Alpha School, an “AI-powered private school” that heavily relies on AI to teach students and can cost up to $65,000 a year, 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, according to former Alpha School employees and internal company documents. 

Alpha School has earned fawning coverage from Fox News and The New York Times and received praise from Linda McMahon, the Trump-appointed Secretary of Education, for using generative AI to chart the future of education. But samples of poorly constructed AI-generated lessons that I have viewed present students with unclear wording and illogical choices in multiple choice questions. 

“These questions not only fail to meet SAT standards but also fall short of the quality we promise to deliver,” one employee wrote in the company’s Workflowy, a company-wide note taking app where every employee can see what other employees are working on, including their progress and thoughts on various projects. “From a student’s perspective, when answer options don’t logically fit the question, it feels like a betrayal of their effort to learn and succeed. How can we expect students to trust our assessments when the very questions meant to test their knowledge are flawed?”

My investigation into Alpha School also reveals that the massive amounts of data the company collects on students, including videos of them, is stored in a Google Drive folder that anyone with the link—even if they’ve left the company, or if it was sent to them—could access. In turn, that sensitive material is viewed by more Alpha School employees than students and parents may realize. 

Former Alpha School employees told me that the company’s increasing reliance on generative AI in every aspect of its operation, as well as the constant monitoring and tracking of every student’s mouse movements, is making students anxious and does not always provide the quality of education Alpha School advertises to parents. 

This investigation provides previously unreported details about how Alpha School builds and uses AI tools and how they fail students in a time when the entire education system is struggling to adopt and adapt to generative AI. 

“Students are being treated like guinea pigs,” one former Alpha School employee told me. 404 Media granted the three Alpha School employees we talked to anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements with the company. 

“We are not computers or algorithms. We are simply people who need breaks. We are people that don't like being watched through their computers,” one Alpha School student wrote in a feedback form to the company. 

The “2 Hour Learning” Pitch

Alpha School is a private school covering kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) with locations across the United States. It also offers Alpha Anywhere, a remote virtual learning program that offers “a complete at-home school replacement.” The school’s primary selling point is its “2 hour learning” philosophy which promises to give students their required education and prepare them for necessary standardized tests, AP tests, and the SATs in just just two hours of learning. The rest of the day, Alpha School says, can be dedicated to more creative learning, students following their passions, and advanced life skills. Alpha School tells parents that its students’ test scores are in the top 2 percent in the U.S.

Alpha School says it’s able to cram all that learning into a two hour window in large part thanks to “AI tutors” and various AI apps that generate custom lesson plans according to each student’s needs. 

“We are not computers or algorithms. We are simply people who need breaks. We are people that don't like being watched through their computers.”

“All educational content is obsolete. Every textbook, every lesson plan, every test, all of it is obsolete because gen AI is going to be able to deliver a personalized lesson just for you,” Joe Liemandt, Alpha School’s “principal” and the founder of Trilogy, the company that owns many of the apps used by Alpha School, said in a podcast interview published last year. 

Alpha School co-founder MacKenzie Price said in an interview with The New York Times Hard Fork podcast that she started her first school in 2014, and that Alpha School has used various learning apps over the years, but that generative AI changed how the company teaches students. 

“In 2022 when generative AI started to come out, that's when we realized we have an opportunity to really make sure that kids are efficiently and effectively learning and we can do a better job of building the personalized learning plans to meet kids where they are. It also completely changed the role of assessments and how great of a feedback tool they are,” she said.

To ensure that students are learning, and in order to improve its lesson plans and teaching strategies, Alpha School also digitally monitors students very closely. Similar to employee monitoring software in the corporate world—what has come to be derogatorily known as bossware—Alpha School keeps track of when students are using its various apps, how long it takes them to complete their exercises, their results, and also records videos of them in order to see whether they are focused or distracted. 

Former employees I talked to and internal company documents show Alpha School is striving for a future where it can use AI to build an AI-driven education system with “no humans in the loop.” But at the moment Alpha School students have access to human “guides” that offer help and instruction both at Alpha School physical locations and via video calls with tutors who are located all over the world. 

Last year, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon visited an Alpha School campus in Texas where she said she was “blown away” by what she saw. “Harnessing AI thoughtfully will be critical to expanding opportunity and preparing students for tomorrow’s workforce,” she said. 

Former Alpha School employees and internal documentation don’t disprove Alpha School students’ high test results, but show that students often have to study more than two hours a day, that they sometimes arrive at Alpha high school classes unprepared and below grade level reading skills, and that some students had to go back and fill holes in their education before they were prepared for high school level classes. 

One former employee told me some students succeeded despite AI generated materials thanks to human intervention and tutors who cared deeply about their education. The same former employee also emphasized that most of the teaching that wasn’t provided by one of Alpha School’s human tutors was low quality either because it was AI-generated, or wholly lifted from other online teaching services that offer their services for as little as $40, while Alpha School costs tens of thousands of dollars a year. 

“Students incoming into AP Biology the previous year were seriously lacking in their foundational skills,” one former Alpha School employee said. The same employee said these students “struggled” and were “really frustrated,” so “[Alpha School] gave them the prerequisite courses and made them do a lot of testing before entering the AP classes.” 

Illogical AI Questions

One piece of software that’s central to Alpha School’s education is AlphaRead, which teaches students reading comprehension starting in grade school, up to high school and SAT preparation. 

AlphaRead uses existing large language models (LLMs) from companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to generate articles that cater to students’ level and interests, then tests their reading comprehension by asking them multiple choice questions about the articles they read. Former employees and internal Alpha School documentation show that, sometimes, the exercises AlphaRead generated failed to teach students necessary skills, especially at the high school level.

“Poorly constructed questions do more harm than good.” 

“Questions should necessitate passage comprehension,” one Alpha School employee who was tasked with testing AlphaRead wrote in his evaluation of the software. “Alarmingly, some questions in the course can be answered without even reading the article. The SAT Reading section is designed to test a student's comprehension and engagement with the text; anything less does a disservice to their preparation. These questions are extremely easy for students. They don’t require any deep thinking or analysis, which means students aren’t being challenged to develop the critical reasoning skills they’ll need for the SAT.”

In other instances, AlphaRead suffered from “hallucinations” that are common across all LLMs and presented students with illogical questions. 

“Poorly constructed questions do more harm than good,” another Alpha School employee testing AlphaRead wrote. “They confuse students with unclear wording and illogical choices, undermining their trust in the assessment process. These questions not only fail to meet SAT standards but also fall short of the quality we promise to deliver.”

The employee specifically cited the question in the screenshot below, which doesn’t make grammatical sense, and, as they note, doesn’t allow the student to make a choice “to complete the sentence in a way that makes it a full, coherent thought.” 

“When a student requires help with additional questions, the chatbot fails to identify which specific question is being addressed,” an internal Alpha School document outlining issues with AlphaRead says. “Accuracy of the content provided by the [AI] tutor is a concern. There are instances where it not only delivers incorrect answers but also provides convincing yet flawed justifications. Despite raising multiple queries about a particular answer, the chatbot erroneously confirmed an incorrect option as correct.”

While employees often test Alpha School software as they work to improve it, low quality  questions end up in front of students because the process for creating them is largely automated, according to internal company documents and former employees. Employees scrape the internet for existing learning materials, feed those into whatever LLM they think is best at any given moment, and write prompts to generate questions according to their needs, according to internal documents and former employees.

Assessing which materials are worth scraping for training data, what third party apps might be suitable for students, and checking students’ work all heavily rely on LLMs at Alpha School. 

“You are an experienced educational content evaluator tasked with grading a ‘worked example’ educational video,” reads one AI prompt written by an Alpha School employee for evaluating the quality of educational videos. “Your goal is to provide a comprehensive and balanced evaluation across several categories, focusing on how well the video serves as a learning resource for students and how effectively it achieves its overall goal.”

“You are an AI assistant tasked with creating a 20-question multiple-choice test based on the provided JSON document,” reads another prompt from an employee working on materials for a science class. 

Despite thoroughly documenting the AI-generated errors in its lesson plans, Alpha School relies on AI to test the quality of its AI-generated lessons, creating a situation where a faulty AI is tasked with fixing its own faulty generations. 

A note in the company Workflowy showed that generative AI had at least a 10 percent hallucination rate that made it unsuitable to generate explanations of articles for students.  

“Students complained about question quality a lot since the transition to AlphaRead,” one employee wrote in the company Workflowy. “I conducted manual QC [quality control] on random articles for a week to locate questions with issues and provide feedback to the developers.” The employee wrote that he found “Questions about sections not in the article; Questions with multiple plausible correct answers; Multipart questions presented in the wrong order; Questions about a specific part of an article that contradict further sections.”

Scraping Without Permission 

In October, Wired reported that IXL, an online learning platform that was used by Alpha School students, deactivated Alpha School’s account and said Alpha School is “no longer an IXL customer due to violating our terms of service.” Former Alpha School employees told me they don’t know why Alpha School’s IXL account was deactivated, but that Alpha School regularly uses other online learning platforms’ materials in a way that violates their terms of service, either by copying their materials or by scraping them wholesale as training data for its own AI products.

According to the company’s Workflowy, several employees were working on something called the IXL Replacement Project, which involved evaluating other online learning platforms as suitable IXL replacements for Alpha School’s purposes. It’s not clear if the plan to replace IXL at that point had anything to do with IXL eventually terminating Alpha School’s account.

Alpha School focused on the famous free online learning platform Khan Academy as a potential target, and multiple Alpha School employees heavily relied on AI tools to evaluate Khan Academy’s materials and how well they matched what the company was getting from IXL. 

“First, I created a spreadsheet containing the Khan Academy 4th-grade curriculum, which encompasses the specific Khan 4th-grade activities (i.e., exercises, videos, and articles) along with their associated lesson, unit, and CCSS [Common Core State Standards],” wrote one Alpha School employee, explaining their process. “Then, I built a custom GPT tailored for IXL vs Khan mapping. I fed it with the spreadsheet above, and provided specific step-by-step instructions on how to do the mapping. I even enabled it to directly access Khan Academy's website.”

We don’t know how exactly Alpha School eventually replaced IXL. But at the moment Alpha School uses Khan Academy, branded as Nice Academy. Nice Academy has the exact same content as Khan Academy, the same user interface, and even embeds Khan Academy videos, but the site students use to access this content uses the Nice Academy logo and does not mention Khan.