I have been writing essays here for just over two years, and what follows is the strangest I’ve composed to date—by far. It’s a report on life in the first weeks of high school at Alpha School, based on what students are sharing on social media. Because what they describe is so profoundly weird and concerning, I am dividing this into four sections:
Reporting on Alpha School’s boot camp
Alpha School’s response
Reactions to Alpha School’s practices as described in this story
My commentary
Buckle up, grab a beverage, this is a long journey.
Before we get into things, there’s some important context I must share. First, if you’ve read or know anything about my work, you know I do not subscribe to the vision of Alpha School’s leaders regarding the role of AI in education. What’s more, because Alpha School is a very small private school network that serves families that can afford ~$50,000 in annual tuition, until the last week I’ve paid very little attention to the specifics of its model, for the simple reason that the world they inhabit looks nothing like my own, nor that of most families in the US (or worldwide). The press may be captivated by their story, but I am not. Indeed, after two decades of working in education and seeing prior incarnations of Alpha School-like efforts fail spectacularly, I’ve focused on other matters.
All this changed midweek last week when my phone blew up with people sending me messages related to Alpha School’s official Twitter account, and tweets that appeared to be written by its students. At first, both my friends and I thought it might all be part of an elaborate prank, because the style and substance of what was being shared was so bizarre, it seemed impossible that they could be genuine. Further, many of the tweets appear to be generated in whole or in part by AI, adding another layer of difficulty in separating fact from fiction.
However, after conducting an independent investigation, I believe that the accounts are legitimate, and that taken as a whole, the tweets convey aspects of student life in the first weeks of Alpha School’s high school, the period called “boot camp.” Although tweets are obviously public, and Alpha School itself is promoting them through its Twitter account, in an abundance of caution I have blurred out the student avatars and names here.1
Please note further, while I have many critiques aimed at Alpha School’s leadership and the vision of education they are promoting, the students are blameless, they are simply teenagers trying to make their way in the world. And as is so often the case in education, I am grateful for their honesty and insight, and for sharing details of their experience.
Let’s turn to that now.
You can access the list here, and as of September 7, 2026, there are 46 affiliated accounts. Although Alpha School refused to confirm or deny that @Alphaschool is the organization’s official account, the gold check next to the handle indicates that “this account is verified because it’s an official organization on X.”
Numerous students report that they are currently experiencing what Alpha School calls “boot camp,” which is not something I found described anywhere on Alpha’s official website, or anywhere else. The students share that, as part of boot camp, they are required to join Twitter and obtain at least 100 “authentic” followers by early October 2026. Most of the student accounts appear to have been created in August this year, when boot camp commenced.
The tweets below are illustrative. Note the last student stating that “building an audience is what we’ve been working on for the past seven days at Alpha high.”
Numerous students refer to a boot camp activity that, as the heading describes, involves biometric monitoring of students as they watch pre-recorded videos of their parents providing critical feedback. This is done in group settings with student peers. Below you will find multiple tweets of students describing this activity (and there are more like these).
Please note the first student describing their hands shaking “the entire rest of the afternoon” after doing this.
There are multiple posts by students suggesting they found out about boot camp as the school year commenced. At least one student indicated that they must complete boot camp activities in order to stay enrolled in Alpha School:
In contrast, one student said that their enrollment was not contingent upon completing boot camp. Instead, they described that certain privileges are denied to students until 21 separate “life skill” activities are completed. Specifically, students are (1) denied access to their phones during the school day, and (2) denied permission to go off-campus during breaks. “There really are no other consequences,” this student said.
A PR representative for Alpha School refused to answer any of my questions regarding boot camp or its consequences. I did speak with someone with extensive career experience working in the field of independent schools (what most people call private schools), and this person confirmed it would be highly unusual for Alpha School to dis-enroll students after eight weeks — in their words “typically, once [an independent private school] enrolls a student, they’re in, barring unforeseen circumstances.”
Dan Meyer has reported in more detail on Alpha School’s admission policies for its independent private schools.
One of the apparent life skills that students must cultivate in boot camp is “grit and hard work” — as noted above, this can apparently include cleaning toilets, scrubbing dirty restaurant kitchens, or mucking horse stalls.
Two students describe this activity as follows:
On July 14, 2026, a few weeks before Alpha School’s boot camp commenced, Alpha School co-founder MacKenzie Price tweeted this:
She received several responses, all seemingly from adults, and all roughly within 24 hours of posting. However, last week on the night of September 3, I discovered a single tweet from a student at Alpha School that appeared to have been posted within the previous day:
That same night, I responded to this message to ask this student to elaborate on their concerns, but the next morning, the tweet had been deleted.
Numerous students report that, as part of boot camp, they are required to complete one unit of an Advanced Placement course and receive a score of 5 on the end-of-unit exam (my spot checking suggests a full AP course usually contains ~10 units). Students must accomplish this within five days, and they must do so entirely through their own self-directed learning using AI and information on the Internet, what in the education field is called “discovery learning.”
These tweets are illustrative:
The emphasis on “learning to learn” as a “core life skill” in boot camp is particularly striking given that Alpha School has engaged Dr. Carl Hendrick as consultant to its activities (described briefly here). Hendrick is longtime vocal critic of discovery learning — as one example, in 2020 he co-authored How Learning Happens, a book that includes chapters titled, “Why independent learning is not a good way to become an independent learner,” and “Why discovery learning is a bad way to discover things.”
In a more recent interview, Hendrick said this about Alpha School’s future AI plans, with my emphasis:
Schooling fulfills the function of accountability. In the future, this will mean cameras on, and an AI monitoring student behavior, their latency, what websites they are looking at, their ability to focus and then producing a report for a human tutor. If you can get kids to concentrate on the apps, on the sequencing, phenomenal learning is going to happen.
But people won’t like this. You’ll see articles about “Orwellian spyware.” As a parent, I’d prefer this model to simply unleashing kids on the internet, crossing my fingers, and hoping for the best. AI will supervise better than humans. There are very skilled teachers who can supervise a class well, with eyes on the back of their head. But even then, there are kids who drift through the lesson, ‘cosplaying’ attention, and learning nothing.
I contacted Hendrick and requested public comment from him regarding Alpha School’s widespread use of discovery learning, as well as its use of biometric monitoring. He declined to comment. He did state on Twitter that, “adult educators with huge social media followings publicly shaming kids to criticise a school they don’t like is a new low...But if you’re the good guys saving the world from the ‘big-tech bro’ bad guys then anything is permitted.”
Here are some quotes from students attending Alpha School about their experience in comparison to other schools and students:
Your child isn’t learning anything at school, because their lessons are paced for the slowest kid in the room.
While kids at normal schools take a bus to a museum, we’re getting split into 10 tribes to build tarp shelters with no tents.
My school may give 50k to a group of students that win our take on survivor. At
@Alphaschool we value learning what “normal school” won’t teach you.
I learned how to belay another person that was really cool. Over all thankful towards the @Alphaschool team for putting this together for us, and giving us the opportunity that we wouldn’t get in normal school.
Most students sit in class for 7 hours and forget half of it by Friday. At Alpha School we finish our core academics in about 2 hours on a learning platform and spend the rest of the day on real skills like building audiences, giving feedback, and working in teams.
I use AI in @Alphaschool every day and it is proven to 2x our learning speed compared to normal students. Why do protesters, adults, and the mayor of NYC all oppose something that will revolutionize education across the World?
My team of high schoolers just scored higher than most Harvard MBAs at their own leadership simulation.
Today at @Alphaschool, my team proved that we are smarter than 85% of Harvard students by climbing Mount Everest with 4 other students.
I just got 98th Percentile Nationally on my SAT...As A Freshman. It's been proven that most parents lock their kids in rooms to improve their SAT scores; that doesn't work.
@Alphaschool’s incoming freshman score better than the average senior. Today I took my first ever practice SAT today and I’m already in the high performers.
Here at @Alphaschool we are learning two times as fast as other teens. We need to hit mastery, which is 90% or over.
Imagine going to a school without teachers, homework, and grades. That's my reality everyday.
I just self taught myself AP World history without any teachers.
Many Alpha School boot camp activities feel akin to what graduate students might experience pursuing an MBA.
Among other things, Alpha School students participate in a three-day “real world Survivor” wilderness activity. The curriculum includes Radical Candor, Atomic Habits, Legacy, Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, Grit, Courage to be Disliked, The Culture Code, and the essay 1,000 True Fans. Students also participate in the Harvard Everest simulation, an activity sold by Harvard Business School. Many of the students describe starting their own companies, such as a basketball shoe manufacturer or a “car-flipping” business, or doing something in tech, such as creating a “prompt optimizer.”
In reviewing more than 40 students’ accounts and hundreds (perhaps thousands) of tweets, I did not see a single reference to a work of fiction.
Although my essays typically are more op-ed than straight news reporting, in this case I felt it prudent to offer Alpha School the opportunity to respond to, and if necessary clarify, whether the activities described by its students are accurate representations of its boot camp. Alpha School’s website does not list a direct press contact, but I was able to reach Daphne Ortiz with Statement PR, which represents Alpha School.
In my initial email, I asked for information on whether Alpha School was requiring students to use Twitter, the structure of boot camp and consequences for failing, and the biometric monitoring of students’ responses to parental feedback in group settings. I included some of the screenshots listed above. Ortiz responded with the following statement, reprinted here in full:
The substance of the characterizations you describe are false, and we decline to lend them credibility with a point-by-point response. We would caution against publishing manufactured claims as fact.
Your email screenshots seem to seek to publicize and potentially criticize the social media activity of minor children. We ask that you weigh the ethics of identifying minors in this way in your reporting, and we expect any published piece to protect their identities.
I replied as follows:
Thanks for the prompt response Daphne. Just to be clear, these tweets were all found via the Twitter account purporting to belong to Alpha School, and as noted, many of the tweets say that they are tweeting as part of their coursework, and further, many state they are supposed to gain 100 to 1000 followers by October 1.
So I guess my follow up question is, did Alpha School weigh the ethical issues you are suggesting I or any other journalist should follow, and nonetheless decide to promote these student accounts through its official Twitter handle?
Ortiz did not respond further.
Neither MacKenzie Price nor Joe Liemandt (another co-founder of Alpha School) responded to my requests for comment via social media.
Alpha School appears to have launched a new microsite explaining its bootcamp, which you can find here. I strongly suspect, but cannot yet confirm, this site was launched after I informed them of my forthcoming story (I requested comment on September 3.)
Based on initial review, the site confirms every activity reported on here, and then some. I will have more to say about what it reveals in the days ahead.
Larry Ferlazzo (Semi-retired veteran teacher and Education Week columnist):
Requiring students to post publicly on Twitter is inexcusable. Do teachers really want to create more opportunities for students to be bullied or receive unfair criticism than they already have on their own? It’s likely a public school teacher who assigned students to do something like this would be immediately suspended.
I believe it’s important for teachers to create the conditions in their classroom so that students can feel powerful, and feel positive and proud about themselves, their families and their communities. It’s concerning to me that a fair number of the comments purportedly coming from Alpha students show them bragging that they are BETTER than others. That attitude seems to be antithetical to what most educators want to promote.
I am floored by the irony of Alpha School promoting “discovery learning,” if that information is accurate. For many years, I have responded to critics of discovery learning by stating that I knew of no educators actually doing it, and that it was a straw man used to support the idea of direct instruction being the one true form of teaching. To see some of those critics supporting Alpha School, which appears to be the first school I’ve seen actually doing discovery learning, is ironic indeed.
John Warner (Writer and educator):
We're at an inflection point where there is a rising fever and something must break it, either we will blast through and decide school is a kind of weird entrepreneurship boot camp...or something for human beings.
Adam Boxer (Science teacher and director of education for Carousel Learning)
It appears that students are being asked to make Twitter accounts as part of their school curriculum and work. This strikes me as very odd indeed. Social media is not a safe space for children, and encouraging them to build a following increases their online vulnerability to predatory actors.
If a teacher in an English school asked their students to create social media accounts and seek a larger following, it would very likely result in an immediate safeguarding referral directly to the principal/headteacher of the school, followed by escalations to the LADO (Local Authority Designated Officer), and potentially the Teacher Regulation Agency. It is unlikely that any teacher or educator who supported a practice like this would be employable at a school in England.
Dylan Kane (Veteran teacher and writer)
The real talent of folks at Alpha School is marketing. More specifically, they are good at marketing to a type of highly-online, Silicon-Valley-adjacent, anti-traditional-education world where they've made their niche. Their marketing is full of high-level claims about what is possible in education and very few details about exactly why what they do works. They're impressively apathetic about the details of their academic program.
I'm a teacher, and I will tell you that most days teaching feels really hard. I would love to get better at it, or to find a better way to structure schools. But Alpha School seems totally uninterested in helping the broader education system. Their disdain for people like me is obvious. Their priority is saying stuff that sounds clever on the internet.
Audrey Watters (Educator and writer)
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” — Bob Dylan
AlphaSchool’s promises have always been mostly snake-oil: this idea that artificial intelligence can deliver high-speed, high-quality education is mostly the stuff of science fiction, not reality.
But now, for AlphaSchool to embrace social media and “AI” as the winds shift, as courts weigh whether the companies that build these products are liable for actively harming children, seems not just out-of-touch with public sentiment but actively dangerous and damaging to the students in its charge. Indeed, encouraging AlphaSchool students to use Twitter isn’t simply asking them to give up their privacy or to offer themselves to software systems for algorithmic evaluation and manipulation. Elon Musk has openly touted his sites as crucial for right-wing indoctrination; and more damningly, Grok and X have been accused of creating and spreading CSAM [child sex abuse material].
What we witness with AlphaSchool isn’t a matter of simply ignoring the weatherman, fingers-crossed hoping that the sun will continue to shine on the chosen few and that the winds will shift again in industry’s favor. Rather, it’s pretty clear that there’s an absence of any moral compass at all.
Lila Byock (Parent and founder of Schools Beyond Screens)
At a moment when major public school districts like NY and LA are leading by example to protect students from predatory tech companies, it’s disheartening to see for-profit Alpha School clinging to such an outdated vision of “future readiness.” Education should empower children to achieve their full human potential, not count followers on a dying social media platform. Kids’ dreams are too big to fit into 280 characters.
Jane Rosenzweig (Writer and educator)
I reviewed some of the supposed “student” posts, and as a writing instructor, I found one particularly sad: The “student” wrote about using a“web optimizer” to generate a prompt to ask ChatGPT for essay ideas for his friend. This yielded “five solid thesis options” and a finished essay “before lunch.” It’s hard to see where the learning is in this approach, and the message the “students” seem to be getting is that writing is something to be produced as quickly as possible, rather than a way to figure out what you think about something.
Anne Lutz Fernandez (Writer and educator)
Most of what I have to say about this is unpublishable. If the teenagers at this school are being subject to much of what has been posted on Twitter via the Alpha Schools account, someone there needs to be reminded that teenagers are children. They are not soldiers in an army, they are not adults at a business school, they are not workers in a pressure cooker environment.
I spent 10 years on Wall Street in mergers and acquisitions, and my 20- and 30-something colleagues and I were not treated as these students appear to be. Especially dark is the biometric monitoring, which sounds like something a CIA trainee would be subjected to. Students in “normal” schools face serious pressure to achieve and are increasingly over-surveilled. This takes those elements to a new and unheard of level – and especially if the leaders of Alpha School aim to influence how schooling is done across the United States, I’m profoundly disturbed.
Shriram Krishnamurthi (Professor of Computer Science)
If this situation accurately represents what is happening at the school, I feel most for the students who have been forced into an unforgivingly brutal public sphere. It's one that has undoubtedly been useful as a source of knowledge but is also a shiv that periodically sticks in you. Doing that for what is clearly its real purpose — to raise the school's visibility — feels like a violation of sacred educator norms.
Stephen Fitzpatrick (Veteran teacher and writer)
My interest in Alpha is mostly as a counter-point to our current system of education — they are exploiting a system that runs on tests as metrics of success. There are absolutely kids who can get a 5 on an APUSH [single unit] exam in five days — does that mean they’ve gotten the same experience as a kid who had his eyes opened to the history of this country in a class on American history over nine months but didn’t get a 5? Of course not! But the state rewards the 5’s.
If Alpha wants to push its test scores as their main measure of success, how they arrive at, achieve, and report those definitely need to withstand scrutiny.
Andy Liddell (Attorney with Ed Tech Law Center)
If the reporting accurately describes students’ experiences at Alpha School, I am profoundly concerned for their wellbeing.
In my work with the EdTech Law Center, I represent children who are harmed by the technology they are made to use at school. If you can imagine the worst things that can happen to a kid on the internet, they’re happening every day to kids on the internet at school.
But rarely are schools actively putting kids in harm’s way as enthusiastically as Alpha School reportedly does: not only are students being flung into commercialized online spaces that are havens for scammers and predators and powered by hostile algorithms, they are being surveilled, quantified, and publicly humiliated by their own school leaders in ways that seriously risk their mental health.
Alpha School is not the future of public education. I question whether its unproven model even has a place in present-day private education.
Callie Lowenstein (Educator and founder of Acuarela Biliteracy Works)
The practices described here are an almost perfect distillation of dehumanizing pedagogies, a reminder of why the Humanities have their name...and why they are so important. I just want to sneak a little Mary Oliver poem into the pocket of every teen in this program, a little Audre Lorde here, a little James Baldwin there. I wish for them:
To learn something by being nothing
A little while…
I don’t even know where to begin.
When I shared screenshots with my friends in education about Alpha School biometrically monitoring their students, their first reaction was typically “WHAT?” or “WTF,” soon followed by “this can’t be real” or “this is The Onion, right?” In fact, one friend of mine, a close observer of Alpha School, finds the whole situation profoundly funny, and with good reason. If I were to pitch HBO on a new series with the logline “Silicon Valley meets My So-Called Life,” the scenes would be taken straight from Alpha School’s boot camp. Everything about this feels like sublime parody. (This might be true about life in general nowadays.)
But what I cannot fully convey is how profoundly surreal it was to spend several days immersed in online conversations about boot camp, and for the first time contemplating what is actually happening at Alpha School right now. Because it seems to me that one of only two possibilities must be true:
(1) The accounts and tweets are not authentic. It’s possible that Alpha School has created de facto “Potemkin students,” meaning that, while the accounts may be affiliated with actual students, the tweets are largely being directed or steered by Alpha School employees. A PR campaign using student avatars, essentially. That would at least explain why so many of the messages feel so radically inauthentic to everything I know about teenagers (and here I must reiterate that I’ve spent two decades working in education, so I’ve met my fair share). When I see a purported 14 year old stating, “your child isn’t learning anything at school, because their lessons are paced for the slowest kid in the room,” I am beyond flummoxed, because kids don’t usually talk like this — who is the parent audience they are imagining? Why do they care? Why are they spending their time doing this?
So while it would be abhorrent to confirm that Alpha School officials are using student accounts for propaganda purposes, I’d find it relieving, too. Adults behaving badly in education? Not my first rodeo. However, I don’t think that’s what’s happening.
(2) The alternative is that these accounts are authentic, and the tweets accurately reflect the activities of Alpha School’s boot camp, and student dispositions more broadly. As noted in the introduction, many of the tweets are obviously AI generated (some even are labeled as such by Grok), but you still have to prompt a chatbot to generate its output (for now anyway). Plus, the student who messaged MacKenzie Price to raise her concerns — can’t explain that one as a bot. So as I’ve said, after investigating independently, I personally believe the accounts are legitimate, and real students are posting to them. But if that’s the case…
…we have to take semi-seriously the question of whether Alpha School is a cult? A set of indoctrination camps for the airport-book class? What the hell is happening here?
This is A Clockwork Orange meets B.F. Skinner nightmare fuel, what with Alpha School student heart rates being biometrically evaluated and these students expressing triumphant superiority over the out-group “normal school” children and these students engaging in ritualistic and some might say degrading bonding activities and these students repeatedly praising the virtues of their one special school, over and over and over. “At my school we do this, at Alpha we do that, my school Alpha School my school Alpha School my school Alpha School,” the chant of the Hare Krishna as voiced by Veruca Salt. Daddy I want to go to an Alpha School nowwwwww.
And then on top of this we have Alpha School cloaking itself under the banner of “the science of learning,” a term I helped popularize, while promoting radically extreme behaviorist practices such as heart-rate monitoring (!) and pure unadulterated discovery learning by combing the Internet (!!!) and an affiliated “learning scientist” is promising us that in the future AI will be used to monitor student behavior, including “latency” of physical reactions (!!!!!!!) and oh by the way the co-founder is apparently aiming to reach one billion students…well, I’m rarely at a loss for words, but what can be said?
This is madness. Actually, my 10-year-old daughter said it best after hearing these boot-camp activities described to her: That’s not okay.
No it’s not. None of this is okay.
In the course of writing this essay, a few people expressed nervousness about my reporting on students using social media. I get it, and I agree students should not be forced to do this (and please see the footnote), but it’s precisely because these are real kids living in the real world that I’ve written this story.2 The most agonizing post I read is the one shared in #6 above, the student who messaged MacKenzie Price to express their concern that the activities being undertaken in boot camp were “faulty” and involved skills or morals — please linger on that word choice — that clash with other, deeper values. Price is fond of hand-waving away Alpha School critics that she sneeringly labels “haters,” but this was one of her own students speaking up, clearly not a hater, just a teenager grappling with a very confusing boot-camp experience and sensing, rightfully, that something profoundly fucked up was happening.
In reviewing drafts of this story, a few folks also suggested that it wouldn’t be “the worst thing in the world” for teenagers from privileged families to have to scrub toilets or clean horse shit. Here’s the thing, though: (1) Numerous students expressed complete surprise by this activity — and indeed, boot camp itself — and as far as I can tell, nowhere does Alpha School publicly advertise such activities are part of its program. I find that telling. (2) There is extensive academic research on how selective groups — such as cults, gangs, fraternities, and emerging religious sects — make use of “shame and stigma” rituals that include deliberately demeaning initiations so as to enhance commitment to the in-group and its norms. In my view, these boot camp activities are intended as bonding rituals. As such I would be quite surprised to discover that Alpha School continues to make students clean toilets or horse stalls beyond boot camp, but if its leadership wants to confirm on the record that they do, I’m all ears. Though then we might have to have a different conversation about child-labor laws.
Will any of this derail the Alpha School Hype Train? Well dear readers, this is where you come in. I was grateful to see my recent The 50 Percent Problem essay “do numbers” as it became the second-most popular post I’ve published — my thanks to all of you who read it, commented, and most importantly shared it. Now, I’m asking you to do the same with this one. Let the word go out:
What’s happening at Alpha School should shock the conscience, and going forward, everyone who covers them should ask hard questions about the student experience at Alpha School as described here. Journalists: Please investigate, interview, dig into the numbers, review the failed charter applications (and there are many), do whatever is necessary to bring to light what’s really going on.3 And for everyone else, myself included, it’s time to train our critical gaze upon the world that Alpha School is “optimizing” for, the culture it aims to foster, and the values it hopes to inculcate in children. Education is not thinkmaxxing.4
In a world where attention is precious, I vowed to give as little of mine as possible to this grotesque little enterprise of the elite. But I’ve 2xed my own learning about what they are doing.
Alpha School, you have my attention now.
This report features the experiences of Alpha School students, but I’m interested in talking to Alpha School parents, both past, present, and potential future. While I obviously have strong views about Alpha School’s vision for what education entails, I respect that not everyone shares my values. I am interested in having respectful conversations with you, whether on or off the record.
To Alpha School’s leadership, well, you know how I feel, but I also deeply believe in the democratic spirit, what David Foster Wallace eloquently described as “passionate conviction plus sedulous respect for the convictions of others.” So if anyone there wants to have a respectful conversation with me about your vision and your practices, please get in touch.
Email me at info at cognitiveresonance dot net with “Alpha School” in the subject line.
My thanks to the many people I consulted with in reporting this story — as always, all errors and mistakes are mine alone.