Alpha School is a chain of AI-centric private schools built around a program where academic subjects are supposed to be all wrapped by lunch, so kids can focus on life skills like “leadership” for most of the day. It’s expensive, and the pedagogy includes unconventional ideas like having kids “earn money by doing academics, so they can fund their passion projects.” Famously, Alpha School is largely app-based, gamified, and very little paper is used.

The Alpha site advertises “2x Learning,” in which students “learn twice as much as their peers in two hours of academics a day.” But according to a report by the New York Times, it’s not meeting that self-imposed academic goal.

According to “documents obtained by The Times,” internal reporting from Alpha shows that whatever promising things might be happening inside the brains of its students, parents’ wishes for “2x Learning” do not seem to be coming true.

Last academic year, less than half of Alpha School’s K-8 students reached the “2x Learning” mountaintop. One in five students did not meet the school’s reading goal. And approximately 50% “did not meet the promise that they would learn math twice as fast,” according to the Times.

Anna Davlantes, an Alpha School spokesperson, told the Times representatives of her company wouldn’t be interviewed, and that the company won’t respond to “written questions.”

The model goes by Dessa. Presumably because, once you hear it talk, you'll say "'Dessa' pretty convincing human voice."

A creepy new type of model misbehavior, just in time for Halloween.

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