An AI private school that replaces teachers with “guides” for student instruction is making its way to Chicago.

As AFROTECH™ previously told you, Alpha School students learn through adaptive apps and receive one-on-one, personalized instruction for two hours each day, which is tailored by software diagnostics and machine learning. The school promises that students will “progress with concept-based mastery and without any knowledge gaps,” according to its website.

“AI is going to help us unlock the greatest untapped resource in our world, which is human potential,” Alpha School Co-Founder MacKenzie Price told the Chicago Tribune.

Beyond the two-hour instruction, students participate in workshops that include building robots and participating in obstacle courses, according to the Chicago Tribune. While “guides” may not deliver curriculum like traditional teachers, they can still support students with emotional well-being.

“We’re not replacing teachers. The role is just changing. Our teachers don’t need to be subject matter experts,”  Price explained, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Alpha School Launches Chicago Location

The school launched in 2014 in Austin, Texas, and has expanded to other cities, including San Francisco, Miami, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Dallas, as AFROTECH™ previously reported. Now, a K-8 campus will launch in Chicago’s Loop, with annual tuition of $55,000, the Chicago Tribune reports.

Blake Mohseni, a Bloomingdale, IL, resident and finance professional, plans to enroll his 3-year-old daughter in school when she turns 4. He says he firmly believes that AI is the future.

“At the end of the day, the biggest asset that we can give our daughter is not a bag of money, it’s the brain between her ears,” Mohseni said, according to the Chicago Tribune. “We’re not skeptical of AI because we know that this is where the future is going.”

Not everyone is fond of Alpha School.

“I worry that you’re changing the nature of what learning and education, at its best, has always looked like,” said Joe Vukov, an associate philosophy professor at Loyola University Chicago who studies the ethics of AI, per the Chicago Tribune.

Victor Lee, an associate professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, commented:

“There’s just so much that teachers are doing that is well-beyond what even the most sophisticated language models can do,” Lee said. “Right now, the evidence just is not there.”

Price still stands behind Alpha School and its model, which has led its students to score in the 99th percentile in virtually every grade in math, reading, language usage, and science, according to a blog post published by the school.

However, Lee notes that most of these test-takers come from affluent backgrounds, which has a significant impact on student success.

“This is a private school with tuition, and therefore tends to cater to a particular socioeconomic status, whose students would tend to perform very strongly on these measures,” Lee explained, per the Chicago Tribune.

To combat steep tuition prices, Alpha School has applied for charter status in 10 states, but has been approved in only one. Achieving charter status would allow students to attend the school tuition-free. In Austin, 40% of its students are receiving financial aid, notes the Chicago Tribune.

“Some of these private schools, they want to keep themselves small and exclusive instead of saying, ‘How do we educate more and more people?’” Price told the outlet. “Private schools select for great kids. But I believe we are developing great kids.”