Rocketship charter schools have a goal of expanding to enroll one million children. Their model relies heavily on technology and inexpensive, inexperienced teachers who work long hours and have no union. Their schools are focused on test scores and leave out the arts and other “non-essentials.” The San Jose, California, board of education will decide tomorrow about whether to send more children and more public dollars to this poor substitute for a real school.
This letter came to me from a Rocketship teacher:
“Dear Diane,
I have been reading the coverage on your blog on the lawsuit against Rocketship in its quest to build Rocketship Tamien in San Jose. I appreciate your attention to this issue. I am a current Rocketship teacher who is also concerned about Rocketship’s expansion. With a vote by the San Jose City Council coming this Tuesday, I decided I could not longer remain silent. Below you will find an anonymous letter I sent to the San Jose City Council, as well as the parent group against Tamien you featured on your blog. I wanted to send this letter to you as well. I’m not sure if it is something you would be interested in posting on your blog, but even so I wanted you to know you helped encourage me to write it.
Thank you!
A Rocketship Teacher
To all those concerned and involved with the Rocketship Tamien dispute,
I am a Rocketship Teacher who has become increasingly concerned and frustrated while silently watching the dispute over Rocketship Tamien. In this letter, I hope to bring a perspective of a current Rocketship teacher. I am just one perspective and do not claim to speak for other Rocketship teachers. However, I do think my point of view, without a union for protection, is silenced and hidden in this debate. By raising my voice, I am fearful my job could be in danger. Therefore, I have chosen to write this letter anonymously and leave out many details of my own personal experience.
I have structured the letter under a few key points of my feelings about Rocketship as an organization and the direction we are headed. I hope this perspective might raise new questions in the ongoing debate over opening Rocketship Tamien. I have tremendous respect for many of the teachers I work with at Rocketship and by no means wish to attack the incredible effort and energy they put into this difficult job.
Rapid Expansion Without a Clear Model:
Just a few months into the last school year, Rocketship announced to teachers the start of “redesign.” I say announced, because it was not offered as a conversation, but as a mandate. We would be changing many of our schools to an “open-space” model. This model’s vision would have placed 100 students in a room with two credentialed teachers and one learning specialist (including in Kindergarten and first grade). Without research or proof that this was a good idea for our students, redesign was launched at several Rocketship campuses. Teachers, without a union, had no choice but to follow blindly into the “redesign” path, many teachers staying nightly until 9pm trying to figure out what in the world they were going to do in a new space with that many students.
Unfortunately, the experiment Rocketship embarked on with their students and communities proved to be rash. This year, they have slowed down and redesign is happening, for most schools, only in 4th and 5th grade classrooms. I think my biggest concern when thinking about redesign, which left many teachers bitter and caused many to leave Rocketship, is that even though Rocketship is experimenting with its model and unsure of its future direction, it still seeks to rapidly expand across San Jose and across America. It is irresponsible and egotistical to believe that a model that you have not figured out is superior to established public schools in the neighborhoods you are interrupting. This is especially true in light of last year’s CST scores which showed a decline at every Rocketship campus.
No Teacher Sustainability, Little Experience at All Levels:
Working at Rocketship is not sustainable. I personally have never had a colleague tell me, “I could work as a Rocketship teacher for the next 10 years.” I haven’t even heard a colleague say they could work as a Rocketship teacher for 5 years. Rocketship relies heavily on Teach for America corps members. Many TFA teachers come into the classroom with no experience and no perspective on what a traditional school is like. Without experience of a traditional model, I think many TFA teachers come into Rocketship blindly and follow the unreasonable expectations blindly. They grind through their two year commitment of late hours, ridiculous test score pressure, and tumultuous school and organizational environment. At the end of those two years, or even before it, many will leave Rocketship. Some will go into traditional public schools; some will run away from teaching, or what they believe from Rocketship to be teaching, forever. This turnover and burnout robs the San Jose community of veteran teachers that have worked in and understand the community.
It is not just inexperience on the teacher end, it is also inexperience on the administrative end. If you teach for three years at Rocketship, you may have just as much or more teaching experience as some administrators at Rocketship. Rocketship claims to have a robust teacher training and development program, but unfortunately that training comes from inexperienced educators, which I think highly questions the value of such training. When I have heard this concern brought up, usually the value of veteran teachers and experience is scoffed at as unnecessary. This, I think, is part of a larger issue at Rocketship. In my opinion, Rocketship believes itself superior without the experience or results to support it.
Instability of Student’s Day:
Rocketship, to save money by hiring fewer teachers, has a rotational model. Students move throughout the day between different classrooms and spaces, largely three: 1) Literacy, 2) Math, 3) Learning Lab. Literacy teachers have two classes during the day, while math teachers have four, which I think greatly contributes to lack of teacher sustainability. Building relationships with 60 or 120 elementary students and their families, as well as maintaining classroom culture throughout the day, is difficult, emotionally draining, and exhausting.
I truly believe that this middle school model of rotation is not appropriate for elementary school students and creates a culture of instability that breeds behavioral issues. When students are rotating through multiple spaces throughout the day, they do not have consistent behavior expectations, consistent authority figures, or often enough eyes monitoring the transitions. I do not believe this model suits every child, particularly those with special needs. I believe many of our students crave a more stable environment, especially for our students who may experience instability at home.
Students also spend about one hour a day on computers which, as Rocketship has admitted in the PBS special, is not currently effective in pushing student learning. However, because we have a higher student to teacher ratio than traditional schools, students continue to be “held” in the learning lab until their math and literacy classes open up. I do believe that online learning has incredible potential, but Rocketship is using it for too long every day which breeds a lack of investment and boredom in our student’s experience in the learning lab.
Anti-Union Anti-Traditional Public School Rhetoric:
Rocketship claims unions will block their ability to expand and innovate. What that means practically for teachers in the case of the “redesign” experiment last year and day to day decisions of the organization, is that we effectively have no voice or tangible power in this organization.
The PBS special had two Rocketship teachers who claimed that they did not need a union, that they were valuable to Rocketship and safe. Both of those teachers were slated and have now become administrators at Rocketship. PBS didn’t dig, but if they had done some digging, they would have found plenty of disillusioned teachers for their interviews. Or perhaps, they wouldn’t have since we have no union protection. Rocketship also pushes its anti-union, anti-traditional public school rhetoric on our families. I have had many interactions with parents where claims are made about unions or public schools in the area, that have been garnered from Rocketship, that are wrong or over-generalized.
Rocketship, I believe, is not here to provide pressure and competition to traditional public schools. They, with their goals of expansion to reach 1 million students, are here to take over. It is essential to that goal then, to discredit traditional public schools and the teachers at those schools. Students, because of state funding per child, become dollars Rocketship takes from a traditional public school with every child it recruits. This in turn puts more pressure on established districts to lay off teachers and will, eventually, lead to school closures.
Test Scores as the Ultimate Goal:
Rocketship is obsessed with its tests scores. As a charter, they live or die by those test scores. We are now asking our students to learn how to bubble multiple choice questions as early as kindergarten. Teachers are constantly in cycles of testing (which again, is to 60 or 120 students which contributes to the unsustainability).
I believe that knowing where our students are and working to address knowledge gaps is important, but test scores have taken over the culture of Rocketship schools. The stress put on teachers I believe translates directly to the students who are constantly being assessed. Last year, my and other teachers’ salaries were based largely on one computer examination that is given to the students three times during the year. Science, social studies, art and general play time have all become victim to the testing grind. I do not believe Rocketship is cultivating creative, innovative, challenging, minds.
In closing, I do not believe that Rocketship is an organization to be given blind trust. The parents at Rocketship are just like the parents protesting against Rocketship Tamien. They want the best educational experience for their students. I send this letter in the hopes of raising more pause towards Rocketship, its lobbyists, and the tighter hold it is trying to establish over San Jose’s elementary schools.
Like most ventures in corporate raidership, Rocketship is engineered to crash, but not before it achieves its design goal of destroying a prior resource that people had labored to build up over many long years.
The design goal is to cash in big bucks off the backs of the students and the taxpayer’s pockets, get as much as possible and then leave for easier pickings.
The first thing that struck me in the letter was, “Omigosh they are going back to the ‘open classroom’ model”! Tried. Didn’t work. Too noisy. The teachers quickly cordoned of their space.
That’s the problem when non-teachers run schools. They have no foundation. They don’t know what works, what needs to be modified and what is just WRONG. Remember in the 1950s when we had a whole generation of kids who could not spell because they had been taught sight reading instead of phonics? Remember when they were taught phonics so they could sound words out, but no sight reading so they could call words but not read for comprehension.
This teacher was extremely brave to speak up without having a union or, I presume, tenure. Unfortunately, if any administrator reads her letter who knows her writing style and her issues, they will be able to tell who it was and she will be fired.
After watching the PBS profile and reading this teachers’s comments, I have typed about three responses. I am struggling with a loss for words. How can anyone working in the education profession (broadly defined) support this type of school? By instituting the computer “learning lab” and cutting out social studies and the arts they are able to scale-up a cheap, “basics only” form of schooling. Ok, but why would we want that in the first place? What problem is it solving? While it may be possible to get students to do comparatively well on standardized tests using this approach, if it works then other schools that spend more but don’t show better results will be viewed as wasteful and inefficient. The very definition of what a school is, and what a school should deliver, could be eroded over time.
Adults making their living in the educational field have a moral responsibility to rage rage rage against the premise that spawned the Rocketship “innovation”. A school without art and social studies is not a school. If there isn’t money in the system to have an appropriate curriculum and pay the teachers then the answer is not to cheerfully create a school that fits into these confines. Who is going to speak up for the children forced to endure a cut-rate education when it is not even the people we pay to look out for them?
teacher’s
They prey on poor and politically naïve people. If you could see the charters in most urban areas you would wonder, “Who would send their child here?” The schools don’t even have full staff because of the poor conditions for teachers. If you found out there were six different teachers in one classroom for the school year you wouldn’t send your child to that school. Parents have to accept this in urban areas. This is what “choice” looks like in the reform movement.
Thoughtfully written, Emmy. Social Studies is what connects the student to the world. How sad that it has lost its status as a necessary discipline – the tie-ins are so numerous, it pulls everything together for understanding of much of what we are trying to teach.
I am seeing first hand at the elementary level how important it is to be formally taught something rather than just using it as something to read about or write about. It just doesn’t stick and many students don’t make connections. We must continue to value and teach about our and other societies at even the most elementary level so that students will have an understanding of why things are the way they are now and how they came about.
Officially stepping off my soapbox now.
Without Social Studies, where will kids learn about democracy and the electoral process?
Good question. They won’t learn about social studies. No art. Just computers to raise test scores in reading and math.
Diane, your comment below is appallingly and irresponsibly inaccurate. Rocketship adapts units from Project GLAD to teach science and social studies, at all grade levels. The curriculum we are now developing in-house incorporates content-area texts into every unit.
Lourdes, perhaps you might explain why I get anonymous letters from Rocketship teachers opposed to the expansion, and why there is a local parent group trying to block the addition of more Rocketship charters. I don’t have all the facts. I would like to know.
You seem to assume they know something about government now. It’s not just democracy and the electoral process people need to understand, but the nature of a constitutional republic. I’d venture, Skeptic, that even YOU do not know about constitutional government, if you have concluded that the only mentionable elements of government are democracy and the electoral process. I hope I am wrong. NO ONE on this blog, aside from myself, supports constitutional government.
The typical charter school formula for disaster. Thank you Rocketship teachers for telling us the inside story of this fraud.
From the Rocketship website:
Our Partners
Tim Ranzetta and Theresia Gouw Ranzetta, Partner at Accel Partners
Bill Gurley, General Partner, Benchmark Capital
Dave Goldberg, CEO SurveyMonkey
Sheryl Sandberg, COO Facebook [Author of Lean In]
Jason Stinson and Aileen Lee, Partner Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Jennifer Carolan and Shawn Carolan, General Partner Menlo Ventures
Reed Hastings, CEO Netflix
Dave Peery, Peery Foundation
Toni Rembe Rock and Arthur Rock, Venture Capitalist
Jonathan Chadwick, CFO Skype
Franklin McKinley School District
The BelleJar Foundation
Check out Bullis Charter School in Los Altos for a sense of how even their childrens’ charter schools differ from Rocketship. Why didn’t they think to scale-up that school with its Mandarin, arts specialists and “fab lab” instead?
Perhaps because those enrichment opportunities are not scale-able financially. Rocketship is admirable in that it does not predicate its instructional model on private donations.
No, they profit from tax dollars siphoned from the public schools.
Thank you for speaking out. Our society needs voices from within the ranks and operations of the corporate reformers. Is whistleblowers the word I am looking for?
Dear Rocketship teacher, if you haven’t already you need to try to get this letter published in the Mercury News or the website San Jose Inside, places where you’re not so to speak preaching to the choir.
So I’m a Rocketship Si Se Puede parent, and while I believe Rocketship is far from perfect (and I have been far from silent about Rocketship’s need for improvement) and while think this teacher gets some things right about Rocketship, I don’t think one teacher’s story can be considered sufficient testimony upon which to judge Rocketship’s overall success or failure as a school system. If one teacher’s testimony were enough, I’d offer the insights and experiences on the “Teaching in the 408″ blog (http://roomd2.blogspot.com/) as conclusive evidence that the neighborhood schools my kids would attend if there was no Rocketship are so irredeemably dysfunctional that any school–even the dystopia described in this blog–would be a better option for any parent with even an ounce of concern for her or his child’s education.
As it turns out, neither Rocketship nor the Alum Rock schools are quite as bad as the nay-sayers report, and thanks to Rocketship and other charters, for the first time parents of kids in this poor, overwhelmingly immigrant community have the option of choosing which school best fits the educational needs of their children, a privilege the rich have enjoyed for years without much complaint. We have found Rocketship to be an excellent choice for our three children, because our Rocketship has figured out a way to meet the educational needs of our first and third child, who are traditional learners, and of our middle child who is not a traditional learner. Maybe the school described in the “Teaching in the 408″ blog also could have instructed our kids, but I know Rocketship is doing a fantastic job, and like any individual or institution willing to take on the task of educating low-income kids, they deserve our gratitude and praise.
–The Rev. Ben Daniel
Hi Ben,
Don’t use my blog or my experiences as a foil to bolster the erroneous and self-serving claims of Rocketship superiority, or worse still, as being a school that was capable of educating low-income kids from the 408 for the “first time.” If you followed the blog, or the rise of Lee Mathson Middle School 2002-2008, you would see how off-base such a comparison is. In any event, corporate shilling gets old, but I guess not bashing the hard-working folks the public school system, huh?
Hi Ben. Don’t use my blog or my experiences as either foil or fodder for your erroneous and disingenuous claim of Rocketship superiority. A close read, or close connection to the ed world of the 408 2002-2008, would reveal how sad an argument you a making. The fact that you seem to equate the privileges of the wealthy with the rise of charter schools underwritten be the wealthy is mind-boggling. There’s a social justice argument to make here, but denigrating the rise of Lee Mathson Middle School at the turn of the century is not it. Neither is going to bat for an organization that, like all CMOs, will soon find itself biting down firmly on its own tail.
If it has any part in this conversation, my blog may exist as proof point of the un-necessity of destructive charter incursion. And yes, for the record, I absolutely could have educated the hell out of any of your children. You find yourself relocating to East Oakland, and I’ll make good on that promise.
I am a parent of two kids at Rocketship Mateo Sheedy;I believe there is a big fault line in between Rocketship’s method and the traditional school’s method of teaching.Both my kids entered Rockethip for their first year of kindergarten.They are both accustomed to that method because they were first taught that method when they first entered Rocketship.Kids who leave their prior schools and enter Rocketship arn’t accustomed to that method.This causes a mix in their test scores.Something very important for Rocketship,their kids’test scores, which try to prove why they want to expand and continue to improve their methods of teaching.In conclusion, their methods are rocky at first but if we can understand why, we can help and comtinue to improve their methods to help the kids of this generation.
Social studies and science ARE TAUGHT at Rocketship.If you came to one of the Rocketships’ exhibition nights,you would see kids presenting what they learned in social studies and science.
I know a beginning teacher at a Rocketship school and I am appalled at what she is expected to do and the hours she is required to be in meetings. (In fact, it is 6:30 and she is still at work in a mandatory meeting!) Since she is new she has no idea what is considered acceptable expectations. It now makes since as to why there was an opening midyear and the teacher seemed to have disappeared! I’m not a huge fan of union but I do appreciate the rights I have and am protected without fear of dismissal. She is not being treated as an honored teacher but rather someones puppet! I can’t wait for her to get out of there and join the real world of teaching! If I ever hear of another teacher looking at a job there I will tell them to run the other directions as fast as they can.