A few weeks ago, a purported student at Alpha School - the teacherless AI-powered private academy led by software developer Joe Liemandt - posted to X, “Today [at Alpha School] they hooked me up to a heart rate monitor, put my live pulse on a big screen, and played a pre-recorded video of my parents giving critical feedback in front of the entire class. The challenge was simple: my resting heart rate was 80 bpm, and I had to stay within 10% of that the whole time. Anything above 88 was a fail.”
This post has since been deleted, perhaps in part because it drew the attention of Benjamin Riley, who has been reporting on the cultish practices of Alpha School at Cognitive Resonance. But many other posts, also from purported students, described the same lesson. A poster whose profile claims they are a 15-year-old student at the academy prefaces a summary of the assignment by saying, “Today, [at Alpha School], we got to hear what our parents really thought about us.”
While Alpha School has stated that “the substance of the characterizations [Riley] describe[s] are false,” they have not pointed to any factual inaccuracies in Riley’s reporting, and have confirmed that “the heart rate challenge” assignment was part of the eight-week “Alpha High School Boot Camp” which kicks off the academy’s freshman experience. Moreover, the extensive posting by Alpha School students was itself a “life skills” challenge within the extensively metricized bootcamp: students were tasked with launching an account on X and accumulating over 100 organic followers to pass.
If you’re not sure which of these assignments is a more nauseating violation of the social contract which should exist between students and their schools, you’re certainly not alone. As Audrey Watters succinctly puts is, “What the hell are we doing to these children?”
If you want the fullest accounting of, as Riley adroitly says, “the nightmare fuel” details of the Alpha School experience for both primary and secondary schools students, head on over to Cognitive Resonance. More reporting is forthcoming, as Riley’s inbox is apparently overflowing with testimonials, most recently from former students. I also recommend Todd Feathers excellent reporting for Wired this year and last, and Vauhini Vara’s questions about Alpha School (which now seem more urgent than ever) in her broader survey of AI in education for Bloomberg.
The contribution I hope to make here is to placing the Alpha School “model” within a broader framework of extractive and exploitative disruption to education during the 2020s. To do so, I need to start by highlighting two crucial details about Alpha School which might not be evident even if you have been following the recent media coverage.
1.) Alpha School did not start marketing itself as “teacherless” or as an “AI school with no teachers” until 2023.
When Emergent Academy was enrolling a few dozens students in the Austin metropolitan area - as it did starting in 2014 - and even for several years after it rebranded to Alpha School in 2019 (adding additional locations elsewhere in Texas), its recruiting materials were focused on project-based learning, personalized learning plans, and self-paced assessment. These are all established pedagogies, supported by research, though, of course, the devil is in the details of how they are executed.
Alpha School’s “version of teachers” were always referred to as “Guides,” as many of them did not have degrees in education or previous teaching experience. If you’re familiar with private experimental or public charter schools, none of this is particularly surprising. Such schools often use idiosyncratic nomenclatures to signal their ambition to innovate, which is part of the recruiting pitch to parents. And they frequently hire - either strategically or by necessity - fewer credentialed student-facing staff so that they can spend money elsewhere (not always on extractive technology and graft, but not never).
But the absence of credentialed teachers was not something Alpha School started broadcasting as a reason to attend until 2023, shortly after Joe Liemandt became the schools “principal” (a title which exploits the word’s dual connotations in private equity and education). A more robust and attention-grabbing marketing strategy was also necessary at this point because Alpha School was undertaking a nationwide expansion. Liemandt has reportedly invested $1 Billion (through some combination of his private fortune, the private equity firm he leads, and the software companies he or the firm owns), much of it devoted to developing Alpha School’s eLearning platform.
2.) Alpha School’s eLearning platform is being developed for hyperscale.
One of the central tenets of the Alpha School model is that students spend two hours daily on the academic curriculum, all of it delivered via “adaptive technology” or, the nomenclature which has become more common since 2023, “AI tutors.”
From the outset, the proposition from Emergent Academy’s cofounders, MacKenzie Price (who remains Alpha School’s public face) and Brian Holtz (who now leads The Drew School, a Alpha School-resembling primary school associated with Drew University which opened this Fall), was that they could build a platform which, if students were required to use it for two hours daily, starting in kindergarten, would train them to excel at the standardized testing which was frequently used to accredit schools, to accumulate college credits, and to determine college admissions and scholarship eligibility. And, if they successfully designed such a platform, the rest of the school day would be freed up for alternatives to, as educators often put it, “teaching to the test.”
I want to be perfectly clear, in theory, I understand the appeal of this proposition. So long as the largely extractive and inequitable regime of standardized testing retains its stranglehold over U.S. education, the ethical quandary every educator faces is how to deliver the test scores they and their students need while minimizing the interference of tyrannical standardized testing services in the actual day-to-day project of education1
Other EdTech providers are merely aspiring to the extractive and coercive power which The College Board and Educational Testing Service (ETS) attained decades ago. If Alpha School can limit “teaching to the test” to two hours a day without themselves becoming a tyrannical childhood-devouring monster some parents and students will regard that as a reasonable bargain given the present education policy landscape. Much, of course, depends on whether they can deliver, and also what they do with the rest of the day.
In 2022, Liemandt took control of Alpha School’s internal eLearning platform, then known as 2HourLearning.2 The platform, or some version thereof, has since been rebranded as Timeback, which the Alpha School website now describes as “a ‘Shopify for schools’ that empowers entrepreneurs to build the next generation of highly effective, for-profit educational institutions.”
What has usually been covered as a network or chain of private schools is also part of a bundle of corporate holdings, among them Alpha School, Alpha Holdings, Timeback, Future of Education, Crossover Markets, and 2HR Learning. Most of them are registered to Andrew Price, who is both MacKenzie’s husband and the CFO of Liemandt’s primary businesses, the enterprise software company, Trilogy, and the investment firm, ESW Capital. Liemandt was the best man at the Prices wedding, having recruited both of them out of Stanford through the “Trilogy University” program which Emily Chang gives credit for writing the tech industry’s “bro code” in the 1990s.
One of these corporations, Future of Education, has been used to make at least one large donation to a Republican candidate (Glenn Youngkin) in a state Alpha hoped to expand into (Virginia). Their “interconnectedness is part of how the game is played,” as Peter Greene puts it in his coverage of a proposed Pennsylvania charter school, Unbound Academy, also run by the Prices: “So we have a total of five organizations involved in the proposed school, all tied to MacKenzie and Andrew Price, and all proposing to pass a pile of Pennsylvania taxpayer money back and forth. And what a pile of money it is.”
Vauhini Vara, an experienced tech reporter, put it thusly in Bloomberg Businessweek last year: “The financial arrangements among these entities is unclear, but the filings suggest that Alpha has been serving as a sort of in-house distribution channel for a corporation developing AI products for schools.” An Alpha spokesperson disputed this characterization. Last week, Vara put it more plainly: “This school is a literal subsidiary of a tech company. Pass it on.”
The former students Riley interviewed return again and again to the impression that their parents were paying large tuition fees for them to be part of the Beta-testing (or maybe, more accurately, Alpha-testing) phase for Liemandt’s software. “He’s not disclosing to students that when they enter into Alpha, that it is an experiment. He’s saying this is a school and it’s going to work,” one says, “It’s not a school and it’s not guaranteed to work. What it is…is a science experiment that’s been framed as a school.” Another says, “I was a guinea pig, and I knew that I was a guinea pig. They were not subtle about it.”
While MacKenzie Price continues to emphasize that Alpha School is expensive and exclusive private academy, only for “the right families,” Liemandt has contrarily been expressing his ambition to not only expand Alpha School nationwide, but hyperscale its eLearning platform to the globe. As he put it to the podcaster Patrick O’Shaughnessy, “We need to scale this. We need to get out to a billion kids.”
Liemandt has many times regurgitated this intention to scale to “a billion kids.” According to UNESCO, there are only about 1.67 billion school-aged children in the world. So what Liemandt’s describing would be one of the most totalizing global monopolies in world history.
The aspiration to outrageous scale is characteristic of the AI boom, of course. And Alpha School and its associated brands have been, at least since 2023, committed to the accelerationist optimism endemic to the AI bull market. It is quite possible Alpha School will prove to be just another varietal of tulip which succeeds in capturing the desires of the superrich during this period of speculative mania. Media coverage, both positive and negative, is totally out of proportion with the schools enrollments, which, across all grades and more than twenty branch schools, likely do not much exceed the median size of a single U.S. public secondary school.3
But make no mistake, if Joe Liemandt gets his way, all our kids will soon be spending two hours everyday on a platform he owns.
“There’s going to be a tablet that costs less than $1,000 that is going to teach every kid on the planet everything they need to know in two hours at day and they’re going to love it,” he told Jeremy Stern.
Buried in one of the longest and most hagiographic profiles of a tech founders you will ever read is a nearly perfect sentence:
When GenAI hit, I thought, ‘Oh, neural nets, it’s finally here,’ Liemandt said as we rode in his Cybertruck across Lady Bird Lake to MacKenzie Price’s Alpha School, where for the last three years he’s been able to capture an enormous amount of data.4
Every once in awhile it’d be nice if there were a tech bro who envisioned a “potential trillion dollar market” that didn’t depend on extracting huge reservoirs of capta from children and young adults. (And Liemandt is, as Chang puts it, “a total bro” whose “bro style - his volatile mixture of entitlement, hubris, and risk-taking - came to be shared by many founders and CEOs in the 1990s.”) Timeback captures a vast array of aptitudes and behaviors, twelve years before Instagram can legally do so, so that it can, as Liemandt puts it, “generate personalized lesson plans for every kid that are 100% engaging,” “can track their knowledge graph,” and “monitor it all - the anti-patterns, the habits slowing them down, the mistakes they make, the time they’re wasting.”
As one parent, Kristine Barrios, who witnessed the transition from Graham Frey (Alpha School principal from 2017 to 2022) to Liemandt put it to Feathers: “It switched from being about the kids to the metrics and the data and the numbers.”
Education As a Mind Virus
“It’s putting a mind virus into a kid’s head, which is what education is,” Liemandt told Stern, “And it’s being done by a teacher you trust.”
Regardless of how realistic it is to see the Alpha School model scaling to a billion students, Liemandt’s definition of education speaks directly to the current plan for education at the federal level. He echoes the “woke mind virus” diagnosis which Elon Musk foisted on the AI Model Wars and the 2024 election cycle, the origin of which the SpaceX founder alleges is “Berkeley politics.”5
Much as Musk speaks of Grok, Liemandt does not suggest Alpha School is an antidote to “mind virus,” but rather the introduction of a variant, maybe even a super-strain. The goal, as he frames it, is not to release young people from indoctrination, but to replace brainwashing by radical teachers you can’t trust with brainwashing by tech bros you can.
A common distrust of educators and desire to exert dominance over U.S. education is one of the things that most reliably binds the fractious constituencies aligned behind the second Trump administration. The federally-authorized takeover of the "core infrastructure” of U.S. education is supposed to generate revenues which will help float the bankroller of the multitrillion-dollar AI buildout through the uncertain and increasingly illiquid phase of diffusion to consumers. In return, the AI-forward education platforms are expected to provide indispensable systems for surveilling and disciplining two despised populations - educators (especially unionized ones) and young people - who remain durably resistant to fascist propaganda.
Christopher Rufo crowed, after the inauguration, that “the first field of battle is higher education.” And Trump signed several AI and EdTech-friendly executive orders in his first hundred days, including one which created a White House Task Force on AI Education (explicitly K-12 focused), led by Michael Kratsios, a longtime capo of Peter Thiel.6 That task force launched the Presidential AI Challenge, the explicit goal of which was to put AI tools in the hands of “every student in America from kindergarten to twelfth grade.” It is explicitly supported, unsurprisingly, by all the major AI developers, the biggest brands in EdTech, numerous venture capital and private equity firms, and Alpha School.
The messaging from this Task Force, flowing through members like the Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, the First Lady, Melania Trump, and the former “AI & Crypto Czar,” David Sacks, is eerily similar to the marketing of Alpha School in the Liemandt era. They predict that AI will act as a personalized tutor for students at every grade level. It will unlock their entrepreneurial potential. It will make teaching credentials irrelevant. And, most importantly, diffusion to classrooms must be rapid, unregulated, and indifferent to risk. As one Alpha School Guide told Vera, “In a traditional school you get in trouble if you’re using AI, and here you get in trouble if you’re not…The starting point of every conversation I have with a kid is ‘Is there an AI that can do this, so that you’re not spending your time on it?’”
Alpha School has been regularly cited by Task Force members as an example they hope other schools, private and public, will follow. Earlier this month on an episode of Sack’s All-In Podcast, his co-host, fellow venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, described Joe Liemandt as “our friend” and Alpha School as “the leading edge” and the “answer that’s going to win” the policy debates about AI in schools. Sacks himself ranted about Zohran Mamdani’s AI ban for New York City public schools, characterizing it as an appeal to his “downwardly mobile progressive” voting base by “trying to sabotage those kids” and “put them through Doomer Academy.”
In an interview with CNN last month, when McMahon was asked if she was “concerned that students are effectively becoming sort of guinea pigs for chatbots,” she answered by describing her visit to the Alpha School flagship campus in Austin and claiming “AI is really working in that particular school.” When State of the Union host Dana Bash asked her if Alpha School was a “proper model,” McMahon said, “It’s incredibly effective for this school, for these students, and I’m not saying that works everywhere, but that’s what we have to look at.”
The Dream of Teacherlessness
The current alliance against educators started taking shape during the tumultuous Summer of 2020, when, recognizing the progressive populism which had been unleashed by the combination of police violence and pandemic mismanagement, reactionaries started planning their counter-attack. Christopher Rufo created the education strategy in an anti-DEI executive order signed by Trump in September 2020.7
Though this was not apparent from the outset, Rufo’s aspiration to remake U.S. education as automated white libertarian apologia would soon appeal to the resentments of at least three constituencies. The first were true believers in the triumphalism of the late 20th century U.S. Establishment members of both major parties were holding tight to the “end of history” and “great moderation” discourses, to Washington Consensus political economy and cultural imperialist foreign policy. To Rufo and his allies in this contingent, the U.S. had solved all its major social problems by the end of the Reagan administration, and had created the template for perfectible hyper-capitalism which could be exported to the rest of the world.
To somebody with this worldview, the diagnoses of systemic racism, intersectionality, white privilege, and implicit bias - which had been gaining popularity throughout the 2010s but were further validated by adoption into corporate, campus, and government policies in the early 2020s - were nothing short of enraging. It was like being dragged out of the “shining city upon a hill” and remigrated into the sturm and drang.
While many politicians, pundits, and their donors shared nostalgia for the Washington Consensus and its associated orthodoxies, the explicit white grievance of Rufo’s education strategy made them queasy, especially following the January 6th insurrection. But something happened in the latter stage of the pandemic and the transition out of it which converted them: the so-called Great Resignation (remember that?). Workforces across occupations and wage classes were refusing “return to office” initiatives, were “quiet quitting,” were organizing against policies and projects they found reprehensible, and, worst of all, it was revealed in 2021, the rate of union membership had increased nationwide for the first time since 2008.
The establishment had been willing to tolerate a politics of social equality, but was not willing to tolerate a politics of equitable economic distribution. Where were the previously docile workers in tech and healthcare getting these crazy notions about their collective power to dictate terms to CEOs and private equity principals? Such collectivism had been mostly dormant since the 1970s. Educators were unionizing more rapidly than any other profession. And they were being gratingly loud about it. To even the most compassionate conservatives it became imperative to cut the resurgent labor movement off at the knees, and education seemed like the best place to start.
The pandemic had created a boom in education technology. Venture investment in EdTech startups quintupled between 2019 and 2022. Brands like Zoom and Lockdown Browser became ubiquitous, while a wide range of bespoke applications had helped educators deliver remote instruction. But a disjunction came when educators and students alike abandoned EdTech products en masse as soon as they were able to return to in-person instruction.
Nobody in the EdTech industry had accounted for this exigency, and it enraged them. They had built the digital infrastructure for remote instruction at blazing speed under crisis conditions, but were left flailing as a series of once-promising platforms skidded towards insolvency. Valuations crashed. The teachers who had once treated them as lifesavers would no longer use their products unless someone forced them to.
The commercial launch of ChatGPT in 2022 made possible an EdTech pivot from remote instruction to AI instruction. The flood of money into AI models had started years earlier, but in the early 2020s, existing EdTech startups integrated the models or merely rebranded themselves as AI applications. Their resentment towards educators was still fresh. They felt betrayed and wished for vengeance in kind. Chatbots and AI agents wouldn’t decide they preferred whiteboards and group study around a table. They could be trained on what to teach and how to teach it, and could by “fine-tuned” to the whims of school boards, state legislatures, and partisan regulators.
These three constituencies united on the “first field of battle” in 2025. Largely thanks to Rufo, they had a pretty refined plan of attack. They could disrupt revenue streams via anti-DEI, anti-immigration, and viewpoint diversity initiatives deployed by both federal regulators and state legislatures. With this leverage, they could pressure schools to adopt AI platforms, accept partisan oversight of curriculums, subsidize conservative civics centers and libertarian thought leaders. The goal was to destabilize U.S. educational infrastructure and carve out a large space for reactionary indoctrination within it. I think we have to acknowledge, though progress towards this goal has been uneven and not without impediment, it has been substantial everywhere and in some places the goal has already been reached.
The question is, once you have made space for reactionary indoctrination, what do you do with it?
Cruelty Is The Curriculum
I first got a sense of their answer while covering the Academic Transformation of West Virginia University under Gordon Gee in the Fall of 2023.8 As I put it then:
A common refrain coming from administrators, boards of trustees, and certainly the hydra-headed mollusk of EdTech and private equity whom they serve: Students are too soft, too kind-hearted, too idealistic, too entitled.
They side with their unionized instructors who demand living wages. They demand divestment from fossil fuels in the name of climate change. They fill the streets calling for ceasefires. They need less history and more real-world lessons.
Make no mistake, the curriculum is cruelty.
Sustaining the neoliberal order, which has reigned from the 1970s forward, relies upon convincing a large proportion of the electorate that cruelty is normal and politically expedient. Cruelty is, in fact, the very height of rationality. Within the epistemology of neoliberalism (an epistemology for which we can thank the Chicago School disproportionately), cruelty is intelligence itself.
Those who best acclimate themselves to it, who develop the most tolerance for witnessing the suffering of others and the greatest capacity to exact that suffering for profit, they are the masters of the universe, or as Twain put it, “the blessings of civilization trust.”
The project which Chicago School Economics, led by George Stigler, had undertaken explicitly during the midcentury “Chicago Fight” with Robert Maynard Hutchins and his idea of the university as a “center for independent thought” was to produce a set of “market signals” (foremost replacing state funding with student debt financing) which would convert the politically radical students of the postwar period into entrepreneurial individuals who would embrace neoliberal rationality, cutthroat competition, anti-union and anti-New Deal political realignments, the rhetoric of meritocracy, and the dismantling of regulatory protections and public services.
What we are seeing today within the coalition Rufo mobilized against education is nostalgia for the success of that project. For those who regard the Washington Consensus of the millennial decades as an “end of history” nirvana, the hope is to revive the disciplining apparatus of Chicago School doctrine. The fatal blindness within this nostalgia is that the success of this brand of responsibility politics in the late 20th century was conditioned by real upward mobility and shared prosperity. The education gospel was believable for generations of Americans because they had evidence of it in their own families and communities, and a living memory of decreasing inequality and rising living standards.
The Chicago School and their acolytes could construct a positive curriculum in the epistemology of neoliberalism based on freedom of choice, self-reliance, and “small government,” drawing on widespread belief that each generation of Americans was predestined to be better off than their parents. Contemporary disciplining frameworks cannot rely on such belief. There is no longer any pretense that the “rising tide will lift all boats,” so the curriculum of cruelty must return to the “fear of sinking” which characterized capitalist apologia during the first Gilded Age.9
I have seen many attempts, some more successful than others, to implement the cruelty as a curriculum for higher education over the past four years, Riley’s reporting on Alpha School demonstrates its tenets being applied as early as kindergarten. Among them:
1.) Hierarchies of leisure and suffering.
The students Riley interviewed describe a hierarchical system founded on extreme rewards and punishments. Students who earn “Rocket Ship” status (primarily, it seems, via high scores on standardized tests) have “more privileges,” “no rules,” “snacks for free,” “a special room,” etc. Students on “Pirate Ship,” on the other hand, were subjected to ever-increasing workloads, isolation, confinement, stigmatization, and, as one student put it, “pretty much a concentration camp.”
2.) Supervision at all times.
Totalitarian surveillance of college students has been an explicit aspiration of EdTech platforms and their investors since 2023. Alpha is extending this surveillance to much younger cohorts. Riley cites one of Alpha’s consultants, Carl Hendrick, describing his hope for the school:
Schooling fulfills the function of accountability. In the future, this will mean cameras on, and an AI monitoring student behavior, their latency, what websites they are looking at, their ability to focus and then producing a report for a human tutor.
Cameras on is apparently already the default. As one student told Riley, “They would get frustrated if we taped over it. We had to keep the camera on.” Another reported, “It would also track your facial expressions…It would tell me that I look really sad, which is fair because I was really sad.”
3.) Entrepreneurship is the only legitimate knowledge.
The Alpha School workshops - which comprise the portion of the day not spent not glued to a computer - are overwhelmingly focused on building businesses. At the so-called “Founders School” - Alpha’s new and unaccredited outlet in New York City - they explicitly promise that students who enroll as Freshman will earn “$1M in profit” by graduation, or their parents will receive a “full tuition refund.”
When Liemandt and Price promote Alpha School, they always talk about how teenagers are building businesses. And students have noticed this emphasis. Liemandt, one student told Riley, “didn’t care about the education. He cared about…creating businesses that he could be part of. It seemed like he was more after the ideas of the students, profit-wise, than the actual learning.”
Hyperscaling The Ideology
As I put it earlier in this long essay (sorry), “Much depends on what they do with the rest of the day.” When Secretary McMahon says “we have to look at” whether Alpha School is the “proper model” for the whole of U.S. public education, is she considering mandating adoption of one or more of the eLearning platforms its incubating (Timeback, 2HRLearning, Studient, etc.), or is she considering its whole curriculum, its associated pedagogical practices, the rocket ships and pirate ships, and the underlying worldviews upon which these are based?
I want to be clear. I don’t trust Alpha School’s founders when they tell us their students are testing in the 99th percentile while only spending two hours daily on their test-centric eLearning platform.
And even if they could prove to me they were telling the truth, I would not trust that their model was scalable to a billion kids, or even a million kids, or even ten thousand kids. As Dan Meyer put it, “They haven’t replaced teachers with AI. They have replaced poor kids with rich kids.”
I expect if the Alpha School model had representative demographics, it would not only fail to produced exceptional test results, it would make many more students very sad, and many more parents very angry.
But I don’t actually think the coalition organized by Rufo over the course of the 2020s cares much about hyperscaling the software. The software is just techwashing for their dream of teacherlessness and totalitarian surveillance of students and schools. That’s what they really want to hyperscale.
When Annie Abrams, author of Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students (2023), first drew attention to the Alpha School students bulk-posting on X and diagnosed (correctly) that the Alpha School model is built atop a standardized testing foundation (these posts of since been deleted), she was overrun by reply guys mocking her for falling for an AI advertising campaign and for shoehorning Alpha School into her existing critique (or vendetta, as they saw it) of AP.
The online discussion and defense of Alpha School is completely out of proportion with the actual number of students, families, and employees actively associated with the chain. Some of this is the result of well-conceived and well-funded public outreach. Riley has diagnosed a phenomenon of “Alpha-Beta” accounts on X, that rush to defend Alpha and smear its critics. While I would be surprised if Alpha School were not deploying some kind of PR bot swarm (as many startups do), it is also true that there are real people with no school-age children, many of whom have never set foot in an Alpha School facility, who are nevertheless euphoric and evangelical about the brand. As I’ll get to later in this essay, Alpha School’s marketing and PR appeals to an audience who has no direct interest in what happens at Alpha School academies.
Riley’s reporting has since shown that many (possibly all) of the X posts Abrams drew attention to were from real students. And that the Alpha School model relies not only on the promise of high test scores for its recruiting, but also, according to the students Riley spoke with, intensive standardized testing, in some cases “pretty much every day.”
Holtz, Liemandt, and/or the Prices are developing several AI-forward brands for different consumer bases, including Studient, Motivention, LearnWith.AI, TeachTap, Incept, 2HR Learning, and Timeback.
There is not a firm figure for current enrollments, but last year Alpha School’s Director of Growth told KUT Radio of Austin, that total nationwide enrollment was 230 students, and “around 150” of those were part of the flagship Austin campus founded in 2014. Several new branches have been launched this year, but these will not exponentially expand the overall enrollment. The Lexington Observer reported that the Alpha Lexington branch set their goal for inaugural enrollment at 20 students. It’s highly unlikely Alpha branches have enrolled much more than a thousand students, and possible that the number is far less than that.
Liemandt regards neural nets as the solution to Benjamin Bloom’s “2 Sigma Problem,” coined by the educational psychologist in 1984 as shorthand for his belief that tutorials were the most effective mode of instruction, but because of labor costs this mode could not be scaled beyond the elites.
Directly before coming to the White House, Kratsios was an executive for Scale AI, a startup launched by Thiel’s Founders Fund which Elke Schwarz describes as part of the class of “new military technology unicorns.” Scale AI hawks Defense Llama, a weapons decision and targeting system built atop Meta’s proprietary LLM, which military experts told The Intercept in 2024 not only “gives bad answers” but “also complies with a fundamentally bad question.” Since Trump retook the Presidency, Scale AI has accumulated over $100 Million in federal contracts.
For a more detailed account of the whitelash strategy, I recommend starting with Isaac Kamola’s “Manufacturing Backlash: Right-Wing Think Tanks & Legislative Attacks on Higher Education, 2021-2023” (2024), published by the AAUP’s Center For The Defense of Academic Freedom.
The well-publicized crisis portion of the Academic Transformation was unfolding while I was making “Criticism LTD.” I wrote “Gordon Gee’s Draw Check Scheme,” which I’m proud to say was cited in the WVU faculty’s Resolution of No Confidence. WVU also took center stage in the episodes “Ponzi Austerity & The Monolingual University,” “The Empire of Criticism, Part III,” and “Criticism LTD: Continuing The Dialogue.” In “Empire,” I explicitly define the Curriculum of Cruelty.
For more on this, I highly recommend Andrew Kopec’s Sink or Swim: Capitalist Selfhood & 19th-Century American Literature (UNC, 2025) and Paulette Kilmer’s The Fear of Sinking: The American Success Formula in The Gilded Age (U. Tennessee, 1996).
This is such a vital essay Matt, and thank you for the citations to my reporting, notwithstanding the deeply troubling reality it portrays. My overwhelming priority right now is the safety of children under Alpha School's care, but you've rightly framed the much bigger question about where we are headed as a society if we allow Alpha School or similar such efforts to become part of our education system.
I'd say more but, well there's more reporting to do, much more. Stay tuned.
Excellent journalism. One quibble from over here in K12, about where the “first battlefield” is. This phenomenon is contiguous with the Ed Reform of the Obama era that had roots in 1981’s “A Nation at Risk.”
Tech became a major part of this in my experience around 2010, and I joined the fight in 2011.
Higher Ed is armed with a measure of greater stability, time to network and communicate with eachother, along with fewer avenues of direct harassment than K12. It feels like we in primary and secondary education generally must resist this unarmed.
From over here, it seems like higher ed has only more recently been activated, but communications across the divide are too few to really know. College Board and AP seems to have interposed itself somehow?
I’m sure you’re aware, but one engine of these efforts by private equity and political forces is the assessment-industrial complex, which this article touches on but is also central to the issues presented in this excellent piece.