Nearly every metropolitan area these days has its own wealthy promoters of education reform. Little Rock has the Waltons, Seattle has Bill and Melinda Gates, Newark has Mark Zuckerberg, and Buffalo has John Oishei, who made his millions selling windshield wipers.
Few areas, however, have as concentrated and active a group of wealthy reformers as California’s Silicon Valley. One of the country’s fastest-growing charter school operators, Rocketship Education, started here. A big reason for its stellar ascent is the support it gets from high tech’s deep pockets, and the political influence that money can buy.
Rocketship currently operates nine schools in San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley. It opened its first school in Milwaukee last year and one in Nashville, Tennessee, this fall. Its first two schools in Washington, D.C., where almost half the students already attend charters, open next year. Rocketship plans include running eight schools in Milwaukee, in Nashville, and in D.C. in the near future.
Rocketship also proposed a charter school in Morgan Hill, just south of San Jose. But there they ran into resistance from parents, teachers, and the teachers’ union. That successful campaign to block Rocketship and protect local public schools highlights the importance of confronting charter chains as they try to infiltrate school systems across the country.
“Blended Learning” The Rocketship Model
“Blended learning,” the hallmark of the Rocketship education model, is based on using computers more and teachers less. Its roots lie in a valley dominated by high-tech factories, where electronic assembly lines belie the hype of entrepreneurship and “creative disruption.” Education policy analyst Diane Ravitch describes Rocketship charters as “schools for poor children. . . . In this bare-bones Model-T school, it appears that these children are being trained to work on an assembly line. There is no suggestion that they are challenged to think or question or wonder or create.”
A report by Gordon Lafer for the Economic Policy Institute, Do Poor Kids Deserve Lower Quality Education than Rich Kids? examined the Rocketship model: “The ‘blended learning’ model of education exemplified by the Rocketship chain of charter schools,” it found, “often promoted by charter boosters – is predicated on paying minimal attention to anything but math and literacy, and even those subjects are taught by inexperienced teachers carrying out data-driven lesson plans relentlessly focused on test preparation. But evidence from Wisconsin, the country, and the world shows that students receive a better education from experienced teachers offering a broad curriculum that emphasizes curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking, as well as getting the right answers on standardized tests.”
The contradiction between high-tech hype and regimented reality is a hallmark of the Silicon Valley model, and is not just found at Rocketship. “Blended learning” is promoted by John Fisher, who started the $25 million Silicon Schools Fund. Fisher is the son of Gap founders Don and Doris Fisher, among the world’s wealthiest clothing manufacturers and scions of San Francisco’s elite.
On the website of Navigator Schools, for example, a video promoting its Gilroy Prep charter (at the south end of Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara County) is full of superlatives like “incredible.” It claims its 1st and 2nd graders are “engaged 100 percent of the time.” Images show youngsters, each in an identical pale blue polo shirt with the Navigator logo, chanting in unison while a teacher holding an iPad moves through the classroom.
The slick video is just one indication of the big money at stake in the expansion of corporate charter schools in Silicon Valley. Students use “the best adaptive software,” the video enthuses. On their desks are “student responders,” remote controls with buttons for answering multiple-choice questions. “Gone are the days of textbooks and endless worksheets,” the narrator boasts.
The first goal of the Navigator mission statement is “to develop students who are proficient or advanced on the California state standards test.”
The use of computers in the Navigator video is a pale shadow of the dependence on them at Rocketship. In Education Week, Benjamin Herold (“New Model Underscores Rocketship╒s Growing Pains”) explains: “For years, schools in the network have used the ‘station rotation’ model of blended learning, with students cycling each day between about six hours of traditional classroom time and two hours of computer-assisted instruction in ‘learning labs.’ That model . . . has allowed Rocketship to replace one credentialed teacher per grade with software and an hourly-wage aide, freeing up $500,000 yearly per school that can be redirected to other uses.”
According to Lafer, students in Milwaukee will take the state standardized test every eight weeks and the MAP three times a year. All their work in the learning lab is converted to data daily. Teachers’ salaries are primarily based on their students’ math and reading scores.
Education As a Profit Base
Rocketship’s tech connection starts at the top. Co-founder John Danner is on the board of a company that sells DreamBox Learning math education software. According to Lafer, venture capitalists John Doerr and Reed Hastings are primary investors in DreamBox and big donors to Rocketship; Hastings sits on the national advisory board. In turn, Rocketship uses DreamBox in its learning labs. “Thus,” Lafer concludes, “Hastings and Doerr help fund the nonprofit Rocketship chain, which contracts with a for-profit company they partially own; the more Rocketship expands, the greater DreamBox╒s profits.”
Profits come other ways as well. Also according to Lafer: “Rocketship’s school buildings are owned by a sister company – Launchpad – which in turn charges Rocketship rent for the facilities. Rocketship’s official business plans include the goal that ‘Launchpad will charge relatively high facilities fees’ and that ‘the profit margin will be used to finance new facilities.'”
Hedge fund investors fund individual sites. One of them is former tennis star Andre Agassi. “Now it’s proven,” Agassi boasted to Bloomberg Business News. “Across the board, everybody is starting to realize that there is an innovative private sector solution.” His partner, Bobby Turner,adds, “If you want to cure – really cure – a problem in society, you need to come up with a sustainable solution, and that means making money.” Investors in the Turner-Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund include New York City’s Pershing Square Foundation. By summer’s end it will complete 39 schools for 17,500 students, growing eventually to 60 schools for 30,000.
Where do teachers fit into this picture? Rocketship’s charter application in Morgan Hill specified that its staffing ratio would go from 35.92 students per teacher in 2014-15 to 41.27 in 2016-17. Many teachers are hired from Teach For America, and non-credentialed paraprofessionals staff the learning lab.
“The student-teacher ratio at Rocketship schools is 27:1 during traditional classroom instruction,” Rocketship media contact Shayna Englin responded. “The learning lab is staffed by tutors and individualized learning specialists who receive extensive professional development and training for the months before the school year starts and participate in required hours of additional development weekly throughout the school year.”
However, a report by the Alum Rock, California, school district last spring said Rocketship was “misleading” when it didn’t include computer labs in its calculation of teacher-student ratios. They decided to reject Rocketship’s proposal.
David Bacon is a writer and former union organizer. Read the full article on Rethinking Schools.org.
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