Every appearance by Education Secretary Linda McMahon on television, discussing a department she’s vowed to dismantle, seems to invite fresh confusion. Her Sunday interview on CNN, marking the start of the school year, followed a familiar pattern from an official who once mistakenly referred to AI as “A1,” the steak sauce. When the anchor pressed her on AI use in K-12 classrooms, noting that the technology is evolving so quickly that measuring its actual effect on learning outcomes has become nearly impossible, and asked directly whether students risked becoming test subjects for chatbots, McMahon pointed to a visit she’d made the previous year to Alpha School, a private school in Austin founded with help from an AI entrepreneur, where students spend two hours daily on individualized, screen-based instruction.
She described students wearing headphones for the first stretch of each school day, working through subject material on computers while teachers monitor their progress, comparing the setup to having a personal tutor. Asked whether this represented an appropriate model, McMahon said it was “working wonderfully” and had been running successfully for several years, something worth examining closely, though she stopped short of claiming it would work everywhere.
What McMahon didn’t mention is that Alpha School’s methods and its claims of success have never been independently verified or studied, and that as a private institution, it retains full control over which students it admits. Among the tools its students use is Khan Academy, whose own founder has already softened his earlier optimism about AI’s promise in education, noting that for many students, the introduction of the company’s chatbot amounted to little more than a shrug. Reporting last October also surfaced accounts of families withdrawing their children from another Alpha School campus, in some cases mid-year, after finding the academic and social experience deeply unsatisfying.
