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By 2:45 p.m. the regular school day at August Boeger Middle School had already ended, but one class is about to start. More than 20 eighth graders drop their backpacks and settle into desks — not for extra credit but for college credit.

These 13- and 14-year-old students in East San Jose are taking their first college course, an entry-level class on career planning. This middle school is one of the first in the state to offer a college-level course. In the coming years, the San Jose Evergreen Community College District wants all middle school students in this school district to be able to complete three college courses before they start high school, and soon, the district plans to offer other courses, such as sociology and ethnic studies, said Beatriz Chaidez, the chancellor for the community college district.

Middle schoolers have long been eligible to enroll in college classes in California, though only a few, high-achieving students actually do it. By offering a college class at a middle school — especially one in a high-poverty area — the community college district is looking to make that enrollment easier. The class is taught by a middle school staff member, and it’s reserved exclusively for middle school students.

But with so few programs, there is little research about whether students are benefitting, and the local faculty union is worried middle school students might not be ready.

Chaidez disagrees. “Navigating (college) as early as middle school is unheard of in their community,” she said. “So when they experience success, it really motivates them to continue.”

California is increasingly pushing high schools to offer community college classes directly to students during the regular school day, a set-up known as “dual enrollment.” Unlike AP classes, which include expensive exams and are limited to certain subjects and high-performing students, these community college classes cover a range of topics and are open to all students. By 2030, California Community Colleges Chancellor Sonya Chiristian wants all high school students to graduate with

Chaidez wants to go further. She wants every local high school student to be able to complete about 20 college courses by the time they graduate — enough to earn an associate’s degree.

CalMatters reached out to the college district’s faculty union, which was surprised to learn the district is offering classes at a middle school.

“This opens up some problems,” said Jessica Breheny, an English professor and the union’s vice president. “I’m sure there are 12-year-olds that are college-ready, but there are just less of them and it’s less likely. Developmentally, they have other things going on.”

Research that high schoolers who take college classes are more likely to attend college and graduate, but there’s little research on how middle school students fare, said John Fink, a senior researcher at Columbia University’s Community College Research Center. “Nationally, and in most states, this is very, very rare, and in many states this is not allowed.” Instead, he said the focus is typically on enrolling more 10th, 11th and 12th graders in college courses.

A college-level course, with a few middle school games

About 10% of California’s high school students took a community college class in the 2021-22 school year, according to by professors at UC Davis using the most recent data. California’s community college system doesn’t track how many middle school students take college courses.

So far, the Mount Pleasant Elementary School District, which includes August Boeger Middle School, offers only one college course, called “Career Planning,” and it’s almost indistinguishable from any other class on its campus. The college course is taught in a regular middle school classroom, and the professor, Oscar Lamas, already works at the middle school, where he’s a counselor. Perhaps the only noticeable difference is the timing: The middle school day ends at 2:30 p.m. and Lamas’ course starts at 2:45. He’s paid separately by the community college to teach the course.

Career Planning helps students learn about , practice resume-writing and learn psychological theories related to professional success. A governing board of college district professors, known as the Academic Senate, sets the objectives for each college course, but Lamas has broad discretion in teaching it. The Academic Senate responsible for setting the parameters of Lamas’ course did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The dean of the community college’s counseling department, Victor Garza, refused an interview request from CalMatters but issued a written statement. Garza said the middle school class is akin to other dual enrollment courses, which maintain the college’s “academic rigor.”

“Some adjustments might be needed to cater to the unique needs and experiences” of students, he added.

On a Thursday before spring break, Lamas tries to make his class more fun by breaking the students into five teams to play a Jeopardy-style quiz game on the topic of the day, .

Natalie Mendoza, 14, becomes the default spokesperson of her team, named the “Tacos R Us Club,” but she answers the first question wrong, putting her team back 300 points and prompting her classmates to burst into chatter and analyze their mistakes.

As part of the class, she has to study a career, write a short essay about it and present it at a career fair. She picked intellectual property law. “A lot of people say I’m assertive,” she said. “I think that’s a really good trait for a lawyer, and I think it’d be fun to fight for people who have created stuff.”

Natalie said she’d be the first in her family to attend college but she’s already planning to go and has a few schools in mind, including UC Berkeley and San Jose State. If she does attend one of those schools, her grade in this counseling class would be part of her official college transcript.

Breheny, with the union, said she’s concerned about the quality of the classes, especially once the college district begins teaching other subjects, such as ethnic studies.

“Faculty designed their courses for adult learners,” Breheny said. An ethnic studies class may cover topics such as sexual violence and genocide, she added — topics that may be difficult to convey to a middle schooler. “Some of the material assumes a certain knowledge about the world, about politics, which you may not have at 11, 12, 13 years old.”

High schools offer few dual enrollment classes

August Boeger Middle School sits at the base of the Diablo Range mountains, tucked between the ranch-style homes and strip malls that color East San Jose. Teachers and staff greet each other with mucho gusto instead of hello. All around the open-air campus, murals tell the story of the region’s multi-cultural heritage, especially its Mexican and Chicano roots.

That celebration of culture is a direct response to a history of adversity, Lamas said. “East San Jose has always been a marginalized, disadvantaged environment.” As a result, schools in the community contend with education disparities, he said, such as a high dropout rate and a high teen pregnancy rate.

Offering a college class to these middle school students allows them to “see a possibility for their future that doesn’t exist within these walls here” and can inspire them to reach for a higher goal, said Marisa Peña, a school advisor.

Male students, Black and Latino students and students from rural areas in the community college courses offered at California’s school districts. California lawmakers have signed numerous bills in the hopes of expanding access but certain regions in the state, such as Los Angeles, enroll a higher percentage of students.

Natalie said she hopes to continue taking college courses when she starts at Mount Pleasant High School this fall, which is just around the corner from her middle school. But her options are limited.

Mount Pleasant High School offers just three community college courses, which serve about 10% of the school’s roughly 1,000 students, said Kyle Kleckner, the school district’s director of instructional services. All of the classes are in “multimedia” studies, he said, which teaches students how to create their own podcasts or YouTube channels, along with other digital marketing skills. 

Although Mount Pleasant High School’s dual enrollment is about on par with the state average, it trails other districts in the region. Less than 20 miles away, at high schools in the Milpitas Unified School District, roughly 25% of students enrolled in a community college class in 2021-22, according to the UC Davis analysis.

Finding professors to teach middle school

Part of the dual enrollment challenge is finding qualified college professors who are willing and able to work at a high school or middle school. Existing middle and high school teachers are allowed to teach college courses but they have to meet the qualifications, which usually include a master’s degree in the area of instruction. Most of California’s high school and middle school instructors a master’s degree, according to a study by the Public Policy Institute of California.

“We have graduation requirements that students have to accomplish,” Kleckner said. “The trick is finding that community college course that also fulfills those requirements and also finding a teacher who can teach it.” He said Mount Pleasant High School is committed to expanding the number of college courses but noted that it’s smaller and therefore has fewer teachers who meet the requirements to teach a college course.

In turn, many college professors lack experience teaching children, said Breheny, who teaches at San Jose City College. “We have had some problems already with dual enrollment where faculty have gone to different (high schools) to teach and have dealt with classroom management issues that they wouldn’t have in a college course.” In one case, she said a college faculty member saw bullying in a high school classroom but didn’t feel equipped to respond.

Lamas has a master’s degree, which is required for most . He’s gentle with the middle school students in his class, occasionally awarding points in the Jeopardy game even when the answer isn’t perfect. Lamas had two quiz games planned that day, each one covering a different topic, but the first game took up almost all of the class time.

He ends class by taking questions about the upcoming final project. Although spring break is minutes away, the students sit still through the final minutes, except for the occasional joke and bursts of laughter. Not a single phone was in sight.

Once class ends, however, chatter ensues, the students pull out their phones, and staff escort them to the parking lot. While they may be taking a college course, they still must wait for their parents to pick them up.

This article was and was republished under the license.

If a fierce reformer such as Rhee couldn’t survive in a troubled urban district, then maybe charter schools were the answer. But which charter network to pick to profile?

I had never heard of tiny San Jose-based Rocketship charters, but several savvy charter school followers pointed in their direction. I flew out to San Jose, met with co-founders John Danner and Preston Smith, and they agreed to provide me complete access to their schools and expansion plans over the next year. Over the course of that year, I earned a lot of airline miles flying back and forth to California, and even more miles as they expanded to Milwaukee and Nashville. The result, , was published in 2014. I then departed for other book projects.

Today, Rocketship Public Schools has – celebrating its quinceañera, as long-time Rocketship leader Maricela Guerrero aptly put it, considering the network’s roots in educating low-income Latino students – with about 10,000 “Rocketeers” across the country, with 13 schools in California, two in Milwaukee, three in Nashville, three in Washington, D.C. and one in Fort Worth, Texas. Over its 15-year history, Rocketship has served 27,508 students.

This seemed like a good time to catch up with Smith, who today shares the title of co-founder and CEO. Back then, Smith and I spent many hours together on school tours and sitting across from one another with a digital recorder, so for me, this was a reunion of sorts.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

While I was researching the book you told me so many great stories about the early startup years, when you operated out of a tiny, unairconditioned space at St. Paul’s Methodist Church in San Jose. One of my favorites was about you having to move 40 traffic cones every morning and then move them again in the afternoon, to accommodate the parishioners. Your exact words during our interview when recalling those years: “I’ll never move a damn cone again for the rest of my life.” Do you have any better stories about that time?

You know, Richard, that is a great one. I’ll stick with that one. But once in a while, to help our school leaders during startup, I help out with moving cones. So, time heals all wounds.

Let me give you another story. In our church space we had different learning centers, a center with blocks, a center with enrichment, etc. There were all sorts of materials, carpets, tables. Every Friday the church group held a dance, so every Friday afternoon we had to clear out that space, moving everything. So it was like a huge fire drill. And then every Monday morning, we had to set it up again for the kids.

In some ways, Rocketship is a typical charter network, with an emphasis on academics and college readiness. But in other ways, you are very different, creating only elementary schools, putting parent empowerment as a top priority and keeping an eye on the biggest prize: social change around education. 

Let’s first discuss your K-5 model. The biggest charter networks have gone to K-12 models, mostly on the assumption that to make their students truly college-ready they can’t send them off to traditional schools where academic gains might be lost. Why doesn’t Rocketship do that? 

First is that it is unlikely that we, or anyone, can scale to the size of the challenge within public education, so we have to be innovative in how we think about sharing our model and impact with other kids, families and schools beyond directly enrolling more students. We do not want to be a parallel K-12 system, rarely interacting with other school systems. Rocketship does not believe that contributes to a larger ecosystem of impact.

Rather, by being K-5 it creates much larger catalytic effects for our kids, families and communities in regards to high-quality choices, district or charter. We believe that by creating a bunch of K-12 systems we would actually be undermining choice, which is a value we as a movement say that we value. That would encourage families to make the choice to opt into one K-12 network and then not make any further choices. Thus, the K-12 approach ironically undermines our value as a movement of choice.

Your theory of change has always been that Rocketship will take in low-income students, deliver a superior education, empower their parents and then send them to schools that will have to adapt to these students and their parents, who will demand better educations. And yet, at least in the early years, the traditional schools, especially the teachers unions, have fought you at every turn. Have traditional districts started to make changes as a result of your schools being in their district?

We’ve definitely seen it in each of our regions. What I’ve learned over time is this power of being only elementary, right? It starts with a great education, and then you couple that with parents who become super powerful through advocacy. From their years with children at Rocketship, they understand how to navigate and influence the system. They not only understand what a high-quality school is and what their Rocketeers deserve, but they also know how to navigate the political and leadership system and community. And that creates systemic change, community change. We’ve seen it in San Jose and every place we’re at.

Could you cite some examples?

Sure. Here in San Jose, where we have 10 schools, our kids are showing up in middle school a year ahead in academics, and those gaps actually grow in the subsequent years. They are going to be in really strong shape no matter what kind of school they choose. Several middle and high school charter schools have grown up here in San Jose and even the local traditional districts have innovated, opening up schools of choice, small autonomous schools, dual immersion schools [where English- and Spanish-speaking students learn together in both languages]. And if you look at the overall results of the surrounding districts, everyone is doing better. So I really think that has proven our theory of change.

In Milwaukee, where we now have two schools, what we saw is the district really wanted our Rocketeers, so they opened additional middle schools so they could serve our kids. Also, we used to partner with community organizing groups, but in 2015 we shifted, based on this theory of change, and made organizing part of who we are at Rocketship. Now, we have Rocketship employees who are education organizers who work with the families not just in our schools but with other district and charter schools to organize families to access power. That helps us drive this theory of change in a larger sort of community and ecosystem.

Most charter networks were launched with an end-goal of college readiness, which in more recent years expanded to college success – ensuring that students not only enroll in college but actually earn degrees, hopefully in four years. Now, suddenly, and partly as a response to the pandemic, an anti-college movement is afoot as seen in the rapidly declining enrollments. The belief that a college degree is necessary in life has begun to fade. Has that affected Rocketship?

I guess I’ll speak for our Rocketship community, that’s what I’m most familiar with, right? What we’ve seen is our parents are still all over college. They’re still very much motivated by that vision for their children. So, we do annual college visits in our schools, with the families. We’ve still got cohort names and college banners in our classrooms. This emphasis on getting a college education is something parents say is what really motivates them and what they appreciate about Rocketship. 

That college focus is interesting for us because we have to wait, right? Our kids leave after fifth grade. And it’s years before that student gets to college. Now, we have our third class of college graduates, and we have Rocketeers who have graduated who come back to visit our schools. That has been super motivating to our families, to our team. So I’ll just say within our Rocketship community, college is what our families are still aspiring towards.

I’d like to ask the college question more broadly. Education is infamous for its ill-advised pendulum swings. Remember “whole language,” which got its start in California, swept the country and triggered years of reading instruction malpractice? Considering how fast the pendulum is swinging on college, is this another trend going too far? 

I would say I deeply believe that in the United States of America we need a public education system that regardless of zip code, enables kids to have the opportunity to go to college. And if they choose not to do that, that’s fine. Right? That is their choice. But I am still deeply motivated and deeply inspired by a country that believes in public education. You should be able to attend a free school that’s high quality and gives you the opportunity to go to college.

My question here is whether this [anti-college movement] is more a reflection of the reality of how our current public system doesn’t provide that quality education to prepare students for college. If so, we still have work to do. 

A few charter networks have figured out ways to enroll better prepared students from more motivated families. In short, gaming the pool of low-income families. Not surprisingly, their academic outcome data consistently looks outstanding when compared to their close-by neighborhood schools. I spent enough time in Rocketship schools to know that doesn’t happen there. If anything, you lean in the opposite direction. And yet, that gaming has to be tempting, right? Great headlines when the test scores come out.

No!

Our challenge is serving kids in socioeconomically disadvantaged zip codes, often Black and Latino kids, right? For me, that’s the challenge, giving all those kids in those zip codes a chance to go to college. That’s what we’re obsessed with at Rocketship. The more we get into learning how to do that, the more we have to share with other schools to influence the larger system, right?

We’re not interested in designing magnet schools [that attract the strongest students]. There’s a place for them in the United States, sure. But the massive need is designing true public schools that serve all kids.

In San Jose, Rocketship clearly showed that it could succeed with low-income Latino students in ways the local traditional public schools could not. You pretty much wrote the book on that, and you could have stuck with that student population, nationally. But you didn’t. That sense of mission led you to expand into cities such as Nashville and Washington, D.C., where you started to serve mostly Black students. A lot of people (OK, maybe me as well, considering my D.C. reporting for the Rhee book) thought you would stumble at that abrupt transition. I know it was rocky, but based on school outcome data in those cities, you appear to be succeeding now. Please talk about that.

Now, I feel so blessed and grateful for the opportunity to open schools that are so disparate. Opening in D.C. meant opening in a very different community, where a third of our students were homeless in our second year. We had never seen anything like this. The amount of trauma, and the counseling that was needed was new for us. 

Think about that. Our school was the largest charter that ever opened in D.C. Our authorizers were skeptical. That was hard. We were learning how to do this. What do we do? How do we raise the bar, push the bar, for kids like we’ve never seen before? The beauty of that was reconsidering our Rocketship model. Oh, we need counselors. We need counselors who understand trauma. We need to better discern the scaffolding of our behavior management to get smarter, better and faster. 

And now, that’s all in our model, and not just in D.C., right? You fast forward to San Jose, and now we have mental health professionals in every school. Everybody should do that. We learned that. So that has benefited all kids, not just in D.C. If we had just remained in San Jose, I don’t think our model would be as rich as it is now. Being in Milwaukee, Texas, D.C., Nashville, we’re seeing very different communities, very different needs, very different learning styles. That’s how we have elevated our overall model.

Here’s the other thing. We got launched in San Jose with English language learner models we developed. And then you go into districts such as D.C., where people tell us those teaching techniques aren’t needed, because these students aren’t learning English. And meanwhile, we know that English is a hard language to learn, right? It’s not a natural language. At a young age, everyone is learning English. That skill, teaching English, and that model of teaching it, was a super powerful thing to bring to D.C. At the root of this is Rocketship as a learning organization. Always innovating, reflecting, always pushing ourselves.

For most of your startup years with Rocketship, there’s been a rocky and adversarial relationship between charters and traditional districts, especially with the teachers unions. Now, post-pandemic we see steep enrollment declines in all schools, especially the district schools. In some parts of the country, that has intensified the animosity, with traditional districts arguing they can’t afford to lose students to charters. From your perspective, how has the pandemic changed the relationship between charters and traditional schools?

There were definitely years when charters and districts were not all in this together. During the lockdowns, however, we all started sharing our resources. Overall, now there’s a shared sense of just how intense this work is trying to deal with learning setbacks. I would say at least among educators, there’s more collaboration between charters and districts, after what we all went through.

It strikes me that there’s one Rocketship practice that should be at the top of the list to share with other schools, both traditional and charter, and that’s parent involvement. You were able to do that with Latino parents, who traditionally have shied away from dealing with the education establishment. How did you do that?

It starts with making sure they’re truly treated like their child’s first teachers, making them true partners. That’s why we continue to do home visits with our families. Also, we make sure they share power, such as asking them to name new schools and help select the staff. When we hold meetings in the evening we offer food and day care to make it more accessible to our parents. Once parents are engaged with the school they are more likely to become education advocates, community organizers. That’s why we brought our community organizing in-house.

Let me give you an example. During the pandemic we established Care Corps, which placed a Care Corps coordinator in each school to help parents find the help they needed. That help included partnering with to deal with food scarcity, distributing boxes of produce, eggs, milk and chicken to our families.The coordinators help parents navigate support systems and get the assistance they need by overcoming language barriers, red tape and lack of internet access to connect them to vital services that are too often cumbersome and complicated.

For us, having a broader impact doesn’t always mean enrolling more students. It involves trying to share practices such as Care Corps with other districts.

One East San Jose school district is looking at how post-pandemic challenges are contributing to students skipping school, as chronic absenteeism rises in the local education system.

One out of five students in the East Side Union High School District were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year, missing class as families struggled with financial instability and lack of child care at home. A student is chronically absent if they miss more than 10%, or 18 days, of the school year.

The East San Jose school district had an absenteeism rate of 20.4% last school year. Rates for low-income students spiked to 28.6% in 2021-22 from 21.9% in the 2018-19 school year. Absenteeism rates are also high among foster youth and homeless students in the district, at 47.6% and 43.1% respectively. There are more than 21,000 students enrolled in East Side Union High School District’s 19 high schools and adult education programs.

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The absenteeism rate for East San Jose students is more than double the county’s average of 8.8% in 2018-19, right before the pandemic forced distance learning.

The problem is tied to students’ lived experiences battling housing insecurity and financial instability, said Maryam Adalat, director of student services.

“There’s a lot of barriers to attendance,” said Adalat at a recent school board meeting. “We’re noticing that a lot of our teens are providing child care for their younger siblings because parents are having to work two, three jobs. We’re also realizing that some students are having to work to contribute toward the household.”

The district partners with community organizations like the Bill Wilson Center and New Hope for Youth to alleviate challenges for families through child care or mental health services, while also outlining individualized plans to improve attendance, Adalat said. Families still contend with the region’s , risking as can add up to more than $20,000 per year for one child alone.

Chronic absenteeism is hitting school districts . San Jose Unified School District, the county’s largest school district with more than 30,000 students, has a this school year of 17%—and had rates that hit 25% over the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools continue to grapple with the problem, with officials suggesting lingering and as potential factors. The pandemic disproportionately impacted low-income students, which contributed to lower test scores and .

“Pandemic-related challenges that many (district) students faced intensified many other typical challenges, including financial hardships,” J. Manuel Herrera, an East Side Union High School District board member, told San José Spotlight. “All of these challenges impact student attendance because they require students to sacrifice time and effort that interferes with their schooling.”

District officials hope to stem the tide of chronic absenteeism by addressing the issue before students step foot on a high school campus.

East Side Union High School District aims to connect with other districts before students enter high school, reaching out to middle school students to understand their current challenges.

Academic struggles in middle school can translate to higher amounts of absences, said Teresa Marquez, associate superintendent of educational services. That in turn impacts academic success and the ability to graduate on time. The district is looking toward summer programs to acclimate incoming students to high school curriculum and schedules.

“It’s looking at establishing those relationships in our (middle) schools, so that we can start with those incoming freshmen that we already know are going to need that extra support and that extra care,” Marquez said.

Relationships also need to be established with parents, who play a major role in student attendance, Herrera said.

“Working with our incoming freshmen is crucial, because good attendance habits need to be established early,” Herrera told San José Spotlight. “As a district we need to make sure we provide the information and the tools so that students and parents understand how to navigate the school system when it comes to reporting absences and communicating with school personnel to seek help as needed.”

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