Lack of Social Promotion at BASIS?

[Anonymous]

Public schools are for everyone. If you want exclusivity, then you need private or magnet. Neither of which are charters.

Sorry, them's the breaks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Public schools are for everyone. If you want exclusivity, then you need private or magnet. Neither of which are charters.

Sorry, them's the breaks.

Who is it that you claim is being "excluded"? Care to cite some specifics about anyone being rejected?

You want to talk big about lawsuits, but lawsuits require hard evidence - evidence that does not exist.

[Anonymous]

C'mon. Keep fighting women. The other BASIS thread got 33+ pages. This one is failing!

[Anonymous]

We keep hearing how the public schools, "by law, must meet the needs" in the context of special ed and now some bogus "need" for social promotion of the underachievers who won't do the work, and whose parents/guardians evidently don't give a damn about their children's education. So apparently some posters here think that's fine and that the schools must lower the bar to the lowest common denominator.

So that ends up NOT meeting the REAL needs of the remaining 80% of the student body. They are evidently supposed to just sit in class and twiddle their thumbs, and if suit-happy nutcases like the other poster have their way, evidently be denied any hope of getting a meaningful education or any hope of ever getting into college or any hope of ever getting a good-paying job.

Unbelievable.

[Anonymous]

Essentially it seems that some of the posters want to drag Basis down with bogus fear, uncertainty and doubt. How about this: go to http://profiles.dcps.dc.gov/ - Basis is local to wards 2 and 6, serves grades 5-8 - plug that into the dcps site and you get three pages worth of results, any of which would be a fine choice if you don't want rigor.

[Anonymous]

Basis isn't local to anyone. It's a charter, meaning it is subject to a citywide lottery where they must educate any child who wins a spot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Basis isn't local to anyone. It's a charter, meaning it is subject to a citywide lottery where they must educate any child who wins a spot.

Correct. Yet some posters have suggested that it's there for NW since it's in NW (neighborhood preference). No, it serves all of the city. It's then a function of how far you want to send your kid in the morning. The motivated parents will go the extra mile to get their kid a good education, wherever it is, just as they do with Latin (which is inconvenient to many, including our family) - And, yes, acceptance is by lottery - as such, ginning up this nonsense about "exclusion" is pure nonsense. FUD as another poster pointed out. I think it's a worthwhile option for us - more so than most of the other schools we have been checking into. There's no perfect one-size-fits-all anywhere in the city. What works for one family won't necessarily work for another. It's up to parents to make an informed choice about what works best. But dumbing the entire system down to meet the lowest common denominator and depriving the remainder of a worthwhile education is definitely no solution, and in fact does NOT meet the needs of most.

[Anonymous]

No dog in the fight but I don't understand why there are so many detractors, almost hoping that BASIS will fail. More options are good for all so why be so negative? I happened to meet a future BASIS parent as well as a BASIS administrator and the plan seems to be very thought out - the parent was very pleased with the tutoring that has already started. As a parent and as a citizen, I wish BASIS and all DCPS and charter schools the best.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:"Vim and vigor" is quite misguided, totally on the wrong track. It's parents like me who should be doing the suing. The DC school system does not meet the needs of talented young achievers. As such, those talented and hardworking students are being "excluded" and the DC school system is therefore "not following the law" unless those needs are met. All the more reason why a school like Basis IS needed - to meet the unmet needs elsewhere in the DC system. The DC school system should be required to support those needs, by law.

Totally agree

talk to the folks in central office, then who are totally focused on getting the scores of kids who are not proficient.

They are sure it can be done, irrespective of any family deficits, with the right teachers and the right evaluation system. It hasn't come close to working in five years, but still they persist.

As for BASIS - I hope it succeeds, but we must remember - it is a public school and must abide by the laws that apply to all citizens. Parents who aren't willing to or can't pay the price for private schools, can't expect laws to be bent for their children.

If the gentrifying parents sent their kids to their neighborhood schools, they'd be just as good as the ward 3 schools are right now. You don't hear ward 3 parents demanding special privileges from the public schools or demanding quality charters. They don't need them - their real estate choices are serving them well.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:"Vim and vigor" is quite misguided, totally on the wrong track. It's parents like me who should be doing the suing. The DC school system does not meet the needs of talented young achievers. As such, those talented and hardworking students are being "excluded" and the DC school system is therefore "not following the law" unless those needs are met. All the more reason why a school like Basis IS needed - to meet the unmet needs elsewhere in the DC system. The DC school system should be required to support those needs, by law.

Totally agree

talk to the folks in central office, then who are totally focused on getting the scores of kids who are not proficient.

They are sure it can be done, irrespective of any family deficits, with the right teachers and the right evaluation system. It hasn't come close to working in five years, but still they persist.

As for BASIS - I hope it succeeds, but we must remember - it is a public school and must abide by the laws that apply to all citizens. Parents who aren't willing to or can't pay the price for private schools, can't expect laws to be bent for their children.

If the gentrifying parents sent their kids to their neighborhood schools, they'd be just as good as the ward 3 schools are right now. You don't hear ward 3 parents demanding special privileges from the public schools or demanding quality charters. They don't need them - their real estate choices are serving them well.

a.) what DCPS central office does is what DCPS central office does, and what BASIS does is what BASIS does.

b.) ALL public schools must abide by the laws, whether BASIS, DCPS, et cetera. If DCPS were abiding by the laws, and that means, meeting the needs of *all* students, regardless of whether they can or can't afford private schools, whether or not they are special needs, gifted and talented, or whatever. Clearly DCPS is not meeting that need, which is driving the huge explosion in charters. So before we go carrying on about what needs Charters are or aren't meeting, stop and go back and look at the core problem - it's DCPS. It's not about "gentrifying parents" and which schools they send their kids to. Gentrifying parents sending their kids to neighborhood schools isn't going to magically change DCPS, as everything else will just stay the same, unless change happens elsewhere also.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:"Vim and vigor" is quite misguided, totally on the wrong track. It's parents like me who should be doing the suing. The DC school system does not meet the needs of talented young achievers. As such, those talented and hardworking students are being "excluded" and the DC school system is therefore "not following the law" unless those needs are met. All the more reason why a school like Basis IS needed - to meet the unmet needs elsewhere in the DC system. The DC school system should be required to support those needs, by law.

Totally agree

talk to the folks in central office, then who are totally focused on getting the scores of kids who are not proficient.

They are sure it can be done, irrespective of any family deficits, with the right teachers and the right evaluation system. It hasn't come close to working in five years, but still they persist.

As for BASIS - I hope it succeeds, but we must remember - it is a public school and must abide by the laws that apply to all citizens. Parents who aren't willing to or can't pay the price for private schools, can't expect laws to be bent for their children.

If the gentrifying parents sent their kids to their neighborhood schools, they'd be just as good as the ward 3 schools are right now. You don't hear ward 3 parents demanding special privileges from the public schools or demanding quality charters. They don't need them - their real estate choices are serving them well.

a.) what DCPS central office does is what DCPS central office does, and what BASIS does is what BASIS does.

b.) ALL public schools must abide by the laws, whether BASIS, DCPS, et cetera. If DCPS were abiding by the laws, and that means, meeting the needs of *all* students, regardless of whether they can or can't afford private schools, whether or not they are special needs, gifted and talented, or whatever. Clearly DCPS is not meeting that need, which is driving the huge explosion in charters. So before we go carrying on about what needs Charters are or aren't meeting, stop and go back and look at the core problem - it's DCPS. It's not about "gentrifying parents" and which schools they send their kids to. Gentrifying parents sending their kids to neighborhood schools isn't going to magically change DCPS, as everything else will just stay the same, unless change happens elsewhere also.

Wow, that's rich. DCPS schools in many wards have been horrible for decades, and now this poster wants us to believe the reason they are horrible is because gentrifying parents don't want to send their children there. Way to shift the blame to gentrifying parents, who had nothing to do with making the DCPS schools horrible.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Public schools are for everyone. If you want exclusivity, then you need private or magnet. Neither of which are charters.

Sorry, them's the breaks.

BASIS DC is the least exclusive of any charter school in DC. Every single family that wanted a spot for the fall got one.

Furthermore, I overhead one of the administrators say at an information session that if more families wanted spots than the charter allowed, they were planning to go back to the the Charter Board to amend the charter to increase the number of spots.

What's driving all of this concern about exclusivity. Is "exclusivity" code for "insist that the students work hard"?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Public schools are for everyone. If you want exclusivity, then you need private or magnet. Neither of which are charters.

BASIS DC is the least exclusive of any charter school in DC. Every single family that wanted a spot for the fall got one.

Furthermore, I overhead one of the administrators say at an information session that if more families wanted spots than the charter allowed, they were planning to go back to the the Charter Board to amend the charter to increase the number of spots.

Basis won't have the room or funding to offer every interested family a slot for more than another year or two. No popular charter can.

The DC PS system oozes exclusivity as it is: middle-class taxpayers paying the bulk of property taxes in neighborhoods like Capitol Hill are effectively excluded from neighborhood schools above around 3rd grade because their children aren't challenged or pushed in such institutions (see threads about what happens in the upper grades at Two Rivers). In cities around the country run by braver and more pragmatic politicians, selective admissions in both "regular" public schools and charters are an option, keeping a far greater percentage of affluent parents, and their money and organization prowess, in the system. The losers here, where the system promotes a misguided paternalism to protect low-SES kids from competition from better-off kids, are the brightest poor kids. What Basis is saying is that we won't water down the curriculum for low-performing kids in class, we will turn them into high-performing kids via tutoring outside class instead, or watch them quietly opt along the way. Nonsense, a teacher can't teach effectively above the heads of a good portion of students in any particular class, even in the 5th, 6th and 7th grades (before those end-of-year exams kick in). The kids s/he is missing would become disruptive if that were the case. And parents of kids left behind in class would invariably storm the school complaining that their kids' needs were not being met. It was foolish to bring Basis in without a mechanism for any sort of selective admissions - a more creative administrative paradigm was needed. After perusing the various Basis posts, I still don't understand why amending the charter law and/or a DCPS-charter hybrid to set Basis up for success have been out of the question. As a practical matter, the kids entering Basis should have scored advanced on the 4th or 5th grade DC-CAS. I'm not rooting for Basis as is; I'm rooting for Basis as it should be.

[Anonymous]

+1,000. When the chickens will come to roost on these issues in a few years, logic may yet triumph.

[Anonymous]

Interesting to note that it is the much-demonized upper middle class and gentrifiers who are paying the lion's share of taxes to fund the DC school system, yet it is they who continually face the most resistance toward actually having their students' needs met by the DC school system.