Article from New Yorker on something called AltSchool which innovates learning approaches with an emphasis on cloud tools.
Inside, the space has been partitioned with dividers creating several classrooms. The décor evokes an IKEA showroom: low-slung couches, beanbags, clusters of tables, and wooden chairs in progressively smaller sizes, like those belonging to Goldilocks’s three bears.
There is no principal’s office and no principal. Like the five other AltSchools that have opened in the past three years—the rest are in the Bay Area—the school is run by teachers, one of whom serves as the head of the school. There is no school secretary: many administrative matters are handled at AltSchool’s headquarters, in the SOMA district of San Francisco. There aren’t even many children. Every AltSchool is a “micro-school.”
AltSchool’s ambition, however, is huge. Five more schools are scheduled to open by the end of 2017, in San Francisco, Manhattan, and Chicago, and the goal is to expand into other parts of the country, offering a highly tailored education that uses technology to target each student’s “needs and passions.” Tuition is about thirty thousand dollars a year.
This model doesn’t seem to be about affordability, to state the obvious.
Nationally, charter schools are said to average a per student subsidy of approx $7.5K, against a average public school per student cost of around $11K. At least these are the numbers used by charter school proponents.
It is widely believed that online learning will provide access to first rate learning activities at a considerable cost saving over traditional education methods. So what is it about AltSchool that makes it so expensive?
Could someone do an AltSchool knock off at affordable rates, much as various franchises have figured out how to be profitable at dramatically lower costs per customer?
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Learn-Different-The-New-Yorker.pdf”]