In the fall of 2025, top executives from Alpha School gathered a group of wealthy New York City parents at a series of information sessions in Lower Manhattan to pitch them on the company’s new campus. The events, some of which were hosted by Alpha cofounder MacKenzie Price and its billionaire principal, Joe Liemandt, were designed to show how Alpha was “redefining school” through AI-powered learning models. The goal: persuade families to ditch the city’s traditional education system and join what Alpha initially called “the most forward-thinking private school in New York.”
The pitch seems to have worked. This school year, more than a dozen families have been sending their children to the sixth and seventh floors of the skyscraper at 180 Maiden Lane. According to the current Alpha New York web page, the “school day” runs from 8:15 am to 4:00 pm, and the stated “tuition” is $65,000 a year. (Founding families received a discount.) As Price told the Free Press in May, “Alpha is a product as a school that is catering to a certain demographic,” and “it is a premium, expensive private school.”
Except the Maiden Lane campus isn’t really a school. Late last summer, months before many of the info sessions, the New York State Education Department declined to approve Alpha’s request to incorporate as an independent school, according to a previously unreported copy of the decision obtained by WIRED. “Instruction as proposed is primarily online, with an AI-based platform called 2 Hour Learning™ that delivers instruction in core academic subjects with little to no supervision or competent teacher delivering such instruction,” the department’s office of counsel wrote. “Generally, [the NYSED] does not recognize online schools as proposed.”
About a week later, in a post on X, Alpha invited parents to attend an info session for the Maiden Lane location, which the post called the “Alpha Anywhere Center.” Alpha Anywhere is the company’s line of products for homeschooling, which is advertised as starting at around $10,000 per year. Though the company’s marketing materials didn’t explicitly mention it, parents who enrolled their kids at the Maiden Lane campus would be required to file formal documentation signing up as homeschoolers.
ILLUSTRATION: ELENA LACEY/GETTY IMAGES
After WIRED began reaching out to Alpha employees for this story in April, the company resubmitted its application for incorporation as a school. That application is pending, according to the NYSED. Under state law, even if Alpha receives permission from the agency to incorporate as a school, it will still have to demonstrate to New York City public school authorities that it provides instruction in core subjects that is at least “substantially equivalent” to instruction in the city’s public schools. And it will have to do so at a time when New York City’s top school official has described AI as an “invasive technology” and parents and teachers have called to further restrict how students can use AI in their coursework.
As WIRED has previously reported, Alpha employs “guides” to oversee the classroom. These adults don’t teach academics themselves; they are meant to motivate students to complete lessons in personalized learning software. (“We call them guides, coaches, teachers,” Price has said. “We kind of use those words interchangeably.”) The company pairs this app-as-instructor approach with a competitive reward system. Students at some campuses can earn hundreds of dollars over time for scoring well on tests or completing enough lessons in a day. At the campus in Brownsville, Texas, sources previously told WIRED, kids who failed to meet their learning goals said they were barred from sitting in certain rooms and said they couldn’t take part in other perks such as attending field trips, getting toys, or eating off-campus lunches. The company claims its model enables students to learn twice as much in just two hours of academics as their peers in traditional schools learn in a day. This frees up students’ afternoons for workshops focused on life skills like grit, entrepreneurship, and leadership.
WIRED spoke with multiple sources for this story who have been involved in building out, setting up, and working in new Alpha campuses across the country. Those familiar with the New York campus told WIRED they had concerns about how up-front the company was with prospective parents about the fact that their children would not actually be attending a school. “A lot of these parents are just drinking the Kool-Aid,” one person said. “Their kid comes home with a new Nintendo Switch, an AI robot, an iPad, so their kid’s happy, so they’re happy to see it.”
After WIRED reached out to parents who enrolled their children at Alpha, a group replied with a joint statement saying they were aware that the New York City campus is not a school but rather a “homeschooling support center.” They added that they “are grateful for the positive impact the Alpha Anywhere Center has had on our children and wholeheartedly recommend it to families seeking an innovative, caring, and inspiring educational community for their children’s homeschooling program.” The joint statement had 13 named signatories and 22 who “wanted to express their support for this letter while keeping their child’s educational experience private.” Other families WIRED reached out to for comment did not respond.
