If you've heard of Alpha School, you've heard the pitch: two hours of AI tutoring in the morning, life skills in the afternoon, no teachers, top-2 percent standardized test scores. It's the Austin, Texas, tech-money education project that's been profiled credulously and picked apart skeptically in roughly equal measure over the past year. The Trump administration's education secretary called the model "exemplary." CNN ran a long piece on it in January, asking "Is AI schooling the future of education — or a risky bet?"
G.T. School is the gifted-and-talented branch of the same network, just a few miles north of Austin's city limits. Pamela Hobart is its gifted-and-talented-education evangelist. Trained in philosophy and education at Columbia University's Teachers College, she spent years as a "philosophical life coach" before joining G.T. in spring 2025, after enrolling her own daughter at Alpha. She writes a Substack newsletter called Above Grade Level and is, by her own description, a partisan: She thinks academic acceleration works, that screens are tools rather than poisons, and that most American schools are quietly lying to most American parents.
