The Ross School: Preparing students to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world

The Ross School officially started life in 1991, when Courtney Ross and her late husband, the former Time Warner chairman Stephen J. Ross, launched it as a kind of home-school experiment for their only daughter, Nicole, and two of her friends. It has since grown to serve approximately 500 students from pre-nursery through 12th grade — including a growing number of international boarding students.

Ross School’s transformative model of education was created in collaboration with renowned experts and scholars from institutions such as Harvard and MIT. Key among those contributors are the architects of the Ross Spiral Curriculum: poet and historian William Irwin Thompson and mathematician and chaos theorist Ralph Abraham.

The children take music, dance and Chinese, and start the day performing either yoga or Tai Chi. But it is anything but a tiny private school. It is a charter school in the East Village, and most of its 420 students are black or Hispanic and come from poor families.