AI-powered private school network to open new Oklahoma campus this fall

An educational model using artificial intelligence, called “Alpha Schools,” is tripling campus locations this fall to 40 open and enrolling locations nationwide, boasting an “efficient,” nontraditional curriculum with no teachers.

The AI-powered program now operates 12 campuses, with 28 more scheduled to open soon.

The new Edmond campus, near Oklahoma City, will charge approximately $40,000 in annual tuition. The company is offering a five-year $10,000 annual tuition discount for families enrolling in new campuses during the upcoming school year. The school is endorsed by hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and partially funded by Joe Liemandt, who has donated $1 billion to schools including Alpha, according to the Oklahoma City Free Press.

Alpha says its mission is to help students love school, learn twice as much as conventional school – in just two hours a day – and develop practical life skills. Alpha has been described as an “all-AI private school with no teachers.”

In the morning, students work one-on-one with AI tutoring platforms. Instead of teachers, students work with human adult “guides,” who supervise the learning, provide mentorship and lead afternoon workshops.

“Most schools are built on an outdated model that tries to cover too much content in too little time. We believe that when you free up time by streamlining academics, you can focus on developing the character, confidence, and competence your child needs to thrive in the real world,” the company’s website states.

Alpha students are demonstrating more than twice the growth on standardized tests compared to their peers and are performing in the 99th percentile nationally, according to its website.

Alpha students also develop life skills including teamwork, leadership, and entrepreneurship. Training courses include picnic planning for preschoolers, family theater for kindergarten and first grade, public sale challenges for second and third grade, outdoor cooking for fourth and fifth grade, and finishing Spartan races for middle schoolers.

The two hours of AI-led learning are divided into 30 minutes each for math, reading, science and social studies. In the afternoon, students attend in-person campus projects and life skill workshops with their guides.

Alpha School opened its first campus in Austin, Texas, in 2014. Before adopting AI tutors in 2022, students primarily learned through platforms such as Khan Academy, IXL and YouTube, according to Oklahoma City Free Press.

Students now use a learning platform called Timeback, created by Alpha founder Joe Liemandt. The name “reflects Liemandt’s goal of compressing learning so children can get their ‘time back’ and enjoy being kids,” as reported previously by Heartlander News.

High school student Elle Liemandt said the schedule has given her time to build personal projects, including an AI-powered dating advice app called AskElle.

“It’s the best school in the world,” she said. “I have a lot of friends at traditional school, and every day after school and during school they’re doing so much homework. They’re just spending all this time on schoolwork and they’re so stressed out and they’re just miserable.”

Responding to questions about its academic performance, Alpha said it uploaded its 2025-26 standardized testing data into Gemini and Claude, asking the AI systems to compare the results with top-performing private schools nationwide. They reported their findings in Alpha’s Mid Year Report Card on their website.

“In Mathematics specifically, Alpha students are performing at a level that effectively breaks the standard calibration of the test, with high school averages projecting to near-perfect SAT scores,” the AI-generated analysis concluded.

Lawmakers and educators have expressed concerns with the curriculum, including copyright and privacy issues, the latter because of a webcam system that records students completing homework, according to the Oklahoma City Free Press.

“These types of schools and models that are being implemented are taking away the seriousness of what it takes to be a classroom teacher,” Rep. Cyndi Munson, D-Oklahoma City, said in the article. “It is very disturbing and should worry all of us.”

AI can be detrimental when used without regulation, Liemandt said on the Invest Like The Best podcast.

“If you deploy ChatGPT to every student in America, we will become the dumbest country on the planet,” he said.

However, using AI as a tool to track and boost performance will rapidly improve education, he added.

“People think it’s witchcraft, but it’s literally just science,” Liemandt said. “It’s how we can take a kid the conventional school system calls ‘two years behind’ and catch them up in 40 to 60 hours. It’s how we give kids their time back.”