The pitch seems to have worked. This school year, a dozen families are sending their children to the sixth and seventh floors of the high-rise building at 180 Maiden Lane. According to Alpha Novel York’s current website, the “school day” runs from 8:15 a.m. to 4 p.m., and the quoted “tuition” is $65,000 per year. (Founding families received a discount.) As price he told the Free Press in May “Alfa is a product as a school intended for a specific demographic group” and “it is an expensive private premium school.”
Except the Maiden Lane campus isn’t actually a school. Slow last summer, months before multiple information sessions, the Novel York State Department of Education declined to approve Alpha’s application to become an independent school, according to a previously unpublished copy of the decision obtained by WIRED. “The proposed instruction is primarily online, with an artificial intelligence-based platform called 2 Hour Learning™ that provides instruction in core academic subjects with little or no supervision or under the supervision of a competent teacher providing such instruction,” the department’s office of general counsel wrote. “Generally, [the NYSED] does not recognize the proposed online schools.”
About a week later, in a post on X, Alpha invited parents to an information session about the Maiden Lane location, which the post called the “Alpha Anywhere Center.” Alpha Anywhere is the company’s line of homeschooling products, advertised at prices starting at about $10,000 a year. Although the company’s marketing materials did not specifically mention it, parents who enrolled their children at the Maiden Lane campus would be required to submit formal home enrollment documentation.
ILLUSTRATION: ELENA LACEY/GETTY IMAGES
After WIRED began contacting Alpha employees about this story in April, the company reapplied to establish the school. According to NYSED, this request is under review. Under state law, even if Alpha receives agency approval to establish a school, it would still have to demonstrate to New York public school officials that it provides core education that is at least “substantially equivalent” to that in the city’s public schools. It will have to do so at a time when a Novel York school principal has described artificial intelligence as… “invasive technology” and parents and teachers have called for further restrictions on students’ ability to operate artificial intelligence in the classroom.
As WIRED previously reported, Alpha employs “guides” to supervise classes. These adults do not teach academics themselves; they are designed to motivate students to complete lessons in personalized learning software. (“We call them guides, trainers, teachers,” Price he said. “We kind of operate these words interchangeably.”) The company combines an app-based approach to the instructor role with a competitive compensation system. Students on some campuses can earn hundreds of dollars over time for doing well on tests or taking enough classes in a day. As sources previously told WIRED, on the Brownsville, Texas campus, children who did not meet their academic goals found that they were banned from sitting in certain rooms and were barred from other benefits such as attending field trips, buying toys or eating lunches off campus. The company says its model allows students to learn twice as much in just two hours of academic instruction than their peers in traditional schools learn in one day. This allows students’ afternoons to be devoted to workshops focusing on life skills such as grit, entrepreneurship and leadership.
WIRED spoke with multiple sources for this story who were involved in building, setting up and working at new Alpha campuses across the country. People familiar with the New York campus told WIRED they had concerns about how directly the company communicated with potential parents about the fact that their children would not actually attend the school. “A lot of these parents are just drinking the Kool-Aid,” one person said. “Their child comes home with a new Nintendo Switch, an AI robot and an iPad, so their child is happy, so they are happy to see that.”
After WIRED contacted parents who had enrolled their children at Alpha, the group responded with a joint statement saying it was aware that the New York campus was not a school but rather a “homeschool support center.” They added that they are “grateful for the positive impact the Alpha Anywhere Center has had on our children and wholeheartedly recommend it to families seeking an pioneering, caring and inspiring learning community as part of their children’s home education program.” The joint statement had 13 signatories and 22 who “wanted to express their support for this letter while maintaining the privacy of their child’s educational experience.” Other families contacted by WIRED for comment did not respond.