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Bill Ackman Backs AI-Powered Private School Reshaping K-12 Education While Avoiding Diversity, Equity And Inclusion Lessons
benzinga.com/markets/tech ^ | Snigdha Gairola

Posted on 08/21/2025 2:15:42 PM PDT by RoosterRedux

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman is backing Alpha School. This rapidly growing private institution utilizes artificial intelligence to condense academic content into two hours a day, while steering clear of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Ackman praised Alpha in a post on X on Wednesday, calling it "the first truly breakthrough innovation in K-12 education" since the KIPP Academy.

"Two hours of a dedicated AI personal tutor customized for your child's academic program. Four hours of leadership and life skills. No homework. Daily real-time data on how your child is doing," Ackman wrote.

"Alpha kids love school and have incredible outcomes."

(Excerpt) Read more at benzinga.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: aipowered; alphaschool; billackman; fireallunionteachers; kidsneedteachers; teacherssuck; thisiscrap
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1 posted on 08/21/2025 2:15:42 PM PDT by RoosterRedux
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To: RoosterRedux

MacKenzie Price, the founder, said, “We do not let anything—political, social issues—come in the way.”


2 posted on 08/21/2025 2:18:17 PM PDT by RoosterRedux ("There's nothing so inert as a closed mind" )
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To: RoosterRedux

I like the sound of this. Education needs to be transformed. No more government schools.


3 posted on 08/21/2025 2:20:03 PM PDT by ClearCase_guy (Society has no reward for following the rules any more)
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To: ClearCase_guy

That was the intent of Common Core. To make education dysfunctional enough that people would be willing to pay billionaires to run it instead.


4 posted on 08/21/2025 2:22:13 PM PDT by Jonty30 (Pornography feeds abortion. Abortion is Satan's ultimate effort to hurt God. )
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To: ClearCase_guy
If I were a kid, I would like the idea of no homework and only 2 hours a day of instruction.

And you are correct. Change is overdue.

5 posted on 08/21/2025 2:26:14 PM PDT by RoosterRedux ("There's nothing so inert as a closed mind" )
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To: RoosterRedux

If I were a kid, I would like the idea of no homework and only 2 hours a day of instruction.
And you are correct. Change is overdue.


Repitition is one of the key factors of learning.

In the old one room school house the older students would learn by teacvhing the younger students.

Homework was important in the process.

old time learning is apprenticing with your parents, chores, part of the family home business..

I guess the point is there are a lot of important aspects of education to learn from the old methods.


6 posted on 08/21/2025 2:31:12 PM PDT by PeterPrinciple (Thinking Caps are no longer being issued, but there must be a warehouse full of them somewhere)
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To: RoosterRedux

find out what a kid is good at, at an early age, and then immerse them in that.


7 posted on 08/21/2025 2:37:54 PM PDT by MarlonRando
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To: Jonty30

That was the intent of Common Core.


I’ve had some contact with common core during my last years as a regular teacher and over the last 10 years or so as a substitute teacher. Common Core and its predecessor, No Child Left Behind, were an attempt to try and fix the obviously failing schools.

You can’t blame the parents, they’re voters, you can’t blame the teachers because they vote and their unions dole out money and you can’t blame the kids, because, well, they’re kids. So what to blame, the method of teaching.

Now humans have been educating kids for millennia, so you’d think we’d have it down by now. But no, experts say, we’re doing it all wrong. Take math for example. Many math teachers, unlike the rest of us, really love math, the patterns that it produces. They found in their own lives that things like memorizing the times tables boring; they advocated letting kids discover the patterns on their own. Ninety percent of students end up with little to no knowledge of how to do any math operation without the help of a calculator.

Same is true for science. The current idea is to let students discover how the world and universe work on their own. Looks good in theory, but in reality, most kids never get around to figuring out things like gravity or even if the earth is in fact a sphere.

The level of ignorance in most high school grads (not all, the best and brightest seem to learn in spite of not because of modern teaching trends) is shockingly huge.

As for reading, that is, taking written information from a page or a screen and processing in one’s mind, that too just isn’t there anymore. It pretty much goes in one eye and out the other with no stop in between.

AI might fix some of this, but I think the problem is much bigger and worse.


8 posted on 08/21/2025 2:40:27 PM PDT by hanamizu ( )
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To: RoosterRedux

How will they force AI to join the teachers’ unions?


9 posted on 08/21/2025 2:41:19 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum (Democrats are the Party of racism, anger, hate and violence.)
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To: hanamizu

“No child left behind!, no child left behind. Oh really? It wasn’t long ago you were talking about giving children a head start. Head Start-Left Behind. Someone’s losing f______ ground here.” - George Carlin


10 posted on 08/21/2025 2:44:36 PM PDT by dfwgator (Endut! Hoch Hech!)
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To: dfwgator

“No child left behind!,


A parting ‘gift’ to the nation by Ted Kennedy. I have posted before at how inane NCLB was. It was only abandoned when it became clear to even the most obtuse that its goals were impossible.


11 posted on 08/21/2025 3:00:17 PM PDT by hanamizu ( )
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To: RoosterRedux

Oh hooray! Altman wants AI data mining and running kid’s lives in elementary school and he say’s it’s to save us from DEI?

LOL, submit to your Palantir and AI overlords, then you won’t have to worry about woke.

Such bullshit.


12 posted on 08/21/2025 3:10:44 PM PDT by DesertRhino (When men on the chessboard, get up and tell you where to go…)
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To: RoosterRedux
Site

https://alpha.school/

13 posted on 08/21/2025 3:14:10 PM PDT by SmokingJoe
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To: DesertRhino
You are the one talking BS.
You don't have to pay billionaires to use AI to study.
And AI is opposite of woke.
The current schooling system is a disaster.
14 posted on 08/21/2025 3:21:35 PM PDT by SmokingJoe
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To: SmokingJoe

No you don’t. But when billionaires peddling AI want to subject your children to their product, it isn’t because they care. It’s about profiting and exploiting your kids, and controlling what they see and how they think.

You’re being very naïve.


15 posted on 08/21/2025 3:24:40 PM PDT by DesertRhino (When men on the chessboard, get up and tell you where to go…)
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To: DesertRhino
Your making a fool of yourself. Get your facts straight before ranting.

Sam Altman has nothing to do with Alpha—it’s Bill Ackman. And Alpha’s AI isn’t OpenAI or Palantir; it’s proprietary adaptive tools like AlphaWrite that cut class time to 2 hours so kids can spend the rest on projects and life skills.

This is about helping kids learn—not ChatGPT running their lives.

16 posted on 08/21/2025 3:30:23 PM PDT by RoosterRedux ("There's nothing so inert as a closed mind" )
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To: DesertRhino

And you’re very stupid.


17 posted on 08/21/2025 3:30:59 PM PDT by RoosterRedux ("There's nothing so inert as a closed mind" )
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To: SmokingJoe; DesertRhino

Your point is well taken. On top of that, DesertRhino is confusing Bill Ackmann with Sam Altman.


18 posted on 08/21/2025 3:35:23 PM PDT by RoosterRedux ("There's nothing so inert as a closed mind" )
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To: DesertRhino
There are so many excellent AI software out there competing fiercely against each other.
You don't have to go to Alpha in Austin for this school,
There will be plenty of teaching AI out there, a lot of them inexpensive or free in deep red states.
19 posted on 08/21/2025 3:38:10 PM PDT by SmokingJoe
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To: SmokingJoe
Thx for that link. I saw MacKenzie Price in an interview on Fox News or Fox Business, and she was impressive.

I will add that 2 hours a day seems rather light, but I'll give her the benefit of the doubt.

When I was in grad school, I studied many hours a day and wished I had even more. I attribute my success there to coffee.;-)

20 posted on 08/21/2025 3:39:58 PM PDT by RoosterRedux ("There's nothing so inert as a closed mind" )
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