Rocketship on PBS
Posted: December 29th, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 9 Comments »
In February I shared three interesting blogs written by Larry Cuban. They were about Rocketship. That’s a network of high-performing charters in California. It’s growing.
I just read a story by PBS’s John Merrow about Rocketship. There’s a 9 minute video here, plus a transcript. It mostly follows Cuban’s narrative, but Merrow unearthed something I had not heard.
JOHN MERROW: The learning (computer) lab saves schools a lot of money, but there’s just one problem: They’re not really working.
JUDY LAVI: There’s definitely an aspect of us kind of not knowing enough about what’s going on in learning lab to be able to use that in our classrooms.
ANDREW ELLIOTT-CHANDLER: We don’t yet get data that says, OK, teach this differently tomorrow because of what happened here. And that is — that is a frustration point.
JOHN MERROW: A problem we saw is that some students in the lab do not appear to be engaged. They sit at their computers for long periods of time, seemingly just guessing.
JUDY LAVI: That’s definitely not the ideal situation. The ideal situation would be that they’d get help from somebody in the learning lab who would explain the concept to them. Then they would go back and practice it.
JOHN MERROW: Rocketship says it’s about to make a big change to its model.
ADAM NADEAU: If I had to guess, I would say you come back in a year, you won’t see a learning lab.
Emphasis mine.
If it’s not working, change it. Good for Rocketship!
The story brought me back in time to 2000. The original name for our school was the “Media and Technology Charter High School.” The idea was to use kid-created technology projects to supplement regular instruction. The goal of the technology wasn’t to save money (it actually required additional labor, and therefore $), but to improve outcomes.
Our version of “using technology” didn’t work very well, either.
Here’s a painfully earnest interview I did in 2000. Plenty of dumb ideas in there. I’d forgotten how much I’d hoped to attract and deploy volunteers as a key part of the model. There was Ann S and Chris R — thank you! — but that was probably in spite of me, not because of me.
In 2004, after a few years of trying different versions of “media and technology”, we fundamentally changed the school. Kept the acronym MATCH, the proactive phone calls to parents, and the college success mission. Jettisoned the media and technology. Added Advanced Placement classes and the Match Corps tutors.
That’s worked a lot better.
Now we’re cautiously revisiting the ed tech opportunity, in designing a new school called Match Next.
Very cautiously.
Years ago I did some consulting down in Randolph at their middle school. They had added a bunch of extra math time and they used some computer lab program. The teachers and administrators seemed to think it was junk. Not really worth the time. Some kids found it useful; most just messed around and didn’t ever progress.
Also years ago, I watched a first grade classroom down in Newark using computers for centers. Seemed a little bit more useful in that setting because the games were more fun to the kids. Still wasn’t great though.
How’d the consulting turn out?
helped them to develop scope and sequence docs using state standards. not sure it had any impact…
I’m of the age when computers first broke into elementary and middle schools. They were always miserable time wasters. In 20 years, say from about 1980 to 2000, I think the only thing that really changed was people gave up trying.
Now, I’m working on a post about how tablets are a game changer for ed-tech. I had been one of the most anti-tech in education guys I knew. I since changed my mind and completely believe that with quality software, (nb. the vast majority of sw is still absolutely horrible) ed-tech has enormous potential to let kids learn at a pace that will keep them interested and engaged.
This might give a little bit of it away, but my working title for the post is “It’s the form factor, stupid.” I’ll let you know when it’s ready.
I am confused by the PBS story. Rocketship is interesting as a Model T of education. But, if the learning lab “isn’t working,” then it isn’t the Model T of education.
Hi David,
The Model T did change some design features over the years, just as Rocketship is proposing.
Quick summary here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T#Design_changes
It depends on what they are proposing. I think of the learning lab as more akin to the assembly line than a design feature of the car.
Mike,
Going back to Ray’s original post on the Test Kitchen analogy, I received mixed feedback on the rigor of the studies that ST Math has used to demonstrate the efficacy of their program.
(You may have noticed that it was their penguin who shows up at 6:15 in the PBS video)
So yes, we need to be prepared to be confounded, all the time.
Alas expecting the publishers to share this willingness runs afoul of Upton Sinclair’s observation that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
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