The New York Times recently noted the irony that many Silicon Valley technologists send their children to a school that does not compute — that is, to the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, which, like all Waldorf schools, emphasizes free play in a homelike environment and discourages modern media and technology.
(As I’ve noted before, they tend not to play up their theosophical roots.)
Other Silicon Valley technologists are sending their children to Bullis elementary school, where they don’t have to pay close to $20k tuition — but instead “donate” $5k to the publicly funded charter school:
Bullis’s popularity shows that even parents in wealthy, top-performing school districts such as Los Altos have become disenchanted and are seeking alternatives. Bullis has higher state standardized test scores and offers more art and extracurricular activities than the Los Altos district, which is cutting music and increasing class size. Bullis has achieved this success while receiving about 60 percent of the conventional system’s public funding.
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Parents in Los Altos Hills created Bullis in 2003 because they were angry after the district closed their neighborhood school, said Mark Breier, a founder of the school and former chief executive of Beyond.com.To get advice on starting Bullis, Breier said he consulted with Silicon Valley luminaries and charter advocates. They included Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix Inc. and former president of the California State Board of Education and venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers.
The founding parents won a charter from the Santa Clara County Board of Education after the Los Altos district twice rejected them. After giving spots to current students and their siblings, Bullis reserves half of its slots for residents of the neighborhood that fed into the old school.
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On a recent school day at Bullis, a kindergarten class studied Mandarin. Second-graders, sitting cross-legged under pictures of Bach, Mozart, Liszt and Stravinsky, learned to read music. A seventh-grade math class worked on algebra — a year or two before most U.S. schools — while an advanced student did linear equations at a high-school level. The school offers electives in Broadway dance and the stock market.“We’re lucky to have so many different things we can study here,” said third-grader Ishani Sood, 8, taking a break from her Mandarin class.
A foundation set up to help fund the school asks Bullis parents to donate at least $5,000 for each child they enroll. Those who can’t afford to pay should discuss the reason with a foundation member, “recognizing that other school families will need to make up the difference,” the foundation said on its website.
Naturally they’re under attack for their lack of “diversity” — because the kind of diversity Silicon Valley thrives on is not the right kind.