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Rocketship students spend at least 70 minutes a day in “Learning Labs,” where they use computers for self-paced, individualized instruction in basic math and literacy.
The game changer Palo Alto man launches charter-school effort to ‘eliminate achievement gap’ Story by Chris Kenrick. Photographs by Veronica Weber
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an a Silicon Valley business guy retool his startup skills to transform the world of education? Meet John Danner, a Palo Alto resident who is betting his company on it. The Stanford University-trained engineer switched careers to education following the 1999 sale of his high-flying venture-backed startup, NetGravity, Inc. After three years of teaching second- and fifth-graders, Danner’s key observation — that kids need to be reached at the level they’re at, not where they “should” be — became the basis for co-founding his next startup. This time it’s Rocketship Education, a Palo Alto-based K-5 charter-school management firm. That six-year-old, nonprofit startup aspires to a goal as audacious as that of any cheeky tech venture — “to eliminate the achievement gap in our lifetimes.” Today, after launching five elementary schools that have propelled low-income kids in San Jose to top academic results, Danner believes he has an educational model that’s worth “scaling up.” A few dozen — even a few hundred — charter-school success stories won’t make a dent in helping the millions of kids across America who are stuck in failing schools, he said in a recent interview at Rocketship’s downtown Palo Alto headquarters. “There are 100,000 schools, of which the U.S. Department of Education has identified 13,000 as failing — so why does doing 100 or 200 matter at all? “It’s not a bad thing to dream big and hope to be a major game changer for an industry,” he said. “That’s in the water of Silicon Valley. If you’re not trying to do that, maybe you should be doing something else.” Page 28ÊUÊ >ÀV ÊÓÎ]ÊÓä£ÓÊUÊ*> Ê Ì Ê7ii Þ
Rocketship recently got cleared to expand its five-campus network to more than two dozen in San Jose — and to enter the Milwaukee, Wis., public school system with charters for eight new campuses. The company is prepared to bring its model to any other failing school system that’s open to change, Danner said.
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decade ago, after selling his technology company, Danner followed his wife to Nashville, where she took a job as a professor at Vanderbilt Law School and he began teaching elementary school. Like any new teacher, he immediately started puzzling over what to do about the handful of kids who were behind in his class.
‘It’s not a bad thing to dream big and hope to be a major gamechanger for an industry.” – John Danner, CEO, Rocketship Education “I’d ask the other teachers, ‘What should I do? I’m supposed to be teaching a lesson on two-digit addition, but these kids are still learning their numbers.’ They said, ‘You need to differentiate,’ and I said, ‘What does that mean?’” Danner started writing customized learning plans for the students most in need of help. He’d figure out where they were academically, what they needed to do next and create individualized worksheets, guiding them through the developmentally appropriate lessons to bring their skills up to par with those of the rest of the class. “It seems kind of obvious that kids learn
differently, at different speeds and have different gaps in their knowledge,” he said. “But we just had a pretty monolithic system dating from the mass industrialization era that tries to treat kids as if they’re quite similar, when that’s not really true.” Danner started thinking about engineering a system steeped in more self-paced learning for kids. Back in California a few years later, he teamed up with Preston Smith, a former teacher and principal, to create what they call a “hybrid” model that combines traditional classrooms with a daily dose of individualized online instruction. The pair opened their first elementary school, Rocketship Mateo Sheedy Elementary, in San Jose’s Washington Guadalupe neighborhood in 2007. In the following four years they opened four more — Sí Se Puede Academy, Los Sueños Academy and, just last fall, Mosaic Elementary and Discovery Prep. On the inside, Rocketship schools look much like those of a traditional elementary school system: classrooms containing cozy “reading corners” with rugs and books, cheerful purple cabinets, behavior charts and wall displays emphasizing phonics and vocabulary. They also incorporate features often seen in charter campuses serving low-income neighborhoods: college banners hanging around campus, daily 8 a.m. pep rallies where the whole school gathers to sing and chant its core values, and teachers who make a point of personally greeting each child at the classroom door. A key difference in every Rocketship school, according to the company, is the “Learning Lab,” where every student spends more than an hour a day at a computer screen, with at least 70 minutes of self-paced math, reading comprehension and literacy instruction.
Danner maintains the advantages of Learning Labs are twofold: “Academically, it turns out to be much more effective with the most at-risk kids — the bottom quartile of kids do quite well with this,” he said. “Ninety percent of kids move up to ‘basic,’ ‘advanced,’ or ‘proficient’ within a year of coming to Rocketship,” he added. Staffed by hourly workers, Learning Labs also afford a financial advantage for Rocketship, yielding a $500,000-per-campus savings (because they can hire fewer teachers). The organization invests that in other priorities, including “academic deans” on each campus and teacher salaries that are 20 percent higher than in surrounding school districts, Danner said. Rocketship’s track record is short, but in the startup years its schools have logged stel-
Palo Alto resident John Danner is the founder and CEO of Rocketship Education, which combines the traditional education model with a daily dose of individualized online instruction.