AI-centered school education has come to Piedmont. This fall, Alpha School, a Texas-based education company opened the doors to its first East Bay campus. Located on the grounds of the Zion Lutheran Church on Park Boulevard, Alpha School East Bay follows the 2025 opening of a San Francisco Alpha school and the announcement of a Palo Alto Alpha school coming in 2027.
Despite the rapid growth, Alpha School attracts the greatest attention for its academic model: it has no teachers; learning is centered on screens and artificial intelligence; and students engage in just two hours of academics per day via an “AI tutor.” K though 9 tuition is $65,000 a year.
All of which lands Alpha School East Bay in the middle of a red-hot debate among educators everywhere, from the Department of Education to university researchers to elementary and secondary school educators, all struggling to answer a basic question: what is the proper role of AI in education?
Alpha School is far from the first educational institution to make a big bet on AI as a permanent student educational tool. Fusion Academy, which runs a Berkeley campus, and the long-running Khan Academy are two such schools that have found ways to work AI-based learning into their educational models.
While Alpha School East Bay is just in its first few months of life and has yet to reveal data about its student outcomes, the company has clearly spent heavily on media to push the successes of its other campuses. The company’s webpages are filled with countless promotional videos lauding Alpha’s academic claims, including these: “2x Learning: Alpha students learn twice as much as their peers in two hours of academics a day; Top 1%: Alpha classes rank in the top 1% nationally.”
Alpha’s online resource page carries no fewer than 80 video testimonials featuring students, parents, and even U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, all plugging how extraordinary Alpha is. When asked to explain what the goal of Alpha is, co-founder and software entrepreneur Joe Liemandt put it this way: “We’re reinventing how K-12 school is.”
Alpha reached out to the Piedmont Exedra in mid-October to share the news of the school’s opening and to set up an interview with co-founder MacKenzie Price. But after the New York Times ran a story that raised questions about the school’s claims, the school declined to comment.