The chatter among well-to-do New York parents is the plan for Avenues: The World School on Manhattan’s West Side. Avenues, a for-profit K-12 institution, won’t open until 2012, but its plan captures the zeitgeist so well it could have been scripted by Aaron Sorkin.
The school aims to take pupils to “global preparedness” by offering terms in Mumbai or Shanghai, for example. Chelsea Piers, a sports complex in the neighborhood will help provide physical education.
To which one can only reply: Swell! Here’s why. US schools, private or public, enjoy a luxury more exclusive than anything in Avenues’ brochure. That luxury is that of an unspoken cartel. The private-school cartel, the one that Avenues is boldly trying to bust into, offers a fabulous education but slots for a limited number of pupils.
One way this cartel maintains its power is promoting the myth that only old is good; parvenu schools just can’t compete.
If Avenues prepares its students halfway as well as it suggests then parents will want to send their children there. The intense demand for slots at the older schools will weaken, even if only faintly. Then those institutions will become more responsive to concerns of parents.
The same logic carries over into the arena of public schools, which feature a different kind of cartel. It consists of teacher unions, school administrators and government agencies. These parties determine what pupils learn, and sometimes their determinations render the students less competitive.
In the end all new schools, public or private, snobby or not, add value to the education market, making it bigger and more efficient.