Welcome to the Report Card with Nat Malchus, the Education Policy podcast from the American Enterprise Institute.

One of the hottest names in education right now is Alpha School, a network of high-end

private schools founded in Texas, but with locations elsewhere. Alpha School uses AI to implement

mastery learning principles and incentives to accelerate student learning. How well the Alpha school model works is an open question.

Alpha graduated its first seniors, a class of 12, just last year, and most of Alpha students

come from wealthier families. That said, for anybody who complains about a lack of

experimentation in the education sector, or wonders what it might look like if

schools took some of the boldest ideas in education more seriously. Alpha is a welcome antidote.

So to learn more about the alpha model, I invited McKenzie Price, the co-founder of Alpha School,

onto the podcast. Mackenzie Price.

Welcome to the report card.

Thanks for having me.

I'm so excited to be here.

I love talking grades.

All right.

All right.

So, McKenzie, Alpha School has been all over the news.

I think it's fair to say that there's much about Alpha that probably intrigues the listeners to this podcast.

Alpha is an innovative school model, focuses on mastery learning, uses technology in novel ways.

It does interesting things around incentives. At the same time, I'm sure some of our listeners have some skepticism.

Alpha is a very tech forward school.

Many in our audience, me included,

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