After extensive research on transformative and innovative education, I recently came across a radically different approach to education: a full stack approach experimented at AltSchool. I have to say I am impressed. As I began reading about AltSchool, I quickly started to draw mental connections with other peer-to-peer business models such as Amazon, Netflix, Airbnb, LendingClub or Holacracy, the management 2.0 world I come from. AltSchool is building a new operating system to enable a 21st century education. But what does that look like precisely?

About AltSchool

In mid-2013, entrepreneur Max Ventilla decided to design “a new type of school that would provide the kind of education he wanted for his own kids: a school that would not follow the usual 'one size fits all' model but a holistic system” that is focused on personalized curriculum, infused with technology, and empowers teachers to maximize the potential of each child. Since they've opened, AltSchool has expanded from one to four micro-schools, with four more opening in the fall in San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Brooklyn, NY. Each of its elementary schools is a single, small, mixed-age class of 25-30 kids with a few teachers.

Let’s look at that model more in depth to understand what makes AltSchool's specifics so revolutionary, and, IMHO, the school of tomorrow. Let's zoom in on what AltSchool is not, and how it is different from other schools.

A scalable model

AltSchool is not one four-walled building but a network of micro-schools. Many private schools are not scalable; in fact, much of their value lies in their scarcity. Conversely, AltSchool is built to scale. The model gets better as it scales, exactly like Airbnb, which improves its customer experience as the network grows (more choice, cheaper, higher product quality, etc.). It is the same at AltSchool: every kid's experience improves as additional kids are added to the network with the idea that teachers can compare and share knowledge, new ideas, coursework, best practices with others within the AltSchool network thanks to the technology in place.

An agile approach

AltSchool is not resilient to change contrary to traditional schools, which have to be very conservative in what they try out due to the bureaucracy they’re saddled with. Altschool is like a lab, emphasizing a "dynamic steering" approach based on direct feedback from reality instead of grand strategies based on high-minded assumptions. Indeed, the first thing AltSchool did was to open a micro-school so it could begin experimenting and testing ideas. Like with any agile software projects, the engineering staff at AltSchool works closely with teachers to build, deploy and upgrade technologies that help the school curriculum adapt to the needs and interests of each child. The more feedback is provided by teachers, parents, and the administration on what works, what doesn’t, what would be useful to have, the more the technology features can improve. In other words, all of the people who are part of that system act like sensors, and in that sense they can design tools that are fully customized to their own needs. Pretty cool, right?

Quite frankly, I do not know a better way to build an organization that sustains acceleration and harnesses the power of evolution. As CEO Ventilla says: “The purpose of school is to prepare kids for the world that they’re actually going to inhabit as an adult. And that world is continuing to change at an accelerating rate.”

A personalized curriculum

Forget about standardized tests and common core curriculum! When a new child joins AltSchool, a comprehensive learning ID card, called a Learner Portrait, is built out and continually updated. It catalogs the child’s level in each area as well as his(her) characteristics as a learner: interests, strengths, weaknesses, intuitive learning strategies, ways of thinking, being, and interacting with the world. From here, a set of tailored individual learning objectives for academic, cognitive, and social emotional learning are selected. Each week, children work through an individual playlist of learning activities, at their own pace, allowing teachers to assign more projects to fast learners and spend more time on concepts that are less intuitive. Compare that to a playlist on Netflix that adapts to feedback, ratings and preferences from the movie-watcher to anticipate exactly the film or TV show (s)he'll most enjoy next. At AltSchool, two kids could be building wooden benches for the San Francisco Zoo, with one working on the design while the other one is focusing on the measurements and the actual construction.

There’s nothing new about using technology in the classroom, of course. That said, technology is not here to replace the relationship-driven real world. Instead its role is to superpower the teacher giving him(her) autonomy and support. With this approach in mind, it’s easy to imagine a vast library of apps, offered by third parties and based on meritocracy, as a teacher’s arsenal for individual learning. Just like you install apps on your smartphone, a teacher at AltSchool could adopt apps on a similar platform, from adaptive learning solutions (Khan Academy, Star Walk, Wordflex, etc.) to administrative operations (office supplies logistics, resource allocation). This territory is one of AltSchool’s most exciting features for me, as it allows for all sorts of experiments and possibilities.

A marriage of mission and startup

I love the fact that AltSchool is not public but is a for profit private company. That gives me the hope that it might be the first organization to change the whole dynamic of our education system. Why? Because this status allows AltSchool to have a customer-oriented approach. They think of school as a service instead of a due, which is radically different from how education is usually experienced. For instance, there are no enrollment cutoff dates that make children born on October 1, say, have to wait an entire year to start educational programs available to children born just a day earlier, on September 30. AltSchool also offers a 90-min drop-off window for parents. These qualities increase drastically the success of the model by allowing flexibility to families.

Now, I’m curious to see how AltSchool develops, particularly in relation to how they will handle what I think to be their biggest challenge: finding and getting facilities up and runnning while navigating the city permit process. Good luck with that!

So is AltSchool the new black? There is no doubt about it, as far as I’m concerned. I'm sold. I admire their clear sense of “we’re changing the world” that emanates from AltSchool insiders. Ultimately, the vision of Altschool is to allow childs within the school to flourish, much like human cells are organized into organs, themselves organized into bodies, and into the world to express their purpose as humans.

Here’s a glimpse into a micro-school so you can experience what it is like to attend AltSchool. Watch here.

My insight into the AltSchool approach stems from my 5/21/15 visit to their HQ and from reading articles (AltSchool blog, the press), watching videos and listening to interviews. I’ve never discussed these thoughts with an actual team member.