Crossroads School (Santa Monica, California)

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For other schools of the same name, see Crossroads School

Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences is a private K-12 school in Santa Monica, California.

The school was founded in 1971 by Dr. Paul Cummins (an educator) and Dr. Rhoda Makoff (a biochemist) as an effort in progressive private education. Although the founders, and many of the school's original students, came from the former St. Augustine By-the-Sea Episcopal Day School in Santa Monica, Crossroads School has always been a secular institution. The school is known for its artistic curricula such as music and film, as well as its upper school newspaper, Crossfire, consistently ranked among the top 20 high school newspapers in the country. Crossroads' academic curriculum is considered competitive with those of America's top private schools. Admission into Crossroads School is highly selective.

The school pioneers innovative teaching styles and curriculum changes. Human Development is a fundamental part of the Crossroads curriculum, holding equal weight with conventional departments such as Math and History. It is meant to teach students maturity, tolerance, and confidence, important aspects of life that are often neglected in a public school education. Advanced Placement (AP) classes were recently excluded from the curriculum, as the faculty felt the required topics for certain AP classes were too narrow, and taught students to merely pass a test rather than truly understand the subject. Students address teachers by their first name. Some question this untraditional approach, but many at Crossroads insist that this practice fosters friendship and trust between the authority figure and the pupil. Classrooms also have names, not numbers, and are dedicated to important figures in history: Einstein, Mead, Frost, Chavez, and Neruda are examples.

The 2004 book Hollywood Interrupted by Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner (ISBN 0-471-45051-0), dedicated a large section to Crossroads; it depicted the school (and the celebrities who send their children there) in a negative light seen by some students and parents as exaggerated. The article focused mainly on a handful of high-profile parents and "drug problems" stemming from the 1980's. The school was also featured in a May 2005 issue of Vanity Fair; like Breitbart's book, it also focused narrowly on the school's celebrity clientele.