EduShyster sat down with journalist Richard Whitmire to learn about his new book on Rocketship charters. Whitmire’s last book was an admiring portrait of Michelle Rhee.
EduShyster asked about John Danner, the founder of Rocketship, who decided to change the instructional model in only one year. He likes the idea of disruptive change. When asked about this, Whitmire said:
Whitmire: [Rocketship founder and then CEO] John Danner was the one who wanted to do it all in one year, which fits your Silicon Valley theme. His mindset was basically *who cares if people don’t want it? Within a year they’ll recover, everything will be fine and everyone will forget about it.* That turned out to be a very poor fit. But I see a lot of positives too. The way Rocketship was able to build their school buildings, and recruit, develop and promote talent was all very Silicon Valley-oriented and a lot of that turned out well. But obviously this particular change didn’t turn out well.
EduShyster: A Rocketship teacher you interviewed was critical of the decision to switch to huge open classrooms because *there wasn’t any research behind it.* But you almost get the sense that that was the point. Danner doesn’t seem to have had much use for either educational research or history.
Whitmire: Danner thought that educational research was second rate, that it was anecdotal, lessons-learned kind of stuff, and that any decent business would go out of business if it had to rely on the caliber of what we see in education research. It’s hard to argue with him about that. What that model change was supposed to pursue was Danner’s long-running theme of personalized learning, which goes back to his days in Nashville. So you could have one teacher working with a large class of 40 kids but in the same space you’ve got small groups broken out. In theory it was going to work but they couldn’t pull it off.
Danner is still working on the Next Big Thing. It involve Ed-Tech and disruption. And he is sure he has a winner this time.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think parents are going to have to fight this at the local level.
They’re all selling it from the federal government on down. They are completely and utterly smitten with the wonders of “blended learning” and there is virtually no push-back.
State lawmakers will figure out giant classes and aides are cheaper tgan teachers (if they haven’t already) and this will be pushed hard in middle and low income public schools.
They have no idea if it’s beneficial or what the downside will be but they are ALL shilling for it.
The only people who will be able to slow it down are local parents. The herd is charging right off a cliff, as usual.
It’s been a disaster in Detroit. The EAA is “blended learning”. Parents who are wary of this can look at what happened there when they put it in.
Let the buyer beware. Lawmakers are doing ZERO due diligence.
Diane: why didn’t EduShyster challenge Whitmire’s assertion re: “… the caliber of education research”, merely saying: “It’s hard to argue with him about that.” For Pete’s sake, why? Shouldn’t Whitmire have to cite his own readings in educational research to support this condescending statement? EduShyster also should bolster his agreement with the above assertion by citing some factual support for this throwaway comment. I guess being a pundit/expert/opinionator has different rules.
“A Rocketship teacher you interviewed was critical of the decision to switch to huge open classrooms because *there wasn’t any research behind it.”
Actually, this theory was tried in the district where I taught for thirty years, and I think it was more widespread than just that one school district. Back in the 1960s when this district was expanding as the barrio grew and built new schools to serve the population increase, the schools were designed to teach several classes in one large room with vinyl skinned partitions that could be pulled into place to break the larger rooms into smaller spaces to teach different sizes groups from more than a hundred to 20 – 30, etc.
That expensive experiment failed within a few years, and it didn’t take long before the district built permanent walls with wood and broke up the larger space into regular sized classrooms.
The noise level and discipline problems magnified with more students creating an environment where it was almost impossible to teach.
Maybe the failure was due to the fact that the poverty rate was more than 70 percent and the local community around those schools was mostly a barrio with violent Latino street gangs who have been at war with each other for generations.
Anyone who hasn’t worked with children who live in poverty in areas where street gangs rule may want to watch the DVD for this film that was based on a true story.
Maybe the larger grouping would work if the school—like most Charters do—expelled all the most at risk and most difficult kids to teach. But then, once you do that, it probably doesn’t matter what method is used, because once you have the easiest kids to work with, every method works.
In fact, once the best students learn to read well and all the most difficult students are removed, many of the easiest to teach would probably organize into groups and teach themselves if they could because these are the kids, thanks to their family and home environment, who are life long learners early in life and most of them actually love to read instead of hate it.
Of course, with a dedicated, seasoned teacher, the life-long learners will learn more than if they were left to teach themselves.
Lloyd, the district where I attended school tried this “open classroom” format in the mid-1970s. It was chaotic. Very difficult for teachers to keep track of students. Very loud. And it catered to highly-motivated, self-disciplined, independent learners.
Deutsch29,
Thank you. What you experienced in the 1970’s proves that the “open classroom” concept had its day in the long list of magic theories from the top down that often promised—-without proof unless it was from a controlled university laboratory school—-that these concepts would lead to every student going to college—then these unproven theories often failed one after another.
I taught for thirty years and saw the endless theories forced on teachers from the top down repeatedly and in almost every case they failed, but the oligarchs, politicians and bureaucrats at the top often refused to accept their theories were failures. instead, they blamed the teachers who often protested these unproven theories wouldn’t work in the reality of the classroom before the teachers were forced to use them.
NCLB, Race to the Top and Common Core are just more unproven theories that are being forced on the country from the White House on down and they have all failed as every unproven theory has failed.
The only one that works is the old fashioned method of an experienced and supported teacher working with a classroom of kids teaching the old fashioned way. It works every time for those students who cooperate and who have supportive parents but that method doesn’t profit corporations or increase the fortunes of millionaires and billionaires recuse then most of the money flows to the classroom instead of fat bank accounts.
What we need is bottom up decision making for what works best for children to learn with support and input from parents. The idiots at the top need to get out of public education and trust teachers to do what’s best just like these same idiots trust the surgeons who operate on their bodies or the mechanics who fix their broken cars and trucks.
Teachers may be the only college educated profession where they have little or no say in how the schools are run and how kids are to be taught while truck drivers, career politicians, college educated theorists and bankers—who know nothing about how to teach—tell them how to teach.
So the reality for low and middle income schools is as follows. If we agree to this experiment where we increase class sizes and replace teachers with low wage aides, and the promoters of the experiment are down the road and on to the next challenge, WE will be stuck with fewer teachers, bigger classes and a budget that will now be baselined at the lower “blended learning” number.
That’s the reality. So ignore the sales pitches and the “urgency!” tactic and use your head.
Who benefits from this? Is it your kid? Why are they all pitching it so hard? If it’s so great won’t schools adopt it organically and responsibly w/out the hard sell?
Apparently the buildings are cheaper, also. There was a story on public radio a few days ago describing a new Rocketship building going up and extolling how much cheaper it was to build than a traditional school. They described the central area, big enough for 100 students on their computers, with polished concrete floors. All I could think about is the noise level in my room when I have 36 students working with a partner…
The kids won’t hear the noise bouncing off the concrete floors because they’re all wearing headphones in the promotional videos.
Glad to hear NPR is promoting cheap schools for poor kids. That’s great. A real public service.
Ten years ago Jeb Bush was promoting this as “cost effective” That apparently wasn’t effective marketing so they changed to “personalized learning”
Even the USDOE is pushing it. They may as well be on the payroll. Hell, they probably will BE on the payroll as soon as they can go thru the revolving door.
I’m sick to death of commercial sales pitches disguised as “policy”
The least they could do is push product honestly.
Margaret,
I think there is some merit to this claim. Does education research go through the same rigorous reviews that scientific research does? Are education research publications as selective in what they publish as magazines like the Journal of the American Medical Association? I have been afflicted with crap, canned character education curricula that was sold as “supported by research” and indeed it was. But the research, upon close inspection, was laughable –not peer reviewed, not replicated in another setting, etc.
Do you think education research is, in general, as trustworthy as research in other fields?
Why has this website got an ad from Amazon dropped into a middle of Lloyd Lofthouse’s discussion? The ad is for a film called the City of God. How can this be eliminated? If this comes via Lloyd, or WordPress, or Edushyster or some secondary source please offer an explanation.The idea that this space will become cluttered with ads from any source is depressing.
Laura, I put the Amazon link to that film in my comment. It’s easy. You copy and paste. I didn’t add it as an advertisement. I went to Amazon because I thought that someone might be interested in seeing a film based on a true story of what it is like to grow up in a barrio where poverty and crime is rampant to give them an idea of the challenges teachers face working with kids from the world of poverty and street gangs—even though the environment in the film is worse than where I taught for thirty years, it was pretty close.
Maybe I should have also gone to YouTube and found the film trailer and added a link to that too.
I have no idea why a WordPress Blog turned it into an image and direct link instead of just leaving it as an html link.
If suggest that if you don’t like it, then ignore it. Maybe someone else will be interested, and to be clear, there is no way I’m going to earn any money off that link because I only pasted that link into my comment to make it easy for someone else to learn something about a world they may have little or no knowledge of.
Thanks for the explanation. I got an an immediate mind block. I am a long time supporter of commercial-free zones. I get the point now. I actually saw the ad while scanning down the page, before I read your post.
It costs money to have a commercial free zone on WordPress.
If the host of a Blog doesn’t pay WordPress and annual fee, they run ads on those sites to help them survive financially. For instance, on all of my WordPress Blogs, the ads appear at the end of each post and those ads aren’t there because I joined some plan to make money off them.
For a WordPress blogger to keep those ads off their site/s, the blogger must pay WordPress an annual fee. I don’t pay that fee because I’m already paying for the domain names for several blogs and several Websites.
I was in western MI this week working and had occasion to look at online employment sites.
It is shocking how many for-profit management companies are doing the hiring for charters here. It’s an alphabet soup of outsourcing.
The turnover must be huge. They’re all hiring and it’s August.
This state will be fully privatized in a matter of years. It’s incredibly sad.
They will lose their publicly-owned, publicly-run schools and they will never get them back. There are so many contractors it’s a whole embedded industry. Shame.
Chiara: I grew up in Detroit. Went to DPS.
I admire your restraint. “Shame” and “shocking” don’t even begin to cover it.
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Thank you so much for your comments.
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So education research and lessons-learned and such are second rate and anecdotal?
The solution: to go back to his days in Nashville, i.e., his three years of teaching in a public school.
¿?
So according to John Danner, the solution to a host of other people’s personal experiences and research [many of whom are far more qualified than he is to do serious credible ed research] is—the unsupported anecdotes of one person who couldn’t cut it as a public school teacher?!?!?
He lasted just as long as Michelle Rhee-Johnson. Can’t wait to hear the equivalent of how he took “his” kids from the 13th to the 90th percentile.
With all due respect, is Richard Whitmire writing a series of books modeled on a famous author of yore, with the updated cage busting achievement gap crushing 21st century series title of—
“Gullible’s Travels”?
An old dead French guy would come in handy here:
“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.” [Ionesco]
Ok, let me try again.
Why am I asking a question that has an obvious answer?
Perhaps, for just a moment, my thinking was deranged by a free floating Rheeality Distortion Field… Johnsonally…
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