Seventeen-year-old Judson Dowell scans through his laptop on a Thursday morning. He reviews math models, checks in on a forensic science class, rehearses a mock postgame interview for a public speaking class and finishes reading a scene in Beowulf. Before noon, he’ll be done with classes for the day and taking batting practice on the baseball diamond.
In a separate classroom on the same campus, 13-year-old Jackson Luikart has his earbuds in. His assignments for the day include pre-algebra, biology and the short story Frankenstein. He struggles with reading but he’s improving, he says, and he can’t wait to shag some fly balls once he answers questions about Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel.
This day is like any other for Judson and Jackson and 50 other male students at The Bennett School, an AI-powered baseball academy. The academic model, designed by Austin-based Alpha School, offers classroom instruction for two hours a day, taught by artificial intelligence tutors and individualized for each student. The rest of the day includes lunch — they are teenage boys, after all — strength and conditioning and baseball practice.
Judson’s mom Brandi Dowell, a commodities trader, co-founded the school last August with Texas A&M University professor Gregg Bennett.
“I just kind of got to a point where I couldn’t take it anymore with the schools,” Dowell said. She reached out to Bennett because her four sons — ages 13, 15, 17, and 19 — had played for him in the 12 Select Baseball Academy. Dowell’s eldest son is a sophomore at the University of Texas; the younger three are enrolled at The Bennett School. Judson has committed to Rice University’s baseball program in the fall.
“You can point to many reasons why our public schools are sub-optimal, but what it mostly had to do with, because we’ve done private school too, is that the traditional educational model is really inefficient and wastes a lot of the kids’ time,” Dowell said. “The kids are held hostage in the classroom for seven or eight hours a day, which doesn’t make sense to me anymore.”
Critics have suggested that AI education models undermine teacher expertise and critical thinking, while increasing screen time and failing to meet a child’s need for social interaction. Lora Kaldaras, assistant professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Houston, has said that AI can personalize certain instructional tasks but it should complement teachers rather than replace them.
In a recent television interview with CBS, Kate Johanns of the Association of Texas Professional Educators questioned the Alpha model’s reliance on AI instead of certified teachers.
“It may work well in some instances, but I think the benefit of a good teacher is the ability to differentiate instruction,” Johanns said. “The other thing that I think AI might miss is the ability to form relationships with parents.”
“It’s Not For Everyone”
An observer at The Bennett School can see there’s plenty of social interaction. The seniors mentor the younger kids, and many of the students carpool to and from school together. While the students are on their laptops for at least two hours every morning, that’s actually less screen time than they’d have in a public school in some cases, Dowell says.
“I do understand people’s concern of wanting a teacher to connect with their kid,” she said. “If you had a one-on-one ratio of one teacher per student, that would be my preference too, but that is not really feasible.”
The students at Bennett do Measures of Academic Progress testing, operated by the not-for-profit Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) used by many Texas public schools. Dowell said that recent test results showed that some students at Bennett tested up to 11 times higher than the national average for their grade level.
Alpha schools like Bennett are accredited by Cognia, a nonprofit, voluntary certification program that validates charter and private schools’ commitment to quality education, continuous improvement, and high standards, according to its website. Evaluations are based on student performance, stakeholder engagement and learning environments.
Dowell acknowledges that AI learning is not for everyone, but says it works especially well for students who have the self-discipline to stay focused on their lessons for a fixed amount of time. They’re motivated by the “reward” of getting to play ball once they finish their lessons, she explained.
All of Bennett’s students came into the program with educational gaps, she said, because they missed key elements during the COVID-19 pandemic when they were homebound with no teachers or assigned schoolwork for over a year. The AI model evaluated their comprehension in each subject and provided a fast-paced option for them to learn what they’d missed.
Jackson said he was 6 years old when COVID peaked, so when he transferred from Santa Fe Junior High to The Bennett School as a seventh-grader, his reading was at a second-grade level. In a traditional public school, that learning gap may have been overlooked, advocates for the AI model say.
“Reading is not my strong suit,” the teen said as he pulled up Frankenstein on his laptop. “I already did this lesson yesterday but I have to do it again because I didn’t answer the questions right. It gives you a debrief of what you got wrong and lets you retake it.”
Alpha Director of Communications Anna Davlantes said students at the Alpha academies learn core curriculum as required by the state, but because it’s personalized, they learn it faster and in a more efficient manner. The AI model builds up a child’s knowledge block by block, like a Jenga tower. “If you have a shaky foundation, at some point it’s going to fall,” she said.
“In most classrooms, kids fall behind and the schools never go back to catch them up,” she said. “They develop learning gaps. All of us have them. As soon as the class moves on and you get an 87 on a test, that means you don’t understand 13 percent of the material.”
The AI model recognizes when a student doesn’t understand fractions, for example, and it reviews the material with them until they grasp it. “It moves on at your pace,” Davlantes said. “They take tests regularly with constant, immediate feedback.”
Accelerated Academics and Elite Athletics
The Bennett School campus is at the Baseball USA stadium on Sam Houston Parkway and while it has the capacity to expand, enrollment is currently limited to male baseball players in seventh grade through high school.
Thirteen other Texas Sports Academy facilities offer similar learning models, including basketball schools in Houston and Richmond, and a baseball academy in Pearland.
The Bennett School is in its first year of operation so its success rate can’t be measured yet but all the boys currently enrolled want to play college ball and most aspire to play professionally, Dowell said. The school is advertised as offering “accelerated academics and elite athletics.”
Dowell said she remembers a childhood friend who was a ballerina and homeschooled while she trained for performances and traveled across the country. An alternative schooling option has been the norm for years for Olympic athletes who train in gymnastics or figure skating and fine arts protégés who go to The Juilliard School, she said.
“Those kids have been doing this for years to focus on their craft and focus on their passion,” she said. “If someone is going to [Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts] so they can focus on performing arts, I don’t see anyone losing their mind over that. Anybody who says this is not a real school, I mean, they’re going to college. That’s a super-critical important priority for us. We want everyone to graduate and go on to college.”
Karson Reeder and Jeffrey “JT” Darden used to compete against each other and left their respective high schools — Tomball and Cypress Woods — to spend their senior years at Bennett. Karson is committed to the University of Texas; JT will play at Oklahoma State University.
“For me, it was just about getting more reps,” JT said. “When I go to college next year, it’s going to be tough to start as a freshman. Not being in the classroom for eight hours, I can hone in on baseball skills and focus on that part of my game while taking care of the schoolwork pretty fast.”
Karson said he threw 300 innings in his first three years of high school. The switch to Bennett allows him to monitor his arm and ensure that he’s healthy for a long baseball career.
Tuition at The Bennett School is $15,000. When the campus opened last fall, all students were offered $10,000 vouchers. Under the state’s new voucher program, eligible students can apply for $10,000 toward their tuition each year going forward, but there’s no guarantee that students at Bennett will qualify to take advantage of the voucher program.
For younger students in the area who like the AI learning model, a K-8 facility for girls and boys is set to open in The Woodlands this fall. It’s one of 20 AI academies that Alpha has opened across the country, including learning centers in Austin, Brownsville and Fort Worth.
The students at The Woodlands Alpha School will spend the mornings studying core curriculum with an AI tutor and afternoons in workshops that “nurture creativity, teach real-world life skills and fuel individual passions,” according to the website. Tuition at the school is $40,000 and it’s not eligible for vouchers.
Davlantes said the students at the baseball academies learn useful life skills like financial literacy and how to change a tire. They can also join a workshop on announcing play-by-play for a sports broadcast. “These are kids who love baseball,” she said. “They get to lean into their passion in a really unusual way,” she said.
Last week at The Bennett School, Coach Russel Reeder, who heads up the baseball program, gave the kids a pep talk before they started their daily lessons, briefly touching on some of the criticism they’re getting from other schools and their baseball teams. Some of the opposing teams’ coaches have questioned whether the Bennett Rebels should be playing in a tournament in Lake Charles this week, but Reeder said it’s OK if those games get canceled.
They’re still planning to host teams from Canada later this month at the Houston field and they’ve got games scheduled against AI schools from Florida and California.
“We knew when we started this program that nobody was going to appreciate it,” Reeder said. “It bucks the system. It’s a little different. You chose to be here because this is what you love to do and what you want to do. You have everything at your fingertips to be great at it. If they don’t want to play us, that’s fine.”
The Bennett School isn’t trying to win championships, Reeder said. It wants to prepare students for college ball and baseball careers. If a team backs out of a game, the Bennett Rebels will just scrimmage each other, referring to the contests as “Iron Sharpens Iron.”
“We want to put y’all against each other and have a program that follows a collegiate professional path,” Reeder said. “We’re going to give you the best opportunities to be successful and follow your dreams and accomplish your goals.”
The Bennett School hasn’t received widespread criticism from educators, Dowell said. Those who seem to have a problem with it are high school baseball coaches whose talent is getting poached, she said.
“If anybody is upset about it, it doesn’t really impact us,” she said. “It’s truly not for everybody. Sometimes I get calls from people who are interested and it’s like they want me to talk them into it. I’m not looking to twist anyone’s arm or give them some kind of hard sales pitch.”
Dowell said her son Judson’s coach at Lamar High School was disappointed to lose a good player but said he wanted the student athletes to have the best opportunities for their future.
Can Students Learn Core Subjects in Two Hours Per Day?
It’s clear that the families who have chosen The Bennett School believe in the academic model. Some families have come from as far away as Midland and rented a home together in Houston, where the kids live year-round and a parent rotates so they’re supervised at all times.
Dowell invested some money out of pocket to start up the school and acknowledged that the academy is not making a profit because of the scholarships they offered to get it running. That’s not what it’s about, she said.
“I think what created the sense of urgency for me was having a college kiddo who’s trying to decide what he wants to do with his life,” she said. “Because I am in financial markets as my real job, I’ve seen that the AI revolution is happening at warp speed and the economy that these kids are going to be entering into is going to be very different from the economy we entered into out of college.”
There are no teachers in the AI schools, but classroom “guides” are assigned to motivate students to become self-driven learners, according to the Alpha website. Dowell said the students at Bennett don’t typically ask each other for help with their lessons. They can book an academic coaching call if they need to talk to a person to walk them through something, but they rarely take advantage of it, she said.
There are four full-time guides at The Bennett School and several coaches. Dowell can track on her laptop which students have a test planned for a particular day and whether they’ve finished their lessons before they hit the baseball field.
It’s a more efficient method than what Dowell previously had to do: watch YouTube videos to comprehend what her kids were learning so she could help them with their homework. “I’m a math person, but I never learned the Lattice method,” she said.
Dowell said her seventh grader will probably have finished his high school academic requirements by the time he’s 16. The transfer portal and eligibility requirements for college athletes are complicated, Dowell said, so the students have to be careful about earning too many college credits too early, but if her son decides at some point that he doesn’t want to pursue baseball, “he’ll be so competitive academically that he can do whatever he wants to do.”
As for social interaction and learning to communicate with their parents, the kids are done with lessons and their workouts by 3 p.m., so that gives them more time for family dinners and hanging out with friends. “It’s a much more balanced lifestyle” than getting up at 5:30 a.m. for a morning workout, spending all day in class waiting for the bell to ring, then going to practice or a game and coming home to a mountain of homework, Dowell said.
“The name of the academic platform is ‘Time Back,’ and it really does give them their time back,” she said.
JT says he spends more time with his girlfriend now than he did when they were at the same school. Karson says when he gets home in the afternoon, he takes a nap or plays golf with his dad. “There has been a lot more family time,” he said.
Dowell said she’s been pleasantly surprised by how well the kids are performing on and off the field and how quickly she and her co-founder were able to get a baseball-focused AI school up and running.
“I never in a million years would have dreamed that I’d open a school and run it, but here I am at 52 years doing just that,” she said. “I wanted something better for my kids. My husband and I had been following Alpha School for years but it was in Austin and it didn’t have a baseball team.”
While some students thrive in a 4,000-person high school, that’s also not for everyone, Dowell added. “This is not us versus them,” she said. “It’s about parents making the choice of what is best for their kids.”
Jackson, the 13-year-old outfielder, said he’s not only becoming a better baseball player, but he’s also making up for lost time academically.
“This is a much better opportunity for learning,” he said. “[In public school], I would be done in 10 minutes and just sit around for 45 minutes when I could have been working on other subjects.”
This article appears in Private: Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2026.