AI-powered U.S. private school generates faulty lessons
Alpha School in Texas used AI to replace human teachers and generate lessons, but the system produced hallucinations, errors, and illogical content that confused students and undermined learning. Students were placed under surveillance and rigid performance pressures without adequate human support, and one child experienced psychological distress and weight loss; IXL terminated the school's account for violating terms of service.
What happened
Reports from former employees and internal documentation revealed that AI-generated lessons at Alpha School in Austin and Brownsville, Texas frequently produced faulty lesson plans, hallucinated facts, contained ambiguous wording, illogical multiple-choice answers and errors that fail to meet standardised test expectations.
Students were forced to hit rigid AI-set goals without sufficient human support, and their performance was tracked using surveillance techniques. One 9-year-old was assigned more than 20 repetitions of the same multiplication problem by IXL software, and after spending hours completing it with parental help, was told she had fallen further behind her targeted goals.
The school's AI was reportedly trained by scraping data from other online courses without permission. IXL terminated Alpha School's account in July 2024, stating it violated terms of service and that IXL is not intended as a replacement for trained teachers.
Reported impact
Former employees described feeling anxious and betrayed when assessments did not logically match questions because they could not trust whether exams were valid measures of student knowledge.
A 9-year-old student lost significant weight in a short time due to stress, stopped eating lunches to catch up on IXL work, and became distressed about the rigid learning targets, telling her parents she would rather die than continue.
Index analysis
The core problem was the decision to build a school model that replaces much human teaching and quality control with generative AI while treating pupils and their data as training material. Leaders promoted the idea that all educational content is obsolete and that AI could fully personalise learning.
Internal notes reportedly show that staff knew the AI had a significant hallucination and error rate yet still used AI to check AI-generated lessons, meaning flawed outputs were allowed to correct themselves instead of being systematically reviewed by qualified educators.
Governance controls
Transparency to parents and students appears limited: they were sold high test scores and 2-hour school days, while internal accounts suggest many students needed more time and human tutoring to compensate for AI shortcomings.
The alleged scraping and reuse of other platforms' educational content without permission, and IXL cutting ties with the school, indicate weak governance around data sourcing, intellectual property, and compliance.
Classification
Sources and evidence
Sources not yet published
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