雅思阅读 020 · Alpha School: Can AI Teach a Billion Kids?
改编自 Scientific American（Mary Randolph, 2026）。题型：选择题 + T/F/NG + 填空。难度：较难（Passage 3，约 900 词）。
🎧 课文朗读音频（约 1 分钟）
正文 Passage
When Carl Hendrick took his first ride in a Waymo, the self-driving taxi service, he thought it felt a lot like the future of education.
Hendrick is a senior learning scientist at Alpha School, a fast-growing private-school company where he trains artificial intelligence models to teach students — a process, he says, that is not unlike training a self-driving car.
For such a car, "it was just thousands and thousands of miles, training itself on data, and not just on a linear path. The challenge is in all the different eventualities, like the cyclist who's wobbling in the road, the kid running out," he says. "I think, in five or 10 years, a similar thing will happen in education where we train AI models on learning and all of kids' misconceptions and problems."
For Alpha School, the equivalents to the swerving bikes and unexpected pedestrians are more like misconceptions, learning differences or preteen classroom struggles. And the "cars" the company is testing have 10-year-olds in the backseat.
In theory, life at Alpha School looks like this: students spend two hours each morning — or more, if they do not meet their benchmarks — working with an AI tutor that adapts to each student's needs, assesses their progress and gives live feedback. In the afternoon, students work on "life skills" by attending workshops on topics that include coding, entrepreneurship and public speaking. Tuition at most campuses ranges from $40,000 to $75,000 per year.
And now Alpha is expanding. This fall the company plans to grow to roughly 50 campuses across the U.S., including 27 newly announced locations. Joe Liemandt, Alpha School's billionaire principal, wants to "reach a billion kids."
One in five U.S. students is chronically absent, and reading and math scores have been declining across the country for a decade. When used by a teacher, adaptive learning models like Alpha School's have shown promise in improving student performance. Alpha takes the idea considerably further, handing over much of academic instruction to software.
Alpha School has not released the underlying data behind its claims. But Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, who saw the school's math instruction model last year, says it resembles other, established adaptive-learning technologies.
In a 2025 randomised experiment conducted in an introductory physics course at Harvard University, some students used an adaptive AI tutoring model while others used in-class active learning strategies. When students used the tutoring model, the researchers found, their median learning gains were more than twice as high.
Kelly Miller, a Harvard professor who co-authored the study, says Alpha School's approach, which centres on active learning, is "better than what currently exists in K–12." But Miller uses AI and recorded lectures to cover basic material so that her in-person time with students can be spent on more complex work. If there is no teacher-student relationship — like at Alpha School, where adults supervising students generally are not trained educators — "what's the point?" she says.
Greg Kestin, lead author of the Harvard study, has similar concerns. If students learn and are assessed under similar conditions, he says, they can develop "brittle knowledge," performing well in that setting without being able to apply what they have learned elsewhere.
Gerald LeTendre, an educational policy researcher at Pennsylvania State University, says the "basic premise" of Alpha School is not wrong. But good tutoring and good teaching, he emphasises, are not equivalent. "There's no evidence in the literature that you can substitute a pure AI tutoring model and still achieve all of the multiple effects that one gets from studying in a classroom."
Hendrick admits Alpha School's model is "not perfect." But he argues that most kids are not getting a good teacher or instruction grounded in learning science in a classroom anyway. "You have massive variance in teacher quality and pupil outcomes in a way that most people would find shocking," he says. "The variance within schools between teacher quality is often greater than the variance between schools."
That is Hendrick's biggest argument for Alpha School's model as a solution: "You can't scale good teaching," he says. Software, Hendrick argues, can be updated across classrooms at once as new curriculum and instructional research emerges and can give feedback far faster than a teacher grading assignments one by one.
Software, of course, scales quite nicely — and so do its mistakes. This year a 404 Media investigation reported that some of the lessons in Alpha School's model were faulty; one former employee said, "Students were being treated like guinea pigs."
If you ask Alpha School, it's working. The data it has released show strong results. But that may reflect "who's attending the school, not the experience of the kid attending," says Andrew McEachin, an educational policy researcher. "These reports aren't designed so that you can draw specific inferences from them."
That question is becoming more pressing as Alpha grows. The company is also beginning to test versions of its model in public schools, where it will encounter a much broader mix of students.
题目 Questions
Questions 1-4: Choose the correct letter.
1. Hendrick compares training AI teachers to:
- A. writing textbooks
- B. training a self-driving car
- C. grading exams
- D. running a school
2. At Alpha School, students spend their mornings:
- A. playing sports
- B. working with an AI tutor
- C. attending lectures
- D. doing group projects
3. Miller says Alpha's approach is "better than what currently exists in K–12" but:
- A. it is too expensive
- B. it lacks a teacher-student relationship
- C. it does not use active learning
- D. it is not adaptive enough
4. "Brittle knowledge" (Kestin) means:
- A. students cannot apply what they learned elsewhere
- B. students forget everything quickly
- C. students do not study hard
- D. students prefer AI over teachers
Questions 5-8: T/F/NG
5. Alpha School has released all its data publicly.
6. The Harvard physics study found AI tutoring doubled learning gains.
7. LeTendre says AI tutoring can completely replace classroom teaching.
8. Some lessons in Alpha's model were reportedly faulty.
Questions 9-13: Complete the notes. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS.
- Tuition at Alpha School ranges from $40,000 to (9) ____________ per year.
- One in five U.S. students is (10) ____________ absent.
- Hendrick argues that you cannot scale (11) ____________.
- Software can give (12) ____________ far faster than a teacher.
- Alpha is testing its model in (13) ____________ schools.
答案 Answers
| 题号 | 答案 |
|---|---|
| 1 | B |
| 2 | B |
| 3 | B |
| 4 | A |
| 5 | FALSE（has not released the underlying data） |
| 6 | TRUE |
| 7 | FALSE（not equivalent） |
| 8 | TRUE |
| 9 | $75,000 |
| 10 | chronically |
| 11 | good teaching |
| 12 | feedback |
| 13 | public |
核心词汇
artificial intelligence / adaptive learning / tutor / curriculum / misconception / benchmark / entrepreneur / tuition / randomised / experiment / median / active learning / premise / brittle / variance / scale
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