About 70 moms and dads gathered Tuesday at Alpha School in the Marina District to hear a sales pitch for why they should drop $75,000 a year per kid on an education that sounds like the plot line of a “Black Mirror” episode.
Alpha School’s promise is bold and not backed by evidence: Just two hours of academic work per day, with the rest of the day spent developing “life skills,” from building a sailboat to managing an AirBnB to traveling internationally. The school’s founders, podcaster MacKenzie Price and her tech executive husband, Andrew, make incredible claims, such as that Alpha students learn 10 times faster than those in traditional education — with the use of AI only.
One mother asked the K-8 school’s principal, the Trilogy Software founder, investor, and multibillionaire Joe Liemandt, how children can learn virtues and values from a computer.
“For years, there have been way better ways to teach kids than a teacher in front of a classroom,” Liemandt said, gesturing wildly to the crowd. “It just wasn’t technologically or economically doable until now.”
Generative AI, Liemandt claims, will revolutionize education. Alpha’s classrooms are run on AI-written books and lesson plans. There are teachers in the room, but they don’t teach. They’re called “guides,” and they act more as coaches, incentivizing the kids with “Alpha bucks.” Students receive the school’s currency for completing assignments, and they can invest, save, and donate their Alpha bucks as they wish.
“We pay kids, literally, starting in kindergarten,” MacKenzie Price told the parents. Kids use their bucks to buy everything from Taylor Swift sweatshirts to squishy penguins to Legos at a school store, she said.
The 3-week-old Marina outpost is the 14th campus of Alpha School, and the most expensive private school in the city, topping elite, $50,000-per-year institutions like Convent & Stuart Hall and San Francisco Waldorf School. The chain has locations in Santa Barbara; New York; Miami; Austin, Texas; and Scottsdale, Arizona, with plans through 2026 to open in Puerto Rico, North Carolina, and Virginia.
A location in Brownsville, Texas, is the cheapest, at $10,000 per year, and sits close to SpaceX headquarters. The company provides transportation to and from the school, along with summer camp programming.
The opening in San Francisco, the heart of the AI boom, comes at a crossroads for education. While 60% of teachers used AI in the 2024-25 school year, according to a Gallup survey, not everyone is on board with the tech replacing human educators altogether.
However, in April, President Trump signed a wide-ranging executive order greenlighting the use of AI in education, from teaching “critical thinking” skills to funding grants for “AI-based high-quality instructional resources” and “high-impact tutoring.” Critics worry that could spark an ed tech gold rush, at the same time raising concerns about how AI is affecting children and teens.
The Prices have applied to open charter schools in at least five states, with one in Arizona under the name “Unbound Academy.” In Pennsylvania, the Board of Education rejected their application in part because it did not include curriculum for some required courses.
Critics of Alpha School note that its technology is not extraordinary — or, for that matter, even new. Ed tech writer and critic Audrey Watters says much of what Alpha School markets as “generative AI” is simply another edition of an intelligent tutoring system that has been used in schools for decades.
“They’ve really leaned into all of this hype that AI is this magic wand that can do anything,” she said. “It is, I think, snake oil.”
Moreover, said Watters, the model of using only the intelligent tutoring system takes away from collective learning. “You learn when someone else gets it wrong, as well as when you get it right,” she said. The elimination of “a classroom where we learn to negotiate and navigate and learn together is not just damaging but, I think, kind of dangerous.”
‘The greatest people in the world’
The school has famous and rich ambassadors, such as billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who last month hosted his own Alpha School information session with Price and Liemondt at his home in the Hamptons, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Price’s podcast, “Future of Education,” has more than 200 episodes, in which she talks to YouTubers, professional athletes, and the dean of Stanford’s School of Education. In an appearance on The New York Times’ “Hard Fork” podcast, Price referred to the Alpha School as “Tony Robbins for kids.”
In his presentation to parents in the Marina, Liemandt was as eager to boast about the business partnerships as he was to tell parents about Alpha’s approach to education. “This year our school is actually working with MrBeast,” he said, eliciting gasps from the audience. “Our students are actually building an app with him, where the goal of the app is to convince 100 million teens the key to their happiness is contributing to their community.”
The Standard was unable to confirm the partnership with MrBeast, but Karl Jacobs and Nolan Hansen, who work with the world’s most successful YouTuber and appear in his videos, have promoted the school on Instagram.
As parents probed the speakers about the quality of the Alpha education — how will typing on a screen all day affect kids’ ability to memorize? How do they decide which guide is assigned to which student? — Liemandt and Price took turns fielding questions, often interrupting each other. Their answers meandered, touching on theories about grade inflation, cognitive load theory, the limits of Khan Academy, and video game addiction.
Superlatives and hyperbole were in abundance. They emphasized that many features of the school are the “coolest thing” or the “most critical.” Alpha School has “the greatest people in the world,” said Price.
At one point, though, candor broke through, and Liemandt admitted that the technology is not yet complete, and does get things wrong. “Today, our hallucination rate, or quality of our dynamic generated content, is not enough, which is why we don’t release it into the wild,” he said. “We do expect in 2026 we will have enough guardrails.”
At the end of the Q&A, Price gave the opportunity for Justin Caldbeck — a venture capitalist who has been embroiled in his own controversies, and the father of three of the 10 children enrolled at SF’s Alpha School — to talk about his experience.
Caldbeck said his kids come home every day talking about how much fun it is. “It’s been, like, the best decision we’ve made,” he said. The kids have been in class only since the beginning of this school year.
‘Education 3.0’
In 2013, a school promising a similar education revolution, AltSchool, came to San Francisco. Founded by a former Google executive and backed by Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Andreessen Horowitz, it shut down in 2019.
Ben Riley, a cognitive scientist who studies AI, wonders if Alpha School will face a similar fate. “Everything feels like we’ve seen this before,” he said.
Riley is concerned that with cash payments and constant fun adventures, students will lose out on the most important pillar of education: patience.
“That friction, you know, sort of creates the learning,” said Riley. “What makes people experts in something is that they’re willing to go through the tedium that it takes to develop that expertise.”
In spite of these fears, some parents are as bullish as Price and Caldbeck on the future of Alpha for their kids.
One dad, who declined to give his name, said he’d heard about the school on the “Invest Like the Best” podcast. He wondered if, with the new AI tools in education, college will soon be obsolete.
“Education 2.0 is highly resistant to education 3.0,” he said. “Education 3.0 is going to have to be done by an upstart.” He likened Alpha School to Tesla’s disruption of the automotive industry.
“The idea of school is several hundred years old,” said Resh Wallaja, the father of a 2-year-old who was there to investigate kindergarten options. “It’s really for farmworkers.”
Most of the parents, however, expressed at least some skepticism. They wondered if Alpha’s promise — namely, that their kids would love school “more than vacation” — would lead to real-world success..
Andy, who declined to give his last name, was concerned about whether such a small and unusual school would make kids socially adept. “When children get such a different experience than what most people get, does it make it more difficult for them to relate to others?” he asked.
Another parent, Andrey Svirsky, a software engineer who lives in the South Bay, noted that because the school’s pedagogy is so new, there’s no evidence — anecdotal or statistical — that shows how it might prepare kids for adulthood. This gave him pause — the idea of experimenting with his kid’s childhood like that.
After all, he said, “you cannot really redo it if it doesn’t work out.”