By Cara Lombardo

Billionaire Bill Ackman has a new fascination: a fast-growing private school that eschews lessons on diversity, equity and inclusion and uses artificial intelligence to speed-teach children in two hours.

Alpha School is launching a New York City location in September, and the investor and social-media commentator has been acting as something of an ambassador for the institution, according to people familiar with the matter.

On Friday, Ackman is set to appear with Alpha's co-founder, its principal and others on a panel discussion at his Hamptons home. The panel on K-12 education will be moderated by former financier Michael Milken as part of the Milken Institute's Hamptons Dialogues.

Alpha School, which calls its teachers "guides," says it uses artificial intelligence-enabled software to help students complete core subjects in just two hours daily. It claims students learn twice as much as those in traditional schools despite the condensed days.

The schedule allows students to do hands-on activities in the afternoon, which the school says help them build life skills. These include 5-mile bike rides "without stopping" for kindergartners, and exploring personal hobbies through AI-generated plans.

The school also strives to keep the hot-button social issues that have divided grade schools and colleges across the country out of its classrooms entirely, co-founder MacKenzie Price said in an interview.

"We do not let anything -- political, social issues -- come in the way," Price said. "We stay very much out of that."

Alpha's guides come from a variety of backgrounds and don't typically have teaching degrees, Price said.

Price co-founded Alpha School over a decade ago and has since become a social-media influencer who shares regular videos with more than 900,000 Instagram followers lambasting the traditional education system.

Alpha has existing locations in Texas, Florida and California. It is opening a school for grades kindergarten through eight in downtown Manhattan and launching schools in Arizona, North Carolina, Virginia and California this year. Next year it plans to open schools in other locations, including Puerto Rico.

The new schools aim to launch with 30 or so "founding families," most of whom pay between $40,000 and $65,000 per student, depending on the location. That is in line with other private schools in New York.

Ackman runs the investment firm Pershing Square, which manages roughly $20 billion and has big stakes in companies including Uber and Chipotle. More recently, the firm bought nearly half of the real-estate firm Howard Hughes, which Ackman has envisioned as a modern-day Berkshire Hathaway, referencing the company of his longtime idol, Warren Buffett.

Ackman, who regularly weighs in on everything from fine dining to the war in Gaza on X, has uncharacteristically not said a word about Alpha School on the social-media platform. But that could change: A person close to the school said Ackman is poised to become a "de facto ambassador."

He is already enmeshed in the New York education scene and sits on the board of trustees of Horace Mann, one of the city's most storied private schools. Horace's head of school, Thomas Kelly, plans to attend the Friday panel discussion, people familiar with the matter said.

Ackman first learned about Alpha School at this year's Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting after speaking to Sahil Bloom, author of "The Five Types of Wealth," some of the people familiar with the matter said. Ackman found its structure, with the bulk of the day not instruction-based, to be innovative. He considered its stance on DEI and avoidance of concepts such as the gender continuum to be a bonus.

He has since been hyping up Alpha School to parents in his social circle and took a small group to visit its Austin, Texas, location, some of the people said.

Ackman has been an outspoken critic of DEI programs and has applauded the Trump administration's crackdown on such efforts. His prolific tweets accusing Harvard University of failing to curb campus antisemitism after Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel helped prompt the school's then- president to resign.

He will appear on the panel Friday alongside Price and Joe Liemandt, a Texas-based billionaire who Alpha says has served as its school principal for the past two years. Liemandt is the founder of Trilogy Software, which became part of his private-equity firm, ESW Capital, and has developed software used by Alpha.

Price said that over time she plans to explore raising external investment funds to continue the school's expansion. Ackman isn't an investor.

Write to Cara Lombardo at cara.lombardo@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 20, 2025 07:00 ET (11:00 GMT)

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