While public schools suffer budget cuts and unfunded mandates, billionaires are funding a start-up chain of private schools. It is not clear whether it will operate for profit or not.
“With its vision of transforming the elementary- and middle-school experience through personalized learning and smart operating systems, AltSchool, a start-up in San Francisco, has attracted top-tier technology investors.
“Last year, it raised $33 million from Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz, as well as from First Round Capital, John Doerr, Harrison Metal, Jonathan Sackler, Learn Capital and Omidyar Network.
“On Monday morning, AltSchool announced that it had raised an additional $100 million from Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Learn Capital and First Round Capital, along with a couple of major philanthropists: a donor-advised fund financed by Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Emerson Collective, an organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs that makes investments and grants in education and other endeavors, is also an investor.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Oh, you can be sure it will operate for the profit of the bullionarses who build it. That has nothing to do with whether it finagles the non-profit label or not.
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Tell me I’m wrong, but I see this experiment as being an introduction of a model that will ultimately wind up as a charter chain. Remember Rocketship Charters? The outcome wasn’t so good. I will predict that, once this new model has a year or two under its belt, the schools will become charters. Is there anything to stop them from applying for a charter, then just opening up in either the same or another location, bringing their presently enrolled students with them? With an advertised tuition of over $20,000, the school is not going to serve disadvantaged children. Why then, are so many people donating to get this off the ground?
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Gotta monetize those data sets – formerly known as children – as soon as possible!
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It is most definitely for-profit. Tons of tech, including full time audio and video recording of what goes on in classrooms.
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/altschool/
“Other people’s children” got even more complicated than it already was.
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After reading the articles, I’m under the impression that these are the ideal schools the well off tech people are building for their own children, “Montessori 2.0”, in their words. I’ll call it Waldorf in the cloud, combining a nurturing and less rule heavy style with their love of all things tech.
Since they have the vested interest of hoping to build it for their own children, that weeds out some bad ideas. Such as, the 100 student in a room tech teaching feed lot, thinking that they can invent a radical new model in no time, the 787 blunder. Plus, they recognize that no excuses, high discipline schools are not for everyone. So to them I say, hats off, good luck with your grand experiment, but where are the bean bag chairs?
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Nowhere in the linked Times article does it say anything about the founders sending their kids to these schools, which I seriously doubt they’d do.
Even if they did send their children to them, so what? B.F. Skinner used his own kids as guinea pigs for his first Skinner Boxes – an antecedent to charter chains like KIPP and Success Academy – and that neither justified nor validated them.
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The reason Public education SEEMS to be failing is because of the beaurocratic idea that if a school’s numbers drop, the school doesn’t need as much money to run. this idea is ludicrous because despite the drop in numbers, the costs remain the same. Those who crunch the numbers do not understand the difference between actual costs and ideal costs. Ideally, the cost would drop, yes. But realistically, they do not. instead, when the funding drops, the costs rise.
Sadly, combining schools don’t always work either. when people who have no experience teaching get involved in how things ought to be run, they always get things f.u.b.a.r. then they blame the school’s teachers or administration-or the system itself-for their screw ups.
Just because someone has more money than the average citizen does not mean they have more brains. it has been my experience that the more money someone has, the stupider they seem to be and the less realistic in their ideals they are. They want to run education like a business, and yet they are not the ones learning, nor are they the ones taking the damn tests. Would they all be willing to sit down and take the tests they want every child to take? and just because many of them grew up in charters or private schools does not mean that their style of education fits all or is a fix-all. it is not.
as a parent, I reject the hedge fund money men. they know nothing about reality. they only see in $ and cents. not common sense.
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Is this surprising? Does it take the whole private school movement a notch higher?
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Previous coverage has made it clear that Alt.School is for-profit. The operators have snookered gullible journalists into treating as credible their cocksure claims that they’re coming with apps and robotics and other technological wizardry that will revolutionize not just private but also public education. Right, folks. As your grandma told you, use the brains you were given.
Also, this outfit is being discussed as though it were all over the country. Actually, it apparently operates out of several small spaces in San Francisco proper, and is planning to open one in Brooklyn, which technically makes it “national,” but again, it’s just the highly gullible who are treating it like a nationwide operation.
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It’s for profit and they plan to sell it as a bundle of services to public schools.
“Ventilla believes the AltSchool network can grow to encompass hundreds of thousands of students, or more, some enrolled directly in the company’s micro-schools and others in schools connected to the AltSchool network. AltSchool’s early-stage expansion into Brooklyn and Palo Alto, already well under way, will be followed by a move into other “creative class” cities, full of well-educated parents with progressive values who can afford annual tuition that runs from $20,000 to $28,000, depending on the location. After that will come greater expansion, all across the country—not just to other cities but also to rural areas, where assembling enough students to fill a standard grade school can mean long car trips to and from school every day.”
I like this piece because they admit that the “personalized learning” model is very different for mid- and lower income schools. They admit that it’s a way to provide a cheaper version of what the private school kids get.
I appreciate the frank admission that we’ll be getting the lower cost commercial version in our schools. I wish more “blended learning” enthusiasts would admit that public schools have budgets and are vulnerable to bad ideas pushed by (sometimes) captured lawmakers. If there’s two tiers- the private AltSchool and the low cost Rocketship chain we need to know that.
There’s risk in this for low and middle income schools. The risk is we’ll get cheap replacements for human beings sold as “personalized learning”. I hope local school governments do their own homework and resist the hype. Is this a good value for ordinary schools? Is it where we should be putting scarce funds?
It would help if people in the federal and state government would quit selling this so hard. That is NOT their role. Their role is to ask good questions about budgets and value. We have a whole industry devoted to selling this, and they’re pretty good at it.. We need government to act as a check on that, NOT as industry cheerleaders.
http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/our-schools-all-have-a-tragic-flaw-silicon-valley-thinks-it-has-the-answer?utm_content=buffere3292&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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‘…personalized learning and smart operating systems, ”
I guess that means they won’t be using MS Windows as an OS.
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With the disappearance of the middle class, the pool of tax payers able to pay a level of taxes necessary for good schools is limited hence the schemes to lower the cost for those other than the 1 percent.
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I see that a little differently. The 1% are in the one percent in part because of trade agreements shipping middle-class jobs abroad, to be done by lower-class [cheaper] workers. Hence their much higher profits. Also due in part to tax legislation allowing them to keep a far higher percentage of this bloated income than, say, during most of the 20thc,– resulting in budget cuts across-the-board to public institutions like schools. Another part is school-privatization legislation, enticing these 1%ers flush with cash to invest in education startups: any dummy can make money when a big chunk of costs are supplied free by taxpayers. The part about ‘schemes to lower cost’ is baked into any capitalist endeavor. The ‘disappearance of the middle class’ is baked into the choices made in response to global competition.
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I agree. I was merely pointing out that the average person is stressed financially. (For the reasons you point out.)
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So this is what I object to, when government does it:
Click to access Sample%20Future%20Ready%20Schools%20Self-Assessment.pdf
It’s a sample “assessment” of a Future Ready school.
What it does is skip past the first part of decision making, which is “is this valuable to your school and if so what is the value and what will the trade-offs be?”
It answers those questions for us, and reduces the debate to HOW we put in the specifics of the plans.
I would be wary of that if I were a principal or school board member. Why not start at the beginning? There’s no reason one should accept the foundational premise and if you accept this “assessment” then they have done that part of the thinking for you.
I don’t even accept the definition of “Future Ready”. What if Future Ready for my school means everyone learns Spanish in 3rd grade and I hire a bunch of language teachers? I could spend the IPad money on that.
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Also, batten down the hatches because they are going to sell this hard! 🙂
The herd is running off another cliff!
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2015/05/04/403577703/a-for-profit-school-startup-where-kids-are-beta-testers
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Chiara. Or check out KnowledgeWorks.org for scenerios. Cinncinati based with future scenerios and all learner centered, no need for teachers, just “navigators” and other new roles to help parents and students find their way through new :learning landscapes.”
Beta testing in a for-profit environment with students as guinea pigs and this is called SCHOOL, notwhat it is– non-stop marketing research. Amazing.
Human subjects research and experimentation is totally unregulated in pre-K to 12 education. Only in university settings and when federal grants are involved is there any oversight, and that can be oversight-light, pro-forma.
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Robert Reich today predicts that teachers are going to be replaced by technology:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/what-will-happen-to-american-jobs-incomes-and-wealth-a-decade-from-now_b_7116316.html
He calls for a grand political movement to force capitalism to work for the many, not just the few. Sign me up.
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My mother heard on a radio show that the teachers were going to be paid 100,000 a year. Are they hiring tech people or teachers? I was under the impression that the teachers would be done away with.
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