We contributed some information about Rocketship in this piece. As we expand to new cities across the country, we are seeing a tremendous difference among cities in where they are in the 12 step program listed at the end of the piece.
In some of the strong cities like Milwaukee, Chicago, Newark and New Orleans, there is a clear understanding of the achievement gap, strong urgency, an acknowledgement that the flexibility of charters gives the strong operators advantages in doing this work, and an outbound effort to recruit folks like us to help in the work. On the other hand, we are working to help districts around the Bay Area which barely acknowledge the achievement gap as a key priority of their district despite thousands of kids not getting an education. If they do acknowledge the gap, they are confident they can eliminate it faster than we can despite the fact that the last 10 years of data shows little progress on their side.
After being involved in the political side of charter and district relationships for a decade, this bell curve doesn't really surprise me any more. But you really have to wonder, are we as a country going to demand that our elected boards and superintendents do everything it takes to solve the achievement gap, no matter how disruptive to the current system? If so, the new generation of scalable high-quality charter networks can help to completely eliminate the gap in the next two decades. If we can't start to build effective partnerships, we're locked into incremental change, measured in 50+ year increments in a recent report on district gains.
In Santa Clara County, thousands of parents affiliated with PACT held an event to ask electeds if they were committed to moving to the right side of the bell curve. The response was muted even among those who accepted the invitation! (Great school district exception was Darcie Green, really heroic!)
It really is amazing that in a valley for which innovation and disruption is our bread and butter, that applying our techniques to make step function improvements in the education of our children is even controversial.
My prediction is that we look back in ten years and are amazed by the lack of collaboration, because we will have achieved it. My second prediction is that our union leaders will be the ones that get us over the hump. As the repeat players in this, union leaders know that ultimately their membership thrives or suffers based on the quality of their outcomes. Yes, the accountability for this can come slowly, but it always comes. And I have met a lot of union leaders that think that the new school model we are pioneering at Rocketship gives teachers higher salaries, more support, and moves a lot of basic skills online so they can focus on social-emotional learning and criticial thinking through projects. That's just simply a better job for teachers.
I think we all have a chance to reassess now and think about what a new system will look like. I for one want to step forward and hope we can start to have those conversations. Thanks to the folks at CRPE for crystallizing the steps along the path to real partnerships. Thanks to the other heroes sticking their neck out politically to try and make real partnerships happen. We can make the achievement gap a historic footnote this decade.
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