Rocketship charters

This summer, the Washington Post asked Is a charter school chain called Rocketship ready to soar across America? - The Washington Post

After their first week at Rocketship, the children woke up early on Saturday morning to do their homework unprompted. The boys made progress. And Vivian had a math breakthrough. “She said, ‘Dad, I finally get it,’ ” Martinez said. “I asked how did your teacher show you?’ She said it wasn’t the teacher. It was the penguin.”
An animated penguin is featured in the math software used by Rocketship.
Computers cannot replace good teachers, Danner said. But rote tasks — math drills, for example — can be offloaded to computers, freeing teachers to focus on more creative work, he said.
Computers cut roughly $500,000 annually from Rocketship’s labor costs for each school, which has an average enrollment of about 500. The savings means Rocketship can finance its own new school buildings — a luxury in the charter world, where facilities pose the greatest obstacle.

In fact what Rocketship brings to the table that's new may be mainly financial. Back in February, Larry Cuban had asked and answered: Are Rocketship Schools the Future? Part 3 | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The answer is maybe. But not for all schools.
Like KIPP, Aspire, YES Prep Schools, Uncommon Schools and other charters including regular schools that have aimed at enrolling low-income minority children and youth...–hybrids like Rocketship are the latest generation of the “effective schools” movement that began in the late 1970s. Aimed at urban failing schools, Ron Edmonds’ work on whole-school reform energized districts across the country as they replicated his five features (strong principal leadership, climate of high expectations for students, focus on basic academic skills, etc.) that seemingly accounted for high-achieving slum schools. ....
What the standards,testing, and accountability movement has done for the past two decades is create different models of “effective schools” to rescue students from toxic urban schools. Rocketship schools founded just before the recent economic recession offers a less expensive hybrid model...

It's certainly plausible that parts of that may carry over to schools that really aren't failing and are very far from urban...but there's no special reason to think that the solutions of "toxic urban schools" will work for us. Maybe we're already doing what they do, just not as cheaply. On the other hand, I'm not knocking cheap. Cheap is good, cheap frees up resources for other things, cheap is a quantity having a quality all its own. (Yes, quantity having a quality all its own is supposedly Stalin.) I find it very plausible that each of us, whether six or sixty, of whatever income and linguistic background, can have a collection of things to be learned by computer games, and that's where Rocketship comes in; and a collection of things to be learned in self-assembling study groups (mostly of people in your own time zone, but video between Greece and the US does work), and a collection of things to be learned with the individual assistance of actual teachers, with teachers preferably being certified by students rather than by officials... It might work.
Or then again, maybe not.