This is a very strange post. I have written it four times, and each time the text has disappeared. Hmmm.
Washington, D.C., is getting its first Rocketship charter school. The building is under construction, and parents who plan to send their child have been invited to interview prospective teachers.
Rocketship started in San, Jose, California, where it was a sensation for a while. The business model is that kids spend a lot of time in front of computers, monitored by inexperienced teachers, mostly TFA. No art, no music. John Merrow did a segment about it on PBS, wondering if this was the Henry Ford factory-style school of the future. The scores of the Rocketship charters were high, which brought them much acclaim. But then the scores faded, and community opposition impeded the chain’s expansion.
Here is a recent analysis from the Hechinger Report: http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/education/2015/07/05/rocketship-charter-network-criticized-overly-rigid/29646659/
But now Rocketship plans to open eight charters in DC. Very likely they are benefiting from the strong interest of the Walton Family Foundation in turning DC into another New Orleans: No public schools, private management, many TFA, no unions.
It is hard to believe that the Waltons actually believe that this model will have a dramatic effect on the children of DC. At present, DC has the largest achievement gaps of any urban district tested by NAEP.
The news here is not about parent involvement. The real news is that Kaya Henderson and the mayor of DC, who controls the schools, apparently have given up on public education and are prepared to privatize the public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
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I’m not seeing anything, here. What am I missing?
Me too????
PLEASE OPEN THE POST AGAIN. The text mysteriously disappeared. It is fixed.
It is finally posted. Please look again!
Got it this time. Thanks!
So DC is welcoming a charter chain whose model has failed on the west coast? Are we to believe that these parents have any idea of their record?
Poor children get absolutely nothing. This will ruin generations. Michelle and Barack are fine with it. As a matter of fact, it could never have happened unless this President was willing to trade upon the love his people have for him.
Mary, you are so right. Keep other people’s children, especially those who are poor, away from the fine arts, funnel them into narrow tracks so that they will become frightened, joyless, obedient serfs for the plutocracy. Shame on Obama for accelerating this – and now in his own back yard. This is but one of the reasons why I shudder every time Hillary Clinton ties her fortunes to Obama – if she is elected and re-elected, we will see the continued strangulation of public education in America, until it is reduced to a lifeless heap. SMH
It could have a dramatic effect on children and the Walmart machine knows it. Imagine future generations with no choice but to get consumed by a trained to work efficiently education from the same source of their discount superstore consumables!
I often refer in conversation to the Newshour report about Rocketship that pictured a child in a wearhouse of computers, not a teacher in sight, so bored by the terminal as to be resting his head on the back of his chair, staring off into space, drool coming from his fixed open mouth. That image, to me, sums up the miracle of education technology.
Since this is DC, I’m wondering why no one has ever looked to the Defense Department for its model of schools. They educate American children all over the world. I would think that there’s enough talent in the DoD schools to come up with an alternative to the charter schools.
DoD schools serve a population with 0% unemployment, supportive community, drug testing, etc, etc. I doubt they have much expertise with populations resembling DC.
DoD schools have certain advantages. All parents are employed. Children and parents have no choices. It is the military.
Ed reform (private sector along with government actors) are pushing blended learning very hard – this isn’t just charter schools. They’re marketing this model to every low and middle income public school.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone when it spreads from charter schools to public schools. That’s the stated aim of ed reform, after all – public schools adopt charter policy and practice.
My concern is no one will be able to AVOID any of this because ed reformers so completely dominate policy and political circles- which of course turns the whole idea of “choice” on its head. You get charter methods whether you want them or not.
The “personalized adaptive learning” ie. cyber schools has always been Bill Gates’ nirvana. It is cheap, and he gets to make money from hardware, software, and data mining.
Chiara –I too am worried we won’t be able to avoid computer-based learning. CA has recently released its list of new CC-aligned state-approved ELA packages. These used to be textbook based. Now most of them computer-based. There are no textbooks. This means schools are going to feel an irresistible push to get laptops for every child so as to be able to deploy these new Common Core-sy ELA materials. Some of us teachers rarely use the textbook. Perhaps we could rarely use the computers if we chose. But I worry that once the Trojan horse is in the gates, the software developers will come up with myriad clever tricks to make us HAVE to use them (e.g. daily attendance will be linked to kids logging on, or all tests will HAVE to be given digitally or, even worse, will be corporate-designed and embedded in daily activities). State law allows CA schools to disregard the official state adoptions and buy whatever ELA materials we see fit but our superintendent is horrified at the thought of doing something so eccentric. She desperately wants to follow the herd.
I have a question. If a public school superintendent was relying exclusively on an online curriculum that he or she had a financial stake in, would that be acceptable? Wouldn’t that raise questions?
“Despite this poor performance, Rocketship executives are bent on an “unshakeable pursuit of large-scale growth.” But instead of good education practice, what drives the Rocketship model is profit. As the report explained, along with a test-driven instructional method, the Rocketship model relies heavily on substituting extensive online instruction for personal instruction from teachers. However, this model leads to clear conflicts of interest when the charter network partners with its own for-profit providers of curricula, and two leaders of the charter venture both sit on Rocketship’s Board and are primary investors in a for-profit company that provides the math curriculum used by Rocketship.”
You know it would. Can my public school superintendent “partner” with a for profit company and put a specific product in all 4 schools she runs? What if she put the principal investors in that product on the school board?
Why is this okay in charterland? Why do none of the ordinary conflict of interest norms apply?
http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/charter-schools-fail-new-reports-call-their-magic-into-question/
This is a great question. Ethical behavior seems to have been lost in pursuit of cash. We used to sanction conflict of interest behavior, and we still rarely do. Now it seems the road to getting hands on public money is through “relationships and partnerships.” Charters offer some of the worst examples of nepotism and mutual hand washing, particularly since they get access to lots of taxpayer cash that comes with little oversight.
It’s funny because DC is supposed to be the example of how ed reformers are “agnostics”- this is just a pure unsullied “market”- every school is on an equal footing and they battle it out for market share. Charters “win” on pure merit!
Except 100% of the promotions, marketing and political clout go to charter schools. I figure their public schools will be gone in a decade.
The game was rigged from the start, but good effort, public schools. Thanks for playing.
We aren’t done yet.
The “K-12” section at the Philanthropy Roundtable website, outlines the attack on university schools of education, in a posted article, by Frederick Hess, from 2014.
“More philanthropic donations are channeled into education than any other sector of American society, except religion.”
In a recently reported poll, with the question, “Should the government spend whatever is necessary to ensure that all children have really good public schools they can go to?”, only 35% of the richest 1%, answered “yes”. In contrast, 87% of the remaining population (those who actually contribute to GDP), answered “yes”.
Charter schools are nothing more than an stop gap measure to abandonment of public education,