An AI-powered, billionaire-backed chain of private schools promises to educate students with two hours of virtual learning a day and entrepreneurship workshops.
There are no teachers, and tuition is nearly double the most expensive private school in the state.
This is Alpha School and, come August, it’s touching down in Oklahoma.
Here’s how it works, according to Alpha: Students start each morning on a laptop, with two hours on Alpha’s adaptive, AI learning platform. Half an hour is allotted to each core subject: math, reading, science and social studies. Then, in the afternoon, students learn through projects and workshops that build life skills.
Alpha’s rejection of tradition is its draw; for one soon-to-be Alpha parent, whose son will start eighth grade at the Tulsa location, the workshops and highly personalized learning convinced her family to commit.
Alpha opened its first school in Austin, Texas, in 2014 and has since expanded to six states and 12 spinoff schools. Alpha is opening 28 new campuses this fall, including in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, more than tripling its footprint across the country.
Before ChatGPT, Alpha students learned directly from online platforms such as IXL, Khan Academy and YouTube. Now, Alpha uses a proprietary artificial intelligence program it developed called 2 Hour Learning, which personalizes curriculum and claims to teach students twice as fast as traditional school models.
Alpha has been the subject of enthusiastic coverage from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider and others. Few outlets have flagged concerns with the technology or the company.
News outlets 404 Media and Wired published stories in the past year that accused Alpha of scraping online learning platforms to develop 2 Hour Learning, though an Alpha spokeswoman disputed that claim and said the company respects the intellectual property of the companies it works with.
A line of broken contracts and licenses with the companies follows Alpha, 404 Media reported, as do concerns about the AI program’s efficiency and privacy: 404’s investigation found examples of AI hallucination and seemingly unsolvable quiz questions in the curriculum.
There are privacy concerns, too. Alpha’s AI programming employs screen monitoring and takes photos of students when the program notices a lack of progress or unusual screen patterns. The system once captured a video of a student working on schoolwork in her pajamas in bed, the Wired investigation revealed.
Anna Davlantes, chief communications officer for Alpha, said the 404 Media and Wired stories relied on cherry-picked examples and sources who’d been fired from Alpha. Alpha may pursue legal action against the news outlets, she said.
But Alpha’s fans are loud. Alpha earned the backing of top Trump administration officials, sent an 11-year-old student to the State of the Union address on the arm of Melania Trump, and hosted and wooed Gov. Kevin Stitt at an Austin Alpha school site in December.
Alpha plans to open a kindergarten-through-10th-grade school in Edmond, branded the Oklahoma City campus, and a kindergarten-through-8th-grade school in Tulsa. As of July 20, 26 students were enrolled at the Edmond site and 32 at the Tulsa school, according to Alpha’s website.
The schools are arriving as debates over the Parental Choice Tax Credit program, AI in schools and Oklahoma’s dismal education ranking play out loudly across the state. For excited families and skeptics alike, the opening of the schools will be a test of how Oklahoma responds to a new frontier of unconventional, ultra-expensive schools.
A School with No Teachers
Guides are the closest stand-in Alpha has for teachers. There’s one key difference, though: guides don’t touch any curriculum.
Guides monitor students’ progress and productivity with the AI tutor, but aren’t in the room when students are learning, according to job postings. In the afternoons, guides run one-hour skill workshops for students as young as 5. Past workshops have focused on sailing, programming toy cars and completing Navy SEAL challenges.
At one Alpha workshop in San Francisco, the school sent middle school students to a Starbucks with preloaded cards, Wendy Vassiliou, whose son will start at the Tulsa location come August, said. Unbeknownst to the students, their guide had zeroed the account balance for at least one student, meaning their card was rejected at the checkout. The lesson aimed to teach students how to handle disappointment.
Guides earn $100,000 to $150,000 per year, according to Alpha’s Oklahoma job postings, two to three times the salary of a first-year public school teacher.
Alpha doesn’t require guides to have teacher certification, and intentionally recruits people with unconventional education backgrounds. The San Francisco guide had a career as a sports psychologist.
Guides can hold a bachelor’s degree in any subject. Alpha says it vets candidates with a cognitive test, an intensive background check and a months-long training camp in Austin. From there, guides are sent across the country to Alpha sites.
Rep. Cyndi Munson, D-Oklahoma City, took issue with Alpha’s no-teacher model.
“These types of schools and models that are being implemented are taking away the seriousness of what it takes to be a classroom teacher,” she said. “It is very disturbing and should worry all of us.”
Alpha students won’t get the vital educational and emotional support students receive from certified teachers, said Erika Wright, founder and leader of the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition Facebook group and a community organizer with the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice.
“This is a travesty for those kids,” Wright said.
Tuition is Steep
The school is endorsed by hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and funded in part by software investor and Alpha principal Joe Liemandt, who recently committed $1 billion to schools including Alpha.
Families still pay a premium.
Alpha’s tuition in Oklahoma will be $40,000 per year, toppling the prices of the next-closest private schools in both areas: Edmond’s Oklahoma Christian School is $14,640 per year and Tulsa’s Holland Hall charges $21,625 annually. Bordering Edmond closely, Oklahoma City’s most expensive, Casady School, is $27,950 for high school students. In some states, Alpha families pay $75,000 per year.
Any family that joins Alpha for the 2026-2027 inaugural academic year receives a $10,000 discount for five years, bringing tuition down to $30,000, Davlantes said. Beyond that, there’s no school-sponsored financial aid, at least for the first year of the new campuses.
Vassiliou said she knows that $30,000 or $40,000 is a significant amount to most Americans. She respects public schools, she said; her dad was a school superintendent, and she worked at Jenks schools. She said Alpha is worth it anyway. If her son, Cullen, had continued at the private school he’s attended for 10 years, eighth-grade tuition would’ve cost $16,000.
Vassiliou doesn’t consider herself especially experimentalist and said committing to Alpha, sight unseen, is out of character for her. Alpha’s extensive library of promotional materials and a series of glowing profiles in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal helped assure her.
Alpha’s Edmond campus was initially included on the Oklahoma Tax Commission’s list of schools approved for the Parental Choice Tax Credit, a voucher-like program that pays families up to $7,500 per year for private school tuition and other educational expenses. The tax credit program requires schools to be in Oklahoma and accredited, though schools have until March 2027 to meet the accreditation provision.
In response to questions from Oklahoma Watch, the tax commission removed Alpha from its approved schools.
A spokeswoman for Alpha said they didn’t apply for the tax credit program. Alpha School is accredited by Cognia, but the accreditor will need to conduct site visits and ensure compliance with its standards at the new Oklahoma locations before they are included, which could occur by next school year.
The tax credit program was pitched as a way to make private schools more accessible for families who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford tuition. But critics argue that the tax credit directs public funding to families making above-average incomes. Of the nearly $248 million allotted to families by the program in the 2025-2026 academic year, $169 million in tax credits went to families earning more than $75,000 a year, more than the state’s median household income of $65,039.
That’s especially true among Alpha’s families, for whom the tax credit may only shave off a minimal amount of the tuition. All founding Alpha families will have to pay the $30,000 tuition for the first year in full, with no financial aid or tax credit at their disposal.
“What scares me is they're going to try to take even more public school funds to do their little pet school projects,” said Jami Cole, an elementary educator and leader of the public school advocacy group Edvocates.
AI Guardrails for Public Schools, Not Private
The Legislature this year introduced guardrails for AI in public schools, but those rules won’t apply to Alpha, which is a private school.
The Oklahoma Responsible Technology in Schools Act, introduced by Sen. Ally Seifried, R-Claremore, passed unanimously through both chambers of the Legislature in May. The law requires all school districts to establish an AI policy and mandates educators maintain final decision-making authority over any AI-assisted instruction, grading or placement.
At Alpha, both tenets are broken.
Seifried said she’s fascinated by Alpha and will be monitoring how it fares. Seifried is a strong proponent of the Parental Choice Tax Credit, and celebrated that Alpha parents may qualify for it in years to come.
Still, she warned that AI must be coupled with caution.
“AI and technology are moving at such a quick pace that we just want to make sure that we're not hamstringing our teachers or our districts, but also making sure that students are safe,” she said.
Alpha promises an education, courtesy of its AI program, that laps the public school system, which, in Oklahoma, is ranked second-to-worst according to sites such as WalletHub. The average SAT score of Alpha seniors is a 1545, an Alpha spokesperson said. A perfect score is 1600. Alpha’s students score an average of 4.2 to 4.4 on Advanced Placement tests.
Sen. Regina Goodwin, D-Tulsa, still doesn’t get it.
“I understand we have challenges with our public education,” she said. “But the answer is not to just eliminate human involvement that is certified.”
The Governor Wanted to Bring Alpha to Oklahoma
Alpha is at the forefront of an AI-friendly governor’s office.
Stitt has been vocal in his support of AI, throwing support behind concepts like Alpha, even if not publicly addressing Alpha by name. In December 2025, Alpha’s Texas Sports Academy hosted a conference for the National Governors Association, which Stitt chairs. Stitt filmed and uploaded a video to Facebook lauding new technology and AI, including AI schools. He vowed to bring programs like the school back to the state.
Stitt’s support of Alpha’s methods is at odds with his sharp pushback against virtual schooling in the state’s public schools. In May 2025, he signed a bill into law limiting virtual instruction in any public school district to 12 hours per academic year.
“Governor Stitt is talking out of both sides of his mouth,” Wright said. “This concept is a complete slap in the face for all of the districts who have been working diligently to have quality virtual stuff that's been shut down by the Legislature.”
Rhett Jones, a 2024 graduate of Alpha’s Austin campus, said he saw Stitt in the Austin Alpha offices in February. Stitt’s staff made contact shortly after and asked him and other Alpha graduates to travel to Oklahoma, as arranged by Stitt’s team, to meet prospective Alpha Oklahoma families. Jones agreed and made the visit on February 23.
Jones credited Alpha with pushing him to launch two businesses, a mountain bike park and Cased, an e-commerce action sports apparel company.
Until Alpha mentors encouraged him to pitch investors in his junior year of high school, he thought being a business founder wasn’t in the cards for him.
“I thought high school entrepreneurs were prodigies and I was a very regular kid,” he said. “I just played video games, played sports.”
He decided to drop out of the University of Austin, an unaccredited university founded in 2021 backed by Palantir founder Peter Thiel, to go all-in on Cased. Alpha supported his less-traditional pathway.
“The school truly unlocks kids educationally in a way other schools can't,” he said.
Alpha is Recruiting Families and Staff
Alpha School’s first day is August 12. Alpha leased more than 6,000 square feet of industrial space in Edmond for the Oklahoma City school, but the building was barren and bore no Alpha signage when Oklahoma Watch visited.
Alpha hasn’t yet secured a location in Tulsa. In mid-May, the school sent a report, prepared with AI, detailing two potential Tulsa sites, to prospective parents. One user noted that the report cited incorrect data.
The campuses are still recruiting new students, too, for a $100 application fee.
Alpha warns applicants that the school isn’t equipped to meet the needs of students requiring intensive behavioral, therapeutic, or one-to-one academic support. Applicants are asked to disclose any Individualized Education Program, 504 plan, or behavior or learning plan or risk being withdrawn.
Weeks away from the first day of classes, families are eager.
Cullen, Vassiliou’s son entering eighth grade at the Tulsa campus, said he thinks Alpha will be more fun and set him up with better opportunities and education than the school he now attends.
Vassiliou has researched the drawbacks of Alpha — the data-scraping claims, accreditation inconsistencies, and legislative criticism — and is still confident in her family’s decision.
“I'm going to look and scour the internet for every bad thing I can find about Alpha,” she said she decided before her family locked in their choice. “And so I looked at everything I could find, and I still was not deterred.”
Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.
