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'Students Are Being Treated Like Guinea Pigs:' Inside an AI-Powered Private School
Alpha School, an “AI-powered private school” that heavily relies on AI to teach students and can cost up to $65,000 a year, is AI-generating faulty lesson plans that internal company documentation find sometimes do “more harm than good,” and scraping data from a variety of other online courses without permission to train its own AI, according to former Alpha School employees and internal company documents.
Alpha School has earned fawning coverage from Fox News and The New York Times and received praise from Linda McMahon, the Trump-appointed Secretary of Education, for using generative AI to chart the future of education. But samples of poorly constructed AI-generated lessons that I have viewed present students with unclear wording and illogical choices in multiple choice questions.
“These questions not only fail to meet SAT standards but also fall short of the quality we promise to deliver,” one employee wrote in the company’s Workflowy, a company-wide note taking app where every employee can see what other employees are working on, including their progress and thoughts on various projects. “From a student’s perspective, when answer options don’t logically fit the question, it feels like a betrayal of their effort to learn and succeed. How can we expect students to trust our assessments when the very questions meant to test their knowledge are flawed?”
My investigation into Alpha School also reveals that the massive amounts of data the company collects on students, including videos of them, is stored in a Google Drive folder that anyone with the link—even if they’ve left the company, or if it was sent to them—could access. In turn, that sensitive material is viewed by more Alpha School employees than students and parents may realize.
Alpha School has earned fawning coverage from Fox News and The New York Times and received praise from Linda McMahon, the Trump-appointed Secretary of Education, for using generative AI to chart the future of education. But samples of poorly constructed AI-generated lessons that I have viewed present students with unclear wording and illogical choices in multiple choice questions.
“These questions not only fail to meet SAT standards but also fall short of the quality we promise to deliver,” one employee wrote in the company’s Workflowy, a company-wide note taking app where every employee can see what other employees are working on, including their progress and thoughts on various projects. “From a student’s perspective, when answer options don’t logically fit the question, it feels like a betrayal of their effort to learn and succeed. How can we expect students to trust our assessments when the very questions meant to test their knowledge are flawed?”
My investigation into Alpha School also reveals that the massive amounts of data the company collects on students, including videos of them, is stored in a Google Drive folder that anyone with the link—even if they’ve left the company, or if it was sent to them—could access. In turn, that sensitive material is viewed by more Alpha School employees than students and parents may realize.
https://www.404media.co/students-are-being-treated-like-guinea-pigs-inside-an-ai-powered-private-school/
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