May 16, 2018
Rocketship Public Schools Response
8yI’m sorry you’ve grown frustrated by your experience at Rocketship. Can we do better? Absolutely. But few schools do better than Rocketship when it comes to serving our communities.
Rocketship is a non-profit organization, so by definition money is not our priority. Our *only* measure of success is how well we’re serving our students and families. To that end, there’s no fooling parents -- they know if their kids are making progress. If they don’t think their kids are getting a great education, they can choose another school -- but year after year, our parents come back, and moreover, 89% have recommended Rocketship to another parent.
And our parents keep choosing Rocketship because our schools are high-performing. Innovate Public Schools, a third party, recently released their annual report (https://reports.innovateschools.org/top-bay-area-public-schools/) and identified only 52 schools out of 1,275 in the Bay Area that are eliminating the achievement gap. I am proud that 8 of those 52 schools are Rocketship schools. We had the most schools of any charter network or school district featured on the list.
If it were money I were after, frankly I wouldn’t be working in public education. Eliminating the achievement gap is my passion, and I’ve dedicated my life’s work to serving disadvantaged kids and communities. So have all of the folks who work here at Rocketship. It’s why I send my own kids to Rocketship -- I believe in our network’s commitment to the students we serve, and I see the difference we’re making.
I believe in the teachers like you who work tirelessly for our kids. Yes, we need to have more support to achieve better work-life balance, and to that end we announced big changes to our lesson planning process (and more) for the coming school year. While we recognize a number of areas for improvement, and the need to continually listen to educator feedback to learn how we can get better, we’re also proud to receive lots of positive feedback from our staff. They tell us they love their colleagues, they know their school leaders care about them, and they benefit greatly from the professional development we prioritize as part of our model. As a result, our retention rate is on par with most high-performing charter schools (and we’re working hard to increase it every year).
I believe in our school leaders, who are the most dedicated and impressive group of people I’ve ever known. Period.
I believe in our curriculum, because it is crafted from rigorously vetted and renowned best practices in STEM, humanities, and social/emotional learning -- such as Singapore Math, Reading & Writing Workshops, Lucy Calkins, STEP, Kimochis, and more. As for “teaching to the test,” the new Common Core aligned assessments include more open-ended questions designed to gauge student understanding, so it wouldn’t make sense for us to focus on anything other than our students’ grasp of crucial concepts and their ability to apply them independently. And while we aim to minimize time with testing, it does have value for measuring growth, which is incredibly important as we work toward closing the achievement gap. (You can read my post about this topic on our blog: http://www.rocketshipschools.org/value-of-year-end-assessments/.)
I believe in our parents, who are incredibly engaged and committed to ensuring their kids get a good education and a chance to succeed. We receive highly positive feedback from most of our parents and they send their kids back here each year because they believe in us, too.
But most of all, I believe in our kids, who are our number one priority at Rocketship. Many of our Rocketeers face incredible daily challenges, and yet they constantly rise to the occasion and prove what is possible in our communities.
When I visit our campuses I see kids who are full of joy from the moment they arrive for Launch in the morning. They have 40 minutes for recess and lunch, as well as physical education classes and enrichments like dance, yoga, art and music. Of course we have our share of behavioral problems (like any school), but your description is unfair to our students -- the vast majority of whom constantly model our core values as Rocketeers. Moreover, I take great pride in our work to serve all students, which means sometimes we have kids who are more challenging behaviorally. If serving all kids means we have some outbursts at times, then it is worth it for us as we know and believe that all kids can learn and thrive with support and time.
I am proud of our schools and incredible team. We have a long way to go to realize our mission, but thanks to the dedication of our school leaders, teachers, parents, and most of all our Rocketeers, I know we can and will get there. Thank you for service to our kids and communities.
