Experienced journalist Tom Toch visited a Rocketship charter school in San Jose, California, and came away impressed.
What impressed him most, however, was not the ubiquitous computer instruction, but the intensity of the human interactions.
He took away a lesson about the importance of parent involvement and support, as well as the intense engagement of teachers.
Conservative commentators see the Rocketship model as a way to reduce the number of teachers and to break the hold of teachers’ unions.
Toch is not so sure.
Rocketship charters are now expanding rapidly into other markets outside California.
What do you think?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Pretty much everything I said in my review of “Mission Possible” would apply here too. With, of course, the added “bonus” of a “daily awards ceremony”. Not to go all Valley Girl, but gag me.
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When Rocketship applied for five charters in Louisiana last year, I did some research and based my opposition and testimony before our Board of Education based on that and a blog by a member of a school board in Wisconsin who had a similar situation with them. The national Association if Public School Charters Authorizers, who is paid by our state to review charter apps, recommended them and if I am not mistaken they were approved.
I have not heard the name Rocketship since so don’t know the outcome but I will research it right now. Charter operator names sometimes get buried underneath the charter school names. I have difficulty with so many charters coming and going in our state keeping track if who operates which charters. Thanks for the reminder. I will report back.
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According to the article, “Every day, students spend two hours in headphones in one of a hundred brightly colored cubicles in a big, open “learning lab,” doing a wide range of exercises in reading and math through programs with lots of audio and animation. They also routinely take “adaptive” quizzes that adjust the difficulty of questions to the accuracy of students’ answers”….and this is what “promotes stronger, rather than weaker, ties between teachers and students”? Who really believes these lies? The only things being promoted here are corporate profits.
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It is more MacDonaldization of schools. Do the teachers wear paper hats and name tags?
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Any time you find a school where “parents are everywhere” you will find high achievement. This goes for public, private, parochial and charter schools.
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Diane, I’m sure the latest technology can help kids. I think the use described here is a little worrisome–2 plus hours in front of screen, with very young children (read the Children’s Alliance study on this). Nor did we find out how large class sizes are, whether there is music, part, phys ed and something taught beyond reading and math? And how much is test prep in those two fields.
SinceI believe the real crisis exists in the absence of intergenerational, interclass, etc etc relationships, from young people getting interested and xcited by adults who have strong interests of their own, are excited to share it with the young, and in the process get to know and care about each other. Where technology can promote that–hurrah!
Deb
Deb
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Good teaching is good teaching. It can happen in a charter school like this, or in a public, neighborhood school. The difference is in ownership and the impact on a community. If this were a neighborhood public school it would be transforming and benefiting the local community, not a for-profit company. Local communities learning how to educate their own children strengthens communities in crucial ways. That’s who the country should be supporting and helping…not for-profit companies with private control.
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“The younger and more disadvantaged students are, the more they need adults supporting them in many different ways day in and day out – the more they need school to be a place rather than merely a process.”
The photograph of these very young children doing a shift in a cubicle in front of a screen wearing headphones seems to indicate children not merely being processed but also programmed. The question is – do these children choose to do this – to sit in isolation staring at a screen – or are they required to do it? Are they enjoying what they’re doing or are they frequently bored, frustrated, alienated? Haven’t we learned by now that children learn better and learn faster when they collaborate and interact with classmates, when their learning is absorbing and creative, and when their learning is individualised according to their preferred learning styles and their real interests? Are they really learning how to learn? Shouldn’t technology be a tool for active learning and not an electronic teacher substitute? In many ways the school seems to be caring and innovative, and they’re right that children need lots of contact with adults, but we need to know a lot more about the school, and about its methods – especially about the learning that is supposed to be taking place in those booths – before we can really form an overall opinion.
Gary Foskett
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I have several questions. First of all, what is the teacher to student ratio for this school? The article mentions 640 students, but not the number of teachers. I’m thinking it is probably more teachers per student than public schools. Even if teacher/student ratio were the same as public schools I can only dream about the things I could get done if I had several parent volunteers on a daily basis.
“And they ask parents to spend 30 hours a year in their children’s schools and most do.”
What if the parents cannot volunteer (because of work, health, or other circumstance that often plagues low income populations)? I wonder if students are dismissed from this school because their parents can’t “volunteer.” What happens to those students with parents who can never volunteer? I wonder what would happen if we had this much parent “volunteering” going on in the public schools. Of course, public schools can’t throw a kid out because his parents don’t volunteer 30 hours a year.
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Visitors are impressed w/ the model: the prez of SF teachers union has praise for the instructional & management model
Sent from my iPhone
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So you’d send your own kids there?
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Dienne, you hit the nail on the head. The litmus test–for EVERY school–should be: Would I send my child to this school?
And, this goes w/o saying: I wouldn’t base my decision on just one visit.
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According to this article by Adam Bessie, Rocketship is the typical so-called “miracle” charter that gets better test score through high cohort attrition rates, serving fewer special education students, and using oppressive “zero tolerance” discipline: http://www.dailycensored.com/2011/11/18/a-retro-rocketship-to-the-future-corporate-education-reform-blasts-off-in-silicon-valley/ And as an added bonus, these low-income children of color get experimented on using technology. Upper-class white children will continue to get small classes, human contact, and a variety of arts, music, and sport, while low-income kids get computer screens, Teach for America novices, and lessons practicing standing straight on the yellow line. Sigh…
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Like it or not–it is the wave of the future. As administrators we had better be incorporating technology and online resources to effective education, or we might be seeing Rocketship coming our way.
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It doesn’t have to be. It’s only “the wave of the future” if everyone just assumes it’s inevitable. But people could stand up and say, wait a minute here, let’s think about this. Nothing wrong with using technology as a tool, and teaching kids to use it as such, but there’s going to be a lot of buyers’ remorse if we don’t slow down and stop equating technology with education itself. It may be hard to slow a moving train, but the effort will be worth it in the end.
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I’m not an administrator and gladly so. Your job may depend on incorporating technology (I don’t have to grovel before the powers that be to keep my position) but one certainly does not need computer technology to be the main force in “training” our children as computer training is not the same as human interactive teaching and learning is. And no, it’s not the “wave of the future” unless one believes that being trained to be a cyborg is the wave of the future.
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I think it’s important to make a distinction between useful, developmentally-appropriate technology used to enhance the greater process of learning in the classroom (such as communicating with sources outside the classroom, doing research, using social media, accessing news sources, content videos, with some programs designed for struggling readers, and the occassional educational game used to reinforce skills etc) and technology used to save a buck on labor costs. Although the author tries to spin it differently, from the article, it sounds like Rocketship is using technology more as a marketing tool and labor-saving cost. Sitting kids in front of a computer for extended amounts of time for disconnected, skills-based (not content-based) “independent work” seems wrong to me.
This type of “technology” used to monitor and create immediate “data” is a natural outgrowth of the standards/accountabiliy movement focusing on low-level, rote skills. It is no surprise, then, that according to the article, the school relies heavily on Teach for America recruits. Teach for America is infamous for being data obsessed in their training model. While there remains great potential in tapping into technology, this school is it not it. This is basically a huge experiement being foisted on low-income children of color. They get experiemental unproven software/hybrid schools, rigid behavior plans, fewer teachers and the ones they do get are poorly-training, uncertified TFAs. I would never send my own child or relative to this school.
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Disagree completely…. There is a place for technology but it is not the panacea for educating all children. Check out the Waldorf schools in the Silicon Valley and their
approach. If a student cannot formulate a coherent thought on paper (excluding physical disabilities, meaning cognitively) they are not going to be able to write clearly just because you stick an iPad in their hands. I see kids everyday who have access to devices 24/7 and they lack many abilities , including social skills and independent thought. This is not about teaching and learning. This is about reducing the teaching staff and inflating some salaries, most likely those at the top.
A Silicon Valley school that doesn’t compute:
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Just to be clear I was disagreeing with Mark. By the way Mark, do your children attend this school?
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Much appreciated the link. A stunning refutation of the reformista agenda.
I suggest the readers of this blog put your linked-article side-by-side with the linked-article provided by Diane at the top of this page, and then ponder Diane’s recent observation: “In schools for the rich, children are taught. In schools for the poor, children are tested.”
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If the wealthy so-called reformers (what we know to be profiteers and privatizers) were truly concerned about the poor and middle class they would be fighting for the same opportunities their children receive in their private or well funded public schools. If the KIPP style charter chains staffed by TFA were so outstanding, wouldn’t Wendy Kopp, John King, Obama, Rhee, Emanuel and Duncan send their kids to this miracle school? Even Deborah Kenny, HVA, sends her kids to private school.
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Children need to be taught how to read comprehensively, write and think critically, none of which are dependent on technology-based learning. In fact, the even greater immersion of kids into computer screens and cubicles reveals what these schools are really about: training, not educating, them for the tedium and authoritarianism of the 21st century workplace.
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Rocketship is an interesting hybrid business — it has a micro-reach strategy in which its software and the two 50-minute computer drilling sessions are incorporated into a much longer school day.
so it need not only open its own charter schools and use its ow software. It can permeate traditional public schools.
As proponent Tom Vander Ark of Jeb Bush’s Digital Learning Now! said in August 2011, “Give me two more hours a day and two more weeks a year and you can subtract two teachers.”
This is all about much larger class sizes, classroom monitors replacing teachers, and now, it seems, parents coming in to help the littlest ones figure out how to keep the headphones on their heads.
This is an awful education. This is computer-based test prep and testing in a shiny, brightly painted cubicle.
This is corporate greed triumphing over common sense and the usual concern which adults should have for ALL children.
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Perfectly stated. That is it in a nutshell. No power on iPhone. Thanks for the accurate summary.
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Thank you for saying it as it is. If you look at why Rocketship and some virtual schools have been pushed, you will find corporations behind them — making billions of dollars. This is like the last frontier for large corporations with Jeb Bush and his foundation for Excellent Education in the lead. The greed is on the backs of children taking standardized tests that only leave most of our children behind owned by profiteers who only want to make more money. I have been fighting this for years and worked all across this country.
Now Digital Learning is the push – virtual schools and I believe in technology but for the right reasons. Look at Carpe Diem HS in Arizona with over 200 kids – according to Tom Vander Ark, we really don’t need as many teachers. OMG! Why are people jumping on board when kids need a guide and coach and mentor to help them meet their fullest potential. Haven’t we seen Rocketship before with Successmaker or CCC – they didn’t work in the 90s. They won’t work now.
100 min a day in front of a computer. I hope parents and thoughtful educators wake up to see how they are being bamboozled – it’s like the carpetbaggers from the wild west all over again. Kids will definitely love the tech but they are smarter than you know. They’ll drop out – figure out things on their own. Time to let kids personalize learning — not the technology take over. Teachers need the skills to be a partner in learning with them.
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This line is ridiculous: “But the role of computers at Discovery Prep is to supplement rather than supplant traditional teaching.” Unless they have extended the school day by two hours, than the time spent in front of the computer supplants time spent with teachers.
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More and more my desire is for school to become a refuge from the distracting, stultifying, electronic clutter that bombards the students (and everyone else) at all other times.
Computers are tools; they do not create knowledge. As with all other tools, they are only useful for people who have been able to acquire the appropriate skills beforehand. The pedagogical attributes of computers certainly exist, but are grossly overstated.
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I just finished talking to my cousin in New York to see how they are doing. After finding out that everyone is OK, we started to chat about our children. It seems like her son, a special ed teacher who is very successful with autistic children, is teaching in a charter school and only getting paid $30,000 a year. I wonder how much the “CEO” of this school is making?
This is how I see it: If the economy improves, districts will go back to having a difficult time hiring teachers and salaries will improve. Citizens will catch on to the educational grifters and throw them out. However, if the economy stays this way, I think teachers will lose the gains that they’ve made over the past decades. Of course, the real losers will be the students. How very sad for everyone!
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LJ,
I’d be prepared to see the economy stay this way for at least another decade (and hell, I’m not even an economist so my prediction will probably be closer to the actual facts than theirs).
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Today’s NY Times:
Technology is changing how student learn, teachers say:
There is a widespread belief among teachers that students’ constant use of digital technology is hampering their attention spans and ability to persevere in the face of challenging tasks, according to two surveys of teachers being released on Thursday.
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