Alpha School data: only 42% hit its 2x learning goal

Alpha School has grown quickly on a simple promise: students learn twice as much in two hours of academics a day, with AI software called TimeBack doing the personalizing. That pitch has attracted backers from Silicon Valley to the Trump administration, and the network has expanded to roughly 50 campuses. The internal data reported by The New York Times now puts the central claim under scrutiny, showing that fewer than half of students met the 2x goal in both math and reading.

The gap is wider in math. About half of K-8 students at Alpha's private campuses missed the goal of learning math twice as fast, and roughly one in five missed their reading targets, according to the Times' review. Students who started behind fared worse: about a fifth of Alpha's private school students scored at or below the 50th percentile nationally in math last fall, and only 37% of that group met the 2x growth goal by winter.

The findings arrive as Alpha pushes into public schools, where more than 2,600 students in Texas and South Carolina now use its platform. Public schools cannot remove struggling students, the Times noted, and they lack the prize incentives Alpha uses at its private campuses. Separate research suggests how students use AI matters: a study of 26,811 secondary students in central China found homework scores rose 18% after adopting generative AI tools while closed-book exam scores fell 20%.