I was part of two conversations recently that covered two extremes of what we are talking about when we discuss AI and schooling.
The first was an episode of the AIR|GPT podcast where we discussed the disaster that is Alpha School. We had actually talked about the Alpha School model in a previous episode but here we discussed recent headlines that have laid bare the unethical and immoral organization that it is. I was the one who had brought the school to the group’s attention in our WhatsApp group and was easily the most negative voice in this discussion.
To give some context, Alpha School claims to be a new school model in which children spend two hours every morning on adaptive software while the adults in the room, called guides rather than teachers, are told not to help them with academic content. This doesn’t come cheap, charging families up to $65,000 a year. Ben Riley at Cognitive Resonance has been reporting on the place for months now and his series is definitely worth your time if you have been inclined to give Alpha the benefit of the doubt.
What brought things to a head is the boot camp. Alpha’s high school program opens with an eight-week boot camp built around eighteen separate challenges, and three of them were what we discussed. Consider this: Students are wired up to live heart rate monitors in front of their classmates and made to listen to recordings of their own parents criticizing them, with instructions to hold their pulse within ten percent of their resting baseline. One student described having to stay under 88 beats per minute, averaging 87, and shaking for the rest of the afternoon. Further, they are required to open a new account on X (formerly Twitter), pay for X Premium, and post daily until they have a hundred organic followers. Finally, we discussed that they were given five days to get through an AP unit using nothing but AI chatbots and the internet and score a 5 on the unit exam. The indignities run well past these three, and Ben Riley has been documenting them at Cognitive Resonance for months. Go read him (links below).
Riley calls it pedagogical and psychological malpractice, and I do not think that is too strong. Teaching has its own version of the Hippocratic oath, which is to do no harm and to treat the students in front of you as agentic human beings rather than as subjects in somebody’s experiment. Alpha has forgotten both halves of it.
Thankfully, we did not spend the entire episode there, and the better part of the conversation moved on to places where AI genuinely does deepen learning and supports neurodivergent students, but Alpha is where we started.
The second conversation sits at the opposite extreme. If the Alpha school conversation was about AI and how it could be (mis)used for learning, the other conversation was about banning AI altogether, building on the recent news on the New York City moratorium on AI and the outright ban in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Errol St. Clair Smith had one-on-one conversations with a wide range of people (teachers, school leaders, researchers, and ed tech enthusiasts) to hear what the nuance underneath the noise actually sounds like.
I was one of the people he spoke to. My take: The pushback against AI was inevitable, and probably necessary. For three years the pressure has run in one direction, from the companies toward the schools, pushing this so-called inevitable technology into every aspect of our lives, and those of our children. And frankly it was time someone called their bluff. A moratorium is one of the few moves a district can make that the companies actually have to notice. I see this as a natural pushback and valuable in the long run. The fact that within a week Microsoft promised a series of safeguards for children and schools to me was a positive outcome of these decisions by schools.
That said, the contrast between the two conversations is hard to miss. One of them, Alpha, takes the adults out of the room. The other, the districts, takes the machines out. My bias is clearly with the second group, not because I don’t think AI doesn’t have a role in learning but because the hype has overstretched itself and needs some reining in. (This is similar to my recent editorial about the crisis that ed tech has called on itself).
Thanks as always to our producer Errol St. Clair Smith for working his magic, and to the rest of the AIR|GPT cohosts, Caroline Fell Kurban, Liz Kolb, Ruben Puentedura, and Helen Crompton, for their insights.
Links to both episodes below.
- AI-Driven Education: The Good, The Bad, The Alpha School. The Gen AI Dream Team, 34:54.
- Banning AI? Listening to the Big and Small Voices Reshaping the Future of AI in Education. Powered by Gen AI, 31:11.
Finally, Ben Riley’s reporting on Alpha School at Cognitive Resonance