Looking for solutions to what they claim is a fundamentally broken public education system, wealthy families are sending their offspring to institutions called Alpha Schools, a private school network that’s putting AI-based tutoring front and center for an eye-searing cost of $75,000 a year.
But the kind of education students are being exposed to is nothing short of bizarre, if the latest reporting is anything to go by, turning them into guinea pigs in a game set up by a dystopian enterprise that’s allegedly trying to revolutionize schooling with tech like AI.
The situation is even more dire than it sounded at first. Thanks to the extensive reporting of education policy writer and cognitive scientist Benjamin Riley, we know that kids are being pitted against each other based on their ability to complete rote assignments, are being monitored by individuals employed at offshore call centers through their school laptop webcams — and even told to wear heart rate monitors while their work is critiqued in class.
According to Riley’s latest update, which includes the testaments of Alpha School alumni, students recall being monitored like a “lab rat” through their computers — not by an AI but by presumably cheap labor from across the pond.
“They would make me and a few other kids take standardized math tests pretty much every day, and then any question that we got wrong, we would have to get on a Zoom call with some random guy from normally India,” one student told Riley, “and explain to him every single thing that we got wrong and why. And I hated that.”
The revelation highlights AI’s “Mechanical Turk problem,” as Elmira College director of media studies Matt Seybold pointed out in a Bluesky post, “that is, ‘artificial intelligence’ is actually the cognitive labor of humans in the Global South.”
Just this week, 404 Media reported that Meta’s claims that its AI tool, dubbed Muse, could call businesses on users’ behalf actually involved humans at call centers makign those calls instead.
The Alpha School software even tracked students’ facial expressions and continuously monitored their emotional states, which unsurprisingly had students distressed.
According to Riley’s reporting, youth are also being grouped into various “internal programs” including “Rocket Ship,” described by one former student as “basically their smart kids club” that allows students to “do whatever they wanted.”
The smart kids “had really no rules” and “could do whatever they wanted.” They didn’t even “really have to come to school during the school day,” the former student told Riley. (Another program, called Pirate Ship, was reportedly meant to group kids together who weren’t doing so well.)
“They kicked me down to sixth grade math when I was in ninth grade,” another former student told Riley. “They screwed my credits up. They’re doing it deliberately so people cannot leave. If your credits are messed up and you try to go somewhere else, you might not be able to graduate.”
“We were just kind of robots,” the student added.
Students also recalled “getting nuked,” which happened when students didn’t cross a certain threshold in testing on their computer, effectively shutting down “your entire computer” other than a proprietary learning app.
A “jokey screen of a mushroom cloud” announced that “you’ve been nuked” — even when the tracking software got it wrong, they charged.
Administrators at the school were reportedly forced to communicate with the school’s software team, which was largely “outsourced to other countries,” in a “convoluted process” that could take days.
Alpha School has yet to respond to Riley’s latest questions.
‘Nothing I could possibly say could speak more powerfully to the dystopian horrors of Alpha School than the student voices shared here,” he concluded. “So I’ll simply say this.”
“Alpha School’s public narrative has been shattered irreparably,” Riley wrote. “And I will not rest until the full magnitude of its pedagogical and psychological malpractice against children is revealed.”
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