Is Alpha School actually disruptive? Probably not—at least not in the way Clayton Christensen defined the term. Alpha’s schools are expensive, high-end, and competing directly with elite private schools. That is almost the opposite of a classic disruptive foothold. But there may be something afoot that at least has disruptive potential underneath the school: Timeback, Alpha’s learning platform. The last wave of edtech largely failed because schools bolted new technology onto old learning models. Alpha took a different approach. It redesigned the “airframe” around the technology—how time is used, how adults work with students, how motivation is structured, and how progress is monitored. Now Alpha is increasingly building more of the curriculum itself, which may be a sign that its platform needs tighter integration to keep improving and serve more-demanding contexts. The real question, then, isn’t whether Alpha’s $65,000 school is disruptive.