Alpha reality check: When it's open to all and virtual, outcomes are weak
- Joanne Jacobs
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Alpha School claims its students can learn academics twice as fast in two hours a day of personalized online learning, leaving the rest of the day for life-skills workshops and projects. The growing network of private schools charges $40,000 to $75,000 tuition, (except for one school that charges only $15,000), so it enrolls children of highly motivated, affluent parents. It's gotten tons of publicity.
Does Alpha's model work for regular students? asks Dan Meyer on Mathworlds. Does it work without the bricks and mortar? So far, he concludes, results are disappointing.
Unbound Academy, a virtual charter that launched in Arizona in fall 2025, uses Alpha's “2 Hour Learning.” platform to personalize learning for its students in grades 4 to 8. They interact with teachers on screen. Students get a hour of free time for lunch and whatever else they want to do, then have two hours for workshops on topics such as starting a business, designing games, publishing stories and mastering chess, says the school's web site. It claims 2.8 times faster learning, compared to the national average, on NWEA's MAP growth test.
In its charter application, Unbound told Arizona's state school board that it expected to reach 90%+ averages on the state test in two to three years.
Unbound projected students would start with a baseline proficiency of 34% in math and reach 60% proficiency by the end of the first year. In English Language Arts, the school projected students starting at 40% proficiency and finishing at 65%.
The virtual school fell far short, according to a slideshow for its board, Meyer writes. It's not clear where students started, but they finished at 10% proficiency in math, 28% in English Language Arts. That's lower than state averages.
Start-ups can be rocky. Perhaps the numbers will rise in the second year, he writes. Perhaps students were farther behind than expected. But . . . We'll see.
Alpha Schools, which are private, screen students for motivation and behavior, writes Meyer. Students must be “functioning within a typical range of ability and independence,” according to their application, and must not have been “expelled, suspended, dismissed, or asked to withdraw from any school due to behavioral or disciplinary reasons.”
Alpha School students must be “coachable" and “excited to engage in this model," says founder MacKenzie Price in a Hard Fork interview. On the LiberatED podcast, she defines that as "willing to take feedback.” In short, they're taking the kids most likely to succeed. And the high tuition effectively screen parents for their commitment to their children's education.
Unbound, a public charter, has to take all comers, whether they seem to be a good fit for the model or not. It's free. So it's students are likely to be much better match for the average public school student.
It's also virtual, and we know virtual schools have a very poor academic track record compared to brick-and-mortar schools, as Meyer wrote last year.
Furthermore, he noted, that Alpha's claim that students love their school isn't really relevant to Unbound. He suspects much of the love "is explained by the four hours per day that Alpha School students spend making pasta, climbing rock walls, building in a fab lab, flying drones, and generally doing cool stuff with their friends." But virtual students don't have physical spaces and "activities you share with friends you see everyday." Their projects will be on screen.
But the virtual schools avoid the institutionalize culture of schools that develops whenever a groups of people are corralled together under institutional control. The general population develops affiliate groupings, bullying and preying up on the weak. This school seems tailor made for the nerdy intellectual kid, the Swot as the British call them, who is victimized in a gen pop school for "blowing the curve".
Virtual schools and homeschooling are liberating the kids who want to learn from being beaten down by having to just try to survive day prison.
And it seems this school will go further to helping the kids learn how…
Alpha School has received lots of undeserved attention. A principal criticism I have is its narrow view of curriculum, and orgy of electives displacing subjects whose knowledge will benefit pupils in their futures (science, additional languages, history, art, physical education, music, and others): most of these kids will be dead on arrival when classed for selection into baccalaureate schools that continue to beat the pants off of the best American offerings.
This is clearly a niche approach that will only work with carefully selected students and parents, even in a face-to-face setting.
This is somewhat reminiscent of the "flipped classroom" fantasy that has been touted as a cure-all. Just because a flipped classroom "works" for SOME groups of students taught by SOME instructors in SOME subjects doesn't mean that it works for many students, let alone a substantial majority.