS:
• Alpha School plans to grow from a dozen campuses to roughly 50 in the 2026 school year, co-founder and CEO MacKenzie Price told Axios in an article published Aug. 2, 2026.
• Students spend no more than two hours a day on AI software for core subjects, Price told Axios, and the school hires “guides” paid at least $100,000 a year instead of licensed teachers conducting lessons.
• Axios reported tuition costs $45,000 to $75,000 a year. CNN reported on Jan. 29, 2026, that tuition ranges from $10,000 to $75,000 depending on location.
• Alpha’s program page states students grow 2.6 times faster than peers on nationally normed MAP tests. Stanford education professor Victor Lee told CNN the company has refused to allow independent research evaluating its claims.
• Penn State education professor Gerald LeTendre told Axios that AI education models risk conflating teaching and tutoring.
• The 74 reported that Pennsylvania denied a cyber charter application from the affiliated Unbound Academy, which the state called untested.
The private school network Alpha School plans to grow from a dozen campuses to roughly 50 during the 2026 school year, co-founder and CEO MacKenzie Price told Axios in an article published Aug. 2, 2026.
Axios reported the school plans to open campuses in 27 markets this school year, including Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Denver, Nashville and Raleigh. Some of those campuses were previously announced and delayed, largely because of issues with real estate, Price told Axios. Alpha’s dozen locations include several campuses in California, Texas and Florida, according to Axios, which reported the school expects to grow its New York City campus from 22 to 160 students this year.
Fox News reported on April 4, 2026, that Alpha was expanding to Chicago, Atlanta, Charlotte and Raleigh, along with California sites in Santa Monica, Palo Alto and the East Bay, and that the school already operated in Austin, New York and Miami.
“Alpha is one of probably the most talked about schools in the country right now,” Price told Axios.
How the model works
Students spend no more than two hours a day on AI software to learn core subjects and spend the rest of the day developing life skills in workshops, Price told Axios. In Austin, students organized a music festival for a nonprofit, according to Axios.
Instead of licensed teachers conducting lessons, Alpha hires “guides” whose jobs are to motivate and coach students, and they are paid at least $100,000 a year, Axios reported. Entrepreneur reported on Aug. 27, 2025, that Alpha principal Joe Liemandt said on the “Invest Like the Best” podcast that guides carry that title because they do not do academic teaching, and that base pay starts at a minimum of $100,000. KGOU reported on July 21, 2026, that Alpha job postings in Oklahoma listed pay of $100,000 to $150,000 and stated teacher certification was not required.
Price criticized the traditional school system for its failure to implement AI, telling Axios that schools either allow chatbots to “run rampant” or ban the technology outright.
“AI allows us to finally, truly transform the educational system and not just have it be a little tool that keeps a traditional, one-teacher-in-front-of-a-classroom model going,” Price told Axios.
Tuition figures differ across outlets
Axios reported tuition costs $45,000 to $75,000 a year. CNN reported on Jan. 29, 2026, that tuition ranges from $10,000 to $75,000 a year depending on location, per search results. CBS News reported on the Austin campus under a tuition figure of $40,000 a year, and the San Francisco Standard reported on Sept. 19, 2025, that Alpha’s San Francisco campus charged $75,000, per search results.
Outcome claims and scrutiny
Alpha’s program page states that “On average, Alpha students grow 2.6 times faster than peers on nationally normed MAP tests” and that “The majority of students consistently outperform national averages.” An Alpha spokesperson told Fox News: “Alpha students learn at twice the pace of traditional peers, our median SAT score is 1530.”
Victor Lee, an associate professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, told CNN that Alpha is refusing to allow independent research to evaluate its claims. “That sort of behavior sort of implies there’s something to hide,” Lee told CNN, per search results.
LeTendre told Axios his concern with AI education models, including Unbound Academy and Khan Lab School, is that they risk conflating teaching and tutoring, and that the two are not the same thing.
“Right now we’re conducting a gigantic experiment on the human population, on our children, without any good scientific knowledge,” LeTendre told Axios. “AI tutoring can help, but it has to be within an atmosphere where there’s deep human contact with a highly qualified teacher,” he added, according to Axios.
In an essay published by The Conversation and syndicated by UPI on July 13, 2026, LeTendre wrote that “there is no clear evidence that AI or other kinds of computer-based tutors are superior to human tutors, though in many cases they might be cheaper.”
Investigations and the company’s response
404 Media reported on Feb. 17, 2026, that Alpha “is AI-generating faulty lesson plans that internal company documentation find sometimes do ‘more harm than good,’ and scraping data from a variety of other online courses without permission to train its own AI.”
WBUR’s “Here & Now” reported on March 23, 2026, on the investigation and on AI-generated multiple-choice questions that did not follow logically. Alpha said in a statement to WBUR that it “strongly disputes the inaccurate and misleading claims” and “remains committed to ethical, research-backed education.” KGOU reported that Alpha chief communications officer Anna Davlantes called such reporting cherry-picked and based on sources who had been fired.
Regulatory record
The 74 reported that the Pennsylvania Department of Education denied a cyber charter application from Unbound Academy, an affiliated school using the same two-hour model, and that the state called the model untested. KJZZ reported in December 2024 that Arizona approved Unbound Academy to run an online charter school for grades 4 through 8.
Broader context
Axios reported that many public schools have been slow to put clear guardrails around AI. Gallup reported on May 26, 2026, that “just 18% of teachers report receiving any type of formal guidance from school administrators on how AI tools should be used.” Gallup said the finding came from the Walton Family Foundation-Gallup study “Teaching for Tomorrow: Closing the Expectations Gap,” a web survey of 2,069 U.S. public school K-12 teachers conducted Feb. 9 through March 2, 2026.
This is a developing story. Information may be incomplete and will be updated as more details become available.
