Is thIs the future of educatIon?
Dot-commers are disrupting elementary education, sending their kids to a pricey new Brooklyn school filled with computers — but no grades or core curriculum
O Na crisp autumn morning, TsiAnn Calixte furious ly pounds on her Chromebook’s keyboard, hashing out details on a project she’s spearheading for her 14-person team.
As she sits at a collaborative table reflecting on a job well-done, half a dozen colleagues surround her, tapping on their own laptops.
It looks like a scene from the floor of an ambitious startup, but the little worker bees are just 8 years old.
AltSchool, a new private Brooklyn Heights “micro-school,” is experimenting with a technology-driven approach to education. Every pupil gets their own tablet or Chromebook; wallmounted video cameras called “superpowers” record children’s learning moments and kiddie confessionals for teachers to review. Every student gets a to-do list called a “playlist” where they focus on whatever interests them, from writing an opera about water exploration to creating vessels that protect an egg when it falls.
“Kids like being in a place better when they have agency ,” says AltSchool founder Max Ventilla, a 35-year-old former Google exec based in San Francisco. “My 2-yearold orders lunch for himself, and he’s muchhappier having the lunch he ordered.”
Vent illa was inspired to create the school three years ago, after shopping for a preschool that fostered “self-knowledge” and“entrepreneurial ism” for his older child, Sabine, now 4.
In 2013 Ventilla launched the first AltSchool in San Francisco’s formerly gritty, now hip Dogpatch neighborhood. There are currently five locations throughout the Bay Area serving Silicon Valley offspring, each with just 25 to 100 students.
Now it’s come east. An AltSchool in Brooklyn Heights opened last month, serving kindergarten through third grade, but eventually going up to eighth grade. Next September, a Lower East Side location serving K through sixth will open — though AltSchool avoids such classifications as “grades.” Instead kids are divided into three broadly defined classrooms: pre-K, “lower elementary” for younger kids and “upper elementary” for older kids.
“There’s no such thing as a thirdgrader,” says Ventilla. “There’s each child who has their own experience.”
Other terms AltSchool avoids are “teachers,” “schools” and “classrooms. Rather there are “educators,” “learning labs” and “studios.”
If it sounds like a dot-com start-up, that’s by design. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg led a $100 million financing round for the school last spring, and Ventilla has poached moguls from Apple, Uber, Zynga and, of course, Google for his expanding, forprofit education empire.
The new Brooklyn Heights outpost sits on the second floor of an art decostyle building on a cinematic, tree-lined street one block from the promenade and just a few minutes from DUMBO’s tech hub — and hundreds of startups.
The school day begins between 8 and 9 a.m. — AltSchool has flexible start and end times to accommodate parents, some of whom haul their kiddies from as far away as Westchester and New Jersey to experience education 2.0. There’s nothing so pedestrian as roll call — kids sign in via an app on an iPad at the entry. It’s connected to an
online platform called My. AltSchool that tracks everything from a child’s Personalized Learning Plan to allergies.
The schedule changes daily, but midmorning on a recent Wednesday, some 6- to 8-year-olds studied Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” on their Chromebooks in one corner, while others engaged in writing lessons. There’s no bell to signal the end of a period or recess. Instead, “learning blocks” are meant to end organically.
“Bells feel too disconnected from the real world,” says Mara Pauker, the co-head of AltSchool Brooklyn.
For their daily recess, kids have free run of Pier 5 at Brooklyn Bridge Park and its impressive playground, sports fields and sweeping view of the Manhattan skyline. Physical Education happens at least three times a week, and includes trendy yoga and capoeira in a sprawling common area.
Tests are rare, but not entirely absent. As an alternative to standardized tests, individualized “Measures of Academic Progress” are administered quarterly.
“[It’s] not radical, just different,” says Pauker, who previously taught at the controversial Blue School in lower Manhattan.
AltSchool, which costs $27,500 a year, operates on the traditional school calendar, but parents are encouraged to take family vacations when it’s convenient for them — perfect for a jaunt to Kyota, Japan, in time for cherry-blossom season or a family trip to Austin for South by Southwest.
If it seems a bit out-there — that’s the point.
For Ventilla, the traditional school model is very broken.
“There’s a need for schools that are created this century. [Most] schools are terrifyingly similar to the schools I went to 30 years ago,” says the NYC-bred founder who went to the tony Buckley School on the Upper East Side and Andover, before earning two degrees from Yale.
Many parents seem to agree. AltSchool says 4,000 applications flooded in for 200 slots nationwide this year, but the school couldn’t provide NYC-specific numbers.
The application process isn’t the traditional private-school interview — here, prospective students gather in groups and are evaluated based on how they interact.
Vladimire and Benjamin Calixte of Kensington, Brooklyn, were eager to get their 8-year-old daughter Tsi-Ann into the school.
She was previously going to a Montessori s chool t hat was cheaper and closer to home, but the couple felt that AltSchool was superior.
“She’s a girl who needs to advocate for herself and we felt the school would bring that out in her,” says Vladimire, a therapist in private practice. She praises the school’s weekly “town hall meetings” in which students gather to demo projects and hold discussions. “The message they send is, ‘I hear you, I see you, you’re important to me, and you matter.’ ”
Benjamin, a stay-at-home dad, was initially skeptical, but now he’s a believer. “We questioned if [the kids are] just going to be on computers, but it’s phenomenal,” he says.
But not everyone’s drinking the Kool-Aid.
“Utilizing a model that is centrally tech-focused and individualistic in nature will serve to diminish the interaction and overall social maturation of students,” says Jae Gardner, CEO of tutoring and educational consulting company the Ivy Key.
And the emphasis on self-directed learning puts some parents on edge.
“When they come out, are they going to be academically prepared?” asks Upper West Sider Rachel Fremmer, who has two daughters i n New York City public schools and is active in the schoolsystem’s governing body. “No cur- riculum is fine if you have a really motivated kid, but [what] if you have a kid who just reads comic books or plays Minecraft all day?”
But AltSchool parents insist their kids are getting a good education.
“[They] learn to balance and prioritize,” says Benjamin Calixte, a born-and-bred Brooklynite. He recalls one of his daughter’s first days. “[She] smiled from ear to ear [and said], ‘This isn’t a classroom!’ and I said, ‘That’s right, it’s a learning space!’ ”