Avenues promised New Yorkers a newfangled, global education. For some parents, it didn't live up to the hype.

When Avenues: The World School opened in 2012 in Chelsea, it was supposed to revolutionize education. The for-profit school had a 215,000-square-foot, tech-heavy campus, and students partook in a dual-language curriculum with their choice of Spanish or Mandarin.

Founding families weighed in on everything from what language STEAM subjects should be taught in to whether the cafeteria pasta should be gluten-free. One mom who enrolled her 4-year-old that first year was floored when her son asked for water in Mandarin. And how many preschoolers could come back from a school visit to Chuck Close's gallery and talk about the artist's face blindness?

When one family rejected an admission offer, an Avenues cofounder, Alan Greenberg, wrote a letter urging them to reconsider. Greenberg wrote that Avenues would be "the most important new school ever opened."

"I don't in any way mean this to be demeaning," he added in an excerpt of the letter that was published in The New York Times. "But I would not be forthcoming or truthful if I did not say there is absolutely no comparison."

Thirteen years later, Avenues has had seven different heads of school, including one whose tenure lasted two months. After once talking of building 20 campuses around the world, it ended up with three. In November 2023, the school's two profitable campuses, Manhattan and São Paulo, were sold to Nord Anglia Education, a private-equity-backed chain of for-profit international boarding schools. It was the third time the school had been sold.

While some parents sang Avenues' praises, many told Business Insider they'd been disappointed by what they had come to view as essentially an educational experiment gone awry. They said the focus on dual-language learning came at the expense of core subjects. Parents of older students lamented what they viewed as a lack of structure and said kids weren't penalized for not doing their homework.

"Your kids are kind of like the guinea pigs for this growth model," said one mom who enrolled her 2-year-old son at Avenues before the pandemic. In 2023, after four years at the school, she pulled him out. Having him learn Mandarin without a native-speaking nanny or heavy tutoring was increasingly unfeasible, she said.

This year, close to 2,000 students are enrolled at Avenues' Chelsea campus, where tuition for nursery school starts at $68,850 — among the highest in the city.

Avenues' head of school, Todd Shy, told BI in a statement: "We have thousands of happy, satisfied families and thriving students. Avenues is an innovative school that achieves exceptional student outcomes using research-backed practices." An Avenues spokesperson added that in the school's annual "voice of the community" survey, 90% of parents "agreed that Avenues is an enjoyable school for their family" and more than 90% were happy with the college their child ultimately attended.

Chris Whittle, an Avenues cofounder and former CEO, told BI he was "really proud of how the school has done." But some people said Avenues had failed to achieve an impossible vision.

"A for-profit school with great tech support and dual-language programs seems pretty sexy," Wendy Levey, an admissions consultant, said. "But if people are going to spend that kind of money, they want faculty that have been in place for a long time, a curriculum that has been proven to work, alumni who are attached to the school. They want the whole nine yards."

In short, they want to be part of the "club" — the loosely affiliated network of girls, boys, and co-ed schools that make up the city's educational elite. "Even now," Levey added, "Avenues is not part of that club."

If you're a New York City parent in a certain income bracket who has deemed public school a nonstarter, chances are you're familiar with the hellscape that is trying to get your kid into private school. The search for a competitive preschool often starts when your child is just a year old. By the time you get to primary school, it seems as though all but one open spot is reserved for siblings and legacies.

If you do manage to land at Horace Mann, Spence, or one of the other elite nonprofit private schools that some admissions professionals call the "big 20," you're so grateful that you tolerate the incessant fundraising emails for the early-learning center that won't be built until your child is too old to use it. You tell yourself that the dingy basement where you deposit your toddler each morning is quaint, cozy, and traditional.

In an increasingly high-end city, private school remains a remarkably spartan affair. If there are elevators on campus, students are often forbidden to use them until senior year. Children served by macrobiotic chefs at their Hamptons summer homes push beat-up plastic trays down a poorly lit cafeteria line.

It was amid this landscape that Avenues burst onto the scene. Whittle, a former Esquire publisher who'd turned — somewhat controversially — to for-profit education, imagined a sleek, newfangled school with a global mindset. Graduates would be "artists no matter their field," "at ease beyond borders," and "architects of lives that ascend the ordinary," Avenues' mission statement said.

Whittle and his two cofounders — Benno Schmidt, a former Yale president, and Greenberg, who used to be the publisher of Esquire — spent a lot of time and money selling their idea. Avenues hired a marketing team that included an MTV animator and Ken Segall, who conceived of Apple's famous "Think Different" campaign. They sent a direct-mailer brick to 1,000 New York City parents and threw swanky cocktail parties at the Crosby Street Hotel.

Even parents who snickered at the school's tactics showed up to see what all the fuss was about. "The idea was, let's make it feel like we've been there forever and you just found out about us," the former Avenues global creative director Andy Clayman said.

Whittle had made a career commoditizing education. In the 1990s, he conceived of The Edison Project, a network of commercial private schools that eventually transitioned into managing low-income public schools in cities such as Baltimore and Philadelphia. In 2003, Liberty Partners bought The Edison Project for $174 million. A decade later, Liberty sold the company, reportedly taking an 85% loss.

Avenues embodied the same premise as Edison: namely, that innovative business people could educate students better than traditional nonprofit schools. At the time, this was a welcome philosophy in New York City. During Mike Bloomberg's 12 years as mayor, nearly 200 "low-performing" public schools were closed, replaced by 150 privately operated, publicly funded charter schools. As much as 40% of the city was rezoned to accommodate mixed-use development, paving the way for Avenues' flagship campus in a converted industrial building sandwiched between public housing and the High Line, the elevated park that runs through Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood.

Avenues' for-profit status was appealing to what one Avenues parent, Euan Rellie, called a "certain kind of Bloombergian New Yorker." "You can imagine if you're an entrepreneur or private-equity guy, you might say, good, there's less bullshit," said Rellie, who cofounded the private-equity firm BDA Partners. "This is just a straightforward service provider."

Sejal Shah enrolled both her daughters after touring the school in 2012. "It seemed like a place to move and grow versus being stagnant in one way of thinking and one way of doing things," she said.

Avenues' timing couldn't have been better. From 2006 to 2011, the number of kids younger than 5 in Manhattan had increased by 32%, Whittle told The New York Times, while only about 400 spots at top independent schools had emerged over the past decade. According to the Times, by June 2011, 1,200 families had applied for early admission to Avenues, even though just eight of 180 teachers had been hired, the building was a construction site, and the curriculum was still a giant question mark.

Avenues hired academic heavy hitters like Nancy Schulman, the former director of the 92nd Street Y preschool, one of the city's most prestigious private-school feeders, as well as a former Dalton headmaster, Gardner P. Dunnan. Still, Whittle made clear that he had no interest in being another Dalton. "To me, the biggest risk is that we are just another fine school," he told The New York Observer in 2012. "If that's all we are, this was a waste of time."

Whittle's run at Avenues was relatively short-lived. In 2013, John Fisher — the conservative Gap Inc. heir whose family gave The Edison Project $25 million and who was an early minority investor in Avenues — bought out one of the school's two main backers. "It was a hostile takeover in that I fought it, and I lost," said Whittle, who also placed a bid at the time.

Fisher tapped Jeff Clark as the new president of Avenues in November 2013, the change briefly mentioned at the end of Whittle's annual newsletter. The Avenues spokesperson said the school didn't make a big deal about the appointment to parents because it "in no way impacted day-to-day operations."

That same year, the school's parent company, Avenues Global Holdings, loaned Whittle almost $11 million that a 2018 legal document said was meant to "ameliorate his dire personal financial situation so he could focus on his work for Avenues." (A person close to the company said the loans had nothing to do with purported financial struggles.) Whittle got an additional $1 million in 2014, but he ultimately failed to pay back the entirety of the loan.

In February 2015, Whittle left the school. Two years later, the parent company sued him and foreclosed on his Hamptons home. In 2018, Fisher bought out the last minority investor, gaining full control of Avenues.

The typical New York City private school grows incrementally. Nightingale, Spence, and Chapin began in Manhattan brownstones and expanded over decades, one capital campaign and Ivy League acceptance at a time. Whittle, on the other hand, raised $75 million to renovate Avenues' Chelsea campus in just three years.

The facility embodied Whittle's idea of education as a luxury good. The cafeteria is named "FOOD" after the SoHo restaurant founded by the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, and Avenues students in first through fifth grade receive iPads to do their schoolwork. There is no central library; Whittle told New York magazine in 2012 that his eventual goal was to have a paperless campus.

Many parents were drawn to Avenues' modern approach to elite academia. Instead of the pinafores and khakis favored by private institutions like Brearley or Collegiate, students wear a mix of gray, black, or white solids. There's an emphasis on boardroom-style presentations and group projects, rather than teacher-led lectures, essays, or written exams.

"If you attended the first year, you drank the Kool-Aid," said a mother who enrolled her 4-year-old son at Avenues in 2012. "Why would you choose an unknown entity for top dollar with no proven track record? You had to believe in something bigger." Another mother, who transferred her daughter out of Avenues in 2023 after her freshman year, called the early years there "magical," adding, "These kids would run with smiles into school."

The school's biggest academic selling point has always been its language immersion program. Originally, 2-year-olds at Avenues were taught in a combination of English, Spanish, and Mandarin. When students entered the threes program, they chose Mandarin or Spanish as their target language and spent half their time learning in that language. For instance, after a bilingual morning meeting, students might do a small-group reading in Mandarin, followed by another learning period in English. Science would then be in English, with music and art taught in Mandarin. (Beginning next year, based on parent feedback, kids will choose a target language at age 1, the Avenues spokesperson said.)

In first through fifth grades, subjects like language arts and math switch between English and Spanish or Mandarin on alternating days. By sixth grade, the dual-language component tapers off because, in theory, students are highly proficient.

For some, the bilingual program turned out to be more than they'd bargained for. One mother told BI that by the end of her son's first year in Avenues' twos program in 2019, she began receiving feedback from the school that he needed additional support to learn Mandarin. "They were telling us to get him a tutor and potentially a Mandarin-speaking babysitter," she said. "We started realizing that it's not practically possible."

At one point, the mother said, Avenues suggested that she take her son to occupational therapy for behavioral issues that she felt stemmed from the immersion program's rigor. "It just felt like we had to outsource everything," she said. Last year, she transferred her son to a traditional nonprofit school for first grade where she said he's thriving.

The Avenues spokesperson said that "while some families may choose additional support outside of school, this is not required nor expected at Avenues" and is discouraged in early years.

The mother who enrolled her 4-year-old son at Avenues the year it opened said she started noticing in elementary school that her son's basic reading and writing skills paled in comparison with his Mandarin. She also became exceedingly frustrated that he completed assignments mainly on his school-provided iPad.

For all the hype around Avenues, "I was just not impressed with it as an academic institution," the mom said. She decided to transfer her son out for eighth grade.

The Avenues spokesperson said that learning in two languages "does not detract from what children need developmentally" and that the school's language immersion program had "been designed to maintain literacy development." The spokesperson separately said that Avenues graduates were "thriving at leading colleges and universities." From 2016 to 2024, four went on to attend Harvard, four went to Yale, and one student attended Princeton, according to Avenues' website.

Not all parents or even teachers are convinced of the efficacy of Avenues' methods. One teacher who worked at the Chelsea school for a year prior to COVID said she noticed a skills gap between her Avenues lower-school students and those at the nonprofit private school where she now teaches. She believed Avenues students' writing suffered because they learned in English only half the time. The Avenues spokesperson said they did not recognize the teacher's characterization.

Multiple former Avenues parents also told BI that while they bought into the school's modernistic approach to education, they grew concerned that it was becoming too loose. One mother said that when her daughter entered middle school in 2019, Avenues "tried to teach math three different ways at one time," confusing her preteen, who didn't know which method to use.

The mother who transferred her daughter out of Avenues during high school expressed similar reservations. She told BI that in middle school, her daughter was surprised to learn from a friend at an uptown private school that they got in trouble for not doing their homework. There was so little communication between parents and teachers, the mother said, that one year she didn't learn her daughter was struggling academically until January. (The spokesperson said that if a student doesn't complete their homework, a teacher might pull them aside to "talk about the importance of personal accountability." The spokesperson added that "student progress is carefully monitored through regular formal and informal assessments" that are reported to and discussed with parents.)

No school, no matter how lauded, can be perfect for every student. One mother recently transferred her daughter from Avenues to a more traditional private school for sixth grade. While at Avenues, she'd suspected her daughter might be behind her peers at other private schools, but she was willing to make the trade-off for a kid who was fluent in Spanish, tech-savvy, and a confident public speaker. "Then I came here, and she was literally almost three years behind in math," the mom said. "In English, she was getting tested on adverbs and pronouns, and she knew none of them."

Avenues "really honed in on skills that you need for the future," the mother said, "but not the basics of education. But who knows if the basics of education are even necessary 10 years from now."

Avenues had always planned to build a global network of schools, a former administrator told BI, pointing to its robust research and development team, which totaled 30 full- and part-time staffers by 2019. But in the end, Avenues ended up with only three campuses: in Shenzhen, China; Sao Pãolo, Brazil; and New York City. A temporary Silicon Valley location served 70 students during the 2022-2023 school year.

When Fisher decided to sell the business, the goal was to find a buyer to purchase the whole thing. "And that didn't happen," the former administrator said. "Did they make mistakes? Hell yeah," and "their mistakes cost them their vision," she added.

While the former administrator called the dissolution of that vision "heartbreaking," she believes the new ownership will bring "real stability." A Nord Anglia spokesperson said the group chose to purchase Avenues' Chelsea and São Paulo campuses in part because of a "close cultural fit between us as educators." Plans to build a permanent Silicon Valley location were scrapped after the Nord Anglia acquisition, and Avenues Shenzhen is now independently owned and operated by a local partner in China, which licenses the Avenues brand.

"I did have some parents reach out to me after the sale," Whittle said. "And I think overall, it is going to be quite good for Avenues. They're a capable, thoughtful group. They have global reach, which I think is important to the student body."

In October, Nord Anglia itself was sold to a new ownership group, which could theoretically shift things at Avenues again. Avenues' spokesperson said that, despite the changes, "our focus has been — and always will be — on our students and providing a world-class education."

Meanwhile, the school has taken steps to appeal to a broader swath of families. In the early days, students hoping to transfer into Avenues from first to fifth grade had to pass a Spanish or Mandarin competency exam. But in 2017, Avenues launched a pilot English-only program for incoming fifth graders that gradually expanded to include the third and fourth grades. This past school year, 33 students enrolled at Avenues were non-immersion, the spokesperson said, adding that the school would be willing to add more English-only lower-school spots if parents asked.

Some parents see Avenues' flexibility as a plus. "If you don't like change, Avenues is not the right place for you," said Lynn Berney, who has two children in high school and one who recently graduated. "But I do think that they're constantly improving themselves."

Rellie's younger son, who's now a senior, is staying put. "Being the parent of a teenager is such an effing roller coaster," he said, that "you tend to muddle through until there's a crisis."

Avenues says its enrollment has remained consistent. The spokesperson told BI that applications to its New York campus increased by 50% from September 2018 to September 2023, while the acceptance rate fell by 18%. They added that 2024's admissions rate was about 5% lower than 2023's, "which indicates continued strong demand for limited seats."

Avenues may not have become exactly what Whittle imagined. Depending on whom you ask, it might not even be a particularly successful academic institution. "It's a consultant-created conceit," said the mother whose son struggled to keep up with the Mandarin component. "The shots are called at corporate."

But the school succeeded in at least one way. "We did the impossible thing: We were profitable," said Clayman, the former Avenues global creative director. "This is why we were bought."