A “Revolution”?

Although she bills herself as a cutting-edge education reformer, Price spent most of her career, some seventeen years, in the mortgage business. Price, a Stanford University grad, seems more fluent in the language of Palo Alto entrepreneurs than of teachers, who are secondary in her educational philosophy.

As Price tells it, she became disillusioned with the public education system when her second-grade daughter came home complaining of boredom in the classroom. Public schools, she began to believe, treat students like “clones.” They were “broken, outdated, mismanaged.” This is the origin story of Price’s first school, Alpha, a private school in Austin, which began as her own homeschooling operation and is now a full-fledged school with an annual tuition of $40,000 per pupil.

Price founded Alpha in around 2014 with the help of her husband, Andrew Price, who holds roles with several companies affiliated with 2 Hour Learning. Alpha School, which has a K-8 campus and a high school, says it now enrolls 152 students.

MacKenzie Price, 2 Hour Learning, and various representatives for Alpha schools did not respond to repeated requests for comment and questions from the Lever for this story.

Alpha is 2 Hour Learning’s flagship school, where Price says she developed the company’s model. This is the pitch: Students spend just two hours on academics per day in the morning, freeing up the rest of the day for workshops on “life skills,” which seem to range from more traditional activities like public speaking or team building to “entrepreneurial workshops” like Airbnb class.

Over the last three years, 2 Hour Learning has launched a half-dozen new ventures, opening a K-8 school in Brownsville, Texas, in 2022, as well as four small brick-and-mortar schools — including NextGen Academy, an “e-sports” school that incorporates video games like Fortnite and Minecraft into the curriculum — in the Austin area last year. The company has also been approved to run an all-virtual charter school, Unbound Academy, in Arizona, as well as a virtual private school in the state that accepts money from Arizona’s troubled voucher program.

The central premise here — across all the various schools — is the claim that students learn between two and three times faster when they use their laptops, with the assistance of 2 Hour Learning’s technology. “No teachers, only AI apps,” Price says on her Instagram, again and again. In one recent viral video, students sit curled up in desk chairs in phone-booth-sized pods, staring at their computers.

Although the schools’ academics do incorporate some of 2 Hour Learning’s own proprietary software, students appear to be mostly learning from personalized education platforms that have been widely available for years, like Khan Academy and IXL (2 Hour Learning has combined all these tools in a single dashboard, which tracks students’ overall results). While the company advertises a personalized “AI tutor,” it’s not clear that generative AI plays a central role.

This is typical of the many private schools and education companies that, in the age of ChatGPT, are rushing to rebrand their offerings as AI-based, said Audrey Watters, an author and researcher focusing on education technology. “Everything is being rebranded as AI when, in fact, a lot of it is the same stuff that was already being offered,” Watters said.

And while Price, on social media, is constantly advertising her “schools with no teachers,” her schools do employ educators, although they have been rebranded as “guides.” Guides shepherd students through the education apps in the morning and lead workshops in the afternoon. There are, in fact, far more of them at Alpha School than in traditional schools — one guide for every three students, online materials advertise.

The schools also deploy payola as much as they do AI. Students at Alpha School are paid for their grades and jobs they do in the classroom. They receive $10,000 prizes for designing “the best high school projects.” Parents are paid to show up at parent-teacher conferences. The idea, according to a 2 Hour Learning representative at one parent information session that the Lever attended, is that it’s important for “students to feel that their daily effort is going to be rewarded at some point.”

Price boasts of spectacular results at her Texas private schools. Her Instagram is filled with videos of students who say they have received perfect scores on the SAT or are four grade levels ahead in science. Not only are students learning more than two times faster than in traditional classrooms, they are scoring in “the top 1 to 2 percent nationally,” representing a “paradigm shift in education,” the company claimed in an application for a charter school in Arkansas.

“It holds the promise of revolutionizing education on a global scale,” the company wrote.

Experts are skeptical of the grandiose claims. “I am deeply suspicious,” said Riley. “Maybe the schools are good, but they’re not good because of the technology.”

There’s scant evidence that AI tutors or adaptive learning algorithms are more effective than a teacher in front of a classroom, Riley said: “We do not have strong empirical evidence that these tools work well as the deliverer of instruction.”

As Riley and others emphasized, the idea that technology-driven personalized learning, which individualizes lessons to each student, is more effective than “traditional” classroom instruction is not new. It dates back to at least the 1920s. Price is just the latest in a long line of self-proclaimed education disruptors claiming to revolutionize the education system.

“Schools have been sold personalized learning for a long time,” Watters said. “There is decades of research on this stuff. It’s never really proven to be a silver bullet.”

So far, there has been no serious independent evaluation of 2 Hour Learning’s claims; the company is only citing its own internal metrics. The company did not respond to the Lever’s requests for more information on its data. It’s difficult to know what, exactly, is happening inside the schools’ classrooms.

Even if Price and 2 Hour Learning aren’t inflating their own numbers, some commentators note that it’s near-impossible to compare academic results at private schools to those at public schools, given how different their student bodies are. Many decades of research have found socioeconomic status to be determinant of educational outcomes, a disparity evident in the differences between private and public schools.

As education consultant Dan Meyer argued in a blog post about Unbound, Price’s success comes not from replacing teachers with AI but “replacing poor kids with rich kids.”

But Price and 2 Hour Learning have a response to this criticism: Alpha Brownsville, the school the company opened in 2022 in Brownsville, Texas — home of SpaceX.

“SpaceX Meets Next-Gen Learning”

When SpaceX decided to choose its new campus in Brownsville — after a yearslong, nationwide bidding war — the company promised to bring revitalization to what was at the time a disinvested border city built around boom-and-bust fossil fuels, one of the poorest metropolitan areas in the country.

In the years since, as SpaceX has bought up land in the community and filled the skies with rockets from launches at its Starbase campus, Brownsville has indeed changed, bringing many new residents to the city. But locals are now contending with gentrification, the environmental harms of SpaceX’s rockets, and the company’s immense political influence.

When Price arrived in Brownsville in 2022, she offered a similar pitch, borrowing from the model she had built in Austin: a school that would provide a needed alternative to an underfunded public-school system, opening up new educational opportunities for local students. Alpha Brownsville opened its doors that year, promising to enroll 50 percent of its students from SpaceX families and the rest from low-income local families, to whom the school offered heavily discounted tuition.

SpaceX is clearly central to Alpha Brownsville’s operations. The school’s public statements indicate that SpaceX provides transportation (“Starbase Shuttles”) to and from school for at least some students. “Due to a 4pm SpaceX launch today . . . SpaceX will provide transportation TO Alpha, but will NOT provide transportation HOME,” one Facebook post from last November reads.

SpaceX also provides programming at the school’s summer camp, Camp BTX, and a portion of the camp’s revenue is funneled to the company’s telecom subsidiary, Starlink, to support the company’s “effort to bring connectivity to 1,500 schools throughout the world,” per its website.

It’s not clear to what degree SpaceX and the school are linked financially, and representatives from Alpha Brownsville and SpaceX did not respond to questions from the Lever on the matter. But it’s worth noting that Alpha Brownsville tuition costs $10,000 while tuition at all other Price’s private schools costs at least $40,000 (and as much as $65,000 at a school that will open this fall in New York City).

Alpha Brownsville claims that this school too has delivered incredible results. Lower-income students “scoring in the 31st percentile in both math and reading jumped to the 84th and 71st percentiles, respectively,” 2 Hour Learning says in a charter school application. Price constantly cites Alpha Brownsville as evidence that the 2 Hour Learning model works for all students, not just those who can fork up $40,000 a year in tuition.

“The school district and area is known for being one of the lowest socio-economic areas of the U.S.,” Price wrote this spring on Instagram, touting the schools’ results.

But one local Brownsville mother of students formerly enrolled in the school told the Lever that the reality was not as rosy as the marketing materials claim.

Her children enrolled in the first year of Alpha Brownsville in the fall of 2022, when the school was undertaking significant recruiting efforts in the local community, showing up at farmers markets to attract students beyond the SpaceX transplants. But her daughter quickly fell behind, struggling with the adaptive learning platform, said the mother, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. When she raised concerns, the administration was dismissive, she said, promising her that their model worked.

“You seem to trust this AI model more than our own eyes,” the mother said she told Alpha Brownsville administrators.

By last summer, the mother had removed her children from the school and reenrolled them in the public-school system, where she says they are doing much better. This was the case, she said, for many of the low-income students at Alpha Brownsville. (Price and 2 Hour Learning did not reply to detailed questions from the Lever about her claims.) The school has not released precise student attrition data — and whether the departure of struggling students is accounted for in its public metrics of success.

For her part, the mother is frustrated by Price’s constant use of Brownsville as a “selling point” for underserved families. “For minorities or low-income people, she would always bring up Brownsville as the ace in her pocket,” she said. “It’s not true.”

By the time her family left Alpha, the mother said the school’s recruitment efforts had shifted more to SpaceX families. The company now describes the school as “SpaceX meets next-gen learning” in job advertisements.

While Price has her critics — whom she addresses as her “haters” in videos on Instagram — she also has deep-pocketed allies. Although she often references the humble beginnings of her first Alpha school, which operated for a time out of a garage and a friend’s house, the story of 2 Hour Learning is hardly one of rags to riches.

Ambitions Unbound

The billionaire Joe Liemandt — once ordained by conservative pundit Bari Weiss as the “godfather of Austin tech” — tends to stay out of the limelight. His company, Trilogy, has made billions by quietly acquiring a portfolio of software companies since he founded it in the 1990s.

From time to time, Liemandt has exercised his political influence in Austin, influence that has grown as the city has transformed over the last decade into a hub for tech and venture capital. He spent big in the 2022 Austin mayor’s race to successfully elect moderate Democrat Kirk Watson over his more progressive rival. He also helped fund a right-wing challenger to the county’s relatively more progressive incumbent district attorney last year (the challenger, despite a dark-money influx, ultimately lost).

It’s not clear precisely when Liemandt first met MacKenzie and her husband. Still, Andrew Price is a Trilogy executive and appears to have worked at Liemandt’s company for many years, rising (according to one online résumé) from software developer to chief financial officer. Price also serves as the CFO at ESW Capital, a venture capital firm owned by Liemandt that invests in software start-ups.

By all indications, Liemandt and Trilogy are bankrolling the 2 Hour Learning operation. Liemandt has called himself the “principal” of the Austin-based Alpha School and has given talks about the school’s results — but his name is absent from most marketing materials, allowing MacKenzie Price to serve as the company’s primary public representative.

According to the Alpha privacy policy, the parent company behind the small collection of Texas private schools is Legacy of Education Inc., a Texas company that as recently as 2022 was registered as a subsidiary of Trilogy, public business filings show. (Its owner is now listed as a Delaware holding company.) Job postings for various positions with the schools and with 2 Hour Learning have been disseminated by Trilogy.

Legacy of Education is also listed as the owner of 2Hr Learning Inc., the company that Price says she cofounded. Trilogy has applied for a patent for “2 Hour Learning” and also owns 2 Hour Learning’s proprietary AI software. One AI company, Eigen, says in marketing material that it developed an “autonomous writing tutor” for Trilogy to be used at Alpha School.

Liemandt did not reply to a request for comment from the Lever.

The Prices’ dealings with Liemandt have brought them scrutiny before. In May 2023, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin (R) received a $1 million donation from a mysterious Texas donor, around the same time that Youngkin did a favor for Texas governor Greg Abbott. Reporters tracked the money back to Liemandt, via a shell company called “Future of Education LLC” — the same name as the podcast Price had launched earlier that year.

The Prices’ ties to a shadowy power player like Liemandt were not as problematic when they were only running a few small private schools. But recently, MacKenzie Price has had her sights set on charter schools — which are funded publicly though operated independently of the public school system. As she has tried to expand, some state education authorities have raised concerns about the dark-money interests upon which her model relies.

Price and 2 Hour Learning have submitted charter applications to at least five states under the name “Unbound Academy.” In Arkansas and Pennsylvania, Unbound indicated that “general services” would be provided by Trilogy, which would operate as a vendor. Those applications also indicated that Unbound had secured private grants totaling around $2 million to initially fund the schools from a shell company in Delaware called YYYYY, LLC, which is described as an “affiliate” of 2 Hour Learning.

As Meyer, the education consultant, pointed out in his piece on Unbound, these materials raised conflict-of-interest concerns. Andrew Price is listed as a member of the governing board in charter schools’ applications while also serving as CFO of Trilogy, the schools’ proposed main vendor. MacKenzie Price, too, would be a board member while also working for 2 Hour Learning, which is also described as a vendor.

Not all education authorities have been convinced by such proposals. The Pennsylvania Department of Education issued a scathing denial letter in January to Unbound’s charter application, noting that the school had “failed to provide even a list of courses that would be offered to students” and excluded entire subjects mandated under Pennsylvania academic standards (health, world languages, social studies) from its curriculum entirely.

Officials in Arkansas, North Carolina, and Utah also denied Unbound Academy’s requests to offer charters. (In response, Price complained on Instagram that “I’m honestly just flabbergasted . . . bewildered. . . . The line of questioning and the concerns of these state charter boards are just beyond me.”)

But Price found better success in Arizona, which green-lit Unbound Academy’s virtual charter proposal in December 2024.

It’s not so surprising that Arizona is the first state where Price will expand into the public-school system. More than 20 percent of public-school students are enrolled in charters in Arizona, the second-highest level in the country. Charter governance in the state, meanwhile, has been plagued for years by accusations of fraud and lax standards, though reform efforts have largely gone nowhere.

At the same time, Arizona was the first state to roll out a universal private voucher program, in which public education money is diverted, via $7,500 tax credits per student, to pay private-school tuition. (There are already accusations of fraud now following this program as well.)

Despite the ongoing school budget crisis that this tax credit measure has caused since the 2022 launch, the state’s program is becoming the new model for voucher programs across the country. Copycat programs have since been launched in Texas, Utah, and Florida, among other states — all of which, critics warn, rob public schools of needed resources and redirect them to private schools, with little oversight.

“What we’re seeing is the draining of public resources and reorienting toward the market,” Watters said.

In states where Price has found success offering her services as an alternative to decimated public education systems, her company’s hyperfocus on teaching students entrepreneurship takes on a dystopian quality. In her schools, which prioritize private interests in education, students are celebrated for their online followings, developing AI chatbots, and gamified apps.

This is all part of Price’s plan. She calls it an “educational renaissance.”