This seems like a very long list of complicated and in many cases new and untested changes to the way schools usually work… which is not in itself bad, but does make the plan very risky. How many students do you imagine attend this school? Have you spoken to people who have founded a similar-sized school?
The good news is that outcomes for exciting new opt-in educational things tend to be pretty good; the bad news is that this is usually for reasons other than “the new thing works”—e.g. the families are engaged and care about education, the teachers are passionate, the school is responsive to changing conditions, etc. If your goal is large-scale educational reform I would not hold out much hope; if you’d be happy running a small niche school with flourishing students (eg) for however long it lasts, that seems achievable with hard work.
I agree that there are many relatively untested changes. I do not expect all of them to make it through to the end product (assuming there is one). I have no idea if it’ll work, so I don’t know how it will grow. Maybe 300? Certainly not 1000. Possibly 30. Coming up on my to-do list is to speak with a bunch of people in my country who have founded schools. I plan to start this in a month or so, as the school year starts here next week, so they’re all pretty busy.
I want the thing to work. If the marketing goes well and 100 families want to enrol and I get some strong evidence that it’s no better or worse than public school, then I wouldn’t start it. I don’t know how I would know for sure that it’s no good without trying it, and even then I don’t know how I would know, given that I’d be so invested at that point that I certainly wouldn’t be seeing straight. Though if I thought (based on external sources) that it was working for the kids that attended, I’d happily keep it going with 20 kids.
This seems like a very long list of complicated and in many cases new and untested changes to the way schools usually work… which is not in itself bad, but does make the plan very risky. How many students do you imagine attend this school? Have you spoken to people who have founded a similar-sized school?
The good news is that outcomes for exciting new opt-in educational things tend to be pretty good; the bad news is that this is usually for reasons other than “the new thing works”—e.g. the families are engaged and care about education, the teachers are passionate, the school is responsive to changing conditions, etc. If your goal is large-scale educational reform I would not hold out much hope; if you’d be happy running a small niche school with flourishing students (eg) for however long it lasts, that seems achievable with hard work.
Thank you for the comment!
I agree that there are many relatively untested changes. I do not expect all of them to make it through to the end product (assuming there is one). I have no idea if it’ll work, so I don’t know how it will grow. Maybe 300? Certainly not 1000. Possibly 30. Coming up on my to-do list is to speak with a bunch of people in my country who have founded schools. I plan to start this in a month or so, as the school year starts here next week, so they’re all pretty busy.
I want the thing to work. If the marketing goes well and 100 families want to enrol and I get some strong evidence that it’s no better or worse than public school, then I wouldn’t start it. I don’t know how I would know for sure that it’s no good without trying it, and even then I don’t know how I would know, given that I’d be so invested at that point that I certainly wouldn’t be seeing straight. Though if I thought (based on external sources) that it was working for the kids that attended, I’d happily keep it going with 20 kids.