As someone who actually homeschooled my three kids:
How fast you can make them learn the academic is not an important metric for children’s development, nor should be optimized via AI.
They pick up things quickly no matter what. AI tutoring has an alignment problem: it hits a very particular reward pathway that real world learning / truth seeking would not use — the instant reward and feedback loop that is effectively for passing tests but useless for long horizon tasks.
Structure and accountability throughout the day is the key. AI tutoring solves a sub problem, not the core of it.
Kids need challenging projects on top of all these iPad driven gimmicks.
Hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, and tech executives are pulling their kids from public and private schools to enroll them in AI-tutoring startups that pay staff to stop calling themselves teachers and face no state requirement to report how well any of it works.
Alpha School, now in a dozen cities and expanding to nearly two dozen more this fall, charges $75,000 a year in San Francisco for two hours of AI tutoring followed by project workshops, using software that tracks how closely a child pays attention. Forge Prep in New Jersey charges up to $36,000 and promises graduates a $200,000 payout if they start a company instead of taking a job. Billionaire Bill Ackman has publicly backed Alpha. Neither school reports outcomes to any state, and Forge's own founder admits there is no data showing things are going well.
Alpha sells home-schooling software on top of tuition. Forge's startup fund assumes graduates will found companies rather than join a labor market its own AI curriculum is designed to help automate. Alpha's spokeswoman says its families are overwhelmingly finance, venture capital, and tech workers, meaning the industry building the AI disrupting entry-level jobs is now selling itself a private curriculum to land its own kids on the ownership side of that disruption.
Alpha's in-person staff voted to reject the word teacher, and its remote coaches monitoring the AI software are scattered across the globe. Stanford's Victor Lee says dropping the title diminishes the professionalism teaching requires. Stanford's Caroline Hoxby, who studies these programs rather than sells them, says there is negligible scientific evidence behind any of it.
My take: The same investor class funding AI tools built to gut entry-level jobs is now buying its own children a private exemption from those tools' consequences, for $75,000 a year.
Public schools absorb AI disruption unfunded and unreformed while this cohort builds itself an unaccountable alternative marketed as personalization. This is what class stratification looks like once it gets rebranded as coaching, guides, and life skills.