Chris Whittle, pioneer of the American charter school movement and longtime education upstart, is staking the future of his dream on Shenzhen.
Ground has broken in the city’s Qianhai Special Economic Zone for the first China campus of the Whittle School, designed by Renzo Piano, the celebrated architect behind Paris’s Centre Pompidou, London’s Shard and New York’s Whitney Museum. Piano is one of a constellation of high-profile educators and luminaries attached to ambitious plans for over 30 Whittle campuses in China and abroad by 2026.
At the unveiling ceremony last month, Whittle presented his team. Shen Xianzhang will serve as principal of the Shenzhen campus, after leading Renda Fuzhong students to garner top marks in the gaokao 11 times during his tenure there. Shen will oversee the yet-unnamed heads of the lower, middle and upper schools of the campus. Nicholas Dirks, after serving as chancellor for UC Berkeley, will serve as the school’s chancellor in charge of international expansion.
The Board of Advisors and educators are similarly impressive, as was the presentation in the bleak-chic Sea World Design and Culture Center. Heavy bound books laid out the philosophy and profiled the team, with charts of planned growth and opportunity. But how will it work?
The Whittle School will educate students ages 3 through 18, guiding them through a “personalized” education with an immersive second language environment (English or Mandarin) and summers or semesters spent around the world. It’s a vision of students who will be true world citizens, ready to follow their passions anywhere across the globe.
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The trick, though, is for students to get in early. For the 2019-2020 school year, 2,500 slots across all grade levels are available. Recruiting staff explains that these students will be “the ones who are most hungry for a new conception of a modern school like the Whittle School,” and likely looking overseas for college education. In these first years, “a basic fluency in English will be expected upon admission so that they can engage fully in [the Whittle School’s international curriculum.” The alternative is a traditional Chinese track that fully focuses on gaokao prep.
After that first year, new students will likely be locked out: 2019’s juniors become 2020’s seniors and so on down the line. Once the school is at full capacity, parents need to enroll their child at age 3 to get in the system, unless a current student vacates their spot.
For a tuition “comparable with that of other internationally-oriented schools in the area,” Shenzhen’s Whittle School will offer a Center of Excellence focused on robotics – in partnership with Tsinghua University, “China's MIT” – as well as creative maker spaces, a piazza-style center for spontaneous encounters, a tiny forest on the roof, cutting edge tech everywhere, natural light throughout and student-teacher ratios of 9:1. And then there’s that envisioned network of campuses – starting with Washington, DC, in 2019 – promising a massive and diverse pool of experts.
Whittle maintains that “At the very heart is the idea is that a school with a system of campuses all working closely together — bound together by common culture, common curriculum — can do things for its students and its families that it’s difficult for a single school to achieve.”
The education pioneer sought a similar outcome with Avenues: The World School, founded in 2011 but only now expanding beyond New York and Sao Paolo. This time, with even more ambitious plans, Whittle has put China at the center of the plans. And that seems wise.
With a warm welcome from Shenzhen’s government – and generous support from China Merchant’s Bank – the prospects for the new school look promising. Shenzhen carried Deng Xiaoping’s vision to our current, towering reality. If the Whittle School enjoys similar encouragement from Beijing, and this campus becomes the foundation of the international network, Shenzhen could launch the Chinese Dream of yet another revolutionary.
[Images via Whittle School]
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