What is important to me is to differentiate blended from Rocketship's school model. We don't consider ourselves blended at all. The use of technology at Rocketship is a lot like the use of a textbook in a classroom. So saying that we are a technology-based school would be like saying you are an Open Court school. There is something depressing about associating the value of your school with one of the tools you use to make it great.
The key at Rocketship is actually none of this stuff, rather it is that we've put a ton of work into figuring out how to go from student assessments to individualized learning plans. When a learning plan accurately captures the next 6-8 objectives a student needs at a fine grain (i.e. this student needs to work on short a sounds), then you set yourself up to deliver the right lesson at the right time. This process of figuring out exactly what a student needs to learn is the key. From that, the potential upside for the right lesson to each child at the right developmental level probably has the potential to be 10x more effective for the student than a classroom lesson targeted at what a child that age should be learning, or some scope and sequence that has been defined. For students who are the farthest behind, classroom lessons are almost never relevant, they just aren't there developmentally. So this 10x potential increase in learning is what our model plays on.
Right now, we have a mix of tutors and online learning we use to try to put the right lesson in front of each child. We have both tutors and tech because we know it will probably take the edtech world 10 years to catch up both in terms of having a lesson for every single micro-objective and having each of those lessons be highly productive. The best systems like Dreambox and Reasoning Mind do a substantially better job at this than the others. I can say that confidently because we are very active evaluators of the market. However, even these two leaders have huge gaps in their lesson trees and since we are one of the only organizations monitoring effectivess of every lesson, they have gaps in the effectiveness in various parts of their tree. But the great news is that we know this because we measure it and we focus our tutors on the objectives which cant be covered by tech. So we aren't dependant on where Dreambox or Reasoning Mind is in effectiveness, we just evaluate and compensate with tutors.
Today we use a lot of tutors and some tech. We would certainly love to see the mix change to have more tech over time because it is far more efficient and tech can be done purely 1:1 whereas tutoring is hard to do cost-effectively 1:1, so we do most of it in small groups.
My guess, and a great opportunity for researchers to validate or question, is that this Learning Lab time is probably 2-3x more effective on basic skills if the learning plan is right and we have the right lesson through tech or tutors. As we continue to push up lesson effectivess and the tech side gets better lesson coverage, its all upside for us. That's a nice thing given that our results are already top in the state. We think we can get a lot better as tech improves, and we can move much more of our classroom time towards critical thinking and social-emotional learning, which may not be measured by tests, but is crucial for success in college and life.
Rocketship is in some ways similar to Netflix. By being a hybrid, we were able to work within the traditional system with a full classroom day, similar to the way that Netflix started with DVDs. As the tech side gets better, Rocketship's quality and efficiency continues to rise, just as Netflix has been able to move from a mailer of DVD's to the largest streamer of online video. I think these bridge strategies are important, because you aren't dependant on how quickly the world is ready to change, you just get better as it does.
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