GREENWICH — A school with no homework, no grading, and no teachers — and just two hours of academic instruction each day — might sound like every kid’s dream.

But Alpha Schools, a for-profit educational company based in Austin, Texas, is aiming to disrupt long-held notions of what schooling should look like with the help of artificial intelligence and a belief that what most children might say sounds too good to be true may actually be a better way for kids to learn.

Sometime within the next few months, Alpha Schools’ first Connecticut location will open in downtown Greenwich with additional locations in the state expected to follow in the next year or two.

Alpha is not without its skeptics, some who question whether its bold claims about harnessing the power of AI to turbocharge the learning process are more an aggressive marketing strategy than an effective educational model. But not Cody Kittle.

For Kittle, a Greenwich parent and former member of the town’s Board of Education, Alpha’s arrival isn’t merely a new school opening in town. He helped make it happen and will be among the school’s inaugural class of parents when it opens.

What caught Kittle’s attention, he said, wasn’t Alpha’s use of AI or its unusual educational approach. Rather, it was the unusually strong academic results it touts.

From Austin to Greenwich

The Alpha model dates back to 2014, when the first Alpha School was launched in Austin by MacKenzie Price, a Stanford University graduate with a background in psychology who pitched the idea that conventional schools were wasting too much of children’s time. 

Price developed the basic concept that eventually became Alpha’s signature “2-Hour Learning” model — using customized, adaptive learning software to compress core academics into a concentrated two-hour period in the morning, and then devoting the rest of the school day to team-based workshops in everything from financial literacy, entrepreneurship and public speaking to leadership and physical fitness.

The basic model existed even before AI burst into mainstream public consciousness a few years ago. But AI has since become central to Alpha’s pitch, helping the rapidly expanding school network promise individualized instruction through the use of AI-powered apps at a scale it says would be nearly impossible to achieve with conventional teachers in a conventional classroom.

Billionaire tech mogul Joe Liemandt, the founder of Trilogy Software, has since become an evangelist of sorts for Alpha and – as its principal financial backer – a major force behind its intended expansion.

With approximately 30 schools enrolling about 1,200 students across the country, Alpha says it is poised to nearly double the number of schools over the next year or so. The now 12-year-old company has pitched international expansion as well, with plans to open a school in London next year and a goal of reaching a billion students worldwide within the next 20 years.

It is unclear how Alpha intends to achieve that ambitious goal. However, an August 2025 profile of Liemandt offered a possible window into his plans, noting that the software behind Alpha’s 2-Hour Learning program — which the company recently said on its website it was rebranding as “Timeback,” in reference to its goal of giving kids their time back — will enable it to take its educational model beyond the bricks and mortar of its own schools.

The effort reportedly is the result of a $1 billion investment Liemandt has made from his software companies with a goal of developing a scalable, AI-based remote learning platform that Alpha will be able to offer to anyone anywhere in the world.

Alpha did not comment on the report but already offers a version of its Timeback software for homeschoolers for $833 per month — or just under $10,000 per year — through its Alpha Anywhere subscription service.

In the meantime, at a current annual tuition of $65,000 for the full in-school experience, Alpha is targeting an affluent clientele.

For parents weighing whether to pony up the money, Alpha recently offered a nine-week introductory summer program in the Hamptons. Price tag: $40,000.

But in a community like Greenwich, the company may be in the right place at the right time and says it hopes to open additional schools elsewhere in Connecticut over the next year or two. Company officials say they also hope to provide a limited number of scholarships in future years.

A challenge — and an opportunity

Kittle, a partner in a Greenwich-based investment firm, said he first became interested in the Austin-based private school network last year after hearing Liemandt discuss it on the podcast “Invest Like the Best,” hosted by fellow Greenwich-area resident Patrick O’Shaughnessy. 

Then in February, Alpha released another round of results from the NWEA MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) assessment, a computerized test designed to measure both achievement and growth. Kittle said he knew enough about educational testing from his four years on the Greenwich Board of Education to recognize these were unusually impressive numbers.

With the help of O’Shaughnessy, he reached out to Liemandt — and the conversation quickly turned into a challenge: If Kittle could find 25 Greenwich families willing to put down $1,000 deposits for their kids to attend, Alpha would open a school there by the fall.

Kittle said he went to work recruiting the first Greenwich families and, within days, secured the necessary deposits to begin laying the groundwork for the new school’s opening.

In a conversation with CT Examiner, he underscored that he has not received — nor was offered — any financial compensation or tuition break for doing so. The sole benefit to him, he said, is the satisfaction of bringing about the opening of the school where he eventually hopes to send both of his daughters.

Alpha has since submitted plans to open its first Connecticut school on the first floor of a former Saks Fifth Avenue location at 20 East Elm Street in Greenwich. The town’s Planning and Zoning Commission has not yet held a hearing on the application but is expected to do so in the next month or two.

While permitting and construction are pending, the first cohort of Alpha Greenwich students will begin attending one of two temporary locations just over the state line in Port Chester and Armonk, N.Y. in September. The Greenwich facility is expected to open around January, once permitting and construction work are complete.

The school will begin as a K-8 school with plans to expand upward by one grade level each year until eventually serving students in grades K-12.

Kittle, whose older daughter is 7 and currently attends Greenwich Country Day School, said he plans to enroll her at Alpha’s Greenwich campus once the permanent facility is up and running. His younger daughter is 2 and likely to attend Alpha as well once she reaches school age, he said.

Two hours of academics — and a very different rest of the day

Alpha’s schools are built around a basic proposition that challenges the longstanding assumption that children need to spend hours in conventional classrooms with a teacher dispensing knowledge from the front of the room.

Tasha Arnold, Alpha’s head of schools, said Alpha students spend about two hours in the morning on individualized academic instruction delivered via AI-powered software, allowing them to progress through material at their own pace.

There are no teachers. Instead, the process is overseen by educators whom Alpha calls “guides,” a term that reflects the company’s view of their role as more akin to that of a coach or mentor rather than a traditional authority figure.

The guides’ job is not to deliver knowledge but to help students set goals or “metrics” for themselves, monitor their progress, and develop their ability to overcome setbacks and become self-directed learners.

And rather than addressing their guides as “Mr.,” “Mrs.” or “Miss” as in a typical school setting, the students address their guides on a first-name basis.

Some of Alpha’s guides come from traditional teaching backgrounds, Arnold said. Others have experience as coaches, tutors, professional dancers, entrepreneurs, authors, and more.

What unites them, Arnold said, is an ability to motivate students. Guides receive ongoing training in child psychology, motivational models, and academic goal setting.

Students who hit their daily goals and achieve mastery receive rewards in the form of Alpha Bucks, the school’s in-house digital currency that it uses to help gamify the learning process and teach real-world financial literacy.

The academic and social curriculum also includes weekly student-run Town Hall meetings, where children create their own agendas and discuss problems affecting the school.

As an example, Arnold recalled a meeting in which students argued over a disagreement on the soccer field. One student complained that another child wasn’t passing the ball to them often enough. Another student said it was because they couldn’t catch his passes.

The students eventually came up with their own solution: They would spend the first 10 minutes on the field practicing passing. 

“No adult came up with this,” Arnold said.

That kind of cooperative problem-solving is an example of what Arnold suggested traditional schools do not devote enough time to developing.

Guides also are expected to encourage the idea of failure not as something to be feared but rather as something to be embraced as a temporary setback and learning opportunity on the road to mastery and success. The idea is that students are expected to attempt things they cannot initially do, fail at them, receive feedback from their failures, and try again. 

And because Alpha shuns the use of traditional grades, students have the confidence of knowing they won’t be shamed for their failures or assigned a failing grade. Instead, students are encouraged to keep at it until they gain mastery.

Still, Kittle said his attraction to the model is rooted less in the novelty of its philosophy or use of AI than in what he calls a lack of measurable accountability in conventional public and private schooling.

Measurable outcomes — but questions about Alpha’s claims

“If there’s one theme about Alpha that resonates, it’s measurable outcomes,” Kittle said.

Alpha says its students — including those who come to its schools with already high achievement scores — continue to achieve exceptionally high growth rates that show them learning two times faster than their similarly aged peers despite spending less than half as much time on core academic instruction.

Although the reported success of Alpha’s model has not yet been externally validated, Arnold said the company is partnering with MIT Blueprint Labs and Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program on two longitudinal research projects that will help it better measure the impact of its academic programs.

Asked about the partnerships, staff with MIT and Harvard said in separate statements that the research collaborations will be conducted independently of Alpha, meaning Alpha will have no role in directing the studies and cannot alter the results.

Neither Alpha nor the labs provided details of the contractual or monetary terms of their arrangements. However, a spokesperson for MIT Blueprint Labs confirmed the work is being supported by a “gift” from Alpha Schools.

Some of Alpha’s other claims and practices have come under scrutiny, most notably in a two-part investigation by WIRED magazine published in October 2025 and June 2026.

Despite claims by Alpha that the company does not assign homework, the publication included accounts of students allegedly being pressured to work through lunch or at home in order to achieve their “metrics” and of being monitored through the use of data-collecting software that tracked their activity both in and out of school.

The publication alleged parents had no idea the school had installed such software on their kids’ laptops or that it was using the software for this purpose. The publication also included interviews with parents who claimed they had pulled their children out of Alpha after finding that their children were deficient in core subjects such as reading comprehension and writing.

A spokesperson for Alpha called these accounts “gross misrepresentations.” She said not a single Alpha parent recognized the school described in the articles and that every one of them said they “would never send their kids to a school that reflected the narrative told in that story.”

The publication went on to report that the New York State Education Department had declined to recognize Alpha’s Manhattan campus as an independent school, instead granting it limited recognition as a homeschooling center because most of its instruction was online or computer-based with little or no teacher-led instruction. A spokesperson for the department told CT Examiner that the school had since resubmitted its application and that it was currently under review but declined to elaborate.

WIRED also reported that Alpha’s previous software vendor had terminated the company’s account for a terms-of-service violation related to its alleged unauthorized use of the software as a replacement for trained teachers.

An Alpha spokesperson disputed these reports as well.

“We’d strongly caution against relying on the WIRED article as a factual baseline,” she said. “Prior to publication, WIRED was provided with documentation that directly contradicted its central claims, yet the piece did not accurately reflect that information.”

Alpha did not respond to a number of requests from CT Examiner to provide that documentation, or elaborate on which claims were untrue.

Connecticut, for its part, does not require private K-12 schools to be approved by the state Department of Education. There is a compulsory state attendance law, with which all public and private schools must comply by filing an annual attendance report. But beyond that, it’s up to the schools themselves whether to seek accreditation.

In Connecticut, accreditation is primarily granted through the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. Though it isn’t required, Arnold said Alpha will begin seeking accreditation through the organization but cautioned that the process could take a few years.

A parent’s vote of confidence

Kittle, however, said he doesn’t need convincing.

The fact that Alpha makes a point of promising that his daughters will love going to school there is a bonus for him, though not necessarily because he wants them to have an easier time in school.

“Kids want to be held to high standards, but you have to have lots of support and coaching to get them to those high standards,” he said.

He compared the AI-powered feedback they receive to the feedback that athletes receive in competitive sports, where the score provides them immediate ongoing information about how well they’re doing. Instead of being patronized and told they’re playing a great game when they’re losing by a big score, he said, those who fall short are incentivized to keep striving and improving.

He contrasted this approach with what he sees as today’s all-too-common impulse in education to try to make school easier for students who are struggling by offering them less challenging courses instead of encouraging them to try harder and persevere.

For now, however, the first step in Alpha’s Connecticut experiment remains for it to fulfill the permitting and site plan requirements of Greenwich’s Planning and Zoning Commission. On the other side of that process lies the future home of its school in Greenwich.