Bill Ackman, the finance billionaire who has long espoused support for Donald Trump, has a new preoccupation: a network of AI-fueled private schools that teach students topics at breakneck speed, the curricula for which do not include any sort of troublesome social or political ideas.
The Wall Street Journal describes the Alpha School as a “fast-growing private school that eschews lessons on diversity, equity and inclusion.” The school’s co-founder, MacKenzie Price, told the newspaper that the curriculum is designed to avoid any sort of “political, social issues” that might get “in the way” of students’ education. “We stay very much out of that,” she said.
Alpha’s educational model is quite unique: young K-12 students are taught subjects over the course of two hours using “AI-enabled software.” After that, the rest of the day is parsed out through a variety of physically and socially engaging activities. The school’s website mentions a variety of workshops, some of which are based around leadership, some of which involve business education, and some of which just seem to resemble playtime. The school, which was founded over a decade ago, has campuses spread throughout the country, and it plans to open a new location in Manhattan this year, WSJ reports.
What is Ackman’s role? He’s largely a brand ambassador, according to the WSJ report. The outlet notes that Ackman became interested in it partially due to its “stance on DEI and avoidance of concepts such as the gender continuum.” Over the past several months, Ackman has been “hyping” up the school to parents he knows, and this week, he plans to appear on a panel alongside Price, the outlet writes.
You can actually imagine Alpha’s model working quite well for many subjects, but when you get to the humanities, that’s when you run into trouble. Subjects like history, art, and literature are intrinsically subjective (they require an interpretive lens), which is why they have historically presented such thorny curricular dilemmas. One person’s socially relevant tome on 19th-century race relations is another person’s anti-American woke propaganda designed to ruin the minds of our nation’s youth. How, exactly, do places like Alpha School teach children about the American novel without letting “political, social issues” get “in the way”? From the outside, that part is unclear.
One thing’s for sure: Ackman’s support for Alpha is part of a broader trend in which billionaires (particularly tech billionaires) seek to platform alternative educational models. Bill Gates has long been a cheerleader for the charter school movement. Jeff Bezos founded his own network of preschools. And then there’s Elon Musk, who, when his elite private school wasn’t cutting it for his kids, launched his own school, Ad Astra, which he helped design (if you think about it, this is sorta like homeschool for billionaires). Since then, Musk has sought to expand the school and recently opened a campus in Texas.
For decades, billionaires have also waged a not-so-secret war on America’s public school system. The school choice movement—of which places like Alpha and Ad Astra are only the latest iterations—has largely been promulgated and funded by the 1 percent. At the same time, efforts have long been made to defund the public school system. Project 2025 (which many people believe has acted as a policy blueprint for the second Trump administration) has advocated for dismantling the Department of Education, and, earlier this year, while he was still helming the Trump administration’s DOGE initiative, Musk claimed he supported abolishing the DOE. In February, DOGE purported to cut $1 billion in research contracts from the agency (most of DOGE’s cuts have ended up being bullshit, however).
It’s unclear how the 1 percent envisions a majority of Americans paying for this style of private education, as reports show that tuition for, say, the Alpha School, costs about $45,000 a year. Such fee structures obviously preclude a majority of the U.S. population from participation. I suppose it’s possible that the price of admission at these schools will drop eventually. Or, maybe, the plan is just to dumb the general population down with trade schools until we all become pliant, obedient workers, while the gilded class turbo-charges its offspring intellectually and weans them on an elitist worldview that precludes any sort of empathy for the have-nots. It’s unclear what the ultimate endgame is here, although I can’t say the view looks particularly rosy from the bleachers.
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