One of our most perceptive essayists Rachel Levy watched John Merrow’s program about Rocketship charters and recoiled with alarm.
She said if she put her children in front of a screen two hours a day, she would be called a bad parent, but the charter does it and it is called innovative.
She was distressed that the school treats test scores as the only goal of school, so stuff like art and music don’t get time. That’s what kids do on their own time, if they choose, after school.
And what is it that parents do, other than chant with their children?
What’s clear to Levy is that Rocketship is a school for “them,” for other people’s children, not for “ours.” It is all about test scores, for the glory of the founder, not about education.
Rocketship may be a Model T, an apt means of mass-producing test scores, but that’s a horrifying metaphor for stamping out standardized children who never ask questions, never day dream, always find the answer demanded by the program.
Rocketship is a school designed by Alphas and staffed by Betas for the children who are Delta, Gamma, and Epsilon. Read your Huxley.
Rachel also notes possible conflicts of interest. See her P.S.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t know how to post images or I don’t think it is an option, but check here from Schools Matter. PBS gets funding from Bill and Melinda to promote this as “innovation”, then Bill and Melinda should send their children to Rocketship.
See photo:
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computer use (money) = Gates
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Diane — Every educator and parent needs to read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr to discover what the Internet is doing to our brains. It will make one stop and think about online learning and spending hours on the computer.
Marge
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Model T? More like an Edsel.
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Corvair? Unsafe at any Speed? Here’s what Wikipedia says about that book:
“Unsafe at Any Speed is often characterized as the book “about the Corvair”, though only one of the book’s eight chapters covers the Corvair. The theme of tire pressures chosen for comfort rather than safety is recurrent, and the main theme throughout is the way in which the automobile industry evaded even well-founded and technically informed criticism.”
Sounds familiar.
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The multiple connections, processes, webb/networks that developing brains turn into critical thinking/planning are undermined by digitization/data-fication of education for the masses. I can’t remember for sure, but I think it was Joe Walsh (Eagles and solo guitarist/singer) who said that the digital era gave great control over tiny facets, but what was lost was the depth, the air, the “crackle” of analog that recorded everything the needle laid down.
What we have now in education is a minority looking to VAM out the depth and crackle in schooling for the majority. The minority has wealth and political power, and has digitized the “tracks” that will benefit THEM the most. Reform is really about holding the masses and their schools accountable to attend (teach) to those tracks/priorities of the minority. The depth in the learner is ignored (despite the call for “depth and rigor” in CCLS-the depth called for seems less depth in the learner, and more in the functional training).
There will still be enriched choices, opportunities and schools for those with the resources to afford them.
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Diane, your Huxley allusion is both apt and chilling to the bone.
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