Founded by ex-Googler Max Ventilla, AltSchool has been 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.
to his oldest daughter, Maxima, born in 2015, a year after his meeting with Ventilla. Known variously as “personalized learning,” “learner-centric learning” and “competency-based learning,” the philosophy argues against the traditional model of an all-knowing teacher dictating from the head of the class, sometimes called the “sage on the stage” approach, where students are expected to progress as a group.
Other bigger expenses made even less sense. Because none of the properties had been designed as schools, unexpected problems surfaced, says Carolyn Wilson, AltSchool’s former director of education. “What ate our lunch more than anything was doing real estate retrofits,” she says. At one of the schools in San Francisco, the toilets kept backing up. None of the locations had playgrounds or gyms, so AltSchool took children to city parks.
AltSchool is 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. . “He was talking about a shift from a lecture-based model of education to a learner-centric model,” says First Round Capital partner Josh Kopelman, who sits on AltSchool’s board. “That made total sense to us.” nside AltSchool’s Manhattan middle school, in an office building on the busy corner of Fifth Avenue and 14th Street, there are more books, papers, pens and pencils than computers, though students are each assigned a Chromebook, which they use off and on throughout the day.
At AltSchool’s Fort Mason campus in San Francisco, five-year-old Leonardo Ventilla’s teacher Dina Hamaoui has written out his goals on paper worksheets. All AltSchool students set social and emotional goals in addition to academic goals. One of Leonardo’s sheets says, “I will be able to talk about what zone my brain and body are in and use strategies to shift between them.
Odyssey seems to be off to a promising start, but Ryan D. Smith, Paramount’s assistant superintendent, says there are as yet no plans to adopt AltSchool’s software throughout the district. “In a new school, you have an opportunity to do things completely different from the very beginning,” he says. “At our old schools, we’d have a lot of other work to do before we could have a more personalized learning environment for our students.
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