It’s often said that if a person were to time travel from a hundred years ago to today almost everything about our world would be unrecognizable except our schools, which would look largely the same. Isn’t that crazy? That the system we entrust to prepare young people for meaningful lives—and which is the very foundation of our ability to solve future world challenges—has hardly changed in the past one hundred years? The world is changing faster than ever before. The future is one we can hardly begin to imagine, and yet our education system is stuck in neutral. For the sake of our young people who are expected to thrive in this uncertain future and for the sake of our world—which faces challenges and opportunities like never before—we must rethink education from the ground up, and we must do it now. This is Prisma’s purpose.
We, the founders, are repeat entrepreneurs who’ve spent most of our careers in technology. Like so many parents, our worldview changed upon the birth of our three children. Suddenly the world’s challenges and our rapidly changing future felt very urgent and very personal. How, we wondered, could we prepare our children to thrive in a tumultuous, ever-changing world where we can’t even begin to imagine the careers that will exist? We saw our young children’s passion for learning, joy for life and supreme confidence and felt sure they’d be okay. But then we heard about older children who hated school; who struggled with anxiety, depression or bullying; who were shells of their former happy selves. Might this one day be our kids? This was the beginning of our quest to completely reimagine school. Prisma is for our children and, hopefully, for yours too.
If you hit a prism with light at exactly the right angle, it makes a rainbow. We believe that, like a prism, every child is multidimensional and has the ability to shine. But just as it takes the right environment for a prism to create a rainbow, it takes the right learning environment for a child to show their true abilities. This is why we named our company Prisma (aside from the fact that we think it sounds cool).
Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard founded Prisma in 2020. Victoria & Alain are serial entrepreneurs who’ve spent most of their careers in technology. Like so many parents, their worldview changed upon the birth of their three children. Suddenly the world’s challenges and the rapidly changing future felt urgent and personal. This was the beginning of their quest to completely reimagine school.
They assembled a dynamic founding curriculum and coaching team (you can read more about them here) with deep experience in education, from former school founders & principals to Harvard education researchers to Teacher of the Year award winners. It is their vision that is responsible for our program structure, curriculum, and coaching philosophy. One of those founding team members, Kristen Shroff, is now in place as Prisma's CEO.
Prisma was built for Victoria and Alain's children and, hopefully, for yours too.
We are looking for gutsy, humble, can-do, driven team players to join us. Have a look at our hiring needs.
Unlike most schools, Prisma does not expect its teachers to also serve as curriculum developers. Our learning coaches focus on building bonds with kids, giving them feedback on their work, and building community.
Our project-based curriculum is built by a team of innovative, experienced designers. They've brought to Prisma a range of experiences creating cutting-edge curriculum for organizations like the George Lucas Foundation, Sesame Workshop, Scratch, and the Woodland Park Zoo. Our team has expertise in all subjects from literacy to math to coding to art, and they're laser-focused on designing projects, workshops, and missions that are "hard fun."
Each piece of curriculum your learner experiences goes through multiple rounds of edits, and aligns to our own learning framework that includes our own competencies as well as key standards from Common Core, Next Generation Science Standards, and more. We also ask kids what they think about the curriculum, and use their ideas to improve our work!