Is This the Best Education Money Can Buy?

The World School in Chelsea, to learn about what their kids were eating. Ever since the $85 million for-profit start-up opened its doors in September, food had been a divisive issue. After the first week of classes, a group of parents sent a seven-page e-mail detailing concerns: there were not enough snacks, not enough “worldly” snacks like seaweed, zucchini bread with quinoa flour and bean quesadillas (so long as the beans came from BPA-free tin cans). Unlike other New York City private schools, with their decades of institutional wisdom, Avenues was founded on the premise that its parents were partners in building a new community. So it was ready to hear them out.

That was why many of the assembled parents applied in the first place. Avenues, which was founded by the media and education entrepreneur H. Christopher Whittle; Alan Greenberg, a former publisher of Esquire magazine; and the former Yale president Benno C. Schmidt Jr., was designed to be “a new school of thought,” unencumbered by legacy. It hired seasoned teachers and brought in consultants on everything from responsive classroom training to stairwell design. Mandarin or Spanish immersion begins in nursery school; each kindergartner gets an iPad in class. Students will someday have the option of semesters in São Paulo, Beijing or any of the 20 other campuses the school plans to inaugurate around the world. The cost for all this: $43,000 a year.

Private School Goes All In With Tech
Before enrolling at Avenues: The World School, a new for-profit academy in Chelsea, sixth-grader Isabelle Levent had little interest in technology. She wrote her short stories by hand or tapped them out on an Olivetti typewriter she got for her ninth birthday. When her mother bought a flat-screen television, she called it a waste of money.

 All students at the nursery school to 12th grade school have access to iPads, but starting in fifth grade, all are equipped with an iPad and a MacBook Air—an approach that some experts called unprecedented and, perhaps, redundant.