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Private & Independent Schools
Will Whittle be around next year?
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Anonymous
| IIRC they wooed teachers away in the first instance from schools like Sidwell by doubling their salaries. |
Anonymous
I'd like teachers to get paid more, but how was that supposed to work? Compensation is already 2/3 of a school's budget, excluding financial aid. |
Anonymous
As far as I can tell, no Chris Whittle project yet has ever involved actually thinking through how something would work in the real world. He's been 100-percent "vision" and 0 percent execution in every organization he's ever created. (and he's created, or tried to create, a bunch of them) That's why he has 35 years of failures behind him. And yet people keep giving him money. Baffling. |
Anonymous
| You did not give donation to the teachers you prepaid your kids tuition when Chris ordered you to do. And it is for whittle not for us. |
Anonymous
| Have you noticed they chose to hire teachers who just relocated from other countries/States??? Scamming at best |
Anonymous
Either it’s a lie, or leadership at Whittle were making serious bank. True!! |
Anonymous
| In August Chris Whittle told staff that payroll cost $280,000. He's lying. |
Anonymous
|
From Class Clowns: "By the time Whittle directed his full attention to the educational arena in the early 1990s, his previous exploits had already left a widely publicized trail of unhappy partners, tales of profligate corporate spending and personal excess, accounting irregularities, exaggerated claims, and charges of self-dealing, all culminating in financial collapse."
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Anonymous
| Any update on this? Elizabeth Holmes is currently reading this forum with her jaw dropped. |
Anonymous
| Old enough to remember when I thought this was a ponzi scheme years ago. Enjoy the throwback video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tXNLe7qedQ |
Anonymous
Interesting to see and hear the man behind the name. He comes across as very smarmy in the video. Who would trust that guy? |
Anonymous
I’m, perhaps, even older. I remember the Edison Project /Tesseract schools in Baltimore and Channel One — where Chris Whittle was eager to profit from providing advertising in schools and substandard educational programs to students and communities with few options. I don’t know much about Avenues in NYC, but I did sit through one of the sales pitches for the Whittle School before it opened. I’m startled that investors trusted Whittle with their cash and saddened that anyone would trust him with the education of their —or anyone’s — kids, given his history. He probably should have stuck with Esquire. Giving Kids the Business is an older book that anyone involved with Whittle might want to read. |
Anonymous
I hate to say "told you so," but I posted this type of info and more about Emerson fiasco and his education con men cronies back when it first showed up on DCUM. I have background in charter movement and urban education reform. None of this should have been a surprise. But it's human nature to hear what we desperately want to believe. What ambitous parent wouldn't want their child to be bilingual in Mandarin, get an innovative education, avoid rejection from Big 3, and brush elbows with global elites while paying half the cost of a mid-level boarding school? Whittle's real target this time around was wealthy and/or influential Chinese families looking to fast track their kids' careers without fear of failure in elite Chinese or European schools. DC was a hot market for independents pre-Covid. Avenues itself bought GDS lower school on Macarthur--allegedly. The "good" public schools were overcrowded. The "highly regarded" bilingual charter schools had impenetrable waitlists you couldn't buy your way into. Inside the Beltway still had pre-Trumpism elitist caché. Whittle figured there were enough "diverse" (= high SES & non- white) DC-area families and educators to siphon from Sidwell et al to to attract full paying white families wanting to avoid public schools without looking like - shudder - racists. What he didn't factor in was facilities costs of Intelsat building (rookie-level mistake?), covid and Chinese government 180 turn against for-profit, foreigner-operated schools. Et voila. Buh bye Whittle Studios. I am truly sorry to the families, staff and educators who got caught up in Typhoon Chris. It's not your fault for wanting what's best for your children. Whittle --again--chose to exploit children with hubris gained from decades of enrichment without accountability. I do hope all families find solutions that support and develop their kids like every child deserves. Side notes: Sidwell is not required to file a 990 because it's religious school and technically a church. Same with Cathedral schools, St Pat's, etc. And DCPS routinely pays 6 figures for teachers and librarians. Whomever Whittle recruited may not have known their market value at the time. They too were exploited. |
Anonymous
| You clearly don't hate to say "I told you so." This is a 73 page thread to that effect. |
Anonymous
I was a brand new high school teacher in 1992 when I walked into my classroom one morning to find a shiny new, large TV mounted on the wall. Now in those days, we still used overhead projectors and VCRs as classroom technology! We had to check the VCRs out of the "technology room" and roll them through the school into our classrooms LOL! Now every classroom had a TV and we were told that Channel One had "generously" donated them under the condition that we made our students watch 10-15 minutes of their programming every morning during homeroom. I valued my short time with my homeroom kids every morning, as it was an opportunity for us to casually chat and they often shared a lot with me. The first day I turned it on, there was a young Anderson Cooper blathering on about some news story that was supposed to be of interest to kids. That lasted about two minutes, followed by non-stop commercials for all kinds of junk. Teachers were really pissed and we all hated Chris Whittle from that moment onward! I never turned Channel One on again after that. Such trash. |