On the Rocketship
Richard Whitmire’s new book chronicles a bumpy ride for Rocketship charter schools…
EduShyster: Your book is meant to chronicle the take-off of a high-performing charter school but to me it read more like a cautionary tale. You made the strongest case I’ve seen for why Silicon Valley-style disruption and education are a mismatch. I’m thinking of Rocketship’s decision to blow up its instructional model, making classrooms much larger, in order to generate more revenue for expansion.Richard Whitmire: There were actually two reasons for that model change. California’s per-pupil spending is $7,500, one of the lowest in the country.The state was cutting back further at that time and delaying payment to charters. Rocketship also felt that it had hit kind of a wall. They’d been able to take these low-income minority kids to the mid 800’s [on the California Academic Performance Index (API), but they weren’t getting up to the level of the suburban schools. This seemed to solve both of those problems at once. They could save some money and they could do some more personalized learning in this larger classroom.
EduShyster: In retrospect, though, the decision to make the change in a single year seems to have been highly disruptive—and not necessarily in a cool Silicon Valley way.Whitmire: [Rocketship founder and then CEO] John Danner was the one who wanted to do it all in one year, which fits your Silicon Valley theme. His mindset was basically *who cares if people don’t want it? Within a year they’ll recover, everything will be fine and everyone will forget about it.* That turned out to be a very poor fit. But I see a lot of positives too. The way Rocketship was able to build their school On the Rocketship | EduShyster:
