Many in education—and many beyond—are talking about Alpha School right now. Alpha has been featured in dozens of articles in the mainstream and education media outlets. Its leadership has appeared on countless podcasts to explain and dissect its school model and explore the bigger opportunity to rethink schooling.
On this episode of Class Disrupted, Mackenzie Price, co-founder of Alpha School, joined me and Diane not to explain Alpha School’s model, but instead to dive deep into how Alpha School is leveraging AI to radically rethink the school experience (Mackenzie has joined me in conversation before; you can check it out here if you’re curious). The intent behind this conversation is more on how AI itself is being leveraged at Alpha—from the core academic block to the afternoon spent in real-world projects and life skills development. What’s possible now in school design that wasn’t possible a decade earlier thanks to AI?
Chris Hein
So when the school shut down and went to remote learning, we were really fascinated by how quickly our kids adjusted to e-learning and how hard of a time the teachers seem to have with just the basic tools and systems and then how to translate their curriculum to a digital format. But the thing that really jumped at me was my wife and I were having conversations with our kids every day saying, hey, what are you doing?
Why are you guys playing video games? Or why you, like, want to go outside and play? It’s midway through the day and they’re like, we’ve already done our work. And we were like, that can’t be right. And so we double checked their assignments and their tests and where they’re at. And it was like, no, they got all their work done in a couple hours. And then it really made Teresa and I question, why does it take them eight hours a day at school if the school is teaching them the same content and administering the same number of tests and they’re able to get through it in a few hours?
Michael Horn
That was June 2020, and Diane and I were broadcasting during the height of the pandemic, and we were hoping that parents would realize that schools could be rethought dramatically, including by helping people realize that what we tend to think of as, quote, the academics could be done in much, much less time than the six plus hours that kids spend in traditional schools. Five years later, and thanks to a startup school network, Alpha School, the two hour message finally seems to be spreading like wildfire. So with that as a prelude, Diane, first, it is great to see you as always.
Diane Tavenner
It’s good to see you too, Michael. I’m a little disoriented by us changing up our normal intro, but. But in a good way, change is always good. That take from season one is honestly priceless. It’s taken us a bit longer than we had hoped, but we do seem to be getting some momentum towards some of the big opportunities that we saw in education back then and still are hopeful for now.
Michael Horn
Yeah, no, I think that’s right. And I’m glad you’re accommodating my whims on changing the format up on you today. But I am particularly excited because we have on our show today MacKenzie Price. She’s of course one of the co-founders of Alpha School, and MacKenzie’s been on my Future of Education podcast and substack before and we actually both have sub stacks named the Future of Education. We independently name them, so we’re vibing already. But MacKenzie, it’s great to see you again, welcome.
Scaling Education with Technology
MacKenzie Price
Well, thanks for having me. And, you know, it’s so interesting that you tell that story about the way, you know, education was done during COVID And we were pretty lucky because we’d started Alpha school back in 2014. So when the pandemic hit, you know, it happened to be during spring break. So the kids who hadn’t brought their laptops home came and picked them up at school. And we really had a very smooth rest of the school year because the kids already were doing their learning on the computers. And then we just said, you know, afternoons, we’ll just, we’ll, we’ll call it, you know, do whatever you want at home. But what’s interesting is a couple years ago or in 2022, when we really launched our learning platform with the advent of generative AI, we realized, okay, we can actually scale this. We can go beyond just, you know, a local school that’s doing a reasonable job of educating kids, and we can, we can scale it bigger.
And we were originally talking about the idea of 2x learning. You know, you can learn twice as much, you can learn twice as much. And even our own families were like, we don’t, we don’t care. Like, why does my kid need to learn twice as much? It’s not a big deal. And we, we’d have like, parent conferences where we’d be saying, hey, if, if your son, you know, hits his, his goals, he can be learning twice as much. And they didn’t care. And then we had this unlock idea of let’s call it two hour learning and say, hey, if your son hits his goals, he can be out of here in two hours and freed up to go do the rest of the things, you know, that he wants to do during the day. And suddenly the parents are like, Johnny, come on, get with it.
Let’s hit our goals. And it was that mind shift of, you know, let’s get your academics done in two hours. And as a side note, you’ll learn twice as much, but let’s do that for two hours. And then one of the code names we actually had for our learning platform was Time Back. And we went through a whole process in the last year trying to make sure, what’s our new name going to be? What are we going to call this? And ultimately we landed back on exactly what it is that we’re giving kids, which is Time Back to go do all these other exciting, interesting things during the rest of the day. Because it doesn’t take all day to educate kids. You can not just do academics, but crush academics in a much shorter period of time when you’ve got this personalized, mastery-based tutoring.
Transforming Education Models
Michael Horn
Well, and I think you’re speaking to, like, there’s many reasons why Alpha has done what many education startups struggle with, which is jumping into the mainstream narrative. And that sense of giving kids back their most precious resource, time is clearly part of it. AI is another part of it. And that’s where we want to dig in with you today, just given the focus of the podcast that we’ve had here. But let me perhaps frame it this way. We now have two school founders on this show, you and Diane, who have each created models that at one level I think look awfully similar in certain respects. If you mix in, say, Rocketship Education or something like that, which was founded in 2006 and is an elementary school model.
We can take that and Summit Public Schools that Diane founded and Rocketship and say, hey, a lot of the structures that Alpha Schools has at one level, like a relatively limited block of time on learning academics and content in ways that are personalized for the learners, large blocks of time for projects, a big focus on skill development and habits of success or life skills like growth, mindset, agency, and so forth, those are things that were present in models like that. But then we come to at least one big difference, which is, yes, Alpha was originally designed, as you said, right before the mainstream use of AI, just like Summit and Rocketship were. But Alpha is now aggressively developing AI powered dashboards, AI powered learning applications, AI powered knowledge interest, working memory graphs for students. And so, given our focus on the podcast in this particular season around AI, I just love to dive into the AI parts of the model with you. Even as we’ll say up front, like AI is clearly inextricably linked to the other elements of the overall Alpha model. Pulling them apart is not fair to you all. But just given that we’ve heard so many podcasts with you about Alpha, and we suspect most of our particular listeners have as well, I think digging into that AI question in particular, and this is maybe the framing we can bring to it, which is, what does AI allow us to do today? That was not possible in the best of the personalized models from a decade or two earlier.
