On August 12, a new kind of private school opens its doors in Oklahoma. Alpha School – a billionaire-backed chain that started in Austin in 2014 – is launching a K-10 campus in Edmond and a K-8 campus in Tulsa. Tuition is $40,000 a year, nearly double the most expensive private school in either metro area. There are no teachers.
That’s not a figure of speech. Alpha’s model replaces teachers with two hours a day of AI-driven, self-paced instruction – 30 minutes each for math, reading, science, and social studies – followed by afternoon workshops in life skills and entrepreneurship. The adults on staff are called “guides,” and by design, they don’t teach. According to Alpha’s own job postings, guides monitor screens and run afternoon workshops, but they never touch curriculum, and they don’t need a teaching certificate to get hired. One guide profiled in coverage of the school was a former sports psychologist.
We think this is worth paying attention to – not because Alpha is unusual (it isn’t; it’s opening 28 new campuses this fall, more than tripling its footprint), but because it is the clearest real-world test yet of the question at the center of everything we do: what happens when you take the adult who assesses, questions, and responds to a struggling kid, and replace them entirely with software?
What Alpha actually promises
To be fair to the model: Alpha isn’t hiding what it does. Families know exactly what they’re signing up for, and some are genuinely enthusiastic. One incoming Tulsa parent told Oklahoma Watch she researched every criticism of Alpha she could find before enrolling her son and “was not deterred.” Alpha reports strong outcomes – an average SAT score of 1545 out of 1600 among its seniors, and AP scores averaging 4.2-4.4. If those numbers hold up under independent scrutiny, they’re real.
But strong test scores and an unsupervised AI tutor are not the same evidence. A high score can mean a student learned the material – or that a system optimized for the test got them there without much staying power. That’s the distinction our whole approach is built around: augmenting the thinking, not replacing the person who checks whether the thinking actually happened.
The part that should give any parent pause
Two details from the reporting stand out.
First, the enrollment numbers. As of July 20 – three weeks before opening day – only 26 students had enrolled at the Edmond campus and 32 at Tulsa. That’s a small, self-selecting group of early adopters, not yet a broad verdict from Oklahoma families.
Second, the privacy design. Alpha’s AI platform monitors students’ screens continuously and takes photos when it detects “unusual screen patterns” or a lack of progress. In one case reported by Wired, the system captured a photo of a student doing schoolwork in bed, in pajamas. Separately, 404 Media and Wired both reported that Alpha’s underlying AI system may have been built in part by scraping content from other online learning platforms without permission – a claim serious enough that a line of broken contracts and licenses has followed the company. To be clear about where this stands: Alpha’s chief communications officer disputes the scraping claim directly, calling the reporting “cherry-picked” and sourced to former employees, and says the company may pursue legal action against the outlets that reported it. The screen-monitoring and photo-capture practice itself is not seriously disputed – it’s simply how the system is designed to work.
State lawmakers have noticed the staffing model specifically. Oklahoma Rep. Cyndi Munson put it directly: “These types of schools and models that are being implemented are taking away the seriousness of what it takes to be a classroom teacher. It is very disturbing and should worry all of us.” Erika Wright, founder of the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition, went further: “This is a travesty for those kids.” Alpha’s students, she argues, won’t get the educational and emotional support that comes from a certified adult who actually teaches them.
There’s a regulatory wrinkle here too. Oklahoma’s new AI-in-schools law – the Responsible Technology in Schools Act – requires public school districts to keep a human educator in final decision-making authority over any AI-assisted instruction. Alpha, as a private school, isn’t covered by that law at all. And in a detail that says a lot about how these programs get vetted, Alpha’s Edmond campus was briefly listed as approved for Oklahoma’s Parental Choice Tax Credit – a state voucher program – before the Oklahoma Tax Commission quietly removed it from that list after Oklahoma Watch started asking questions.
The mission-filter test
Run Alpha through the two questions we ask about anything AI touches in education:
Does this augment intelligence, or replace it? By design, Alpha replaces the person whose job is to notice when a kid is confused, reasoning incorrectly, or checked out – and substitutes a system that measures screen behavior instead.
Does this deepen learning, or shortcut it? That one we genuinely don’t know yet. Alpha’s test scores are real, if they hold up. But a test score tells you what a student can produce under exam conditions – not whether the understanding underneath it will still be there in six months, or whether a kid ever got the kind of “wait, why did you get that answer?” conversation that actually builds reasoning. Two hours of adaptive drilling a day, with no adult required to notice whether it’s landing, is a design that we’d expect to compress the appearance of mastery – the exact failure mode we spend the most time helping families and educators avoid.
We’re not the ones who get to answer that question about Alpha with certainty. But it’s the right question to be asking before $40,000 a year and a state voucher program get anywhere near a decision this consequential – and it’s the same question worth asking about any tool, anywhere, that promises to make learning faster by taking the human out of the loop.
Sources: KGOU/Oklahoma Watch, “A $40,000-per-year AI school with no teachers is opening in Oklahoma this August,” by Maya Henry, July 21, 2026. https://www.kgou.org/education/2026-07-21/a-40-000-per-year-ai-school-with-no-teachers-is-opening-in-oklahoma-this-august
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