In this post, EduShyster surveys the progress of the Rocketship charter chain, which aspires to enroll 1 million children in its low-cost, high-tech fleet of schools.
She writes:
“The audacious exercise in audaciousness was off to an audacious start. Fueled by an explosive combo of Silicon Valley funding and free advertising from *journalists* who found the use of rocket-related terminology irresistible, the super cool new rocketships blasted off towards the stratosphere. Before long, ground control envisioned a whole fleet—no wait—a whole galaxy of rocketships, each populated by rocketeers excelling like never before. Why not eight schools serving up to 4,000 children in Milwaukee. Why not schools in Tennessee, Louisiana, Indiana and Washington D.C.? Why not 2,000 schools in 50 cities, serving 1 million rocketeers?
“But space colonization turned out to be rather more challenging than expected. For one thing, sending all of those rocketships into orbit was an expensive business, meaning that new rocketships had to be launched continuously in order to pay for the ones that were already soaring. The mothership was a hungry beast too, and required each school to fork over a 20% facility fee and a 15% management fee. In an old school school that $$ would have gone to pay for outmoded freight like teachers and their salaries. But once again the mothership had thought of everything. The space-age solution: Boost student to teacher ratios from 40:1 to 50:1 and *supplement* their numbers with plenty of minimum-wage-ish computer lab aids on hand to oversee the *individualized* instruction.”
But that’s not all. Big plans ahead to expand the empire and reach 2 billion customers, er, students, with programming delivered to cell phones. Really.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Rockets do crash and burn.
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and empires never last forever
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If current Rocketship “schools” need to be continuously opened in order to pay for the operation of extant one’s, then it’s a Ponzi scheme.
When the Beast stops growing, it has collapsed.
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Part 1
Rocketship is tied in tightly to the corporate “reform” movement. Indeed, “Rocketship relies heavily on Teach for America,” with seventy-five precent of its teachers “either in the program or recent alumni.”
TFA is funded by the titans of corporate “reform,” like the Walton Foundation (which wants to “infuse competitive pressure into America’s K-12 education system”), and the Broad Foundation (“schools must be held accountable for results”), and the Arnold Foundation (which subscribes to “entrepreneurial problem-solving approach”), and the Robertson Foundation (“encouraging competition by supporting the development of charter schools, voucher programs”), and by Bill Gates and Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo and Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase and ExxonMobil and Bain & Company and Chevron and GE Capital, and by a slew of hedge funders.
Many of these “reformers” claim, as the Broad Foundation does, that “Without dramatic changes, the U.S. economy will continue to suffer.” Of course, most of the dramatic changes that are required – alleviating poverty, eliminating tax loopholes, prosecuting corporate fraud, improvement of auditing and reporting standards –– are clearly NOT those the “reformers” are interested in. Instead, they (wrongly and falsely) point the finger at public education.
The World Economic Forum ranks nations each year on competitiveness. The U.S. is usually in the top five (if not 1 or 2). When it drops, the WEF doesn’t cite education, but stupid economic decisions and policies. For example, when the U.S. dropped from 2nd to 4th in 2010-11, four factors were cited by the WEF for the decline: (1) weak corporate auditing and reporting standards, (2) suspect corporate ethics, (3) big deficits (brought on by Wall Street’s financial implosion) and (4) unsustainable levels of debt.
More recently , major factors cited by the WEF a lack of trust in politicians and the political process with a lack of transparency in policy-making, and “a lack of macroeconomic stability” caused by decades of fiscal deficits, especially deficits and debt accrued over the last decade that “are likely to weigh heavily on the country’s future growth,” and “increasing inequality,” and political dysfunction that’s led to “a lack of macroeconomic stability.”
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Part 2
By contrast, in the WEF competitiveness rankings, Finland performs well. The WEF cites Finland for having privately-run businesses that are “among the best run and most ethical in the world” and “the country boasts well-functioning and highly transparent public institutions.” As well, “Finland occupies the top position both in the health and primary education pillar as well as the higher education and training pillar, the result of a strong focus on education over recent decades.”
In Finland “practically every person attends public school,” and public education is highly esteemed and is a national priority. Private schools are virtually unheard of. There is no emphasis on standardized tests. Finland abandoned long ago the kinds of compulsory testing that now define American education “reform.” In Finland, there are “no lists of best schools or teachers…the main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.”
In the Finnish system, the classroom is learner-centered, not test-centered. It is imperative that foremost in the teacher’s mind is the whole child. The classroom environment “must be physically, psychologically, and socially safe, and must support the pupil’s health. The objective is to increase pupils’ curiosity and motivation to learn, and to promote their activeness, self-direction, and creativity by offering interesting challenges and problems.” The citizenship purpose of public schooling is taken seriously. In Finland, the goal of education reform is equity, with all of the attendant policy programs aligned. Education is seen “as an instrument to even out social inequality.” That is simply not the case in the U.S.
What John Danner of Rocketship Education offers up is a far cry from what the Finns are doing, and what we should be doing. Danner implements a merit pay plan for teachers, and “Rocketship focuses exclusively on reading and math…Data is king at Rocketship — in addition to two state tests, Rocketship students take eight internal tests during the school year. Every six weeks, teachers and administrators close school for a day to analyze test results.” Test, test, test.
Danner adds this gem about Rocketship: “Anything in the areas of critical thinking or social-emotional learning or written expression, those are really difficult, and at Rocketship we don’t spend a lot of time trying to get them to do that. What we think is that they’re generally almost always better at the core basic skills, like addition.”
And this is what people want to replicate as “reform?” We are on a very wrong, debilitating track.
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“Danner adds this gem about Rocketship: “Anything in the areas of critical thinking or social-emotional learning or written expression, those are really difficult, and at Rocketship we don’t spend a lot of time trying to get them to do that. What we think is that they’re generally almost always better at the core basic skills, like addition.””
Wow. It’s not rocket science to teach students to add and become empathic critical thinkers. There are several progressive pedagogies that do exactly that, and have done so, for generations now. There have always been people who saying that they don’t want to teach this way for one reason or another. But it is a new and insidious twist to suggest that it isn’t even possible.
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Thank you, Democracy. Your post were very accurate and to the point.
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http://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/nation/2012/10/12/a-new-kind-of-elementary-school-rocketship-si-se-puede-academy/1630549/
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