In a few weeks, Alpha School, serving grades K–8, will be opening its doors at its new location in Miami Beach.
The school prides itself on delivering a non-traditional model of education, where students spend just two hours learning academics via AI apps and spend their afternoons doing hands-on activities and building projects together that foster life skills and entrepreneurship.
MacKenzie Price, a Stanford psychology graduate, is the co-founder of Alpha School. She helped come up with this model 12 years ago, after seeing firsthand how her daughter went from being excited about starting school to disliking it and finding it boring. “So quickly, over a period of just months, I watched that light dim,” she said of her daughter’s disappointment about school. “I just realized we can’t have this.”
Alpha’s promise is that kids will love school, that they’ll learn twice as much (and twice as fast) as their peers who are in traditional schools and that they’ll learn life skills. There are 50 Alpha Schools in the U.S. in 14 states.
“We believe that really what makes a kid thrive is if they’re motivated,” said Price. “They’re basically supporting them with motivational and emotional support and they are helping them learn the skill,” said Price of the guides, who range from D-1 athletes, to coaches and executives. Guides are paid $100,000 with their main job being to motivate and encourage students on their projects.
Price described some of the entrepreneurial activities the kids partake in, like having a boys versus girls lemonade stand, complete with a marketing campaign to come up with different strategies on how to sell more and win. Fourth and fifth grade students at one of the Alpha schools planned and executed a music festival where 400 people attended. In a teamwork building exercise, students worked together to see what’s missing on a sailboat in order to set sail.
“We get a lot of attention about being an AI school or the school with no teachers,” said Price, “but what families are really excited about are the way the afternoons are spent.”
Price said when she first visited Miami, families told her they wanted to make sure their kids are “prepared to be dynamic, to be adaptable and to be able to be really great critical thinkers.” To do that, Alpha implements categories to help students build life skills: leadership and teamwork, storytelling and public speaking, and entrepreneurship and financial literacy.
“Whatever the workshop is, it’s teaching some sort of skill around that,” she said. “What we’re really doing is teaching things like reading body language, making eye contact, engaging in conversation and understanding things like that.”
Tuition at Alpha Miami Beach, on Biarritz Drive in Normandy Isle, is $65,000 a year. At Alpha School Miami (in South Miami), serving grades K–12, tuition is $50,000 annually. There is also a campus in Palm Beach and one planned for Boca Raton this fall.
“Miami has attracted so many people who are excited about innovation, entrepreneurship, business about technology but most of all, what I’ve really enjoyed about getting to know the people in Miami is that there’s such a spirit of optimism and enthusiasm for what’s possible.”
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