This teacherless school says AI can teach students in 2 hours a day

Alpha Schools says its AI-based instruction and focus on developing "life skills" set students up for success. Some experts say it Zane Shah arrives at school at 8:45 a.m., greets his friends and stores his backpack in the assigned cubby. It could be any middle school morning. But one thing about Shah's school is different: There are no traditional teachers. Shah, 13, is an eighth grader at Alpha School, a network of private, for-profit institutions that opened its first Chicago campus this fall for students in pre-K through eighth grade. The adults in the building are called "guides," and artificial intelligence handles all the academic instruction. When school starts at 9 a.m., students work on math, reading, writing, language and science on laptops, using adaptive software that Alpha says lets them master core subjects in roughly two hours a day.

That mastery doesn't come cheap. Attending Alpha Chicago costs $55,000 a year, or roughly $8,000 more than the average annual cost of a private college, according to U.S. News & World Report. Alpha was founded in Austin, Texas, in 2014 by MacKenzie Price, who has become an outspoken critic of traditional schooling. Alpha says its students score in the top 1% on national standardized tests. The school also says it does not screen applicants based on previous grades or test