AltSchool: Stats + Students = Success
Max Ventilla’s AltSchool Revolutionizes Personalized Learning Through Research
AltSchool, founded by Max Ventilla, is leading innovation in education through research-driven personalized learning. His approach brings big data in education to the forefront.
Photo courtesy of AltSchool
Like most new parents, Max Ventilla thought a lot about the future.
He wondered how his two young children could be prepared for a world changing at an accelerating pace. Their education, he concluded, would be critical. That’s when he started to get worried.
“The world in which my daughter is growing up is really different from the world I grew up in,” says Ventilla, who’s 35. “And it seems like schools should be different, because their purpose is to prepare kids for the future.” From what he could see, classrooms looked and functioned pretty much as they did when he was in elementary school.
So he set out to change things. He started AltSchool in 2013 with the goal of reinventing the way teachers teach and kids learn. Doing so meant creating personalized education for each student based on his or her intellect, skills and passions — and on loads of data about how, when, with whom and under what conditions each individual child learns best.
Ventilla knew his vision for big data in education and personalized learning would require huge, ongoing investments in technology and development, and he’d need to attract the best software developers away from other lucrative positions. He needed investments from the venture-capital community to bring his plan to life, so he launched AltSchool as a for-profit company.
His big-picture thinking drew attention and more than $130 million from a group of blue-chip Silicon Valley investors. These investors have bought in to Ventilla’s vision of longstanding transformation with no promise of quick returns — in fact, the business model has built in a long period of in-classroom research and development before the company will eventually license software to other schools.
Personalized Learning
What is it about AltSchool’s personalized learning that has piqued the interest of and secured long-term commitments from investors, teachers, software developers and parents?
Ventilla’s background and connections offer some insight. Before launching AltSchool, he was a Google executive in charge of personalization; he developed individual user profiles based on a person’s behavior on various Google platforms, from Google Search and Gmail to Google Maps and YouTube. Google used those data to customize search results and make media recommendations that reflected a user’s interests. Earlier, Ventilla was co-founder of Aardvark, a service that connected people with like-minded experts who could answer their questions. Google bought Aardvark for a reported $50 million.
Photo courtesy of AltSchool
Ventilla had become a great believer in using technology and data to figure out what attracts and motivates individuals. Why, he thought, should schools continue to treat kids as if they all like the same things and learn the same way?
Ventilla opened the first AltSchool three years ago in San Francisco with 20 students. Today, the San Francisco area is home to five of the company’s seven “microschools.” Last fall, the sixth and seventh AltSchools launched in Palo Alto, California, and New York City’s affluent Brooklyn Heights neighborhood. Another two are scheduled to open in the next two years in Manhattan, along with one more in San Francisco. Chicago’s first AltSchool is scheduled to launch in 2017.
So far, all 350 students in AltSchools are younger kids — none is older than 14. Tuition varies depending on location but averages about $25,000 a year, about 15 to 20 percent lower than comparable private schools in San Francisco and New York City. Financial aid is provided to roughly 25 percent of students and is funded through donations and the corporation operations budget.
Sparking transformation within education is at the core of Ventilla’s larger mission. His schools are meant to be equal parts classrooms and research labs, and discoveries about what motivates kids and how technology can help teachers may be the company’s most important product. To that end, the company employs as many engineers as it does teachers.
AltSchool is fundamentally a technology company that enables schools to learn about learning. The company’s research helps teachers track students’ progress more quantitatively and boosts connections between teachers and parents. AltSchool is using big data in education to start a systemwide revolution.
Data-Driven Detectives Use Big Data in Education
Even the best teachers can’t spot every meaningful moment for each student in a classroom of 20 or more. That’s where cameras come in: Everything that happens in an AltSchool classroom is recorded by custom-built cameras and microphones. Teachers also keep tabs on their students’ development through a tool called Learning Progression, an online dashboard that provides a real-time, comprehensive portrait of each student’s academic and emotional progress. Parents stay in the loop through a mobile app, called Stream, that lets them know what and how their child is doing, in detail.
By capturing events teachers might miss during the course of a busy day, classroom recordings can help educators understand their students in a way tests can’t, allowing teachers to identify, for instance, when and with whom a student starts using new words or begins showing empathy.
Photo courtesy of AltSchool
Ventilla talks about educators becoming “data-driven detectives.” AltSchool teachers collaborate with the company’s engineers. The developers create technology that streamlines teaching by eliminating noneducational tasks. They tap into the teachers’ experience and use that knowledge to create the right metrics for student progress.
Ventilla acknowledges that filming and recording kids while they’re in school could make some people uneasy. The challenge is finding the right balance between efficiency and privacy. Of course, students have always been observed and evaluated in the classroom. The addition of cameras can be seen as an enhancement to the teacher’s traditional role.
“We know both extremes of data privacy are bad,” says Ventilla. “We don’t want a world where we don’t have a record of anything a student did, and we don’t want a world where anything a student did is recorded for all time. Where on the spectrum is ideal? That’s a hard question to answer. We feel we are in a unique position, given our lab-school environment and the close ties in our communities — between students, the teachers, the parents and the engineers — to start to identify where there are the most benefits and the least negatives.”
AltSchool engineers are also developing software and systems that will automate and simplify back-office operations such as admissions, teacher recruiting and scheduling — tasks that keep schools running but necessitate bureaucracies that siphon resources away from classrooms.
Ultimately, AltSchool plans to license its software and data to other educators.
Investors Seeking Innovation in Education
Early on, Ventilla knew his version of a 21st-century education company wouldn’t work as a nonprofit. It required too large an investment in technology and development — both for equipment and to pay all of those engineers. He doubted he could successfully launch as a conventional for-profit company because the level of data analysis and programming he envisioned would take years to complete. If AltSchool was solely focused on turning a profit for investors, it would be under a lot of pressure to quickly create software it could license to other school districts, potentially rushing the research and ultimately creating an inferior product.
Photo courtesy of AltSchool
“We were looking for something that’s longer term, much more mission-driven, and that thinks about profitability not so much as something driven by sales and lobbying, but instead as hard-core R&D that pays off eventually at large scale,” says Ventilla. “That description doesn’t exactly fit for-profit and it doesn’t exactly fit nonprofit.”
By certifying as a B Corporation, Ventilla was making a public statement to investors that they would need to accept his values system and his timeline. “We thought of being a Certified B Corporation as the kind of middle ground that worked.” Investors got it. Over the past two years, AltSchool has raised about $133 million in venture capital and venture debt, and it’s come from some of Silicon Valley’s big-name investors: the Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, John Doerr, and Mark Zuckerberg through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
Ventilla’s proven track record as a startup entrepreneur and a Google executive coupled with his ability to attract talented people from the likes of Google, Uber and Zynga gave investors confidence. “From an investment perspective, AltSchool is attractive for a number of reasons — one being that it would be incredibly difficult to clone this company,” says Brian Singerman, a partner at the Founders Fund. “Two hackers in a garage can’t build a school system.”
He and other investors were also attracted by what they saw as Ventilla’s long-term commitment to high-quality education — a commitment he saw reflected by the company’s certification as a B Corp.
“When I first spoke to Max about AltSchool, he told me this was the company he saw himself working on for the rest of his life,” Singerman says. “It’s always been clear to us that Max was in this company for the long term, but B Corporation status is a clear signal that AltSchool’s team is driven by a sense of purpose, not profit. That said, we believe AltSchool will also grow into an incredible business.”
Ventilla says he’s not ready to project when the company will achieve profitability but reiterated that the investors are in it for the long haul: “We really are on a decade-plus journey collectively.”
“Public education is not free, so making a better, scalable education cheaper is one of the most important things you can do for society,” Singerman says. “We realize that fully executing on this vision will take a long time, and we’re completely fine with that. We always look to maximize positive impact on society with our investments, not to generate quick returns. The most impactful companies in the world also tend to be the most successful businesses.”
Scaling AltSchool: Microschools to Systemwide Reform
Phase two of the company’s growth plan — in which it connects with potential private- and charter-school partners interested in the AltSchool methodology — is already underway. During a presentation at 2016’s South by Southwest conference (SXSWedu) in Austin, Texas, Ventilla announced the launch of AltSchool Open, an enterprise identifying groups that would be most suitable as partners. Even if they aren’t technically AltSchool operations, other schools could be part of a large network using AltSchool’s data and technology. He says that the first partners should be engaged by fall of 2018.
Ventilla and his staff are still deciding whether AltSchool will license software, share it with partners or both. Ventilla says his engineers want to make the company’s software open-source and available to the public. The initial goal might be to widen the research and refine the software before licensing AltSchool products to public school systems in three to five years.
Ideally, the company wants to catalyze the explosive growth of an education network using data to improve education, sharing everything from staff management software to groundbreaking analysis of how students learn.
“First we have to be successful in creating and running our own schools,” Ventilla says. “Our engineering and design team has to build solutions where technology is freeing teachers so they can provide more personalized and meaningful instruction. Then, that platform has to be able to support third parties, who will bring different perspectives and needs. Once we have enough testing and validation under our belts, only then would we feel we have something that will be beneficial to the broader industry.”
Measuring AltSchool’s Success
Ventilla says that AltSchool is still too small and new to compare its results with other schools. But he also says he doesn’t want to measure student achievement in conventional ways. In his mind, traditional measurement is part of the problem.
He describes standardized tests as invasive, saying they’re assessments of one day’s performance, and they benefit schools more than students. He says the learning metrics that AltSchool is gathering will be a more accurate, iterative tool for determining how each child is progressing.
“We use more qualitative assessments instead of a letter grade, along with adaptive testing two or three times a year that mainly functions as a system of checks and balances,” he explains. “What’s important is that all of this information is gathered in real time, so teachers and students have mechanisms for constant course corrections.”
Ventilla also believes that AltSchool’s emphasis on developing students’ social skills will give them a leg up as future professionals, family members and contributors to society.
Photo courtesy of AltSchool
Can Ventilla’s revolutionary ideas be useful beyond the trendy urban neighborhoods where AltSchools are launched? Ventilla is confident that the knowledge and data AltSchool gathers over the next several years will be useful everywhere. In fact, if AltSchool can make education more efficient, schools with constrained resources stand to benefit the most.
“People who don’t have resources aren’t having the same experience as people who do have them,” he says. “In education, they’re getting very different experiences. As a society, we see the issues that come from that.”
That’s one reason the company is a “full-stack” business — it’s involved with the whole process of opening and running schools, not just creating software. By passing on what it has learned about everything from configuring classrooms to staff management to measuring each student’s progress, AltSchool, says Ventilla, will be able to save schools and educators a lot of time and money everywhere.
But is this level of individualized instruction at all plausible in low-income communities where school budgets are badly stretched and children don’t have home internet access? Can public school districts film students? Will teachers’ unions object? Will parents accept a flexible, constantly changing teaching model?
“Right now, what we’re doing isn’t very relevant to the broader education space,” Ventilla acknowledges. “It’s so easy to want to oversimplify an immensely big problem. We hear all the time that AltSchool is going to ‘save education’ or ‘reinvent school,’ and we take exception to that. The future we envision is not a scenario where we’re synonymous with school, but ultimately that we fade into the background, as Cisco or Amazon do in our everyday lives.”
Ventilla knows that for his own children and their generational peers, continuing to move forward is important. Despite all the forces holding the old system in place, it’s time, he says, to find out what else is possible.
Learn more about a day in the life of an AltSchool student, and how Ventilla’s approach compares with that of Salman Khan of Khan Academy.
