Tears filled the eyes of teachers and students in the combined fourth- and fifth-grade classroom at Tessellations, an exclusive Silicon Valley private school for gifted children.
Classmates had just learned that Meta’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, and his wife were planning to pull their son and five other students out of the small, inseparable class to start a home school. The nine students left behind were distraught.
That bombshell last May was only the latest shake-up at Tessellations, a pre-K to 8th-grade school that bore all the markings of the next big thing for young geniuses when wealthy Silicon Valley parents founded it six years ago. Instead, the institution—where tuition starts at $44,500, for preschool—has spiraled into bitter fights with neighbors, lawsuits from teachers and parents, and an internal war among tech executives who fought over the school’s future.
The saga offers a rare window into high-end Silicon Valley schools for gifted children, where the stakes rival college. Toddlers must ace IQ tests to land spots at the most coveted schools, and tech execs wield seven-figure donations to advance their children’s interests.
Such schools have proliferated in Silicon Valley, where the extraordinary concentration of wealth and smarts has produced an unusual dynamic: Founders and executives who soared by disrupting industries arrive at their children’s schools confident they can do the same to education.