Alpha School, a billionaire-backed private school chain that replaces teachers with AI tutors and charges $40,000 a year in tuition, is opening campuses in Edmond and Tulsa in August. The model, which uses two hours of daily AI-driven instruction with no certified teachers, has drawn both enthusiastic families and sharp criticism from educators.
At one Alpha workshop in San Francisco, the school sent middle school students to a Starbucks with preloaded cards, Wendy Vassiliou, whose son will start at the Tulsa location come August, said. Unbeknownst to the students, their guide had zeroed the account balance for at least one student, meaning their card was rejected at the checkout. The lesson aimed to teach students how to handle disappointment.
This is just cruel. Life is full of disappointments anyway; there’s no need to create more by tricking kids.
Alpha warns applicants that the school isn’t equipped to meet the needs of students requiring intensive behavioral, therapeutic, or one-to-one academic support. Applicants are asked to disclose any Individualized Education Program, 504 plan, or behavior or learning plan or risk being withdrawn.
Apparently “withdrawn” is the new word for “discriminated against”. Will this prevent them from receiving public funds?
Fortunately, kids who need specialized help will be taught by actual humans.
I had a “career” class in highschool where they setup a mock budgeting exercise in the library, and we were supposed to visit the grocery store, pay bills, invest, etc.
Instead of using our chosen career like every other class exercise, for this one you were just given a card with your life details on it and you had to work with that. I literally took one look at my card and said to myself “this isn’t going to work.” I was a single parent of 3 kids and my income was something like 2k/month. I knew I wouldn’t have enough money to even make it through the entire exercise so I asked my teacher, who created the cards, what I should do. She just pointed me toward the first expense and said “go do that, then do that” like re-explaining the sequence I was supposed to follow without acknowledging that I was going to run out of money in just a few minutes, so that’s what I did.
I did like 1/4 of the exercise, ran completely out of money, and then stood around for the rest of class while other students decided what they were going to do with their leftover funds. For whatever reason, at the end of the exercise, the teacher asked who ended up with this or that card, and when I pointed out what I’d gotten she was like “yeah that was the worst one” and that was all that was said about it.
I guess it actually was a pretty good lesson on how America deals with poverty.
This is just cruel. Life is full of disappointments anyway; there’s no need to create more by tricking kids.
Apparently “withdrawn” is the new word for “discriminated against”. Will this prevent them from receiving public funds?
Fortunately, kids who need specialized help will be taught by actual humans.
I had a “career” class in highschool where they setup a mock budgeting exercise in the library, and we were supposed to visit the grocery store, pay bills, invest, etc.
Instead of using our chosen career like every other class exercise, for this one you were just given a card with your life details on it and you had to work with that. I literally took one look at my card and said to myself “this isn’t going to work.” I was a single parent of 3 kids and my income was something like 2k/month. I knew I wouldn’t have enough money to even make it through the entire exercise so I asked my teacher, who created the cards, what I should do. She just pointed me toward the first expense and said “go do that, then do that” like re-explaining the sequence I was supposed to follow without acknowledging that I was going to run out of money in just a few minutes, so that’s what I did.
I did like 1/4 of the exercise, ran completely out of money, and then stood around for the rest of class while other students decided what they were going to do with their leftover funds. For whatever reason, at the end of the exercise, the teacher asked who ended up with this or that card, and when I pointed out what I’d gotten she was like “yeah that was the worst one” and that was all that was said about it.
I guess it actually was a pretty good lesson on how America deals with poverty.
Or, according to what I assume is Oklahoma’s end goal, just… not.
They will be taught in the prison system.