Last year, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have welcomed their first child into the world. Inspired by the prospect of becoming parents, they have taken on many humanitarian initiatives, all in a goal to aid in creation of better future for the children. One of the things that they have done since 2010 to aid in education reform was to donate $100 million to Newark, New Jersey’s public school system; pledged to donate $120 million to Bay Area public schools, and have donated  $15 million to America’s newest education model – Alt Schools. However, The Primary School, which is Facebook moguls’ latest attempt at education reform is their boldest yet.

Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

All Children Should Be Given  Equal Opportunity

Priscilla Chan has worked both as a pediatrician and an elementary school teacher. With the plan to bridges the two fields, the idea for The Primary School was born.

Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Chan has always felt that all children should be given equal opportunity to achieve their dreams. However, an academic achievement gap persists between white children and students of color – and wealthier children and their lower-income peers. The health gap between different races and socio-economic classes directly mirrors the academic achievement gap. This begs the questions: what are the underlying causes that account for the disparity in academic achievement and health? And how can The Primary School be a solution?

Research shows that many children face challenges such as poverty, neglect, family instability and poor environmental conditions long before they start any schooling. These challenges have the potential to alter the body’s ability to maintain health and promote optimal brain development. The 2010-2011 the National Survey of Children’s Health has reported that 25% of children have been diagnosed with one of 18 health conditions thought to be chronic. It is no surprise that children with these conditions have very poor educational outcomes that are far below their true potential.

The Primary School in East Palo Alto

Chan plans to set up The Primary School in East Palo Alto with the goal to support families and help children from underserved communities to reach their full potential.  The school will be private, not-for-profit, and completely free of charge.

Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

However, unlike conventional schools that focus on K-12 education, The Primary School aims to support, “the whole child”, by implementing novel techniques that address the complex and interrelated social and emotional challenges students face. In order for the school to be fully integrated with health services, The Primary School has officially partnered with the Ravenswood Family Health Center.

The relationship between The Primary School and a family begins before the child is born.  Parents begin to eceive support from The Primary School beginning at the prenatal level.

A health center, located close to the school, will provide comprehensive health and dental care for students and their families. Children studying at the school may also receive health care at the on-site clinic. Personalization of care and support is one of The Primary School’s top priorities. Chan believes that The Primary School’s assistances should be uniquely tailored to each family’s needs and choices for the children to be physically, mentally and emotionally healthy.  

The first families to be admitted to The Primary School will begin in August 2016 as a full-time school for four year olds and parent-based programming for infants and two year olds. The facility will expand with an additional grade each year and is expected to cater to 700 students once fully built. Although The Primary School website allows for interested families to stay in touch, there is no information as to how the school will choose families if there is a surplus of applicants – which is bound to happen.

The Primary School: a better way of caring for and educating children

Chan has stated that the personal experiences she has had are what inspired her to, “find a better way of caring for and educating our children.” Prior to being CEO at the primary school, Chan had led an after-school program in a housing project and worked at a hospital that was focused on helping low-income and uninsured patients. In Zuckerberg’s announcement about The Primary School, he wrote that “Health and education are closely connected…when children aren’t healthy, they can’t learn as easily. Many kids and teachers across the country deal with the consequences of poor health in classrooms every day.” On a personal note, he also told the world how excited he was to see his wife grow as an entrepreneur.

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What do you think of these initiatives? Do you think that combining health care and primary school is a way to bridge the gaps between children? Would you welcome such a school into your neighborhood or city?  
Please share your views and comments. We love to read them.  

The post The Primary School – The Nexus of Education and Healthcare appeared first on Novak Djokovic Foundation.

Series B funding for the for-profit, Silicon Valley quest to “save education”just netted $100M, thanks to philanthropic contributions from VCs and the biggest names in technology. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife Priscilla Chan, are the newest members of the Valley’s elite to backup America’s newest educational model – AltSchool by investing $15 million. Zuckerberg has been extremely generous in funding new educational initiatives, and it seems AltSchool has exceeded his expectations. But will Montessori 2.0 effectively tackle the major challenges in the U.S. education system or will the tech-based startup only exacerbate the many difficulties in EdTech?  Only time will tell.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

When ex-Googler Max Ventilla embarked on the “miserable,” process of applying to highly competitive, private preschools for his daughter, he became skeptical of whether or not the traditional educational experience would best prepare his daughter to be a happy and successful adult in the 2030s, 2040s and 2050s. Many American parents share a similar sentiment to Ventilla as public schools continue to overemphasize standardized testing, large classroom learning, and antiquated methods of teaching that waste a considerable amount of class time.

Ventilla’s solution was to, “redefine the classroom,” with AltSchool, a startup which blends Montessori education and high tech tools in order to scale-down on many costly resources that public schools depend on. The overarching goal of the company is to use technology to offer every student a personalized learning experience that factors in the interests of students and the pace they feel comfortable learning the material. Currently, AltSchool has opened four micro-schools around San Francisco and will be expanding to Palo Alto and New York by opening four more. In this school system, there are 20-25 students in a class of mixed ages and two teachers. Each student has either a laptop or a tablet and 30% of a student’s day is spent on these devices to complete playlists or a personalized sequence of tasks. The playlists cater to both individual and group work but are heavily monitored.

Students are always videotaped and audiotaped and the company is even prototyping wearable devices with a radio frequency ID tag that tracks the movements of students. The records from surveillance are kept for the purposes of improving teaching techniques, assessing student mastery and address safety concerns. AltSchool classrooms do provide opportunities for leisure to their students throughout the school day and take them on project-based field-trips to the city once a week.

Although the software product of AltSchool – which incorporates an instructional platform, student recordkeeping, enrollment, administration and a social network between teachers and parents – seems to be a positive step in constructive educational reform, the model also gives rise to many concerns.

1. Enrollment into the school is very expensive and highly selective at $28,000 per year and a 6.67% acceptance rate. Bryan Alexander, educational technology expert and author, has expressed that this level of tuition and selectivity does not bode well for an America that is becoming increasingly divided by income inequality.
2. Even though studies have shown the usefulness of technology in learning, many regard that the amount of time students spend in front of a digital screen should be decreased during ages that are crucial to the development of social skills for children.
3. Critics believe that a slight improvement in learning efficiency is a small price to pay if the alternative is to treat students like robots. AltSchool tracks every motion of a student from how he or she performs in an electronic assessment to his or her precise location in the classroom.
4. The AltSchool model is for-profit, making parents dubious if the model’s true intentions are to help kids have a brighter future or benefit a future investor.

So where is the $100M collected from Series B funding actually going?

Ventilla has acknowledged that the majority of these funds would be used for internal R&D – more specifically engineering, payroll, product and design. Next, AltSchool wishes to, “grow the footprint of their original schools,” by allowing charter and public schools to outsource the many basic functions of AltSchool’s software platform. To Ventilla’s comments, the Twittersphere expressed disbelief on how components of AltSchool could be a part of the modern-day public school system stating that AltSchool is tailored to a very specific type of community. Nevertheless, Ventilla is confident that the evolution of public schools into AltSchool-like micro-schools is possible but will take at least five years. And it is evident that the Silicon Valley believes in him. Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla have expressed their commitment to supporting education and personalized learning, both at home and abroad as they firmly believe that:

Education — like access to the internet — is fundamental to helping our community make progress and ensuring that everyone has equal access to opportunities.

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