Here's What Rocketship Education Is And How It Gets Great Reading Results On Year-End Standardized Tests

Rocketship Education, originally founded as a one-off public charter school in San Jose, California, is a network of 19 public schools that are wholly dedicated to rigorously educating students who otherwise would have ended up in low-quality, problem-rampant learning environments. The thousands of students who most recently attended classes at Rocketship public schools were shown to be a full year ahead of their peers in English, language arts, and mathematics.

Looking into the two kindergarten-through-fifth-grade programs currently offered by Rocketship public schools in the nation's capital, similar indicators of top-notch performance are just as abundant. Take, for example, the fact that Rocketship's two schools in the District of Columbia took home recognition of what's known as Tier 1 status.

In the nation's capital, the members of the DC Public Charter School Board collectively band their expertise in the world of education and their innate intelligence together to judge where all public charter school establishments rank. The organization uses four levels - Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, and untiered schools - to inform the public of what it thinks the best schools are.

Keeping kids' interests in reading books, magazines, poems, and other pieces of literature is tied directly to success

As you may have already guessed, Rocketship Education's administrators and teachers share countless highly effective strategies with one another in order to maintain competitive advantages over rival schools. Here are a handful of these strategies - if you're a teacher, take notes!

Books are far from being the only things to read

Rocketship staff members find it easy to spark kids' interests in reading by encouraging them to read things like road signs, instructions on boxed cake mixes, and restaurant menus. It's easy to incorporate games into time spent reading things outside of books and other traditional literary material.

Don't just talk about it - be about it!

Young students are highly impressionable. If one classroom's teacher rarely reads books or newspapers in the presence of her students, students will be much less likely to want to read themselves. Setting examples truly goes a very, very long way.

Allow students to read subjects of books that interest them

Forcing kids to read material that they're not interested in will cause them to associate reading with negative experiences. Encouraging young students to read can also be done by allowing them to read virtually any and every subject they want.

The proverbial proof is in the pudding - let's look at Rocketship Education's batch of statistical dessert

Since Rocketship Education was founded by the talented entrepreneurs Preston Smith and John Danner in 2006, the chain of public charter schools have served upwards of 18,000 young students, a whopping 82 percent of which hailed from low-income backgrounds.

People who grow up in households that struggle financially are statistically less likely to complete any level of higher education, earn even a semblance of a respectable income, and steer clear of risky behaviors known for stunting career growth and development like voluntarily associating one's self with individuals or peer groups associated with gang activity or getting trapped in the vicious cycle of abusing hard drugs on a daily basis.

Thanks to the award-winning, societal class-leading academic programs that Rocketship Public Schools pushes its students through, they're many times less likely to fall short to any of the problems mentioned above. Yet another statistic that demonstrates just how effective Rocketship's programs are is that its schools almost always finish in the top 10 percent of public school districts that serve the same demographic of students that the Rocketship Education public charter school system is designed to serve.