Y’all-itics takes a closer look at how Alpha Schools truly work, and what parents need to know before considering this option.
DALLAS — Alpha Schools across the country utilize AI technology to aid in student instruction. However, this AI-driven approach naturally leads to one common misconception.
“I actually was talking to a lady a couple of weeks ago and she visited the school and she’s like, where are the robot teachers,” Sam DePalo relayed to us on Y’all-itics.
There are no robot teachers, only humans.
Sam DePalo is the Lead Guide at Alpha Fort Worth. Traditional schools would recognize a lead guide as a principal. Teachers at Alpha schools are Guides, and there are currently four in Fort Worth.
DePalo calls their model “revolutionary” because AI technology can tailor education to each individual student’s needs and ability. And it allows their schools to return to a more one-on-one learning model.
“The computer, the AI, is delivering that individualized, and I mean truly individualized instruction for kids. It is crunching the data. It is, like, tracking their eye movements to make sure that they’re staying focused. It is feeding them questions that are specific to their interests and getting their learning done so much quicker, so much more efficiently than a human being over could,” DePalo explained.
Alpha Schools say their AI approach is so efficient, students only spend two hours a day on academics, with the entire afternoon devoted to teaching “life skills,” such as 4th and 5th graders learning how to invest in the stock market.
There’s also no homework at Alpha, again, because the school claims the AI model is that efficient. And there’s no grading. They use a “mastery” model instead. In other words, students must master the skills of their current grade before they can move on to the next grade.
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If the AI model is that good, we asked DePalo if it might eventually put human teachers out of work.
“My catchphrase is AI is not replacing teachers. It’s replacing worksheets. It’s replacing grading,” the lead guide answered. “If you ask a teacher, any teacher, why do you love your job? Why did you become a teacher? I’ll tell you what they’re not gonna say: grading, lesson planning, compliance paperwork, making sure my grade book is up-to-date, right? All of these things that are so easily done with technology, right?”
DePalo tells us Alpha Schools always start off with 25 founding families. And Alpha Fort Worth currently runs kindergarten through 8th grade. But next year, those 8th graders will be freshmen, so the school will be K-9. And that will continue until they get their first senior class.
But tuition isn’t cheap. Take the two newest campuses in Texas, for example. Alpha Fort Worth costs $40,000 a year, while Alpha Plano costs $50,000. While DePalo says the goal of Alpha is to open the technology to every child, the tuition means it’s simply out of reach for many at this point. Scale is the key here, with the hope that adding more students would eventually bring the cost down.
DePalo also tells us Alpha Schools would accept vouchers. Enrollment is now open for private schools to sign up for the program, so it’s still to be determined how many, and which, Alpha Schools will join.
DePalo has an extensive background in education, from starting as a Fulbright scholar, to Teach For America, to public schools. She says she’s never seen anything similar to how AI has the potential to change education, and in many cases already has.
“It’s not trying to shoehorn into the educational system and fix the problems they’re in. It’s just saying, wait a second, we have so much better technology. We are at, like I said, the greatest inflection point of our lives with this new, this progress that’s being made in these fields, like why not utilize that?” she argued. “When the microscope was invented, it revolutionized the field of biology. Why shouldn’t AI revolutionize how we treat learning in the world?”