Results
Rocketship Results
We believe that all children have potential and that great public schools unleash that potential.
But the quality of public education in our country today still depends on where you live and how much money your parents earn. We are building a movement to create educational equity in low-income communities across our country. We still have a long way to go to realize our vision, but the progress we are making is transformational.
Stanford Study Finds Rocketeers Receive 5-7 Additional Months of Learning
A June 2023 Stanford CREDO study of over 3 million public school students found students at public charter schools outperform traditional public school students. And the study highlighted Rocketship Public Schools as one of the charter sector’s “gap busting” networks that are providing empirical proof that high-quality public education is possible anywhere. The study found that our Rocketeers gained the equivalent of 96 additional days of learning in reading and 138 additional days of learning in math. That is equivalent to five to seven months of additional learning in a single school year.
Closing in on Pre-Pandemic Levels
Rocketeers grew in math and reading at rates that reflect what we experienced prior to the pandemic and led to gap-busting schools! Despite the challenges of the pandemic, our academic growth is back on track to pre-COVID-19 levels—and we’re not stopping there. Our students are showing us, day by day, that with the right supports, they can and will exceed expectations.
Rocketship Educators Reflect the Communities We Serve
An increasing body of research shows that student achievement and attendance go up and suspension rates go down when students have at least one same-race teacher. Yet America’s teaching force has not increased in community representation over the years with only 20% of public school teachers in the U.S. who are people of color. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there has been a slight increase in Hispanic public school teachers since 2015 and the share of Black teachers has declined since the 1990s. We are flipping the script at Rocketship. Our educators reflect the communities we serve. The majority of our educators—80 percent—identify as people of color.
We are flipping the script at Rocketship. Our educators reflect the communities we serve. The majority of our educators—80 percent—identify as people of color.
Study Finds Rocketship Graduates a Year Ahead of Peers
When we launched Rocketship, we decided to focus exclusively on elementary school. We believed that if we helped our Rocketeers build a solid foundation in those early years, they would thrive in middle school, high school, and beyond. But there’s no doubt that middle school is one of the most challenging transitions in a student’s academic journey. To examine how our Rocketeer alumni perform in middle school, we engaged SRI International, an independent nonprofit research center, to conduct a three-year study on the performance of our Rocketeer graduates. The study followed nearly 2,000 students in seven San Jose middle schools with high concentrations of Rocketship graduates. SRI rigorously investigated academic performance, social and emotional skills, and student confidence navigating the middle school transition. The study found that Rocketeers are a year ahead of their classmates in math and reading after the first and second years of middle school. Learn more here.
