Max Ventilla, a Google executive who left the search giant to launch AltSchool in 2013, wooed parents with his vision to bring traditional models of elementary education into the digital age.
AltSchool has raised $175 million from Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and others, and the startup is closing a Series C round of funding. But now some parents are bailing out of the school because they say AltSchool put its ambitions as a tech company above its responsibility to teach their children.
The startup, which launched in 2013, develops educational software and runs a network of small schools with four locations, in California and New York; two others closed their doors in the past year, and three more will close in the spring of 2018. These schools serve as testing grounds for an in-house team of technologists to work on tools for the modern classroom.
Since August, 12 parents spoke with Business Insider on the condition of anonymity, some because they worried that speaking out against AltSchool could hurt their children’s chances of being enrolled elsewhere. Six parents have withdrawn their children from AltSchool in the past year, and two others said they planned to do so as soon as they found a transfer spot at a different school. AltSchool enrolls between 30 and 100 students at each campus.