What would you want to see before believing that a new AI learning platform took a school from most of its students failing the state exams to half or more of them passing? Make it your child's school, or one your taxes pay for.
A testimonial wouldn't settle it, and neither would the company's own chart (you'd want a number the company didn't produce). You'd want the state's numbers — and in Texas, those are public. The Texas Education Agency's reporting system lets you look up any public school's STAAR results, STAAR being the state's annual exam. A search box invites you to "Enter full or partial campus, district, or county name," and the report sets the school's results beside its district's and the state's.
Keep that search box in mind. In May 2025, an Alpha leader told Texas education officials that after the company's two-hour learning platform came to Texas Preparatory School, an Austin charter, outcomes went from most students failing state exams to 50 to 60 percent passing. That's how ProPublica and The Texas Tribune recounted it in September. Their next sentence: "Test results published by the Texas Education Agency don't back up that claim."
Type in the school's name and you can see why. For 2024-25, the state's report for the Austin campus shows 21 percent of its tested students reaching "Approaches Grade Level or Above," the lowest level that counts as passing, against 75 percent statewide. The year before, the campus had been at 19 percent, and the share at "Meets Grade Level or Above" (students the test showed at grade level, as the newsrooms put it) fell from 10 percent to zero.
What the state's education agency did next is the rest of the story. Over the following year, the newsrooms reported on October 1, the agency traded emails with companies connected to Alpha, helped with a one-page explainer for school districts and connected them with district leaders. At least three districts (Houston, Fort Davis and Aldine) launched pilots of Alpha's AI tool. The agency says "there is no formal partnership between TEA and Alpha Schools." Gov. Greg Abbott's office says any tool a district deploys must "prove results for students."
So what proof did the state ask for? And what should you ask for, before a district near you says yes?
What the state's report shows, and what it can't
Is 21 percent the whole picture? No — and the rest of it cuts both ways.
Start with the levels. Texas reports three: "Approaches Grade Level or Above," "Meets Grade Level or Above" and "Masters Grade Level." At the Austin campus in 2024-25 they were 21, 0 and 0 percent, against 75, 50 and 21 percent statewide; in reading, 32 percent reached Approaches, and in math, 16 percent. (If someone quotes you a pass rate without naming the level, ask which one.)
The slide began before Alpha arrived, and it's only fair to say so. In 2022-23, 48 percent of the campus's tested students reached Approaches; by 2023-24 the campus had already fallen to 19 percent. ProPublica and the Tribune report that the charter was "already facing a potential state-imposed closure because of low student test scores and failed financial audits."
For 2025, the campus drew an F from the state, and the charter as a whole received its third consecutive F, for 2023, 2024 and 2025, "largely based on the test scores it received during the partnership with Alpha," in the newsrooms' words. The state, they reported, had decided in the middle of the partnership to close the charter for good, letting the campus finish the school year.
How many children is that? The campus enrolled 59 students, and its tested grades, 3 through 6, held about two dozen children. At that size one child moves a percentage by about four points, so any single year is noisy. Noise doesn't rewrite what the report recorded, though. And because the state's STAAR reports count only students enrolled at the same campus on both the fall snapshot date and testing day, the 21 percent isn't dragged down by late arrivals.
Which students, which campus and which year did the May 2025 claim describe? The reporting doesn't say, and Alpha's leaders didn't answer most of the newsrooms' questions, "including about their test scores." The charter's other campus was at 57 percent in 2023-24, down from 70; neither campus shows a climb from mostly failing to 50 or 60 percent in TEA's numbers. "I don't see the extreme growth," said Toni Templeton, a University of Houston research scientist who reviewed the records for the newsrooms. "If you're such a high-performing school, you should have no problem demonstrating it."
How a vetoed charter became three pilots
How does a company whose charter the state board turned down end up in public-school classrooms anyway? By another door.
On June 25, 2025, the State Board of Education — sitting as a committee of the full board — voted 10 to 3 to recommend vetoing a charter called Valenta Academy, in Bastrop, which was to be built on the two-hour learning model; two days later, TEA announced that the board had "vetoed the granting of a charter." ProPublica and the Tribune describe that summer's 10-to-3 vote against Alpha leaders' bid, which Commissioner Mike Morath had supported, and say board members cited AI teaching, screen time and "lingering questions about the drastic student test improvements Alpha leaders presented." It was a "largely conservative" board that "had approved most charter applications over the last decade."
Morath "has been a supporter of Alpha's model before and after the vote, which he doesn't have the power to override," the newsrooms wrote. From September 2025, records they obtained show, he and his staff exchanged "a flurry of emails" with leaders of companies connected to Alpha and visited their campuses several times. Morath offered to personally introduce an Alpha leader to Mike Miles, the superintendent he had appointed to run the state's takeover of Houston's schools, and a TEA associate commissioner wrote of "piloting a few supplemental ... instances in the state." Morath's own line on the company: "There are lessons to be learned in a school like Alpha."
The emails show that "state education officials and Alpha affiliates approached at least 10 school districts about the AI program." At least three launched pilots, and at least five didn't pursue it. Leaders in Aldine and Fort Davis told the reporters it wasn't unusual for the state agency to suggest possible partnerships, and said they were excited about the pilot.
TEA's account is brief. Its written statement says there is no formal partnership, that the agency "is always interested in promising ways to improve student outcomes in math and reading," and (in the newsrooms' summary) that its officials connected district leaders who were interested and left the decision to them. Yet, the reporters note, "Morath's agency knew about results in at least one of those charters, Texas Preparatory School in Austin." And as of their October 1 story, TEA "has not responded to questions about its efforts for months, initially failed to provide some of Morath's emails in response to public information requests and continues fighting the release of additional communications."
What the three pilots are (and aren't)
What did those districts sign up for? Not Alpha's full model — all three say they will use the software for supplemental learning.
Fort Davis is giving it to K-8 students who need more help in reading and math. Michelle Hartmann, the deputy superintendent, called it "an opportunity to provide an extra layer of intervention" and later told the reporters that students were very engaged.
Aldine is using it with roughly 300 students at four middle schools who need support in math.
Houston is running it at Gregg and Clemente Martinez elementary schools, only for students who score above 60% in reading and math assessments. The district says it comes at no cost to HISD and that "Houston ISD teachers will remain the teachers of record, and the pilot does not replace classroom teachers." (The $4.5 million in Houston's budget is for its nine "Future 2" schools, a district model that, like Alpha's, spends fewer hours on core academics; two of the nine run the pilot, and Houston says it isn't paying Alpha.)
Houston says it "will monitor student outcomes throughout the school year and use those results to inform future decisions." It also asked the Texas attorney general to withhold its contract from the newsrooms. As of October 13, 2026, the outcome of that request is unknown.
Think about what Houston's design does to the evidence. If every child in a pilot already scores above 60 percent, a rising line next spring will be hard to read — how much is the software, and how much is who was chosen? And engagement, which Fort Davis reports, is good news but not a result. (HAIA has covered a study in seven English schools where the students who learned the least liked it the most.)
Alpha's private schools came in through a third door. SB 2, the 2025 law that created Texas's education savings account (voucher) program, approves private schools that show accreditation, two years of operation and an annual test, which may be "a nationally norm-referenced assessment instrument" rather than the state's exam; the comptroller, adopting its rules, wrote that the law "does not require private schools to administer the same assessments as public schools." Alpha now runs "more than 30 virtual and in-person campuses" in Texas, most accepted into the program, the newsrooms found. So one company can be measured on the state's test in one school and on a national test of its choosing in another.
The one state that said yes
Is a failing school with two dozen tested children a fair test? Arizona offers another, on terms Alpha's co-founder welcomed.
In January 2025, while an Alpha-linked charter was seeking approval in Pennsylvania, co-founder MacKenzie Price told Chalkbeat, "The great news about public charters is we've got to report our results." Then: "So the proof is going to be in the pudding."
Arizona is where that pudding is now being served. On December 16, 2024, the state's Board for Charter Schools approved Unbound Academy by a single vote, 4 to 3, as an online charter for grades 4 through 8 built on the two-hour model. Its own application predicted that in Year 1, 65 percent of its students would be proficient in reading and 60 percent in math, against baselines of 40 and 34 percent for the students it expected to serve.
Arizona posted its official results on October 6, 2026. In the state's file, 9 percent of Unbound's 180 math test-takers passed, with 77 percent at the lowest of four levels, and 28 percent of its 171 English language arts test-takers passed. (The newsrooms, working from preliminary scores presented to the school's oversight board, had reported 10 percent in math; the official figure is 9.) Statewide, pass rates in grades 4 through 8 ranged from 38 to 47 percent in English and 27 to 40 percent in math. Unbound came in below every one of them.
Is that the end of it? Not quite — the same file holds the best evidence in Unbound's favor. The school kept enrolling students into the spring (its board slides count 41 new starts in January 2026 alone), and about two-thirds of its English test-takers weren't enrolled for the full academic year. Among the 59 who were, 39 percent passed English; among the 112 who weren't, 22 percent. (The file masks the full-year math figure.) Thirty-nine percent is still far from 65, but it tells a different story than the average, and the Austin numbers had already left out late arrivals.
As of October 13, 2026, a week after Arizona posted its file, Unbound's own website still said that state results "will be published as they become available." (Websites lag. That's worth knowing, and not worth more than that.) The same page advertises "2.8×" "faster learning vs. national average (NWEA MAP Growth)," measured "across the 2-Hour Learning model," meaning Alpha's whole network; Unbound's own board slides reported "MAP - 1.8x average growth." And Scientific American reported in August that "Alpha School has not released the underlying data behind its claims."
Don't expect a letter grade to settle it this fall, either. Under the state's grading rules, a new school "will not receive an A-F letter grade" in its first year, so Unbound's first grade can come next fall at the earliest.
Is any of this fair to Alpha?
Fair to ask. The strongest case for patience runs roughly like this.
First, the public schools Alpha has been judged by are hard cases: Texas Prep was failing before the partnership year, and Unbound was a first-year online school still filling seats in March. Neither resembles the private campuses where, as state officials reviewing Alpha's charter bids most often worried, the model had been tested "only among affluent students" and scholarship recipients. Early public results may be measuring the hardest version of the experiment. Kelsey Piper, an education writer who is no fan of Alpha's marketing, writes that Unbound's "student body seems to have arrived at Alpha performing well below average to begin with."
Second, the Texas pilots aren't the full model, and the model isn't teacherless. At Unbound, AZFamily reported, "all staff hold Arizona teaching certificates," and the school's site says "Certified teachers are live on screen all morning." Alpha's leaders, who declined interviews, "maintained that teachers' roles remain significant despite lessons delivered by the AI platform."
Third, the idea underneath isn't fringe. A 2025 review of 28 studies in npj Science of Learning found the effects of intelligent tutoring systems on K-12 students "generally positive," though "mitigated when compared to non-intelligent tutoring systems." Harvard's Kelly Miller, who calls Alpha's approach "better than what currently exists in K–12," still wants "more rigorous analysis" of what makes it work. Tom K. Lindsay of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, calls Alpha's results "reported and debated" but argues that with mastery pacing, "outcomes can move." Piper allows that "Alpha seems to have made some real achievements, if not the miraculous numbers they claim." And Alpha's Carl Hendrick makes the scaling argument in five words: "You can't scale good teaching."
Fourth, outside researchers are now looking. Alpha's spokesperson says Harvard's Human Flourishing Lab and MIT's Blueprint Labs "have both begun independent research studying Alpha's educational model." (MIT's lab says its work "is supported by a gift from Alpha School," with funders' role "contractually limited to providing financial support." No timeframe for results has been given.)
So far, so good? Up to a point. None of it answers the first question a parent would ask: what do the state's own tests show, for how many children, against what was predicted? Alpha's headline claim, that its students "grow 2.6 times faster than peers on nationally normed MAP tests," rests on a test schools administer and report themselves; NWEA, which makes MAP, says "we don't validate or verify school data." Andrew McEachin, an Educational Testing Service researcher who helped develop MAP, warns that strong results may reflect "who's attending the school, not the experience of the kid attending." The growth numbers can't be checked from outside. The numbers that can be checked haven't matched the predictions.
Pennsylvania put its reasons in writing
What does it look like when a state asks for that evidence before saying yes? Pennsylvania wrote its answer down, in a 25-page letter.
In October 2024, Unbound Academic Institute applied to open a cyber charter school in Pennsylvania; Chalkbeat reported that "Both Unbound and Valenta would run on the 2 Hour Learning model." On January 29, 2025, the state's Department of Education denied the application in writing. A single deficiency would have been grounds for denial, the letter notes; the department "has identified deficiencies in all five of the required criteria."
Some of the reasons are mundane: "no petitions or letters of support," gaps on insurance and finances, a board that "has not yet met," and no "list of courses that would be offered to students." Then comes the fifth criterion — whether the school could serve as a model for others — and with it the AI. The department wrote that "the artificial intelligence instructional model being proposed by this school is untested," and that because Unbound had not been approved for a virtual charter at the time of its hearing, "there is no data that supports the efficacy of this model." Unbound listed no specific goals for the state's own tests, including the PSSA. And in footnote 17 the department took up the growth numbers directly: the NWEA MAP evidence "does not include results that can be translated or compared to PSSA results for similarly situated Pennsylvania schools," so Unbound's "testing results cannot be substantiated or used as a suitable measure of potential performance."
None of this makes Pennsylvania anti-AI. The same letter says, "Artificial intelligence (AI) presents unique opportunities that educators across Pennsylvania are exploring through effective, safe, and ethical implementation."
The reaction went the way you'd expect. Chalkbeat called it "a scathing denial"; a spokesperson for Price didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, though Price had told the outlet she believes the model will revolutionize education. The president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, a teachers' union, said two hours of AI-guided learning could not "replace direct instruction from a certified teacher." The state's school boards association called it a "flawed application" in its push to change how cyber charters are paid for.
Does that settle it? No, and Pennsylvania's own record shows why.
A denial grades an application, not a model. Much of this one is paperwork.
Pennsylvania rarely approves cyber charters at all. Its January 2024 approval of one was the first time in eight years, and that applicant had been turned down twice before.
"No data" meant no data yet. The department tied it to the time of the hearing. Arizona has since started to supply some, short of the predictions but with that 39 percent among full-year students.
The door stayed open. The letter offered an appeal or a revised application. As of October 13, 2026, the department's applications page lists no revised application from Unbound, and the appeal board's page lists no Unbound decision. That isn't proof Unbound never appealed; it's what the public record shows.
A pro-charter voice faults Alpha's effort. Jed Wallace of CharterFolk doesn't see the red-state authorizers who said no as "excessively inclined toward charter school opposition." Relaying others' assessments, he writes that Alpha "wasn't putting as much into these applications" as it appeared to put into its new private schools, and that "that lack of commitment" mattered "as much as anything else."
Alpha's own reading is simpler. By the founder's count, in a March Instagram post the newsrooms cite, Alpha had applied to open charters in at least 10 states; only Arizona had said yes. "Unfortunately, change is hard," Price said in the post.
So set the two states side by side. Pennsylvania said what it needed to see (goals on its own tests, results comparable with its own schools), found them missing, and published its reasons. Texas's board voiced similar doubts and voted the charter down; the state's education agency then helped Alpha's affiliates reach districts another way, which Gustavo Reveles, a Democratic board member, said "certainly raises a red flag that perhaps there's ways to circumvent that concern." One state put its standard on paper. In the other, the standard so far is one sentence from the governor's office, and the agency hadn't, by October 1, answered the newsrooms' questions in months.
Imagine next spring's growth chart
None of what follows has happened. It's my extrapolation from these documents, not a forecast about any district, school or company.
It's May 2027. Houston releases its pilot results: a clean chart, a line climbing steeply, a growth multiple in the caption. Every child on it was picked because they already scored above 60 percent, so the chart can't say what the software added, but it travels anyway — into a presentation about growing Future 2 toward the superintendent's goal of 100 campuses by 2031 (only two of today's nine use Alpha's tool), and into a one-page explainer for the next round of districts, the kind TEA helped draft the first time.
Now picture a family with one child at a voucher-funded private campus and another at the public school down the street. The first child's report shows growth at some multiple of the national pace, on a norm-referenced test the school chose. The second's says "Approaches Grade Level" in reading. Which child is doing better? There's no exchange rate. Pennsylvania found that Unbound's MAP results couldn't be "translated or compared" to its own test, and Texas's voucher law lets the two systems keep separate books.
Push it one step further, because the technology is heading there. Mastery-based software is built to decide when a child has learned something and move her on. Imagine it also writes the progress report (the growth chart, the badges, the note home) from its own logs. Who checks it? Even MAP's maker, remember, doesn't verify the data schools report. And a parent who asks for the contract may hear that the district has asked the attorney general to withhold it, as Houston did with the newsrooms.
Then the 2027 Legislature takes up the governor's proposal to limit classroom screens (he said in August that technology should serve specific lessons, "not as a substitute for teachers"), and a pilot the state's own agency helped set up has to fit under a cap on screen minutes. In Arizona, a school's own page still says the state results are on their way. And the study from Harvard, or the Alpha-funded one at MIT, arrives after Alpha's network has doubled again.
None of that requires anyone to act in bad faith. It only requires promising, piloting and measuring to keep happening on separate scoreboards.
Who's asking for proof, left and right
What do the people who govern this, study it and argue about it say? More of them agree than you might expect.
Start with Texas politics. Abbott, who has received more than $1.5 million in political donations from Price, according to the newsrooms, didn't agree to an interview or say directly whether he supports the platform in schools. His Democratic opponent, Gina Hinojosa, called Houston's plan to expand Future 2 to 100 campuses "Greg Abbott's plan to experiment on our children with AI" (a campaign line, about a model only two of whose schools use Alpha's tool). The governor appoints the education commissioner, and Hinojosa has vowed to fire Morath on her first day in office.
On the state board, the skepticism crosses party lines. Republican vice chair Pam Little, who voted against the charter, says: "I don't want anything AI in our schools, especially at the lower grades." Keven Ellis, also a Republican: "I'm just a little skeptical of those types of gains." Julie Pickren, a Republican who voted for the charter, was thrilled that Alpha's private schools had joined the voucher program: "Thank you for not giving up and looking for a way to serve children." In Arizona, the state superintendent of public instruction, Tom Horne, calls the two-hour model "definitely inadequate."
Among people who study schools, the request is for evidence. MIT's Justin Reich: "I don't believe their claims that typical students will see rapid improvements." Jennifer Steele of American University: "as a scalable model for public schools — even public charter schools — there is no evidence that it works." David DeMatthews of the University of Texas at Austin: "It'd be one thing if they were approved as a charter and they did have a track record and they could show evidence. We don't have any of those sorts of things."
Charter reformers want the same thing. Van Schoales, writing for the Fordham Institute, a pro-charter think tank, says "No outside study supports any of it" and hopes authorizers "insist on documented results," while saying he'd "keep an open mind if Alpha opens its books and classrooms to outside researchers and independent evaluation." Dan Meyer, a math educator who works at the curriculum company Amplify (his post says it isn't endorsed by or affiliated with Amplify), writes that Unbound's "poor outcomes shouldn't be the last word on 2 Hour Learning but they should be the loudest," since they show "it is far harder to make successful students than it is to select them in advance." Piper calls Alpha's "2x growth" figures "massaged to the point of being useless for understanding what kids are learning," then adds a note for the critics: "I think the critics are right, but I think they could also do a lot to make their case more persuasive."
Then there's the argument that the gate itself is the problem. A report for the American Enterprise Institute by Ian Kingsbury and David T. Marshall, which doesn't discuss Alpha, concludes that charters "must evolve toward a parent-centric, free-market orientation or face decline," and warns that the alternative "cedes innovation to entrepreneurs unbound by authorizers and state mandates." Wallace states the dilemma from both sides: screen weak applications out and they may reappear "as publicly funded private schools under far looser rules," but keep turning innovators away and that may be "evidence the charter model itself has become too restrictive."
Line the voices up and most of them — from a Republican governor's office to a pro-charter think tank — end up asking for the same thing: proof of results, checked by someone other than the company. The live argument is over what should happen when the gate says no.
What does this mean for you?
Here's what you can do this fall, in Texas or anywhere a district is weighing an AI program:
Look up the state's numbers yourself. In TEA's reporting system, search a school by name (pick 2024-25; the newest year shows only attendance so far), open "STAAR Performance," and read the state, district and campus columns across years, noting which level any "passing" figure means. TXschools.gov has an A–F rating report for every campus, and the Family Portal has your child's own results. These cover public schools only.
Ask what test a growth claim rests on, and how many children took it. "2.6 times faster" is a MAP figure, and Pennsylvania found Unbound's MAP results couldn't be compared with its own test. At Texas Prep, the tested grades held about two dozen children; at Unbound, results split sharply by whether students were there all year.
Ask how many students use it, and how much. Offered isn't the same as used: when the University of Maryland offered students an AI tutor, only 15 percent ever used it. Ask how much screen time it adds, and who remains the teacher of record.
Know which pilot your child is in. Houston's is only for students who already score above 60 percent; Fort Davis and Aldine aim theirs at students who need help. Ask how the district will tell what the software added.
If your district runs a pilot, ask for documents. Request the contract, the evaluation plan and the data-sharing terms. TEA's page on the Public Information Act notes that a request "must ask for information already in existence," so ask for papers, not explanations. Houston asked the attorney general to withhold its contract; ask for yours anyway.
Vote, then speak up. State Board of Education seats are on the ballot; early voting runs October 19 through October 30, and Election Day is November 3. The board meets November 16–20, and public testimony is two minutes, in person, by registration. As of October 13, 2026, TEA lists no proposed commissioner rules open for comment.
In Arizona, the official 2026 school results are on the Department of Education's data page; letter grades are due by November 1, on a tentative schedule, though first-year schools, Unbound among them, don't get one.
In a voucher-funded private school, ask which nationally norm-referenced test it gives, and ask to see the results.
The lesson, as I see it
A performance claim has three parts: a number, a test, and a count of children. The claim made to Texas officials in May 2025, as reported, came with a number. The state supplied the other two once that year's results were in: its own test said 21 percent, at the lowest passing level, for about two dozen children.
The governor's office wrote the right sentence: any tool must "prove results for students." What it doesn't say is on which test, for how many children, compared with whom, and whether the proof comes before a pilot or after one. Pennsylvania answered those questions in a denial letter. Arizona is answering them in public, a year at a time. In Texas, the answers will come from pilots already under way, one limited to students who were already ahead, under a contract Houston asked to keep from the newsrooms.
What should you watch? The Texas election on November 3, and the state board's meeting November 16–20. Houston's spring results, and which children they count. Unbound's second-year results on Arizona's tests. Any ruling on Houston's contract. And the independent research Alpha says has begun.
My vote? Before a state agency helps put an AI program in front of children, someone should write down what would count as success, on the state's own test, and publish it before the first login. It's a modest bar. Alpha's co-founder set it herself when she said the proof would be in the pudding.
If a school is doing well, the state's report will say so. If it isn't, the brochure will say so anyway.