When a new charter school called Rocketship was launched about 10 years ago in Silicon Valley, the entrepreneurs who opened it proclaimed technology to be critical in helping students from low-income families, many of them the children of immigrants, to do better.

They certainly couldn’t have done worse. The school had its origins in the ambitions of a local priest who created a university scholarship only to find that none of the children from low-income families in his parish had the academic preparation they needed to use it.

But while Rocketship - and its substantial reliance on computer-based learning - initially raised those students’ reading and maths performance, spawning more schools nationwide like the first one, this would also become a cautionary tale. 

Technology remains a part of Rocketship’s design, but the chain has learned that some ways of dealing with disadvantaged students need to be decidedly low-tech and that technology itself is rarely the sole answer to education-related questions.

The basic principles of how technology powers Rocketship’s blended-learning model haven’t changed much in the decade the schools have been operating. Working on computers for part of each day, students advance at their own pace through online programmes, and teachers can track their progress and find out who needs individual attention.

Under attack

The school argues that this is better than having students warehoused in classrooms where teachers aim somewhere in the middle, and where students who are having trouble fall further behind, while those that have already mastered the material languish, bored.

But the Rocketship model has come under attack from multiple angles, with concerns about the amount of time students spend in front of a screen and about the way the organisation conducts its blended learning model. 

However, Rocketship is constantly adapting its approach.  Students used to be assigned to “learning labs” (separate from the classroom) for long periods of the day, sitting at computers and working through tasks. Then came “flexible classrooms”. There, sometimes to the accompaniment of bursts of music, the “Rocketeers” (as students are called) would periodically stand up and move from computer screens on which they practised their maths or reading to group projects with others who were making similar progress or to small-scale intensive instruction from teachers, tailored to those that the software suggested needed it because they were either ahead of or behind their classmates. 

Often students in the same rooms at the same time were engaged in different lessons. Each was given an individualised learning plan governing the use of their online and classroom time.

Here’s how Rocketship works now. It offers a mix of whole-group instruction, just as in a conventional classroom setting, with all students learning together from a teacher; small-group instruction, allowing subsets of students who are at the same level to collaborate, with help from teachers or tutors; targeted intervention by teachers for students who are floundering; and online time, for all students to practise what they’ve learned.

The particular blend of these elements differs between schools. 

The shifts in methodology have been in response to an important lesson that the schools, in their brief lives, have learned: that online study for its own sake isn’t as effective as when it’s closely synchronised with what a teacher is doing in a classroom.

Adapting technology to schools, says Rocketship co-founder and chief executive Preston Smith, depends on “our ability to get the right content to the right kid at the right time”. “Technology is a powerful component of that but it’s not the only part of that model.

 “We really think the optimal use of technology is around practising skills rather than for introducing new material. With kids we know are struggling, we’ll pull them off the online programme to get tutoring.” 

The schools employ tutors to run the “lab” time on the computers, Smith explains. 

“Our tutors who run that space will spend planning time with the teachers and share with them details of the kids who are doing well and the kids who are not doing well, so they can adjust what they do in the class.”

Smith, who has master’s degrees in educational leadership and business administration, was the principal of Rocketship’s first school, opened with 160 predominantly Hispanic students from low-income families in a Presbyterian church in the heart of San José, California. The school was established despite a contentious pushback from opponents of charter schools, which take public money but run independently of the surrounding public school systems.

In spite of encountering similar hostility elsewhere, Rocketship has since expanded its kindergarten through to Grade 5 (age 5 to 11) offering, and now has several schools in California, and has also added schools in Nashville, Tennessee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Washington, DC.

The organisation says it is focused on students from low-income families and the children of immigrants and others who generally fare poorly in the US education system. A total of 85 per cent of its 8,000 students are from low-income families, 68 per cent come from homes in which English is not the primary language, and 84 per cent are Latino.

Achievement gap

Rather than narrowing, the reading achievement gap between students from low-income and high-income families in the US  - meaning, those in the bottom and top tenth of the earnings ladder - has widened by 40 per cent since the mid 1970s, according to the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. 

Students from high-income families are eight times more likely to have obtained a bachelor’s degree by the time they reach the age of 24 than those from low-income families, the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education says. At the same time, income inequality has also grown, further amplifying the disparity in educational resources available to the rich versus the poor.

Trying to fix this by, in part, sticking poor kids in front of computer terminals for a portion of the school day has proved controversial. Rocketship’s repeated changes in its approach haven’t helped. With its current combination of those flexible classrooms and learning labs, which it now calls the “rotational model”, the amount of online time has been reduced, from as much as two hours to 15-30 minutes per day for the very youngest children up to an average of 100 minutes per day in most grades.

For some, that is still too much time where children are being taught by software, rather than a teacher. And on that point, the schools have repeatedly faced accusations of high pupil-teacher ratios - way above the national average. However, the schools have responded to previous criticisms of this nature by explaining that this is down to the particular way the extended school day is configured. 

Screen time

Roxana Marachi, an associate professor of education at San José State University, who is familiar with the schools, worries about the impact on young students of spending so much time in front of screens. 

“Yes, we can integrate technology in the right way, it just needs to be at developmentally appropriate times in children’s lives - above age 12 or 13, when they can actually use the technology as a tool the way adults use it as a tool.”

 She is suspicious of the impact that computer-based learning can have on exam results. Higher examination scores may simply be a function of the fact that, as they spend time online, students get better at taking tests, she says. 

“It’s like a video game, and then [blended-learning advocates] use those metrics to show they’re doing well. But while they’re on the same kind of task they’re doing for two hours a day, they’re not getting practice at doing deep-level thinking with the world around them, with one another, with figuring out together how to solve a problem.”

Rocketship has fired back against such criticism with the results of a study it commissioned by an independent research group, which followed its students into higher year groups and found that they were, on average, a year ahead of their classmates in maths and reading, and showed greater persistence. A total of 91 per cent credited Rocketship for teaching them to work hard, 89 per cent said the school helped them learn to work in groups, 85 per cent said it help them to study effectively for tests, 88 per cent said it enabled them to keep track of assignments, and 77 per cent said it encouraged them to learn independently.

The schools have also added enrichment programmes, including instruction in the arts, language, physical education and health, during students’ time in the learning labs.

And Smith explains that to perceive the school as only about the tech is wrong - he is fully aware that many of the issues children from low-income families experience do not have a technology-based solution. For example, the school is now providing children with breakfast and keeping students until as late as 7pm for after-school programmes. 

Smith says that students can have specific needs, too. “The effect of trauma and stress, especially on young children, and how that is then carried forward into school - that’s a very real part of our kids,” he says.

To help tackle this, another low-tech solution that Rocketship has adopted is to use menageries of stuffed animals called Kimochi, which means “feeling” in Japanese. Each has an expression to indicate a particular emotion, and students are encouraged to take the one that best reflects their mood. One six-year-old boy chose the animal that represented “sleepy”, his teacher recounted in a blog, which made her realise for the first time that he wasn’t getting enough rest, so she found a place for him to take a nap.

In older year groups, students use crayons to draw the colour corresponding with their behaviour, or clothes pegs to place themselves along the spectrum of good and bad behaviour. The goal is for those nearer the “bad” end to redeem themselves by the day’s end, Smith says. 

Equally low-tech, it turns out, is the schools’ communication with low-income parents, which often consists of texting. Parents didn’t take to the high-tech programme provided to watch their children’s progress because it required them to download an app. “[What we
use now] are simple systems,” Smith says.

Reams of data

As for utilising technology to crunch data to more accurately predict performance - the school’s use of computer-based learning provides reams of data to, in theory, make this possible - this remains just out of reach. 

That’s not because Rocketship doesn’t have a wealth of information about its thousands of students over a decade of operation; it’s that, as a non-profit organisation, it hasn’t had the time or other resources to analyse it. 

The mix of highly technology-orientated and low-tech solutions to help kids who need it has certainly made the schools influential. They have been used as an example for other schools, and visited by educators from around the world. 

The organisation has also received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, while the former superintendent of schools in Washington invited the school’s representatives to her city, as did the former mayor of New York.

But, with the popularity has come widespread scrutiny and criticism, with the technology elements attracting the most ire. 

Marachi, in particular, issues a warning: “The excitement around this is getting ahead of the research into these schools. There’s more excitement than there is evidence that they work.”

Jon Marcus is a freelance journalist based in the US