The Future is Now
AI replaces teachers at Arizona charter school
A top complaint among teachers is that their students spend too much time engaged with their devices.
One school has a solution: Eliminate the teachers and let the devices teach the kids.
Here’s the story out of Arizona:
The Arizona State Board for Charter Schools’ approved an application for an AI-based virtual academy on Monday.
Unbound Academy, which also operates in Texas and Florida under the name Alpha Schools, claims that kids can learn twice as much using a two-hour learning plan that gets customized by an AI program instead of a traditional human teacher in front of a classroom.
Kids begin their day with two hours of instruction on standard topics like language, math and science, guided by an AI that continuously adjusts the learning plan based on how the child is doing in each subject.
Yes, there will be adults around - but they are there for emotional and mental support.
After two hours of hyper-focused AI instruction, students can build life skills. One example the program sites:
“. . . narrating scenarios in the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.”
It’s not clear to me that Unbound Academy is a charter school. As near as I can tell, it is a private school charging in the neighborhood of $40,000 per year in tuition. As such, it is exempt from regulations that govern public schools operating from public funding. I’m going to contact the school to verify this information