Educated Guess ponders a 5th grade online math quiz at Rocketship computer lab.

A small, ambitious charter school operation in San Jose raised eyebrows this fall for its academic achievement: a 926 API score for its first charter school, making it the highest ranking low-income elementary school in Santa Clara County.

Now it’s gaining attention for financial efficiency. Rocketship Education will receive the $50,000 Innovation Award from the Charter School Growth Fund, a national funder of charter schools. Rocketship won the national competition for its “hybrid” school that combines online education and classroom instruction, at a substantial cost savings. Rocketship shifts the dollars — $500,000 per school each year – into improving instruction, increasing teacher pay and paying for a new school that it builds at each  location. The latter is  remarkable, considering that charters that choose to build their own schools – very few do — must either seek private gifts or, as Rocketship has done, find the money within the state’s standard per student tuition payment, which is the same for charters and district schools.

Rocketship is only three years old, with two K-5 schools up and  five more planned in San Jose. Both Rocketship Mateo Sheedy Elementary and Rocketship Si Se Puede Academy have new buildings

Under the hybrid model, all 450 students in each school cycle through a block of math/science and two blocks of literacy/social studies in a traditional classroom setting with teachers who specialize in their fields. They also attend  one block of learning lab, where they supplement math and reading classes with online work. Because the computer lab is not counted as instructional minutes, it can be run by a non-certified instructor. With three certified teachers teaching four classes,  the school requires one fewer teacher per grade and five per school, along with five fewer classrooms.

Rocketship uses the $500,000 savings in five areas:

• After-school tutoring: the lowest performing 25 percent of students get extra after-school help two hours each day;
• Principal training: a year-long internship for new principals;
• Hiring an academic dean on each campus to work with teachers and develop curriculum;
• Higher teacher pay: about a 10 percent higher than starting pay in the surrounding districts, plus a possible 10 percent bonus. Teachers also work a long day, since students attend from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. (Tutoring goes from 4 to 6 p.m.)
• Facilities payments.

Early results indicate at least some of these may be the right priorities. The percentage of  Rocketship Mateo Sheedy proficient in English Language Arts rose from 56 percent to 81 percent last year, even though  78 percent of the school’s students are low-income and 73 percent are English learners. Most live in downtown San Jose.

Preston Smith, the Chief Achievement Officer and former principal of Rocketship Mateo Sheedy, said the online component is a work in progress. The school will soon switch from using Houghton Mifflin’s Riverdeep educational software to programs produced by Eduss, which will more closely track  students’ progress. But Rocketship ultimately wants to develop its own web-based curriculum with individualized tutorials and assessments; the Innovation Fund award will help do that.

Rocketship was conceived by John Danner, and his entrepreneurial energy and knowledge to technology are in the charter organization’s DNA.

Rocketship adopted this model in its second year and is committed to it. Even if the state increased its school funding – certainly not likely in the next few year – Rocketship would use additional money not to hire more teachers but to pay them more, Smith, a former teacher and small-school principal in San Jose’s Alum Rock Union Elementary District, said.

Rocketship was conceived by John Danner, and his entrepreneurial energy and knowledge of technology  permeate  the charter organization. (See here and here for my earlier posts on Rocketship.) Danner founded  an Internet advertising software company that was bought by Doubleclick a decade ago. After that, he taught elementary school in Nashville and started a charter school consortium in Tennessee. He has a master’s in electrical engineering from Stanford, where he also got his BA.

In following Rocketship’s initial charter application three years ago, I questioned how he could run an effective charter without supplementing state aid with private donations, as KIPP and other successful charter operators do. An effective use of philanthropic dollars, I argued,  would support the case for more state support for K-12 schools.

But Danner was adamant that charters should be self-sustaining on public dollars. It’s still early; Rocketship’s early success can also be attributed to inspirational leaders like Smith. But it has a model that’s caught the charter world’s attention. And district schools should be checking it out as well.

By John Fensterwald on November 9th, 2009