The widely publicized letter that Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, wrote to their newborn daughter this week — a letter that might have attempted to preclude any anxiety on the child’s part with a clause like “don’t worry, there’ll always be money for Cheddar Bunnies” — pledged 99 percent of the couple’s Facebook shares to charity.
Those shares, currently valued at about $45 billion and potentially worth much more, will form the basis for what will be known as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The project’s focus will include efforts toward eliminating disease and poverty and creating a world in which there is greater access to opportunity for children born into circumstances less favorable than baby Maxima Chan Zuckerberg’s.
Among the principles the letter cites as vital to achieving these goals is “personalized learning,” an educational philosophy and practice to which Mr. Zuckerberg is already committed through his investment in AltSchool, a network of for-profit experimental schools that began in San Francisco and recently arrived in New York.
Founded by a young former Google executive, Max Ventilla, AltSchool is a product of the capitalist utopianism that drives Silicon Valley: the notion that smart people, or at any rate those supremely confident in newly held convictions, can make money making the world a better place. “Better,” of course, is highly subjective, but AltSchool, which essentially attempts to use affluent children whose families are paying reasonably high tuition fees as a laboratory to reshape education for the broader population, has the advantage of seeming less ambiguous in its nobility than Uber or the 100th start-up built on the premise that more people need vegan bouillabaisse delivered to their doors.
AltSchool, which opened two years ago, has four branches in San Francisco, one in Palo Alto and a sixth on Hicks Street in Brooklyn, which enrolled its first students in September. An East Village location is scheduled to open next fall, and a Chicago location is planned for 2017. Eventually all the schools will extend through eighth grade.
The trend of the micro-apartment has an analog now in the micro-school. AltSchools are small by design. The Brooklyn branch has only 30 students spanning prekindergarten through the third grade; for those spots the school received 1,200 applications. “Personalized learning” involves the customization of lesson plans to address the needs of individual students, in classrooms where rates of progress and areas of interest vary; technology enhances the process through the use of software and applications that can present various exercises, assessment tools, lines of inquiry and so forth for students. But even given that, meeting every child in his or her own developmental place requires a culture and atmosphere of intimacy, a level of attention from teachers that makes it challenging to imagine the model taking hold across large urban public school systems.
Mr. Ventilla grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Buckley, Andover and Yale, institutions whose tuitions his parents could not afford. He benefited from scholarships and has made financial aid readily available at Alt, where one quarter of the students enrolled in the network’s schools receive help. The student body at the Brooklyn location, where tuition is $28,900 a year, is strikingly diverse. Mr. Ventilla’s own trajectory has served him well, but he has little use for traditional education.
His complaints are familiar and often fair: The system is antiquated; it doesn’t prepare students for a rapidly changing world guided by technological innovation; we are too reliant on testing; students do too little of what is applicable later. “When, in professional life, are you ever required to sit at a desk, in a room, for three hours filling in answers in bubbles?” he asked rhetorically one afternoon, seated his Brooklyn office. There is no formal testing to speak of at AltSchool, and little in the way of homework. Mr. Ventilla believes, he said, that the thousands of hours that children invest in learning foreign languages is almost surely a waste of time, given that translation technology will soon be good enough that we will all be multilingual. That students in some of the city’s most prestigious schools immerse themselves in Latin is something he must find as useless as crochet.
There is gym at AltSchool — in Brooklyn, it takes place largely in Brooklyn Bridge Park because the whole school encompasses only 5,000 square feet — but there are no organized sports teams. Readers of Amanda Ripley’s best-selling book, “The Smartest Kids in the World,” will recall that two-a-day practices and squash teams don’t much exist in schools in countries where education systems outperform our own. The AltSchool philosophy is progressive to the point that some might find it anarchic, either wonderfully or maddeningly so. The curriculum isn’t set; it evolves out of the interests of the students. In the lower grades at the Brooklyn school, teachers observed students for the first two weeks to see what inspired them.
“We follow a cycle of inquiry,” one teacher explained. Students were interested in transportation and neighborhood infrastructure, which led to the kindergartners learning about the East River. Third graders wound up studying the brain as part of a “mindfulness” curriculum, as one administrator put it. Benchmarks for knowledge and learning are embedded into whatever is being studied so that, presumably, no one graduates having never heard of Napoleon.
Part of the school’s marketing strategy is to make it very user-friendly for parents — if you need to change drop-off or pick-up plans, you can, and you do it on mobile devices. School vacations can happen at the parents’ discretion. If you want to take your child with you on a weeklong business trip to Hong Kong, you can — this is considered another opportunity for learning. A tablet with your child’s lesson plans would go with you, and he or she could study and work wherever you are. AltSchool’s plan, ultimately, after years of data-keeping, self-assessment and reassessment, is to take its best practices and technological innovations to the universe of public schools.
For all of its arguably dubious ideas — AltSchool is not for parents committed to radical limitations on screen time — it is serious about the idea that progressive education should not simply be the provenance of the well off. This is a notion markedly absent in the boot-camp model of so many of the city’s charter schools, where learning can too easily be divorced from pleasure, and fear rather than joy is the operative motivator. You don’t need rich parents to get turned on to learning from a river.
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