CRAIN'S: For NYC parents, trying to get their kids into quality schools can be a long, hard slog. But help is on the way.

For parents in New York City, trying to get their kids into quality schools can be a long, hard slog. But help is on the way.

A record number of new private schools are flooding the New York market, while existing schools are expanding at a rapid pace. The boom comes in response to skyrocketing demand from a growing number of families—and larger families at that—who are choosing to raise their kids in the five boroughs.

Some of the education newcomers are trading on reputations built elsewhere to break into the New York market, but few have pedigrees like Dalton, the prestigious Upper East Side prep school. The majority are branches of relatively new for-profit education companies with schools in multiple cities across the U.S. and overseas that focus on innovative learning techniques and the desire to help kids compete internationally.

“I’ve been in practice since 1999 and I’ve never seen so many new schools opening at once,” said Emily Glickman, head of Abacus Guide Education Consulting, a firm that helps parents with the application process. “The for-profit education market is looking to open schools in affluent places, so it makes sense that New York families are being courted.”

Among the new entrants is Wetherby-Pembridge, the exclusive U.K. school that Princes William and Harry attended in London, which just started accepting applications for its first branch in the U.S., set to open on the Upper East Side next September. The program will start with preschool classes but will build to 280 seats serving kids up to age 11. AltSchool, a San Francisco-based company with backing from Mark Zuckerberg, started a school in Brooklyn Heights a year ago, opened a second branch in the East Village this fall and is planning another in Union Square for next year. The kindergarten-through-sixth-grade program features an innovative teaching approach where students work at their own pace in mixed-age classrooms.

Portfolio School, a 2,500-square-foot facility in TriBeCa developed by Stanford’s graduate schools of education and design, opened in September. The Nord Anglia International School—an East Village venture that offers the English national curriculum along with an exclusive Juilliard-branded performing arts curriculum—launched in 2011 and has 240 students from more than 50 countries.

Growth spurt
Along with the newcomers, many existing programs are looking to expand. BASIS Independent, a STEM-focused school that opened in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in 2015, is launching a Manhattan branch on the Upper West Side next fall. Enrollment at the Red Hook location this year jumped to 675 kids from 400 in 2015. BASIS has attracted families with its rigorous focus on math and science, and its cheaper tuition—$25,400 a year in Brooklyn and $29,500 at the Manhattan location, roughly two-thirds of what many more established private schools command.

“The number of school-age children in New York is rising, and we offer them a solution to their education problem,” said Mark Reford, chief business development officer for BASIS Educational Ventures. “They either can’t afford the traditional privates that are over $40,000, or they can’t get in, or they’re not comfortable with them because they are so elite.”

With more families opting to stay in the city, and spots in top public schools so hard to come by, parents may have no choice but to consider these new schools, experts say. On the Upper East Side, 59% of all families with a household income of $100,000 or more had two or more children in 2011, up from 49% in 2000, according to census data. The numbers were similar on the Upper East Side and in Park Slope.
Meanwhile, across the five boroughs, 21% of those earning from $200,000 to $399,000 had three children, up from 15% in 2000.

At the same time, the number of children under the age of 5 in many wealthy communities in New Jersey has fallen 20% to 40% since 2000, with similar declines in Westchester and Nassau counties, census data show.
For-profit-school advocates say that their model leads to better-run institutions with a higher level of investment in facilities and programming. They also say their focus on international education resonates with well-educated, well-to-do parents today.

“There’s a globalization at the higher echelons of education,” said Kate Bailey, head of school at Wetherby-Pembridge in New York. “In both London and Manhattan, we are in neighborhoods with very successful, internationally oriented, high-end communities.”

But experts on the New York market say parents are skeptical of for-profit schools and feel more secure with the nonprofit model overseen by a board of directors. In fact, despite the demand, experts predict that many of these newcomers won’t last in the tough local market where parents want schools with longstanding track records of getting kids into the Ivy League.

“We have 1,600 clients and we don’t have one who is applying to a new school,” said Amanda Uhry, president of Manhattan Private School Advisors. “The schools have no history, and people in New York look at that.”
Indeed, new schools in New York don’t always succeed. BASIS Independent is taking over the Mandell School’s kindergarten-through-eighth-grade facility on the Upper West Side next year, as that school is closing because of financial difficulty.

But so far, demand has been strong for at least some of the newcomers. BASIS has more than 1,000 families requesting applications for its Manhattan branch. In its first year in Brooklyn Heights, AltSchool received 1,200 applications for 30 spots.

New math
There is no official count of how many kids apply to private schools in the city each year, but Uhry estimated that there are often more than 1,000 applications for 60 spots in kindergarten at many schools. “And it’s going up 10% a year,” she said.

Parents might be more willing to consider these new schools, some experts say, in part because of the success of Avenues: The World School, a for-profit academy that opened in Chelsea in 2012. Avenues just graduated its first class of seniors and widely publicized the colleges they were attending. Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago were just some of the top schools on the list.

“Avenues is highly sought-after, and New Yorkers typically like a club that’s hard to get into,” Glickman said. “Still, only a few schools have been so successful in quickly generating demand.”

A version of this article appears in the November 21, 2016, print issue of Crain's New York Business as "Learning curve".