Veronica Weber
Courtesy of Mike Bromberg/Santa Clara Office of Education
Cover Story
Aracelia Benavides, left, Aniya Tanner, Emily Hernandez and Kassandra Santillan play during an enrichment lab at a Rocketship Education campus. As a board member, Grace Mah has championed charter schools like Rocketship.
Grace Mah is inducted into the Santa Clara County Board of Education in December 2008. She was appointed to fill a vacancy during 2007 and ran for the position in 2008.
M
ah indeed has been a solid part of the county board’s pro-charter majority. That includes a sweeping grant of 20 charters in December 2011 to the ambitious Rocketship Education, a charter-management company cofounded by Palo Alto resident John Danner. Among the supporters of the Rocketship charters were San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed and U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, as well as
many parents. “Charter schools give families of underserved kids another choice besides the traditional school, which typically has been failing those kids,� Mah said in an interview with the Weekly. “It’s considered an equal-opportunity, civil rights mandate to be able to support kids to have equal access to a really great education. “I believe in choice in general, in
parents having that ability if they want to have that different kind of education.� Although there are none in Palo Alto, there are 52 charter schools among the 352 schools across Santa Clara County, 33 of them in San Jose. Thirty-six of the 52 are run by individual school districts. The remaining sixteen — with many more in the pipeline — are
chartered by the county Office of Education. Charter schools are publicly funded entities that operate on five-year “charters� from sponsoring agencies, usually a school district. They are exempt from many strictures of the California Education Code but are required to meet educational benchmarks as measured by standardized tests taken by all California students. They must petition for renewal every five years. Prominent supporters of charter schools as a means to closing the achievement gap include U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, philanthropist Bill Gates and, locally, Netflix CEO and education activist
Reed Hastings. Hastings sits on Rocketship’s national strategy board. Santa Clara County’s charter grants to Rocketship, which already operates six charter schools in San Jose, are part of “San Jose 2020,� an initiative to eliminate the achievement gaps among San Jose’s 150,000 public school students by 2020. Currently, nearly half are not proficient in grade-level skills, and 2,300 middle and high school students drop out each year. The Rocketship charters, projected to be educating 14,000 San Jose students by 2020, are “like opening (continued on next page)
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