On January 15, there will be a crucial vote to allow the expansion of charter schools in Morgan Hill, California. As the post below points out, Morgan Hill is a small town of 40,000 with only 8 elementary schools. Rocketship wants to open 2 new charters in this small community, which will effectively destroy public education. Please read this post and send an email to the Santa Clara Office of Education. I will. I hope you will too.

 

Rocketship Education is the poster child of corporate reform charter schools. Founded in a poor Silicon Valley Latino community, they hope to expand to nearly 40,000 students nationwide in the next 5 years. That’s despite the fact that they have registered falling test scores each year for the past 5 years; this year only half of their students met English language standards. They came to my community with big promises of accountability and local control. But when they failed to meet their performance goals they broke their promise to relinquish future charters. Only two years after promising local school autonomy, they quietly slipped in a new governance provision, moving all the power to their distant national offices. They use a 41:1 student to teacher ratio, with inexperienced TFA teachers, but tell the public their student to teacher ratio is 27:1, lest it would hurt their recruitment machine. Their aggressive recruitment, with information inconsistent with the facts, is destroying what was once the cohesive fabric of our Latino communities. Rocketship does have some clever ideas, like requiring teachers to visit every student’s home, but a lack of community and district collaboration outweigh those benefits.

Rocketship has greased the wheels with hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions to our County Board of Education, who have approved a state record setting 38 charters in a row. Now Rocketship Education, and their cousins Navigator Schools, are asking for 2 additional charters in Morgan Hill, CA. Morgan Hill is a small town of 40,000, the first farmland south of the San Francisco Bay Area urban sprawl. They have only 8 elementary schools. If these charters moved forward they would crush Morgan Hill Unified, an innovative and successful school district. It’s a plan that makes no sense; Rocketship has falling test scores, while Morgan Hill has successful and thriving math, arts, and STEAM focus academies. Sadly, the district is considering closing those academies if the charters move forward. How ironic that these focus academies that provide thriving students with broad opportunities in the sciences and arts would be replaced with a drill & kill charter that offers little more than intense test prep on computers in rooms packed with students.
You can learn more at: http://www.stoprocketship.com/?p=1151
We’d like to reach out to your readers and ask for help by sending a quick email to the Santa Clara County Office of Education against this plan,http://www.stoprocketship.com/take-action-now/

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