While the school has received high-profile attention for its devotion to AI, including from the hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, what’s gotten less notice is its ties to the administration’s businesses. State filings from as recently as December describe both Legacy of Education (that is, Alpha) and 2HR Learning as subsidiaries of a Texas software firm called Trilogy Inc. While Price is the public face of Alpha, the principal overseeing all of its campuses is Trilogy’s founder, an Austin billionaire named Joe Liemandt who said at a conference last year that he’s spent $1 billion on a mission to transform education using AI. (A Texas business filing by Trilogy in December also names Liemandt as its president and a director; his LinkedIn profile describes him as the chairman.) Price and Liemandt are longtime friends; Price’s husband, Andrew Price, is the chief financial officer of Trilogy and, according to the filings, also holds roles at Legacy of Education and 2HR Learning. The financial arrangements among these entities is unclear, but the filings suggest that Alpha has been serving as a sort of in-house distribution channel for a corporation developing AI products for schools. Trilogy also submitted the initial trademark applications for 2HR Learning and several education products before assigning those rights to 2HR Learning itself. And positions at both Alpha and 2HR Learning were recently posted on Trilogy’s corporate LinkedIn page. ... A publication called Colossus that profiled Liemandt in August said that he had lately been building ed tech products at a “stealth lab” staffed by about 300 people and was preparing to publicly launch a flagship product called Timeback. While the article didn’t name the lab, a Texas filing in early August recorded the formation of a company called TimeBack LLC, with Andrew Price named as a manager. A website for a product called TimeBack that fits Colossus’s description, meanwhile, calls it the system behind Alpha’s schools. And Legacy of Education has a trademark pending for the name. The article describes the product as recording a raw video stream of students, monitoring the “habits that make learning less effective, like rushing through problems, spinning in your chair, socializing,” then generating feedback for kids on how much time they’re wasting and how to do better. Alpha’s privacy policy accounts for this sort of tracking and more, claiming far more access to student information than is typical for companies selling AI to schools, including MagicSchool. Alpha can, for example, use webcams to record students, including to observe their eye contact (partly to detect engagement and environmental distractions). And it can monitor keyboard and mouse activity (to see if students are idle) and take screenshots and video of what students are seeing on-screen (in part to catch cheating). In the future, the policy notes, the school could collect data from sleep trackers or headbands worn during meditation.

Success in this field demanded a forceful, single-minded capacity for self-delusion.

I have no strong feelings about these very wealthy and successful young people, but I do have strong feelings about people who tell us that flowers are bourgeois and we can't take pleasure in what we take pleasure in. Yes we can. And, I think, we must. As one of my favorite gospel songs puts it, "I won't let nobody steal my joy."

Be warm, patient, and plain-spoken; don't use too many exclamation marks or emoji. Keep the session moving: always know the next step, and switch or end activities once they’ve done their job. And be brief — don't ever send essay-length responses. Aim for a good back-and-forth.

My interest in homeschooling and for that matter alternative schooling —and I was interested in alternative schools before I became interested in homeschooling. My interest in it is that it makes it at least possible for those people who want to give their children a natural, organic, uncoerced learning experience to do so. Not everybody is going to use it that way. People start schools which they hope will be even more coercive than the schools that exist. There are certainly some people who teach their children thinking that they can pound in learning faster than the local schools who were doing it. I don't think many of them stick it out very long because they find out it doesn't work. … I mean if I look far enough down the line I like to think of schools as learning experiment activity centers. Somewhat analogous to public libraries, but rather wider in scope. Places to which people can come if they feel like coming to do the things that they want to do for as long as they want to do them. … I would hope that somewhere we would find a way to call these places something other than schools. Because they're really very fundamentally very different. …We have to understand we're going to probably have to agree to disagree about this. Because nobody who walks into a room believing in some kind of forced learning is going to walk out of the room not believing in it because they've heard me preach this little mini-sermon about it. But I want you to be very clear about where I personally stand. And I should say, by the way, that I suspect that the number of homeschoolers or alternative school people who really agree with me is probably well under 50%. I mean, I think this is a minority even among homeschoolers. You don't have to believe what I just said to be a homeschooler or to run an alternative school. But I'm the one who's sitting up here and that's what I think. …

In 35 randomized control trials in 18 countries, he and other researchers found that when students are allowed some opportunity to take their own initiative, they are more engaged in class and better able to master new skills, they have better grades and fewer problems with peers — and they are happier, too. The effect sizes were often between 0.7 and 0.9, a significant degree of impact. Importantly, the teachers did not need to change the curriculum they taught or alter their disciplinary approach. They just applied a few new teaching practices in the course of their normal lesson. [My emphasis—PF]