Name: What Will Schools Look Like in the Future?
Uploaded: 2017-02-28T14:18:25.000Z
Duration: 6 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It’s a tragedy that, as the world outside  school changes faster and faster,

the majority of American kids are not being  set up to succeed in the future that’s coming.

We're entering a world where  there's not a lot of value

in just kind of sitting there  and doing what you're told.

Increasingly a computer  could do that kind of stuff.

We are eventually going to create a new model of education suited to the 21st century,

instead of the last half of the 19th century.

We're just trying to make it happen sooner.

My name is Max Ventilla, and I'm  the founder and CEO of AltSchool.

Working in Silicon Valley, and  being at Google, and living here,

it's kind of impossible not to  have it shape your worldview

and to believe that a mission-driven technology company

can have an incredible impact, beneficially, on the world.

And being a parent of young kids there's  really nothing I can think of that is

more important than their education  that I can be working on.

As an entrepreneur you have that startup bug.

You need to work on something that catches you, and this was the thing that caught me.

There is this problem, which is that the model that we have for educating kids,

it is a mass production model, it is a factory model.

It doesn't provide an individualized experience to kind of anybody.

Every 45 minutes kids switch  to a different subject,

and they open a textbook, and  they read the next chapter.

And at the end of the week they take a quiz.

That experience is teaching kids  how to think like computers.

And that's not going to be very valuable  when these kids actually grow up to be adults.

If you're trying to fundamentally  transform the education experience,

that is not something that you can just  whiteboard with a bunch of research,

and a bunch of smart people in a room somewhere.

You have to learn what that model looks like.

For us, that meant immediately, almost  from starting the company, opening a school.

And then we opened three more schools,  and then we opened three more schools,

and now we're opening two more schools  that are focused on personalized education.

Each child defines their own experience  to learn in a way that feels natural,

and that doesn't try and corral them to  learn this thing right now, in this way.

And that's where technology plays a  foundational role versus a superficial role.

There are two tools that fundamentally  enable personalization in our schools.

So this is a representation of all of the  things that are important about each child

that different people can add to for curating a day-to-day education experience

That maps to a second tool,  which we call the playlist,

which is the, the kind of  scaffold for each child's day.

It allows each child to decide  what order they do things,

or they can decide what's on  that playlist as they get older.

None of us like being told what we need  to do, when, where, how, with whom.

There's nothing that's more  demotivating than that.

And if you're not motivated,  you don't actually learn.

They have to actually go along with a certain  experience, they have to actually think.

What we see is incredibly promising  out of the gates in the first two years.

We're seeing much more than a year's worth of progress on kind of nationally norm tests.

But, as importantly, they’re making  progress on the social, emotional pillars.

Things like grit, ability to work with  others, ability to manage your time,

to set goals that are going  to serve those kids critically

when they enter a world that's going to demand  those kind of characteristics from them.

I mean my daughter is going  to have a different life

because this is the kind of  school that she went to.

humans tend to overestimate what  we can accomplish in a year,

and underestimate what we  can accomplish in ten.

First year, it probably costs  us $100,000 per student.

The next year it's like 60,000, the next year  it's like 35,000, this coming year it's like 25,000.

I think that when you get down  to about $15,000 per student,

now you're in the realm of the kind of median experience in lots of parts of America.

There are lots of public school districts that  spend way more than that on average.

how do we take the platform that we  use to support our own schools,

And how do we expand that  platform with partners?

We're just starting to work  with the first set of partners

who would open schools  which aren't run by us.

It's on that path that eventually  you get to what you want.

A new ecosystem where all schools,  existing schools and new schools,

are able to take advantage of a new  way to educate kids for their future.

There's literally a technology company  behind their school working tirelessly.

That's the kind of ten-year future  that we believe is possible.

In general a startup is hard.  In general a startup takes a long time.

One that's trying to do something  this ambitious in this space,

This is mile three of a marathon, and I feel good.