MacKenzie Price has made headlines with a charter school that uses two hours of AI instead of human teachers, then expanded that model to cyber schools under the “Unbound Academic Institute” brand. Now she is awaiting approval from the Pennsylvania Department of Education that would bring that same cyber charter model to cash in on the commonwealth’s already-crowded, yet still profitable, cyber school marketplace.
Price, a Stanford graduate now living in Austin, Texas, started her entrepreneurial journey with Alpha Private Schools. In this glowing profile from Austin Woman, Price tells the origin story of Alpha Schools, starting with her own child:
“Very early on, I started noticing frustration around the lack of ability for the traditional model to be able to personalize anything,” she recalls. “About halfway through my daughter’s second grade year, she came home and said, ‘I don’t want to go to school tomorrow.’ She looked at me and she said, ‘School is so boring,’ and I just had this lightbulb moment. They’ve taken this kid who’s tailor-made to wanna be a good student, and they’ve wiped away that passion.”
Price, who has no previous experience in education, launched Alpha Schools about a decade ago, powered by a model that she soon spun off into its own company – 2 Hour Learning. She has thoughts about how long education needs to take, as she told Madeline Parrish of Arizona Republic:
“When you’re getting one-to-one personalized learning, it doesn’t take all day. Having a personal tutor is absolutely the best way for a student to learn.“
The snake oil pitch is even more direct on the company’s website:
“School is broken, and we’re here to fix it. 2 Hour Learning gives students an AI tutor that allows them to: Learn 2X in 2 Hours.”
The personal tutor in this case is a collection of computer apps. After two hours at the computer, students spend the rest of the day pursuing “personal interests” and joining in life skills workshops. There are no teachers in Alpha’s schools, but “guides” are on hand to provide motivation and support. Tuition at most of the Alpha campuses is $40,000 a year.
As Price tells an “interviewer” in one paid advertorial:
“Yes, it’s absolutely possible! Not only can they learn in two hours what they would learn all day in a traditional classroom, the payoffs are unbelievable! My students master their core curriculum through personalized learning in two hours. That opens up the rest of their day to focus on life skills and finding where their passions meet purpose. Students love it because it takes them away from the all-day lecture-based classroom model. Instead, my students are following their passions.“
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Price has been clear that “AI” in this case does not mean a ChatGPT type Large Language Model, but apps more along the lines of IXL Math or Khan Academy’s Khanmigo, that pitch themselves as being able to analyze student responses and pick a next assignment that fits, or perhaps recommend a video to explain a challenging point.
If that seems like an extraordinary stretch, Price has decided to go one better and turn that model into a virtual charter model. How that model would manage the “personal interest” afternoon structure is not entirely clear; one application promises “a blend of scheduled live interactions and self-managed projects.” As the application promises, “No Teachers, Just Guidance.”
And that model is the one Unbound wants to bring to Pennsylvania.
The model looks to be a highly profitable one. While MacKenzie Price is the public face of the company, with a big social media presence, at least some of the business savvy may come from Andrew Price, MacKenzie’s husband and co-founder of the business. Andrew is the Chief Financial Officer at Trilogy, Crossover, Ignite Technologies, and ESW Capital.
Crossover recruits employees, particularly for remote work. ESW is an private equity firm for one guy –Joe Liemandt, who made a huge bundle in the tech world; Leimandt also owns Trilogy. In 2021, Price’s boss was expressing some interesting thoughts about white collar jobs, as quoted in Forbes:
“Most jobs are poorly thought out and poorly designed—a mishmash of skills and activities . . . poor job designs are also quickly exposed with a move to remote work.“
In 2023, Liemandt was found slipping a million dollars to Republican Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial campaign, via Future of Education LLC, formed just the day before the donation. It turns out the address of that group was the Price home ; MacKenzie had launched the Future of Education podcast in February of 2023 (though her LinkedIn dates it to August).
All of this interconnectedness is part of how the game is played. The Unbound application to open a cyber charter in Pennsylvania includes:
“In support of its operations, Unbound Academy will collaborate with 2hr Learning, Inc. to deliver its adaptive learning platform, while Trilogy Enterprises will manage financial services, and Crossover Markets, Inc. will assist with recruiting qualified virtual educators.“
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In Pennsylvania, it’s not legal to run a charter school for profit. But the law says nothing about running the school as a non-profit while hiring other for-profit organizations to handle the operation of the school. In Unbound Academy we find the Prices hiring themselves to operate the school. And they’re not done yet.
YYYYY, LLC. will be the general and administrative service provider.
The President and Director of YYYYY, LLC. is Andrew Price. According to the application, YYYYY,LLC will provide a start-up donation for Unbound and then serve as its management organization.
The application was filed by Timothy Eyerman, the Dean of Parents at Alpha Private Schools.
So we have a total of five organizations involved in the proposed school, all tied to MacKenzie and Andrew Price, and all proposing to pass a pile of Pennsylvania taxpayer money back and forth.
And what a pile of money it is.
Unbound made applications in four other states—Arizona, North Carolina, Arkansas and Utah. Only Arizona approved the school. Three of those applications list proposed per-pupil fees that the Price’s school would pay to their 2 Hour Learning company for the teaching program:
– The North Carolina application estimates the fee as $2,000 – $2,500.
– The Arizona application lists a per-pupil fee of $2,000.
– The Arkansas application also lists a $2,000 fee.
– The Pennsylvania application lists a per-pupil fee of $5,500, which includes a $1,000 discount.
Trilogy would charge 2.5 percent of all revenues. In other applications, that amount is capped at $150,000 per year. In Pennsylvania, the proposed cap is $350,000.
The application offers no explanation of why a Pennsylvania cyber charter is so much more expensive, but the clear explanation is that Pennsylvania’s laws allow it.
While other states use a variety of formulas and oversight methods, Pennsylvania simply and generously funds cyber charters as if they were bricks and mortar charter schools. As pointed out by a 2022 report from the PA Charter Performance Center of Children First, of the 27 states that have cyber charters, none fund them as Pennsylvania does. Consequently, cyber charters in Pennsylvania rake in money hand over fist, spending excess funds on everything from extensive marketing to building a real estate empire.
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Nor have Pennsylvania taxpayers gotten bang for their many bucks. Cyber charters have repeatedly failed to serve students. The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University found that cybers have an “overwhelmingly negative impact” and that a year at a cyber charter left students a half year behind in English, and a full year behind in math. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, groups that exist only to promote charter schools, issued a report saying that cyber charters were in big trouble. The Thomas Fordham Institute, a group that promotes charter schools, issued a report highly critical of Ohio cyber charters. California’s cyber charter scandal was so bad that the state put a moratorium on new cyber charters, an example that Pennsylvania would do well to follow.
And yet, Unbound predicts extraordinary returns, promising in its application to rank academically in the top half of all Pennsylvania schools in Year Two (a feat never achieved by any of Pennsylvania’s more experienced cyber charters using actual remote teachers) and then the top quartile in Year Three. They promise achievement in financial literacy, public speaking, goal setting, grit and resilience, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving, plus mastery of core subjects at double the ordinary rate — all with students spending two hours a day on the computer and the rest of the day following their chosen path.
These claims are supported by no real research, but even if they were true, they are based on the Alpha Private Schools — schools that require students to take an admissions test, which charge $40,000, and which operate in physical buildings. Unbound is using apples to predict the taste of its oranges.
Unbound’s approach to cyber chartering is not only unproven — it hasn’t even been tested yet.
The application includes plans for staffing. In Year One, they call for 1 Head of School, 5 senior guides, and 10 junior guides, plus one special education guide. This is for a planned enrollment of 500 students.
There is no physical school in the plans, but Unbounded would briefly rent space for students to come take the PSSA test. The physical location listed in the application is a FedEx office located in a parking garage in Lancaster.
The application projects a budget balance of almost $1.5 million for year three; that’s all taxpayer dollars. That fund balance would continue to climb to over $5 million by year five, though that projection is based on growing enrollment by 500 students each year. Unbound plans to cover grades 4 through 8.
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What we have here is a proposal to start a cyber charter with no actual teachers and an academic program scheduled for only two hours of the day, with the rest of the school day involving life experience learning of some sort, independently managed. It is an untested model that three other states looked at and said, “No, thank you.” It would be trying to break into the Pennsylvania cyber charter field that is already crowded with over a dozen schools, many of which spend millions every year on marketing; Unbound’s marketing budget is capped at $350,000, which is peanuts for this market.
Pennsylvania taxpayers are already spending a billion dollars on cyber charter schools. Adding another cyber charter to Pennsylvania is like buying extra tap shoes for an octopus — a waste of money that isn’t going to help anyone.
The hearing for Unbound was held in November, and the public comment period has ended, so the Department of Education could be making a decision at any time. Let’s hope it’s a decision that looks out for the interests of Pennsylvania taxpayers and students.
