Alpha School: The $75,000 AI School Surveilling Kids at Home

Alpha School charges up to $75,000 a year for an AI-first education where kids do their core academics in two hours a day. Leaked documents show employees flagged AI-generated lessons with broken questions, were told to use personal emails while scraping sites like Khan Academy, and monitored students through webcams at home.

Behind the school is Joe Liemandt, a billionaire whose companies built software to track workers. MacKenzie Price says Alpha students learn 10 times faster than average. Education Secretary Linda McMahon visited the school and called it “exemplar.”

Juan and Kate get into the faulty AI lessons, student surveillance, publicly accessible student records, and what happens when the logic of bossware gets applied to children.

ABOUT SLOP WORLD

AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Saturday.

DISCLAIMER

All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to "scams," "grifts," or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us.

CHAPTERS:

00:00 Alpha School Charges $75K to Replace Teachers With AI

00:55 The Woman Selling the Dream

01:33 Joe Liemandt: The Billionaire Behind Alpha School

02:17 Why Linda McMahon Is Promoting This as America's Future

04:27 What $75,000 a Year Actually Buys

05:08 AI Teaching Kids Wrong Answers

07:14 They Scraped Khan Academy for the Curriculum

08:30 Surveillance Cameras Watching Kids at Home

12:09 The Student Data Anyone Could Find Online

13:27 This Is What AI in Education Gets Wrong