The Alpha School, a private school that replaces traditional teaching with artificial intelligence, wants to open a new location at 92 Hayden Ave. in Lexington this year.
Under the “Massachusetts compulsory school attendance law,” the Alpha School must get the local School Committee’s approval to open in its municipality.
Representatives from Alpha spoke with Lexington’s School Committee about opening a location in town for the upcoming school year during a June 16 meeting. After over an hour of discussion, some members of the School Committee seemed skeptical of the school’s offerings.
While Alpha wants to open for the first day of school this year, the School Committee likely won’t meet that deadline since its next meeting is at the end of August, Julie Hackett, Lexington Public Schools superintendent, told the Observer.
The Alpha School was founded in Austin, TX, in 2014. The crux of Alpha’s curriculum is its AI-based two-hour learning model. Students spend just two hours in the morning working on core classes — math, English, social studies, and science — on AI apps owned by the school.
Students, in kindergarten through high school, complete coursework on individual laptops at their own pace. The AI component adjusts the level of difficulty for each student based on how they perform. If a student answers a question wrong in a lesson, the next question might be a little easier, for example. If they answer a question right, the next question may be a little harder. If a student is struggling in math, they may spend more time working on math than their other subjects one week.
Students are in physical classrooms in an Alpha School building with a human guide. The guide may not be a teacher, however, nor are they meant to act like one.
“If a kid is struggling on fractions, will the guide teach them fractions?” School Committee member Mona Roy asked a group of three Alpha School guides at the June meeting.
“No, the system is built out so it will show you sample problems, maybe there’s a video, if they still don’t understand it, sometimes the guides will teach them if that’s their area of expertise, but for some guides, that’s not their area of expertise,” Tasha Arnold, head of Alpha Schools, said. “We have a group of academic experts from all around the world that [students are] able to book a coaching call with.”
“Many” of the guides have teaching certifications and every guide has experience working with children, Arnold ensured.
After lunch, students spend the afternoon doing “life skills workshops.”
For younger students, those workshops might be ‘how to lose a game without crying’ or ‘how to tie your shoes,’ Arnold used as examples. Elementary-aged students must take part in a triathlon that requires them to solve a Rubik’s Cube, juggle three items for 30 seconds, and run half a mile. In middle school, Alpha students workshop their social skills by learning how to navigate friendships and handle social pressure.
Alpha’s school day is eight hours long and its school calendar is 180 days, just like at any traditional private or public school.
Alpha has a handful of operating schools across the country, including in Santa Barbara, CA; Scottsdale, AZ; and Austin, TX, according to its website.
It also lists New York City, though that isn’t entirely true. Alpha has a branch in NYC, but the New York State Education Department declined to approve Alpha’s request to incorporate as an independent school, so it operates more like a tutoring or homeschool support center.
“Though the company’s marketing materials didn’t explicitly mention it, parents who enrolled their kids at the Maiden Lane campus would be required to file formal documentation signing up as homeschoolers,” WIRED reported.
The schools’ powerful supporters include first lady Melania Trump, who brought an 11-year-old Alpha student from Austin, TX, as her guest at January’s State of the Union, the Globe reported. And Education Secretary Linda McMahon praised Alpha as “the most exciting thing” in education last fall.
The private school wants to come to Lexington because there is a community of families who have been asking them to open here, Arnold said.
“We were brought to Lexington because the parents asked us to,” she said. “We do have some families moving to the area for the school in particular.”
Based on interest, Arnold anticipates enrolling about 20 students in its first year in Lexington, 45 in the second, and 100 in the third. Eighteen families have already put down deposits to send their children to Alpha in Lexington, she said.
During the June meeting, School Committee members and Alpha representatives went back-and-forth for a while about what Alpha offers — and doesn’t.
Larry Freeman, chair of the School Committee, asked how the Alpha curriculum teaches events such as slavery or the Holocaust.
“How do you encourage that type of critical thinking, and looking at these major real-world issues from different perspectives and incorporating that?” he asked.
The curriculum teaches students to think critically about what resources they are using to learn about historical events, Arnold said. And students engage in debate to learn how to look at an issue from both sides, she added.
Kathleen Lenihan, a member of the School Committee, asked how such a debate would play out when learning about the Holocaust.
There would have to be a both-sides argument, Arnold said, to which Lenihan asked, “is someone going to be the Nazi?”
A debate of that nature would also be hard when students learn about slavery, Freeman added.
“What do you mean you’re going to have kids debate what happened from different perspectives? There is just factually what happened,” he said.
“It’s not isolated to the Alpha School, we struggle with these topics in very sensitive and culturally aware ways even in our district,” Freeman said. “We just want to be very conscious of not harming students and not limiting the perspective of, ‘well, this really happened, it doesn’t make you a bad person, but these are the facts of what happened in history,’ and I’m just wondering, how do you build that into an AI application?”
Lenihan and School Committee member Eileen Jay asked how students are taught to read. Literacy curricula is currently a hot debate across the country as schools are swapping out a curriculum that has been used for decades for a “science of reading” approach in the name of equity.
Alpha has a reading specialist who “either has a master’s degree and at least three to four years of teaching experience or they have extensive certifications in reading programs,” Arnold said.
Students do a good amount of physical writing in the classroom, including hand-writing a book report, she added.
“They definitely have to write, they actually learn cursive, you have to be able to write all your numbers, forward, backward, all your letters. When they’re working with math, they have a notebook next to them, they’re writing practice problems,” Arnold said.
In response, Jay noted, “mastering something and showing that you can master it is one thing, but in all of those disciplines, including math and science, there’s a strong element of critical thinking that needs to be developed.”
Asked whether there will be a playground for elementary students in Lexington, J.C. Fischer, Alpha School’s executive vice president of operations, said there will just be green space for the students this fall.
“There is a very large, green, open area that we’re fencing in to make sure children can run and play,” he said. “There is a second private parking lot along the side of the building that we will be converting into a much bigger playground area.”
Playground aside, Alpha is ready to move into the site on Hayden Ave.
While Alpha will have the entire building to itself, for its first year, it plans to just use the first floor because it won’t have many students. It wants to set up one wing of the building as classrooms, one wing as a “focus area,” and one wing as an activity workshop space.
Alpha representatives already checked in with Lexington’s Planning Board and confirmed they don’t need its review.
“They informed us no major exterior alterations, and no building expansion was proposed so no Planning Board review is required,” Abby McCabe, Lexington’s planning director, told the Observer. “The school’s use and location did not trigger a review by the Planning Board.”
Parents have mixed opinions about the AI-driven private school opening in Lexington.
Michael Horn, a Lexington parent, argued Alpha could fill gaps that exist in public schools.
“What [Lexington Public Schools] does not do well is deep evidence-based personalization within the school day itself,” Horn, who is a lecturer on education at Harvard and has written several books on education, told the Observer.
Horn’s children attend Lexington Montessori School, which he argued “does a really good job developing life skills that Alpha will talk about.”
“I think in Alpha, they’re going to make sure you really master those foundational skills and then give you these unbelievable project-based opportunities,” Horn said.
Horn spoke with Joe Liemandt, Alpha’s school principal, about Alpha in a conversation that’s viewable on Youtube — and published on Alpha’s website — earlier this year.
Another thought leader isn’t so fond of a technology-first approach to learning. Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist, educator, and author of “The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning — and How to Help Them Thrive Again,” argues increased classroom screen exposure harms childrens’ learning capabilities.
“When students self-report classroom computer use, higher daily screen exposure consistently corresponds to lower scores in reading, mathematics, and science,” he wrote to the Senate earlier this year, referencing results from the Programme for International Student Assessment. “The relationship is monotonic: more screen time, lower performance.”
“Independent research consistently shows that reading comprehension and retention are stronger on paper than on screens, particularly for complex or extended texts,” he wrote. “Similarly, handwritten note-taking reliably outperforms laptop note-taking for long-term learning. Typing encourages verbatim transcription and shallow processing; handwriting forces summarization, organization, and conceptual encoding. These effects are not marginal curiosities. They directly affect how students process information across subjects and grade levels.”
Brinleigh Murphy-Reuter, a Lexington mother of two, isn’t a fan of Alpha. Among other critiques, she finds the tuition exorbitant. Alpha charges families between $55,000 and $65,000 per year per student. Arnold noted the software Alpha uses, alone, costs about $10,000 per year per student.
“It’s outrageous,” Murphy-Reuter, who holds a master’s degree in Education from Harvard, said. “Essentially, you’re paying to have a fancy title of a burgeoning product, not for a high quality, proven, tried and true product.”
Murphy-Reuter also “[doesn’t] love” the idea of traditional teachers being replaced by ‘guides’ at Alpha. She worries children will become even more socially disconnected than they already are if they attend an AI-driven school — much like how technology has replaced human interaction in the workplace.
Robin Strizhak, president of the Lexington Educators Association, argues the ‘guide’ setup is “another attack” on the teaching profession.
“We are not made redundant because of AI; rather, we need to help our students understand when it is appropriate to use AI as the tool it is and when to connect with human educators who have devoted their lives to their subjects and students,” she told the Observer.
A handful of Massachusetts parents shared their support of Alpha coming to Lexington during the “public speak’ portion of the School Committee’s June meeting.
“[My son] needs a school like an Alpha to bring out who he truly is,” Genia Enders, an Andover resident who wants her son to attend Alpha, said through tears. “He looks at a lot of his skills and how he shows up in the world and doesn’t feel like he gets what he needs…there is nothing more important than giving options to children…there’s a lot of us that are spread out, that are willing to drive…to make sure our children are successful, and feel self-esteem, and love learning.”
Matt Franklin, a Wellesley resident who supports Alpha opening in Lexington, said he and his wife pulled their daughter from third grade to homeschool her. They ended up creating a curriculum that’s similar to Alpha, with a couple hours of digital learning and then practicing life skills in the afternoon.
“I was skeptical of this approach, but I’ve seen the power of this approach,” he said. “I’ve seen what it can unleash, and the potential, and the love of school.”
Kelly Callahan, a Harvard resident who wants to send her children to Alpha, asked School Committee members to view the school as ‘just another specialized option.’
“Whether it’s in the public, whether it’s in the private, whether it’s people that have dyslexia, there are specialty schools here that are unmatched,” she said. “This is just falling into another one of those categories, so I hope you sort of embrace what they’re trying to do here.”
The week before Lexington School Committee’s June 16 meeting, Boston Public Schools voted to approve Alpha School in its district.
Lexington’s School Committee decided its next step is to form a team, lead by Hackett, that will look more deeply into what Alpha offers and make a recommendation to the School Committee on how it should vote.
“I respect every family’s right to choose what’s best for their child. The School Committee has asked me to lead a team taking a close look at what Alpha offers, including things like high quality staffing, instructional time, access to the arts, and student support, and we’ll do that thoughtfully and carefully,” Hackett wrote to the Observer.
The Committee asked Hackett to bring a timeline to its August meeting of what she and her team will look into. The School Committee is looking for a thorough review, Hackett said, so her recommendation will probably come a few months after August.
Arnold asked Lexington to have an open mind when voting on whether to allow Alpha to open in town.
“It’s a school for certain children, it can meet the needs in some ways that we’re not able to currently,” she said. “I would just ask you to have an open mind, and, from one educator to another, see that there is value for students.”