They Called It a Fringe Idea.
- Rich Washburn
- Mar 31
- 4 min read
August 2023. That's when I first wrote about it. Not as a prediction. As an observation about something that was already happening — the slow, inevitable collapse of the industrial-era classroom model and the arrival of something better. The piece was called Back to School or a New Dawn in Education? Most people scrolled past it. A few thought I was being optimistic. Some thought I was being naive.
This week, Mackenzie Price, co-founder and CEO of Alpha Schools, sat down with Maria Bartiromo on national television and described a school where students spend two hours a day on AI-powered personalized academics — and score in the top 1 to 2 percent nationally in math, reading, science, and language. Two hours. Top 1 to 2 percent. The rest of the day? Leadership, entrepreneurship, financial literacy, public speaking, relationship building. The skills I've been arguing for years that the traditional system has no time to teach — because it's too busy running a six-hour lecture factory.
I've been on this for nearly three years. And I'm not saying that to thump my chest. I'm saying it because the timeline matters.
August 2023 — Back to School or a New Dawn in Education. I wrote about AI as a personalized tutor, about classrooms transforming from passive to active, about teachers becoming facilitators instead of lecturers. At the time, most schools hadn't even decided whether to ban ChatGPT.
2024 — Reimagining Education: How AI Can Accelerate Learning and Prepare Students for the Future. I mapped out what mastery-based, AI-personalized learning could look like in practice. Real teachers. Real results. Teresa, a geometry teacher using AI to give every student individualized feedback for the first time in her career. Bob, a financial literacy instructor whose AI simulation gave thirty students their own personal tutor simultaneously.
August 2025 — Rocket Ships Without Pilots Are Missiles: The AI Literacy Crisis. The problem wasn't that AI wasn't reaching classrooms. The problem was that nobody was teaching people how to use it. Rocket ships without pilots aren't vehicles. They're missiles.
March 2025 — The Districts Are On Their Own — Good. Here's Who Steps Up. Federal guidance wasn't coming. That wasn't a failure — that was an opportunity. A three-tier AI literacy framework: train parents, train teachers, train students.
And then this week — Alpha Schools on national television, describing almost exactly the model I've been writing about since 2023, with results that silence every skeptic in the room.
What Alpha Schools Actually Proved
The debate for two years has been: can AI replace traditional instruction, or is it just a supplement? Alpha answered it. Definitively.
Two hours of AI-powered personalized learning — meeting each student exactly where they are, advancing at their own pace — produces top 1-2% academic outcomes nationally. Mackenzie Price said something in that interview worth sitting with: "The secret to our success is not the artificial intelligence. It's the fact that we have transformed the role of the teacher." That's exactly right. And it's the thing that gets lost in every AI-in-education debate.
The teachers at Alpha — they call them guides — aren't writing lesson plans, delivering lectures, or grading homework. They're focused entirely on motivational and emotional support. Getting to know kids. Unlocking their why.
That's not AI replacing teachers. That's AI liberating teachers to do the part of their job that only a human can do. I wrote about Teresa in 2024. She said: "I've always wanted to give students this level of personalized feedback. There's just never been enough time." Alpha Schools gave her that time back. By taking everything a machine can do better than a human and giving it to the machine.
The Scale Play Nobody's Talking About
The interview covered Alpha's premium private school model. But the real story is Texas. Texas passed school choice. Alpha is launching Texas Sports Academies — the same academic platform, accessible to families earning under $65,000 a year. Mackenzie Price predicted their Texas Sports Academy students will make up the largest school district in Texas. That's not a premium experiment anymore. That's a movement. This is exactly the model I argued for in The Districts Are On Their Own — not waiting for federal guidance, but building at the local level where the real leverage is.
The Part That Still Isn't Done
Alpha proves the model works. It proves that AI-personalized mastery-based education produces dramatically better academic outcomes.
What Alpha doesn't yet solve is the literacy layer. The $100 billion per quarter being poured into AI infrastructure means this technology is arriving in every classroom whether people are ready or not. The question is whether kids — and teachers, and parents — know how to use it.
The literacy problem: knowing how to prompt, how to verify, how to evaluate, how to think alongside an AI rather than just accepting its output. That gap is still real.
I've been building free AI resources for educators since 2022 at richwashburn.com/abc. Custom teaching assistants for different grade levels. Prompt libraries. Zero technical barriers. Alpha Schools proved the destination is real. Now we build the road.
Comments