What Happens When Teachers Are Replaced With AI? This School Is Finding Out

The 8:15 a.m. scene in front of the school that sits on a dusty, sun-soaked residential street in Brownsville, Texas, just across the border with Mexico, looks much like any other elementary or middle school in that chaotic period before the morning bell. Groups of tousled boys and girls get off the bus or otherwise trickle, saunter and dawdle into a nondescript building where they will spent the next few hours, in theory, learning. These kids, though, seem more jubilant than might be expected for a Tuesday morning in April.

The days of dodging class or suffering from a lack of motivation appear to be a thing of the past at Alpha School, a private pre-K through eighth grade institution that utilizes personalized artificial intelligence to teach an entire day of core academic lessons in just two hours.

The tech-savvy students then spend their afternoons working on non-academic critical life skills like public speaking, financial literacy or even how to ride a bike. Staff — known here as "guides" rather than teachers — say they strive to facilitate a sense of independence into each child while overseeing a supportive, nurturing environment like any attentive teacher in any solid school district in America.