Arizona Charter School Pioneers AI-Driven Education, Sparking Debate on Future of Teaching

AI educators are coming to this school - and it's part of a trend

The company has only tested this idea at private schools before but claims it hugely increases student academic success. One school in Arizona is trying out a new educational model built around AI and a two-hour school day. When Arizona's Unbound Academy opens, the only teachers will be artificial intelligence algorithms in a perfect utopia or dystopia, depending on your point of view. The Unbound Academy's unconventional approach to teaching needed approval from the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools, which it received in a contentious 4-3 vote. Students in fourth through eighth grade will be enrolled in the program, in which academic lessons for two hours a day will be delivered by personalized AI, which will rely on platforms including IXL and Khan Academy. The idea pitched by Unbound is that it will make students happier and smarter, with more time to explore life skills and passions. During those two hours, the students will be going through adaptive learning programs. While they study science, math, or literature, the AI will track their progress in real time. Depending on their performance, the AI will then adapt the curriculum's style and difficulty to help them succeed. That might mean slowing down and spending more time on some subjects or upping the ante and making some parts of the educational plan more difficult. While academic lessons are condensed, the rest of the day is filled with hands-on workshops in areas like financial literacy, entrepreneurship, and public speaking. Instead of traditional teachers, students are guided by mentors who lead these sessions and help develop practical skills that aim to go beyond the classroom. Unbound Academy has tested this concept elsewhere in similar programs at private schools in Texas and Florida under the name Alpha Schools. They claim that students in these programs learn twice as much in half the time. Arizona officials are now betting this success will work in public schools, albeit charter schools instead of standard educational institutes. This isn't Arizona's first foray into AI education. Arizona State University (ASU) worked with OpenAI to incorporate ChatGPT as a kind of faculty member. The difference is that ASU has AI helping students to write academic papers and aiding professors in running more complex simulations and studies. It's not actually running any classes. What Unbound Academy is doing is closer to a trial run in the UK. London's David Game College is running an AI-taught class as part of its new Sabrewing program, bringing 20 GCSE students into the program, which employs AI platforms and virtual reality headsets to guide their learning. The idea that AI allows for hyper-personalized learning and can make for more successful students is, of course, appealing. The extra time freed up for life-skills workshops is another selling point, preparing students for challenges outside the classroom. But it's all too easy to see the shadow cast by what's lost without human teachers. AI can't replace the mentorship, encouragement, and emotional support that define a great teacher, at least not in any of its current forms. AI may be able to boost a teacher's ability to help students, but it's objectively ridiculous to claim AI as it is now can be better than a human teacher. It may be cheaper for a district to turn to a for-profit company in the short term, but it's a shortsighted way of considering the value of educators. For now, students at Unbound Academy will be the pioneers of this new approach. Everyone will learn something from the result, one way or another.

A New School Will Teach Children Use AI Instead of Human Teachers

Class is in session, kids. Only the teacher's not in attendance. On Monday, the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools approved an application for an unorthodox virtual academy. Its selling point? There are no traditional human instructors. Instead, the bulk of the lessons will be handled by an AI program, KJZZ reports. The establishment, Unbound School, is part of a network of charter schools that also operate in Texas and Florida under the name Alpha School. Using its buzzword-laden "2 Hour Learning" model, it promises to teach kids at twice the pace of classrooms led by those stodgy old pedagogues. Perhaps just as disarming as its credulous reliance on AI to intellectually nurture children at a critical stage of their development -- the school is initially teaching kids in fourth through eighth grade -- is the institution's eagerness to totally do away with flesh and blood teachers. "Imagine starting a school and declaring, 'We won't have any academic teachers.' We did exactly that!" reads the Alpha School's white paper, as highlighted by our sister publication Popular Science. Kids attending these schools start their day with two hours of instruction on topics led by the Unbound's purportedly specialized AI program, which can allegedly adjust the learning plan as it goes to tailor to how a child is doing on each subject. The AI is supposed to be different from the likes of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini models and more suited for teaching, according to KJZZ. The specifics on this are hazy, though, and it's unclear whose technology undergirds this AI. There will be adults present to supervise the children, but not to provide instruction -- just "motivation" and "emotional support," the report said. To fill these roles, as PopSci found, the charter schools want people who think of themselves as "brand consultants." After their AI inculcation session, the kids are let loose to work on extracurricular tasks where they can apply the wisdom they gleaned from a machine learning model. "The morning is taken over through our AI learning, and in the afternoon they get the opportunity to really hone in on those life skills," Dean of Parents Tim Eyerman told KJZZ -- life skills being stuff like teamwork, entrepreneurship, leadership and social skills. Using AI as the primary means of instructing children is questionable at best, and dangerous at worst. All large language models have a tendency to "hallucinate," or to make up facts. The risk of them providing incorrect information -- maybe even more authoritatively than a human teacher would -- is unavoidable. Similarly, AI models frequently go off the rails, defying their own instructions. Sometimes that looks like the models breaking character and saying horrendous stuff they're not supposed -- like in the case of chatbots on the platform Character.AI that emotionally abused young teens, encouraging eating disorders and suicide. Above all, there's nothing to suggest that an AI will understand the nuances of dealing with children better than a human would, let alone a professional in that field.

Arizona School’s Curriculum Will Be Taught by AI, No Teachers

The state's charter school board approved an application on Monday from Unbound Academy to open a school with a two-hour per day academic curriculum set by AI. Remember that one teacher who made going to school fun and inspired you to pursue your passions? Students at a new charter school in Arizona won't, because they don't get to have teachers. Instead, the two hours of academic instruction they receive each dayâ€"yes, just two hoursâ€"will be directed entirely by AI. By a 4-3 margin, the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools on Monday approved an application from Unbound Academy to open a fully online school serving grades four through eight. Unbound already operates a private school that uses its AI-dependent "2hr Learning" model in Texas and is currently applying to open similar schools in Arkansas and Utah. Under the 2hr Learning model, students spend just two hours a day using personalized learning programs from companies like IXL and Khan Academy. "As students work through lessons on subjects like math, reading, and science, the AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues to optimize the difficulty and presentation of content," according to Unbound's charter school application in Arizona. "This ensures that each student is consistently challenged at their optimal level, preventing boredom or frustration." Spending less time on traditional curriculum frees up the rest of students' days for life-skill workshops that cover "financial literacy, public speaking, goal setting, entrepreneurship, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving," according to the Arizona application. Teachers are replaced by "guides" who lead those workshops. The student handbook for the Alpha School, the charter school Unbound's founders operate in Texas, claims that its students "learn twice as much as standard school students while only spending 2 hours per day on academics." Thanks to financial support and lobbying by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, many public and private schools have integrated personalized learning software like IXL and Khan Academy into their teacher-led curriculum, although experts have questioned whether the programs provide the educational boosts they boast about in marketing material. In its Arizona application, Unbound says its bold claims about how much its students will learn are based on the experiment it's running on students in Texas, inspired by Elon Musk. "The founders of Unbound Academic Institute began with opening a high-end private school, Alpha, for the same reason Elon Musk started with higher-end Teslas: to create a product that generates insights and funding for future research and development," the company wrote in its application.

Arizona's getting an online charter school taught entirely by AI

Charter schools -- independently operated but publicly-funded -- typically get greater autonomy compared to traditional public schools when it comes to how subjects are taught. But Unbound Academy's application, which proposes an "AI-driven adaptive learning technology" that "condenses academic instruction into a two-hour window," is a first for the model. (Unbound's founders have been running a similar program at a "high-end private school" in Texas, which appears to be in-person.) Unbound's approach leans on ed-tech platforms like IXL and Khan Academy, and students engage with "interactive, AI-powered platforms that continuously adjust to their individual learning pace and style." There will be humans, just fewer of them, and maybe not actual accredited teachers: it will adopt a "human-in-the-loop" approach with "skilled guides" monitoring progress who can provide "targeted interventions" and coaching for each student. Academic instruction is whittled down to just two hours. The remainder of the students' day will include "life-skills workshops" covering areas such as critical thinking, creative problem-solving, financial literacy, public-speaking, goal-setting, and entrepreneurship. The online-only school targets students from fourth to eighth grades.

Charter school is replacing teachers with AI

'Imagine starting a school and declaring, 'We won't have any academic teachers.' We did exactly that!' An Austin-based national charter school network offers K-12 students an AI-guided education. Operating under a model called "2 Hour Learning," a company of the same name advertises accelerated pace, app-based classes designed to teach students at "2X" the speed of a traditional classroom, whatever that means. Parents are promised that the system works for 80-90 percent of children, and that students consistently rank in the NWEA's 90th percentile. Apart from generating top-ranking national standardized test takers, however, one of 2 Hour Learning's other explicit goals is the removal of teachers from classrooms. "Imagine starting a school and declaring, 'We won't have any academic teachers.' We did exactly that!" reads a portion of the company's white paper. Instead, affiliate charter schools seek applicants for positions like a "High School Guide." These $50/hr employees will help design "creative, immersive learning experiences that teach students to leverage cutting-edge AI tools and innovative strategies," among other responsibilities. "Think of yourself as a brand consultant for 50 startups simultaneously, guiding diverse branding needs from business to personal expertise positioning," reads one job listing. Apart from students' brand development, the opening also stipulates candidates must possess "demonstrated expertise in social media management, content creation, and audience engagement." Outside the classroom, one charter seeks a $100/hr "Gifted & Talented Education Evangelist" who will be tasked with "identifying and creating viral-worthy content that challenges the status quo around gifted education." To accomplish this, the evangelist will need to set "quality standards" while "improving AI-generated content to amplify our reach." Applicants must have at least 1,000 followers on social media. Alpha School -- the central umbrella for many of the 2 Hour Learning charters -- currently has locations in Texas and Florida, and plans to expand to other states ahead of the 2025-2026 school year. On December 16th, for example, the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools approved an application for an Alpha-affiliated "AI-based virtual academy" called Unbound Academy. Speaking with Phoenix public radio station KJZZ on Wednesday, Unbound's Dean of Parents, Tim Eyerman, described what students can expect outside their AI-overseen 2 Hour Learning sessions. Following each morning's designated two-hour learning module, students then spend their afternoons engaged with their human guides in work "to really hone in on those life skills" like entrepreneurship, leadership, teamwork, entrepreneurship, and socialization. KJZZ reports that 2 Hour Learning's AI system allegedly isn't based on OpenAI's GPT models or Google Gemini, although it's currently unclear who built the technology, and what datasets were used. Popular Science did not receive clarification after sending multiple requests to various 2 Hour Learning-affiliated schools at the time of writing. Tuition for each school varies by location. Unbound Academy, for example, advertises a $40,000 fee covering the upcoming 2025-2026 school year. A promotional video for another related charter called GT School promises to "take the top 10 percent of kids and turn them into the top one percent across all subjects" for $25,000 per year. "No one has ever dared to do this before," 2 Hour Learning's designers vow in their white paper.