About Avenues

Operating Principles

A great school must know both what it wants to achieve for its students and how it can do that. Avenues’ themes imbue its educational objectives and affect every aspect of the school:

1. Depth in Leadership.

Too many schools rely on a single leader. At Avenues, our leadership team will consist of ten individuals, all leaders in their own right, including two school co-heads, an academic dean, four division heads (for the Early Learning Center, Lower School, Middle School and Upper School), a head of admissions, a head of college counseling and a chief financial/operating officer.

2. Best-of-Class Faculty.

Teachers will be the heart of Avenues, and the best are being recruited. Avenues’ attractions include an exciting and thoughtful educational design, on-going professional development, strong school leadership and career advancement opportunities.

3. A Highly-Developed Educational Design Maintained Faithfully.

Avenues will have a highly-developed, coherent, intelligent and responsibly evolving “school design,” which lays out the hundreds of important choices that go into the conception and execution of a fine school. We have already begun the design process, which we will complete several months before the inaugural school year begins.

4. Frequent Assessment of Educational Results.

Avenues will have highly advanced student assessment systems. The most important of these are not tests near the end of the year, which have little value in helping teachers adapt instruction to meet the day-to-day strengths and weaknesses of their students. The most valuable assessment systems will be real-time, in-class assessments to help teachers monitor the effectiveness of their day-to-day instruction.

5. A Hybrid School.

Avenues expects students to work with both teachers and other students in a traditional school setting and to take advantage of the power and flexibility of new technology. Students will enjoy a rich mix of instructional techniques. Part of the day will be in traditional classroom settings; other portions will be with small teams of students on project-based work; and some time will be spent pursuing highly individualized learning, often with the aid of technology. This requires a serious commitment to technological infrastructure, which is imbedded in the Avenues plan.

6. A Commitment to Independent Study.

Avenues is committed to students pursuing significant independent study. Support for this approach will manifest itself in a different building architecture (for example, “studio” areas within the school where students can work on their own or in small groups); a different schedule (time during the day for students to pursue their areas of excellence); and faculty support (teachers specially trained to facilitate this educational approach).

7. The City as Campus.

New York City has a wealth of learning resources available to teachers and students. From Broadway to MOMA, Wall Street to the UN, Columbia to NYU, New York is home to hundreds of media institutions; companies in every imaginable sector; seaports and airports; state, federal and local government entities. All these are classrooms waiting to happen, and they can show students knowledge in action. Moreover, as Avenues opens campuses in other locations around the world, students will have the opportunity to make other great cities part of the classroom. One does not have to be in school to be in class.

8. System-wide Professional Development.

Because most private schools are single-site institutions, they rely on external sources for the professional development/training of their faculty, providing teachers stipends or funds to attend this or that course. As Avenues develops its system of campuses, it will provide Avenues-specific development programs for its faculty. For example, Avenues art teachers from every campus would come together to share and develop their skills.

9. Never-ending Research and Development.

A school design should never be finished. Avenues will fund on-going research and development to ensure increasing quality in its program. Every five to seven years, we will do a complete review of Avenues’ design (Avenues 1.0, Avenues 2.0, etc.). In between these major design efforts, there will be constant upgrades (think the adoption of new technologies, new courseware, etc.).

Avenues’ operating principles, combined with its educational objectives, should lead to success in providing exceptional education for its students.