Rocketship Leads Top Schools in Bay Area for Underserved Students
By Rocketship Public Schools
Each year, Innovate Public Schools recognizes the Bay Area public schools achieving excellent results for low-income Latino and low-income African American students. Their annual Top Bay Area Public Schools for Underserved Students Report examines 2016-17 results to identify schools that are closing the achievement gap. Since Innovate’s first report in 2014, few Bay Area schools have achieved this honor. Out of 1,275 schools in the Bay Area only 52 schools made the list in 2016-17. We are proud to report that eight of those schools are Rocketship schools. Once again, Rocketship had the most schools of any charter network or school district featured on the list.
Rocketship Highlights:
Eight of the 21 public elementary schools in the Bay Area recognized as closing the gap for low-income Latino students in math including:
Rocketship school leaders celebrate their accomplishments
• Rocketship Alma Academy
• Rocketship Discovery Prep
• Rocketship Fuerza Community Prep
• Rocketship Mateo Sheedy Elementary
• Rocketship Mosaic Elementary
• Rocketship Redwood City Prep
• Rocketship Si Se Puede Academy
• Rocketship Spark Academy
Rocketship Mateo Sheedy Elementary is the only elementary school across the entire Bay Area named as gap-closing for low-income African American students in English Language arts.
Rocketship Redwood City Prep is one of just six elementary schools in the Bay Area named on as a Top School in both math and English Language Arts for low-income Latino students.
Rocketship is raising the bar for schools serving low-income African American and Latino students across the Bay Area. The report looks at how schools in the Bay Area perform on the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) with low-income African-American and Latino students. While Bay Area schools routinely outperform the rest of the state, Innovate finds that low-income students in the region lag behind other California students, widening an already large statewide achievement gap. According to Innovate, “Right now, only 1 in 20 low-income Latino and African American students in the Bay Area attend a school achieving these results.”
Schools achieving these results are categorized as those where low-income students match or better the proficiency rates of the California state average in math and/or English Language Arts. Out of 1,275 schools in the Bay Area, 729 serve a significant low-income Latino population and 239 serve a significant African-American population. Only 52 schools from those groups made the list of gap-closing schools.
For the last ten years, Office Manager Aned Sanchez has worked with the staff at Rocketship Mateo Sheedy to help build a genuine community where parents of all backgrounds feel excited to make change.
Rocketship Mateo Sheedy earned special honors as “the only school this year that made the Top Schools list for both Latino and African American students. ” Parent engagement and strong school leadership are credited with Mateo Sheedy’s remarkable results. “The strength of [this] campus is in fact, the families that come here every single day, the families who graduated from here and come back and continue to give, and the new families who are setting the tone for what it means to be a Rocketeer. It became a catalyst for what is possible in not only this neighborhood, but beyond as well” said Interim Principal and Director of Schools Eesir Kaur.
Rocketship Fuerza staff and students show off their award
All schools included in the report were honored at an event on April 28th. There, Genesis, a fourth grader at Rocketship Fuerza Community Prep, shared some of her thoughts on her award-winning school, “I see all of my teachers really caring for my learning. Instead of just saying “good job” and leaving, they give us feedback to improve our learning and to help us learn more. . . Everyday I experience how Rocketship is a school with a clear purpose to give all children a high-quality education…. I am proud of my accomplishments, with all my core values, confidence and courage. I know I am capable of amazing things, and I know I can become what, we as a family, have always dreamed. ”
Congratulations to all the Rocketship students, families, teachers, school leaders, and supporters who made these accomplishments possible. This report underscores what we see every day on our Rocketship campuses: that our collective of parents, teachers, leaders, supporters and students are catalyzing a movement to transform the future for underserved communities across our country.
Published on May 3, 2018
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