This is a stunning and shocking expose by Mercedes Schneider, who has corresponded with a teacher at one of the Bay Area Rocketship charters and fed her documents about standard practices and policies. This is a scary documentation of child abuse.
A small sample:
“In a description of the “charter school nightmares” blog, “rkshp employee” notes the following:
“More about my school. We have:
no cafeteria
no school nurse
no on-site custodian
no school library
school is 7:45 – 4 PM (8.25+ hours) daily
recess is 15 minutes
lunch is 15 minutes and kids are not allowed to talk during lunch
every student (from pre-K to 5th grade) has mandatory computer class for 90 minutes a day
“In another post, “rkshp employee” notes, “Our 3 principals are all TFA (Teach for America) alum.””
This is worse than Dickensian.
If we had a functioning Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education, it would launch an immediate investigation.
This is child abuse. Why do parents put their children in these absive institutions?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I put this up as a comment, on the ECOT piece, as I talk about the scam of “choice” and the fraud that is perpetrated.
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That is a mystery to me, why parents would knowingly do this.
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I just lost a student to charter chains. (I didn’t know until it was too late.) I know why parents do it. In a perfect world, everyone would blame themselves and take responsibility when a child is failing in public school. Sadly, some teaching colleagues blame their students, some students blame their teachers, and some parents blame the schools. If a struggling parent has a struggling child, it’s very easy to fall into the school choice trap, ensnaring the child in any hostile environment as long as order is promised. The charter chains then put the child to work in the test score production factory and leave them there to vomit on and urinate themselves. There have long been barbarous boot camps and military academies; now they are subsidized, and promulgated with slick advertising campaigns. The choice is free and easy if a parent lacks all the facts. And with the propaganda likely being taught in many places today, I predict the next generation of parents will be even easier prey.
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Grammatical error I missed, ‘child’ should have been ‘children’ in theres, somewheres.
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I think the answer is probably more pragmatic than we’d like to think.
A) Location to where parents live
B) Parents work schedules
If you need to go way out of your way to make sure your kids can get to and from school safely, or are in multiple schools very far apart, a school like this might be your only choice.
Similarly, if you work a full day with a decent commute and/or need to pick up multiple children, the amount of time might actually be a plus for child care. After all, would you rather have a school with sporadic after school activities that might require you to pay for additional child care, or, the school supplies it?
In a perfect world you’d care about only the best fit for your child but let’s face it- our current school systems are not set up for convenience or perfection.
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I don’t think the ed reform echo chamber has promoted ANY school the way they’ve promoted Rocketship.
They wrote and relentlessly and completely uncritically promoted a whole book:
“The face of American education is evolving—and the roadmap is clear
On the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools are Pushing the Envelope examines the rise and expansion of leading charter school network Rocketship, revealing the “secret sauce” that makes a successful program.”
If the objective of ed reform is to create critical thinkers, they really need to stop scolding children and become critical thinkers themselves first.
There’s nothing revolutionary about sticking people in front of computers. It’s how low wage employers train employees right now.
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Chiara,
You refer to Richard Whitmire’s laudatory book about Rocketship. That came after his adulatory bio of Rhee, “The Bee Eater.” His latest is about the leaders of the charter industry. His books seem to be the kiss of death.
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The sheen is beginning to dull on Silicon Valley industry disrupters. Let’s make sure they own their dubious ideas in edu-reform, too
“Facebook, the greatest startup success story of this era, isn’t a merry band of hackers building cutesy tools that allow you to digitally Poke your friends. It’s a powerful and potentially sinister collector of personal data, a propaganda partner to government censors, and an enabler of discriminatory advertising.”
https://www.wired.com/story/the-other-tech-bubble/
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Incidentally, Summit is the new Rocketship. They’re over-promoting and over-promising on that one too.
It’s what they do. This “movement” is 90% marketing.
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Here’s an example of the “critical thinking” in ed reform:
“John Danner, forty-six,1 a Stanford-educated electrical engineer who cofounded NetGravity, an early pioneer in Internet advertising, raised the Fibonacci sequence in our first meeting as a way of explaining the exponential growth he planned for his Rocketship charter elementary schools. A steady launch cycle of adding new cities every year, with each city sprouting at least eight Rocketship schools, meant that within thirty years it should be possible to launch 2,500 Rocketship schools around the country. Why 2,500? Because by Danner’s math (he calculates there are roughly thirteen thousand schools that fall in the “failing” category), it would take that many Rocketship schools educating a million students to make a dent in reducing the nation’s steep achievement gaps between have and have-not students.”
Stanford! Silicon Valley! Has a ton of money! He’s the perfect person for ed reform. They don’t need to hear anything else.
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How did that work out for Danner?
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School reform: where VAMmit stays in the Core pit
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Our country is run by a bunch of craven, opportunistic corporations and billionaires. Now that they have captured part of the education “market,” some business people with no background in child development or education, are engaging in dehumanizing, harmful practice. Rocketship represents some of the worst, unsafe bad practice. The commanders of the rocket are too busy counting paper clips to notice the young people and their responsibility to them.
The failing government practice allowing almost anyone to establish a school with very little oversight and accountability should have concerned citizens going after complicit representatives with pitchforks. Even some privatized schools without health violations, have no idea about fire codes, exposure to asbestos and other carcinogens in the environment of their buildings. The libertarian concept of deregulation of everything is particularly reckless when applied to schools. We must have safe buildings and humane practice for our young people.. Public schools are generally held to a higher standard of accountability for the well being of students.
Corporate schools will favor lowering the bottom line over the needs of students. Parents must understand this before they sign their child up with some “fly by night” corporation. The interests of your children will come after profit and lowering the bottom line. This is what we can expect from market based education, an ever lowering race to the bottom.
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At a time when I thought I could not be even more enraged than I currently am, Mercedes’s post brought me to new levels that I was unaware I could reach. When you are brought to tears by rage, you know it’s bad. Every charter supporter should have their noses rubbed into this report. I don’t think we can overestimate the long term damage and costs, financial and otherwise, which will burden so many of these children.
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I think one of the reasons ed reformers spend so much time pitching ed tech product is because they offer absolutely nothing else to children in public schools.
What else do they have? They can’t just promote charters and vouchers to public school families. They have to offer some benefit to the 90% of families who are completely irrelevant to “the movement” so they sell us cheap ed tech product as “reform”.
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Parents put their kids in these institutions because they are open from 7:45 to almost 5 pm. It means they will not have to pay for after school. They provide them with snacks and drinks. Public schools do not provide such luxuries. They have computers on a one to one basis for the kids. They have the appearance of providing a safe place free from bullying for their kids. The teachers treat the parents in a nice manner.
Public schools are better but they do need to do some self-reflection.
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Doesn’t sound like they provide much in the way of food, since food is being cut in the budgetary document provided for the original poster.
And a LOT of regular public schools have programs such as you describe.
And I’m offended that you imply that teachers in public schools don’t “treat the parents in a nice manner.”
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“Worse than Dickensian” is right. The orphans in Dickens had a cafeteria. I have to ask, how is a 15 minute lunch break for an 8 plus hour shift not a violation of labor laws?
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I did not read the entire article, but if the quotes are an example, this is not child abuse. This is corporate greed and possibly evasion of state laws re: the nurse.
Child abuse is serious. It’s bruising and broken minds and bodies. It’s isolation and restraints. None of that was in your post.
As a documentarian, I am surprised and appalled by how many people confuse something they wouldn’t do, with what, legally, is child abuse. Some CPS reports are filed about children’s food, including not feeding a child McDonald’s, or not giving a child a cookie. That too, is not abuse.
If a parent in that school wanted to file grievances about the nurse, the custodian, or breaks, they might get some changes.
But please don’t demean victims, or the parents fighting a runaway privatized child protection system, by calling greed and evading accountability abuse.
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Pip,
I suggest you read Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s book “Childism.”
https://books.google.com/books/about/Childism.html?id=9z6lzlzIDQ4C&hl=en
She was a renowned psychologist, who died right before the book’s release.
She described NCLB as child abuse. She would have agreed that the extreme and harsh discipline at the Rocketship Charter is child abuse.
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Also I suggest you read the whole post. It will take 4 minutes.
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Hi Diane,
I go into more detail about what that 15 minute recess is like on my blog.
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Thanks. Why do you stay there? It sounds like teaching in a prison.
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