Since its founding in 2014, with backing from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Andreessen Horowitz, and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, the San Francisco startup has opened eight of its new-age AltSchools in the Bay Area and New York City. It sees these as mini educational labs where it’s working to create a new kind of personalized educational for the 21st century, and now, the company is sharing its philosophies with the outside world. This morning, it announced that three outside schools will use its platform: Berthold Academy in Reston, Virginia; The Greene School in West Palm Beach, Florida; and Temple Beth Sholom Day School in Miami Beach, Florida.
The eventual goal, says chief operating officer Cody Johnson, is to apply the company’s formula to a network of private, public, and charter schools across the US. Today, AltSchool is taking a step toward achieving that aim.
Altschool Isn’t just for Altschool anymore.
The three independent AltSchools use a wide range of educational approaches, from Montessori to Reggio Emilia, but Johnson believes they can all dovetail with the AltSchool ethos. “They’re schools that look like us. They’re private and independent,” he says. “But they show we can take this platform and put it into external environments, and it will work.”
The company is also providing more detail on the software it provide to these schools. There are two main tools. One, called Portrait, aims to provide a record of each student’s progress in both traditional academic and non-academic contexts, like how often your kid has practiced some skill, and it integrates teacher narratives, educator notes, test scores, and samples of your kid’s homework.
