Parents Fell in Love With Alpha School's Promise. Then They Wanted Out

The Al-powered school was supposed to revolutionize education. But not every student thrives without teachers.

- By Todd Feathers

One day last fall, Kristine Barrios' 9-year-old daughter got stuck on a lesson in IXL, the personalized learning software that served as her math teacher. She had to multiply three three-digit numbers without using a calculator. Then she had to do it again, her mom says, more than 20 times, without making mistakes.

At Alpha School, the private microschool the girl and her younger brother attended in Brownsville, Texas, she had been working a grade level ahead of her age in math, Barrios says. She could do three-digit multiplication correctly most of the time. But whenever she made an error in IXL, the software would determine she needed more practice and assign her more questions. She told her mom that she had asked her “guide,” the adult who supervised her classroom in lieu of a teacher, to make an exception and let her move on. She said the guide’s reply was that she needed to get it done, that it was expected of her.

Over the next weekend, Barrios says, she and her husband sat with their daughter for hours each day until she finished the multiplication lesson, even as she broke down and sobbed that she'd rather die than keep going. Ultimately, Barrios says she double-checked all the answers on a calculator before the 9-year-old entered them. But when the girl returned to school with the lesson completed, her mom says, she came back reporting crushing news: In the time she had spent stuck, she had fallen even farther behind her targeted goals.