Alpha School, an \u201cAI-powered private school\u201d that heavily relies on AI to teach students and can cost up to $65,000 a year, is AI-generating faulty lesson plans that internal company documentation find sometimes do \u201cmore harm than good,\u201d and scraping data from a variety of other online courses without permission to train its own AI, according to former Alpha School employees and internal company documents.\u00a0Alpha School has earned fawning coverage from Fox News and The New York Times and received praise from Linda McMahon, the Trump-appointed Secretary of Education, for using generative AI to chart the future of education. But samples of poorly constructed AI-generated lessons that I have viewed present students with unclear wording and illogical choices in multiple choice questions.\u00a0\u201cThese questions not only fail to meet SAT standards but also fall short of the quality we promise to deliver,\u201d one employee wrote in the company\u2019s Workflowy, a company-wide note taking app where every employee can see what other employees are working on, including their progress and thoughts on various projects. \u201cFrom a student\u2019s perspective, when answer options don\u2019t logically fit the question, it feels like a betrayal of their effort to learn and succeed. How can we expect students to trust our assessments when the very questions meant to test their knowledge are flawed?\u201d\ud83d\udca1Do you know anything else about Alpha School or AI use in education? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal @emanuel.404\u202c. Otherwise, send me an email at emanuel@404media.co.My investigation into Alpha School also reveals that the massive amounts of data the company collects on students, including videos of them, is stored in a Google Drive folder that anyone with the link\u2014even if they\u2019ve left the company, or if it was sent to them\u2014could access. In turn, that sensitive material is viewed by more Alpha School employees than students and parents may realize.\u00a0Former Alpha School employees told me that the company\u2019s increasing reliance on generative AI in every aspect of its operation, as well as the constant monitoring and tracking of every student\u2019s mouse movements, is making students anxious and does not always provide the quality of education Alpha School advertises to parents.\u00a0This investigation provides previously unreported details about how Alpha School builds and uses AI tools and how they fail students in a time when the entire education system is struggling to adopt and adapt to generative AI.\u00a0\u201cStudents are being treated like guinea pigs,\u201d one former Alpha School employee told me. 404 Media granted the three Alpha School employees we talked to anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements with the company.\u00a0\u201cWe are not computers or algorithms. We are simply people who need breaks. We are people that don’t like being watched through their computers,\u201d one Alpha School student wrote in a feedback form to the company.\u00a0The \u201c2 Hour Learning\u201d PitchAlpha School is a private school covering kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) with locations across the United States. It also offers Alpha Anywhere, a remote virtual learning program that offers \u201ca complete at-home school replacement.\u201d The school\u2019s primary selling point is its \u201c2 hour learning\u201d philosophy which promises to give students their required education and prepare them for necessary standardized tests, AP tests, and the SATs in just just two hours of learning. The rest of the day, Alpha School says, can be dedicated to more creative learning, students following their passions, and advanced life skills. Alpha School tells parents that its students\u2019 test scores are in the top 2 percent in the U.S.Alpha School says it\u2019s able to cram all that learning into a two hour window in large part thanks to \u201cAI tutors\u201d and various AI apps that generate custom lesson plans according to each student\u2019s needs.\u00a0\u201cWe are not computers or algorithms. We are simply people who need breaks. We are people that don’t like being watched through their computers.\u201d \u201cAll educational content is obsolete. Every textbook, every lesson plan, every test, all of it is obsolete because gen AI is going to be able to deliver a personalized lesson just for you,\u201d Joe Liemandt, Alpha School\u2019s \u201cprincipal\u201d and the founder of Trilogy, the company that owns many of the apps used by Alpha School, said in a podcast interview published last year.\u00a0Alpha School co-founder MacKenzie Price said in an interview with The New York Times Hard Fork podcast that she started her first school in 2014, and that Alpha School has used various learning apps over the years, but that generative AI changed how the company teaches students.\u00a0\u201cIn 2022 when generative AI started to come out, that’s when we realized we have an opportunity to really make sure that kids are efficiently and effectively learning and we can do a better job of building the personalized learning plans to meet kids where they are. It also completely changed the role of assessments and how great of a feedback tool they are,\u201d she said.To ensure that students are learning, and in order to improve its lesson plans and teaching strategies, Alpha School also digitally monitors students very closely. Similar to employee monitoring software in the corporate world\u2014what has come to be derogatorily known as bossware\u2014Alpha School keeps track of when students are using its various apps, how long it takes them to complete their exercises, their results, and also records videos of them in order to see whether they are focused or distracted.\u00a0Former employees I talked to and internal company documents show Alpha School is striving for a future where it can use AI to build an AI-driven education system with \u201cno humans in the loop.\u201d But at the moment Alpha School students have access to human \u201cguides\u201d that offer help and instruction both at Alpha School physical locations and via video calls with tutors who are located all over the world.\u00a0Last year, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon visited an Alpha School campus in Texas where she said she was \u201cblown away\u201d by what she saw. \u201cHarnessing AI thoughtfully will be critical to expanding opportunity and preparing students for tomorrow\u2019s workforce,\u201d she said.\u00a0Former Alpha School employees and internal documentation don\u2019t disprove Alpha School students\u2019 high test results, but show that students often have to study more than two hours a day, that they sometimes arrive at Alpha high school classes unprepared and below grade level reading skills, and that some students had to go back and fill holes in their education before they were prepared for high school level classes.\u00a0One former employee told me some students succeeded despite AI generated materials thanks to human intervention and tutors who cared deeply about their education. The same former employee also emphasized that most of the teaching that wasn\u2019t provided by one of Alpha School\u2019s human tutors was low quality either because it was AI-generated, or wholly lifted from other online teaching services that offer their services for as little as $40, while Alpha School costs tens of thousands of dollars a year.\u00a0\u201cStudents incoming into AP Biology the previous year were seriously lacking in their foundational skills,\u201d one former Alpha School employee said. The same employee said these students \u201cstruggled\u201d and were \u201creally frustrated,\u201d so \u201c[Alpha School] gave them the prerequisite courses and made them do a lot of testing before entering the AP classes.\u201d\u00a0Illogical AI QuestionsOne piece of software that\u2019s central to Alpha School\u2019s education is AlphaRead, which teaches students reading comprehension starting in grade school, up to high school and SAT preparation.\u00a0AlphaRead uses existing large language models (LLMs) from companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to generate articles that cater to students\u2019 level and interests, then tests their reading comprehension by asking them multiple choice questions about the articles they read. Former employees and internal Alpha School documentation show that, sometimes, the exercises AlphaRead generated failed to teach students necessary skills, especially at the high school level.\u201cPoorly constructed questions do more harm than good.\u201d\u00a0\u201cQuestions should necessitate passage comprehension,\u201d one Alpha School employee who was tasked with testing AlphaRead wrote in his evaluation of the software. \u201cAlarmingly, some questions in the course can be answered without even reading the article. The SAT Reading section is designed to test a student’s comprehension and engagement with the text; anything less does a disservice to their preparation. These questions are extremely easy for students. They don\u2019t require any deep thinking or analysis, which means students aren\u2019t being challenged to develop the critical reasoning skills they\u2019ll need for the SAT.\u201dIn other instances, AlphaRead suffered from \u201challucinations\u201d that are common across all LLMs and presented students with illogical questions.\u00a0\u201cPoorly constructed questions do more harm than good,\u201d another Alpha School employee testing AlphaRead wrote. \u201cThey confuse students with unclear wording and illogical choices, undermining their trust in the assessment process. These questions not only fail to meet SAT standards but also fall short of the quality we promise to deliver.\u201dThe employee specifically cited the question in the screenshot below, which doesn\u2019t make grammatical sense, and, as they note, doesn\u2019t allow the student to make a choice \u201cto complete the sentence in a way that makes it a full, coherent thought.\u201d\u00a0An example of a faulty AlphaRead question from an internal Alpha School document. \u201cWhen a student requires help with additional questions, the chatbot fails to identify which specific question is being addressed,\u201d an internal Alpha School document outlining issues with AlphaRead says. \u201cAccuracy of the content provided by the [AI] tutor is a concern. There are instances where it not only delivers incorrect answers but also provides convincing yet flawed justifications. Despite raising multiple queries about a particular answer, the chatbot erroneously confirmed an incorrect option as correct.\u201dWhile employees often test Alpha School software as they work to improve it, low quality\u00a0 questions end up in front of students because the process for creating them is largely automated, according to internal company documents and former employees. Employees scrape the internet for existing learning materials, feed those into whatever LLM they think is best at any given moment, and write prompts to generate questions according to their needs, according to internal documents and former employees.Assessing which materials are worth scraping for training data, what third party apps might be suitable for students, and checking students\u2019 work all heavily rely on LLMs at Alpha School.\u00a0\u201cYou are an experienced educational content evaluator tasked with grading a \u2018worked example\u2019 educational video,\u201d reads one AI prompt written by an Alpha School employee for evaluating the quality of educational videos. \u201cYour goal is to provide a comprehensive and balanced evaluation across several categories, focusing on how well the video serves as a learning resource for students and how effectively it achieves its overall goal.\u201d\u201cYou are an AI assistant tasked with creating a 20-question multiple-choice test based on the provided JSON document,\u201d reads another prompt from an employee working on materials for a science class.\u00a0Despite thoroughly documenting the AI-generated errors in its lesson plans, Alpha School relies on AI to test the quality of its AI-generated lessons, creating a situation where a faulty AI is tasked with fixing its own faulty generations.\u00a0A note in the company Workflowy showed that generative AI had at least a 10 percent hallucination rate that made it unsuitable to generate explanations of articles for students.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cStudents complained about question quality a lot since the transition to AlphaRead,\u201d one employee wrote in the company Workflowy. \u201cI conducted manual QC [quality control] on random articles for a week to locate questions with issues and provide feedback to the developers.\u201d The employee wrote that he found \u201cQuestions about sections not in the article; Questions with multiple plausible correct answers; Multipart questions presented in the wrong order; Questions about a specific part of an article that contradict further sections.\u201dScraping Without Permission\u00a0In October, Wired reported that IXL, an online learning platform that was used by Alpha School students, deactivated Alpha School\u2019s account and said Alpha School is \u201cno longer an IXL customer due to violating our terms of service.\u201d Former Alpha School employees told me they don\u2019t know why Alpha School\u2019s IXL account was deactivated, but that Alpha School regularly uses other online learning platforms\u2019 materials in a way that violates their terms of service, either by copying their materials or by scraping them wholesale as training data for its own AI products.According to the company\u2019s Workflowy, several employees were working on something called the IXL Replacement Project, which involved evaluating other online learning platforms as suitable IXL replacements for Alpha School\u2019s purposes. It\u2019s not clear if the plan to replace IXL at that point had anything to do with IXL eventually terminating Alpha School\u2019s account.Alpha School focused on the famous free online learning platform Khan Academy as a potential target, and multiple Alpha School employees heavily relied on AI tools to evaluate Khan Academy\u2019s materials and how well they matched what the company was getting from IXL.\u00a0\u201cFirst, I created a spreadsheet containing the Khan Academy 4th-grade curriculum, which encompasses the specific Khan 4th-grade activities (i.e., exercises, videos, and articles) along with their associated lesson, unit, and CCSS [Common Core State Standards],\u201d wrote one Alpha School employee, explaining their process. \u201cThen, I built a custom GPT tailored for IXL vs Khan mapping. I fed it with the spreadsheet above, and provided specific step-by-step instructions on how to do the mapping. I even enabled it to directly access Khan Academy’s website.\u201dWe don\u2019t know how exactly Alpha School eventually replaced IXL. But at the moment Alpha School uses Khan Academy, branded as Nice Academy. Nice Academy has the exact same content as Khan Academy, the same user interface, and even embeds Khan Academy videos, but the site students use to access this content uses the Nice Academy logo and does not mention Khan.\u00a0\u201cOur Terms of Service state that users may not scrape our site for content or data, use our content or data to train machine learning models or AI, reproduce or replicate our service, or use our materials for commercial purposes,\u201d a Khan Academy spokesperson told me.\u00a0IXL did not respond to a request for comment.The Alpha School Workflowy also makes several references to scrapped plans to use content from Albert.io, a company that makes interactive learning content for grades 5-12. One note references a meeting with Ablert.io that \u201cwas cancelled citing \u2018past violations of Terms of Use [\u2026] Albert.io id [sic] no longer doing business with Trilogy.\u201d A former Alpha School employee told me that the company used Albert.io\u2019s materials without permission.\u00a0Albert.io did not respond to a request for comment.The Alpha School Workflowy also includes a section titled \u201cTextbook Scrape Ranking\u201d which lists different existing online resources and courses, why they are ranked highly as a good target for scraping, and their \u201cstrengths\u201d and \u201cred flags.\u201d There\u2019s also a \u201cWhat we should scrape\u201d section outlining which content specifically Alpha School should scrape for its training data.\u00a0For example, Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA), a Core Knowledge Foundation (CKF) curriculum published in partnership with Amplify, is ranked in the first place \u201cdue to its strong alignment with the science of reading, extensive scrapable content, and ease of digital conversion.\u201d The document says Alpha School should scrape it for \u201cphonics and decoding exercises,\u201d \u201ccomprehension questions,\u201d and more.CKF told me that it has no formal relationship with Alpha School, that it was not aware Alpha School was using its materials, and that while some of its materials are available under the Creative Commons non commercial license, Amplify is the exclusive commercial licensee of CKLA materials.\u00a0\u201cUse of CKF and Amplify materials to create derivative works or to train artificial intelligence or machine-learning models is prohibited under Amplify\u2019s terms of use and CKLA usage guidelines,\u201d a CKF spokesperson told me.McGraw-Hill Wonders, a popular K-5 English language arts curriculum, is ranked number 2 on the list \u201cdue to its comprehensive scope and sequence, extensive lesson and assessment options, and adaptability to digital formats.\u201d The document says Alpha School should scrape its lesson plans for phonics and phonemic awareness lessons, vocabulary instruction lessons, reading passages and comprehension strategies, end of unit assessments, and diagnostic tests.McGraw-Hill did not respond to a request for comment.\u00a0According to employees and internal company communication, Alpha School directed employees to purchase learning materials from other companies with their own money and then expense the cost.\u00a0\u201cyou are expected to get some of the required data on your own (basic scraping, OCR [optical character recognition]), said one company employee who was listed in the Workflowy as a subject matter expert on scraping. \u201c@all DON’T get us blocked – only scrape without logging in or from a non-Alpha or ESW account.\u201dBossware for KidsAlpha School\u2019s company Workflowy lists \u201cideas for enhanced tracking & monitoring of kids beyond screentime data.\u201d The goal, according to the note written in Workflowy, was to monitor the way kids are using apps and then use AI to analyze that activity, flag inappropriate behavior like bullying or drug use, and produce a general report about what kids are doing. \u201cPotentially can detect things like changes in friend group or sentiment to flag potential emotional issues to parents,\u201d one bullet point said.\u00a0Alpha School identified Bark, an app that allows parents to surveil their children\u2019s online activity, as potentially offering some of these features, but also said it was \u201cpretty limited\u201d in what data it could get on what kids were doing on apps like Instagram. Alpha School then lists what it calls \u201chacky\u201d ideas beyond \u201cnormal APIs\u201d to get more data on what kids are doing. This includes \u201cfake social media accout [sic] bots to follow the kids and collect what they like, post, comment, etc,\u201d and \u201cuse the kid\u2019s logins and scraping the data (would give not just public info like from following but also stuff like the DMs).\u201dNothing 404 Media has seen in internal Alpha School documents or heard from former employees indicates that the company ever seriously pursued any of these ideas, but close surveillance of students is fundamental to how Alpha School operates.\u00a0\u201cThe idea of installing software that tracks and records everything our kids do and is designed to not let us turn it off is understandably uncomfortable.\u201dAlpha School makes an app called StudyReel, which monitors activity on a student\u2019s screen, their computer camera and microphone, what apps and websites they\u2019re using, and how they\u2019re moving their mouse. If StudyReel notices that a student is using an unrelated website or app, idling, or not at their computer, the app can nudge them to get back to work. If StudyReel notices that a student is struggling with a particular question, it can direct them to an AI tutor or assign other lessons that will help them.\u00a0Internally and in public messaging, Alpha School refers to these recordings of students as \u201cgame tape,\u201d which it reviews in order to help students and improve its teaching. In October, a Wired investigation revealed how this close surveillance upset some students and eventually led their parents to pull them from Alpha School.\u00a0The type of surveillance Alpha School uses on students is functionally identical to the type of surveillance used by Crossover, a platform that matches companies with remote workers. Crossover is also owned by Alpha School\u2019s principal Joe Liemandt. Much like Alpha School, Crossover requires employees to install spyware on their computer that records their screens and tracks their mouse movements to make sure they are being productive. Previous reporting described Crossover as a \u201csoftware sweatshop,\u201d and that the company\u2019s goal is to turn workers into \u201calgorithms\u201d and \u201chuman CPUs.\u201d\u201cI think it would be great if people understand that Alpha School basically has the same psychological effects as Crossover,\u201d one person with knowledge of Alpha School\u2019s software told me.\u00a0\u201cThe idea of installing software that tracks and records everything our kids do and is designed to not let us turn it off is understandably uncomfortable,\u201d an employee who was listed as the product manager of StudyReel wrote in the Workflowy. \u201cWe need to do more to justify it, be better at selling it.\u201d\u00a0To do this, the product manager suggested the company \u201cFind StudyReel recordings of students reading the coaching and enjoying it,\u201d and to \u201cGet consent from parents to use it as promotional material (too far?).\u201dInternally, Alpha School wrote that the \u201cKEY MESSAGE\u201d about StudyReel is that \u201c99% of recordings are never watched by a human\u201d and that \u201cYour data is safe.\u201d However, I saw that Alpha School maintains a spreadsheet which contains a list of student names, their grade, and an archive of their recordings which shows what\u2019s happening on their screen, their remote tutor, and a video of the student taken via their webcam. This spreadsheet is not only available to anyone at the company, but is also shared in such a way that anyone on the internet who has the link can access the spreadsheet and the videos of students.\u201cIf I wanted to, I could go there and just watch students. Anybody who worked in this capacity could watch the videos of students working on their laptops,\u201d one Alpha School employee told me. \u201cSo many hours of just students\u2019 faces […] I’m not sure parents understand exactly what’s going on with that data […] I don’t think that this is clearly communicated, because I’m sure there’d be a lot more opt outs if it was.\u201dAlpha School acknowledged my request for comment but did not provide one in time for publication.\u00a0The former Alpha School employees I talked to all agreed that the company\u2019s goal of condensing core education requirements to two hours of learning in order to give students more time for other, more enriching activities is a good, admirable goal. They also agreed that Alpha School students\u2019 test scores are very high compared to the national average, though they credit the human \u201cguides\u201d at Alpha School for that accomplishment.\u00a0Alpha School\u2019s cofounder MacKenzie Price also admits in the interview with the Hard Fork Podcast that it\u2019s possible the high test scores could be explained by selection bias. Alpha School is an expensive private school. Most students at Alpha School have parents who are concerned about their education and the financial means to send them there, which might be a bigger determining factor in their academic success. Multiple studies have shown that grades, SAT scores, and standardized tests are highly correlated with income.\u00a0The issue according to these former employees is that Alpha School\u2019s two hour learning program usually requires much more than two hours, and more importantly, that the AI products are not working as advertised.\u00a0\u201cBasically the claim that this is some AI magic and much more advanced than other tools is incorrect,\u201d one former employee said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"