Susan Adams, an editor at Forbes, took a close look at AltSchool, a billionaire-funded effort to reinvent American education by putting kids on computers.
Max Ventillaleft Google tolaunch his startup. He’s raised plenty of dough from the billionaires, but success is thus far out of reach. Successmeans making money.
“We’re two intense hours into an interview in a stuffy, glass-paned meeting room in a former 24 Hour Fitness that is now home to one of AltSchool’s two small private schools in San Francisco for grades pre-K through 8. Ventilla, who left Google to launch AltSchool in 2013, has spent $30 million annually over the last several years while trying to find steady footing for his for-profit education startup, which runs four schools; the other two are in New York City.
“AltSchool’s 240 students, including two of Ventilla’s children—Leonardo, 5, and Sabine, 7—are guinea pigs for a software platform that AltSchool is attempting to sell to hundreds of schools both private and public. So far it has 28 customers. Revenue in 2018 was $7 million. “Our whole strategy is to spend more than we make,” he says. Since software is expensive to develop and cheap to distribute, the losses, he believes, will turn into steep profits once AltSchool refines its product and lands enough customers.
Max Ventilla, CEO and cofounder of AltSchool.TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD
“But as Ventilla admits when he lets his guard down, reaching profitability will be quite a stretch. The story of how AltSchool arrived at this point—burning cash in a failed attempt to create a profitable private-school network and fighting to sell an expensive edtech product in a crowded field—shows that the best intentions, an impressive career in tech and an excess of Silicon Valley money and enthusiasm don’t easily translate into success in a tradition-bound marketplace where budgets are tight.
“Ventilla, wearing jeans, scuffed black leather slip-ons, a faded polo shirt with AltSchool’s logo and a black fleece jacket, has been able to hemorrhage cash because, as he has it, “I’m good at telling AltSchool’s story and I’m good at raising money early.” So good that he has raised $174 million in venture capital at a $440 million valuation, according to PitchBook, more than almost any other startup working on K-12 education. That sum includes a personal investment of more than $15 million from Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Zuckerberg initiated two hours-long one-on-one meetings with Ventilla in late 2014, when AltSchool was only 18 months old. “He’s very detail-oriented, and he likes to drill down,” Ventilla says of Zuckerberg.”
The article has little vignettes of a few of the billionaires reinventing education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sickening. Ventilla is a fool.
Yes, but … at least (a) Ventilla is using his own kids as guinea pigs and (b) everyone else is there voluntarily too.
AltSchool is a failure. That means it is time for its rich backers to buy some politicians so that public tax dollars can be used to make AltSchool a “public” charter so they can start making some big bucks.
That is the capitalism and “free market” that the anti-public school people love.
It’s refreshing to read such plain language:
“AltSchool’s 240 students, including two of Ventilla’s children—Leonardo, 5, and Sabine, 7—are guinea pigs for a software platform that AltSchool is attempting to sell to hundreds of schools both private and public”
A software platform. Not “reinventing school” or “personalized learning”
A software platform. That’s what they’re selling and that’s what you’re buying, if you’re buying this. Treat it like any other product and treat THEM like any other salesperson.
“Before starting AltSchool, Ventilla says, he read two dozen books on education and emerged a fan of Sir Ken Robinson, a British TED Talk speaker known for lamenting the dearth of creativity in early education, and Angela Duckworth, a psychologist and the winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant who has written about the need for children to cultivate “grit.” The quality of primary and secondary education in America, stuck in an industrial-age model, has been in steady decline for the last century, says Ventilla, citing the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results, a worldwide test of reading, math and science ability in which U.S. 15-year-olds ranked 38th out of 71 countries. “The factory model in a non-factory world disengages kids,” he says. AltSchool’s solution: “Foster in children the development of an internal compass so that as things are changing around them more rapidly, they can always reorient.”
He read widely in the echo chamber and unsurprisingly sounds exactly like all of them.
A. Software. Platform. That’s what he sells.
Ignore the rest of this TED talk nonsense and at least know what you’re buying. Ask a 16 year old. They’ve been sold this stuff so long they’re very savvy about it, unlike the adults, apparently.
Ha ha, that was one of the first passages that jumped out at me. The arrogance & dilettantism of, I left my Google job and did a deep dive– “two dozen books on education”!– before designing the next techie silver bullet. That Robinson & Duckworth were the cream of the crop tells ‘volumes’ about what he didn’t read.
Exactly. Sir Ken Robinson is my favorite TED speaker to hate. Such pompous fraud, selling old progressivist wine in new bottles, and so popular!
The real problem is that people like Ventilla — for whom learning always came very easy — have no idea what it means to TEACH. To them, a kid should learn just like they did! And if he didn’t, well it’s either the fault of the lazy and inept teacher (if the teach is in a traditional public school) or the fault of the child and his parents (if they are in a charter school).
Ventilla probably believes his AltSchool is a roaring success! It is just the kids using it who are failures.
Very astute comment.
IMO, Ventilla’s arrogance and drive to sell is on display at the school’s website. The firm’s verbiage in the section where public schools would allow comments to be sent, instead is limited to spreading the school’s messaging. And, the format reflects an unwillingness to listen to what others want to say about AltSchool.
It’s similar to Gates and Z-berg- we don’t want to hear your opinions, what do you think this business/country is, a democracy?
Testing this in a tiny private school that is limited to the children of very wealthy people and has near-individual attention to each child isn’t a valid comparison to students in public schools.
Please don’t accept that as a test. It’s not.
The children in Alt School would do fine with or without the software platform, because they’re well-off kids in a lavishly funded school. The exception would be if they DIDN’T do well.
I’ll make him a trade. I’ll take 20k a year in funding and a 10 to 1 student teacher ratio like his private school and he can keep the software.
It isn’t the software.
Cory Booker Hates Public Schools
https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/54821-cory-booker-hates-public-schools
But he LOVES Big Pharma, from whom he has gotten much $$$ to protect their rip-off drug prices in the Senate.
Good article! I agree with closing point: the one positive is that Booker’s candidacy is sure to bring the issue of school privatization into public debate.
There is so much information in the article, I don’t even know where to start in commenting on it. It’s fascinating. I wish I had more time…
Oops, my deepest apologies. I meant to comment on the article on which this post is based, the Forbes article.
yes; lately articles and articulate criticism of Booker’s charter-school/DeVos relationship have been swamping news feeds for many
Ventilla is so typical of many of the venture capitalists that are products of an Ivy League education. They use their pedigree and connections to “go big.” They have been sold on the idea that you have to “disrupt the market” to produce an reinvention that will result in entrepreneurial mega bucks. The main problem is that Ventilla is really a dilettante, not a expert. Unlike Uber or Lyft, education is a very complex issue, and deep understandings are necessary to offer anything of substance and value. Ventilla is guilty of trying to disrupt something he does not fully understand.
“Reinventing Education”
They aren’t reinventing anything. Destruction is nothing new.
They are riding a wrecking ball (imagine Miley Cyrus naked in her Wrecking Ball video then substitute her with Trump) as it swings around and destroys everything in its path.
In the case of Ventilla he is focused on computers because it is his area of expertise, but it is only a delivery system. As we know, it has serious limits. Real educators know that they start with the needs of students, not a plan to make lots of money.
“It is only a delivery system”– well said. And a delivery system for what ? In the ed world, only received knowledge can be “delivered.” For that, we already have books [& their pages are easier on the eyes than screens]. As to review/ reinforcement, anyone who has done both teacher-led discussion & ‘personalized-learning’ [self-testing via sw] knows, one is stimulated to learn from bouncing ideas around via human interchange, & bored to death by sw self- quizzing.
This is all self-evident to students on the ground trialling these sw pgms (& to their parents), which is why we see kids protesting ‘personalized learning’ pgms in their schs, & pubschs w/dwg from them w/n a year or two.
Begin with stereotypes about public education, add ignorance of the history of education, listen to a couple of speakers on TED.
Then get your elevator pitch together. Wow in the investor crowd. Most are as clueless as you are about the possibilities for education. Sell, sell, sell. Tweak, tweak, tweak. There is nothing wrong with treating children as guinea pigs, lab rats.
You think you are reinventing the wheel. You are not.
Thank you Susan Adams for revealing to well-informed educators how shallow the thinking is among the techies who want to make a financial killing at scale, no matter how foolish the ideas.
Thanks to Diane for this link.
The organizers of TED talks about education, based on my limited experience, select tech promotion speeches and reject innovations like UnKochMyCampus.org.
TED came under fire for its treatment of a speech by Nick Hanauer who challenged the belief that America’s wealthy are job creators. TED’s owner, Chris Anderson (Sapling Foundation) is married to the Acumen CEO.
Bias of TED talks in a nutshell.
9/21/2017
“Root Capital and Acumen to test Social Impact Incentives” (Impact Alpha)
Speculating, “philanthropic” monstrosities like schools created by quasi entrepreneurs from the tech industry can get Goldman Sach’s social impact bonds. Then, a cut of tax dollars intended for the vulnerable can be raked off for Wall Street.
Nice to see Forbes calling this product out for what it is, and throwing cold water on its financial viability. Hedge-funders reading this may take note & soft-pedal investments in similar ventures. Cuz they’re all the same– low-quality pap that loses its luster soon after it’s implemented.
It is basically a student looking at a screen and screens are limited in what they can and can not do. What you are looking at is a moving talking worksheet. Your choices are yes, no, maybe so. Well forget maybe so….that gray area that is yet to be explored. Technology is an adjunct and an adjunct only…It is not and never will be a be all in education. One of the regulars on here wrote a beautiful post on education and technology…about how he can look up obscure music which is wonderful, but then how that does not mean faces looking into screens is the answer in education. Would love to see that again…It was a rather long post.
Ventilla’s argument re: PISA scores is a risible meme for ignorant investors w/ no historical background. Were they to study the stats, they’d already know we have ever scored middling on OECD PISA rankings, thro economic thick & thin: heck, we scored 12 out of 12 in the first intl ranking [math] in ’63– in our econ prime, & not long before we put men on the moon.
“The factory model in a non-factory world disengages kids,” he says– which only reveals that he hasn’t set foot in any current pubsch classroom. What is this ‘factory model’ he claims to have observed [but is probably just parroting from BDeVos & her libertarian ilk]?
Is it ‘sage on a stage’ [i.e., lecture mode]? That’s actually a reference to 18th-19thC private-school pedagogy. It was still around [minimally] when I taught in a private acad in the ’70’s– & extant here & there when my kids were in pubschs ’90’s/ ’00’s & perhaps today– practiced only by those w/ preternatural ability to entertain & engage, & motivate students to take notes/ memorize them for tests. Nearly every pubsch & privsch class I’ve observed or taught in 40 yrs as teacher & parent has been a combo of brief lecture, Q&-A reinforcement/ discussion, small-group & hands-on activity. ‘Sage on a stage’ is a straw man.
Obviously the repudiation of ‘factory-model’ ed is marketing hype targeted at parents’/ society’s concern over the decline of US mfg, which once provided a path to wkg/ midclass livelihood.
BUT… this resonates with parents today because of their experience w/ 40+ yrs of ed-deformed pubschs. When I was coming up in K12 schools ’50’s-’60’s, things were more fluid. Teachers’ professional opinions were honored. If you, say, did great in class & on hw, but bombed out on tests, you still had a path forward. Granted, there were issues back then– little understanding of dyslexia et al LD’s, so many were held back despite hi-IQ– tho a sweet spot did develop on that in ’70’s…
BUT. By the time my kids were in pubsch in ’90’s/’00’s– thanks to the growing buy-in to rigid grade-level expectations– not to mention the bizarre public buy-in to pharmaceutical solutions for those who could not conform ontime at grade-level– pubsch had indeed become like a factory assembly-line, w/ those who could not keep up pulled off into SpEd pit-stop repairs. We muddled through [2 out of 3 kids w/IEP’s], but others I knew in similar situations (a) pressured sch district & succeeded in getting a chartersch, (b) went to privates & successfuully sued for tuition reimbursement, (c)moved out of state.
Needless to say, the incursion of CCSS/ RTTT/ ESSA has exacerbated the ‘factory-model’ situation. Our particular district has responded well, establishing bridge program for developmentally delayed, & in-district autism classrooms. But I think the top-down imposition of grade-level stds/ aligned assessments ‘accountability’ system makes us too rigid, forcing intelligent, articulate kids into SpEd because they don’t fit a pre-determined mold. This could render even hi-priced, well-funded districts vulnerable to inroads by privatized charters.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
Grit-
“Her experience growing up was simply trying to be alive-helping to find enough to eat, and then remembering not to eat everything up before there was something in the house to replace it. When she was sick she hid it so no meddling adult would turn her over for medical care that her grandmother couldn’t pay for. That would have been a disaster, because there was no sin as bad as not having any money.” (Thomas Perry)
The donor class created Duckworth and Ventilla to take the focus off of real American grit- surviving a system of billionaire exploitation.
The median family income is less than $60,000. The cost of medical care for the average family of four is $28,000.
If Ventilla had a conscience, he’d use his talents to get a 77% marginal tax rate and Medicare for all.