s/o Gifted classes in DC schools

[Anonymous]

^^^ NP. Glad you turned out ok. Most of kids I knew with that type of background are in jail and/or dead. Face it. You wouldn't want a kid like that in your kid's class especially if you moved to JKLMM to get away from that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most of the time in these reading groups, one maybe two, groups per day actually read with the teacher. The rest read independently or with partners supposedly applying whatever reading strategy is being taught. My 4th grade kid reads independently for hours at home. He doesn't need another 6 - 8 hours of per week at school. What he would really benefit from is high quality literature read as a class, analyzed and discussed closely as a class led by the teacher. Ideally, the themes of the novel would then be woven into a challenging writing assignment or perhaps creating a play or movie setting the novel in a different time or place but keeping the themes and character traits.

This is an example of high level reading instruction. The HOURS per week spent on leveled guided reading groups/independent reading at our schools are almost a complete waste of time. Thankfully, my 4th grader will soon be moving on to a charter middle school that leaves this garbage curriculum behind

That's unfortunate. I work with each of my four guided reading groups for 30 min each day.

So that means the kids are left to do independent or group work for the other 1 and 1/2 hours??? Good luck with that. It seems to me that it would be more effective to ability group in separate classes which would allow the teacher to spend the entire time working with the kids instead of just one quarter of the time.

listening center, word study/language skills, and individual reading/writing/research. There are specific assignments to be done in each station. And they not "left" anywhere. They are in my classroom and accountable for their work. My students look forward to working in stations. Would you want to listen to a teacher all morning long?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most of the time in these reading groups, one maybe two, groups per day actually read with the teacher. The rest read independently or with partners supposedly applying whatever reading strategy is being taught. My 4th grade kid reads independently for hours at home. He doesn't need another 6 - 8 hours of per week at school. What he would really benefit from is high quality literature read as a class, analyzed and discussed closely as a class led by the teacher. Ideally, the themes of the novel would then be woven into a challenging writing assignment or perhaps creating a play or movie setting the novel in a different time or place but keeping the themes and character traits.

This is an example of high level reading instruction. The HOURS per week spent on leveled guided reading groups/independent reading at our schools are almost a complete waste of time. Thankfully, my 4th grader will soon be moving on to a charter middle school that leaves this garbage curriculum behind

That's unfortunate. I work with each of my four guided reading groups for 30 min each day.

So that means the kids are left to do independent or group work for the other 1 and 1/2 hours??? Good luck with that. It seems to me that it would be more effective to ability group in separate classes which would allow the teacher to spend the entire time working with the kids instead of just one quarter of the time.

listening center, word study/language skills, and individual reading/writing/research. There are specific assignments to be done in each station. And they not "left" anywhere. They are in my classroom and accountable for their work. My students look forward to working in stations. Would you want to listen to a teacher all morning long?

What grade do you teach?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most of the time in these reading groups, one maybe two, groups per day actually read with the teacher. The rest read independently or with partners supposedly applying whatever reading strategy is being taught. My 4th grade kid reads independently for hours at home. He doesn't need another 6 - 8 hours of per week at school. What he would really benefit from is high quality literature read as a class, analyzed and discussed closely as a class led by the teacher. Ideally, the themes of the novel would then be woven into a challenging writing assignment or perhaps creating a play or movie setting the novel in a different time or place but keeping the themes and character traits.

This is an example of high level reading instruction. The HOURS per week spent on leveled guided reading groups/independent reading at our schools are almost a complete waste of time. Thankfully, my 4th grader will soon be moving on to a charter middle school that leaves this garbage curriculum behind

That's unfortunate. I work with each of my four guided reading groups for 30 min each day.

So that means the kids are left to do independent or group work for the other 1 and 1/2 hours??? Good luck with that. It seems to me that it would be more effective to ability group in separate classes which would allow the teacher to spend the entire time working with the kids instead of just one quarter of the time.

listening center, word study/language skills, and individual reading/writing/research. There are specific assignments to be done in each station. And they not "left" anywhere. They are in my classroom and accountable for their work. My students look forward to working in stations. Would you want to listen to a teacher all morning long?

What grade do you teach?

5th

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:and whatever you call it, it's not a bad thing



Except that it totally depends on having a good teacher. Our dc was reading Harry Potter and the 39 clues at home last year and we came in for our conference to find that dc's "just right books" included Frog and Toad Are Friends. To add insult to injury, they told us they had made that decision based on a recent eval and they did not want to retest dc (our suggestion) because dc might get "test anxiety." The librarian knew what was up, and was allowing dc to take out books that were not on dcs "just right" list. We had dc bring 39 clues books from home for reading time for the rest of the year, but REALLY....

the problem with this kind of system, which I approve of in the absence of ANYTHING better, is that it totally depends on the teacher to do accurate differentiation. Also, the school (a JKLM) does spend a lot of time dealing with some PARTICULAR problem students, and they have been that way since they arrived at the school. They are OOB and the teacher takes them out in the hall to speak with them privately about their bad behavior, but where does that leave the rest of the class?

PS, my dc is now finally in the highest reading/English group this year and the spelling and vocab words are a joke. DC is capable of way more. We joke about the "wordly wise" book because there is nothing else we can do, and try to get dc to ask when we use words dc does not completely understand, encourage the reading of newspapers, etc. DC aces the spelling and vocab tests. One of the more asinine exercises is spelling a word and then taking off one letter each time so that the result is a blank word instead of what you started with. DC has to do this with each word dc already knows how to spell and knows the meaning of.

Good at math but no one would know it because dc is getting 3s - as a matter of policy this school just seems not to award 4s until the end of the year. I honestly do not understand how so many kids from dc's school are getting into privates with their 3s until the last grading period of the year policy, and we DO have another child who is in trouble but you would never know it because the grades are the same and the comments are all positive. With basically one teacher all year one teacher can ruin a year or make it the best year of dcs lives.

We mostly have good teachers, probably because we are in a JKLM and the teachers who are crappy mostly wash out after a year, but this is the school cluster that everyone seems to want to get into, that feeds into Deal and Wilson. So I just cannot imagine what is happening elsewhere where there are more problem students and less reading proficiency. My dc has scored 100 percent on the DC CAS since the first year dc took it, so I can only conclude that it is basically a joke as well. The idea that some schools had to cheat to get their scores up not only disgusts me because of the immorality of it, it makes me really really worried for the kids at those schools whose answers needed to be erased because they were wrong....



I was with you PP until you described the children in need of redirection as OOB (as if that moniker had anything to do with your point). It sort of tainted your whole post for me.



Sorry but there is ONE child who has been OOB since K, been in my child's class every year, and is physically and verbally abusive to teachers and students alike, and has consistently taken the teacher's time away from the rest of the kids. Furthermore, this kid thinks pulling my kid's chair out from under him/her is funny. We had to switch tables.

Yes we also have our fair share of IB troublemakers, the difference is that when those parents get pulled in, they listen to the principal. The kids go to the guidance counselor. They get in trouble with their parents. They get private counseling if necessary. They repeat a grade if necessary. Heck sometimes when one of our dc is having problems with a particular child, we talk to the parents ourselves and that is the end of it.

This particular OOB kid apparently has no one - father dead, mother incarcerated, cries when no one shows up for performances. I am not saying I do not feel sorry for this child, and one of my dc is now learning a lot about dysfunctional families in one of the best DC charter schools, but I just think that this kid should not have been in the school in the first place, and the vast majority of misbehavior that happens and continues year after year is from OOB kids who do not seem to have family support to come down hard on them early. We are talking 1st grade here folks in a JKLM school.

My dcs can learn how lucky they are to have an intact family where no one calls the police on the other parent once they get to middle school (and they have). But we deliberately moved to this neighborhood to try to avoid this kind of dysfunctional behavior so early that one of my dc is having trouble learning how to read due not to snotty embassy kids or others who think they are better than everyone else but due to a single OOB kid (there are only like ten max in the entire school), and the worst behavior that cannot be corrected comes from them. And yes before you ask they tend to be minority children, and so are mine. It is, for lack of a better term, "ghetto behavior." But please don't judge so quickly. I don't want these kids as the "only" other blank race/color/national origin kids in with my children, so that they are lumped together by the teachers, or more often, just plain ignored by the teachers because they are so busy dealing with these single OOB kids, who are incorrigible sometimes. Someone said a rising tide raises all boats? One bad apple can destroy even a good teacher's ability to teach the rest of their class.

Wow, PP, you sure do know a lot about how conflict is handled at your school, right down to who gets counseling and who repeats a grade for bad behavior. This is especially amazing since your DC is only in first grade. You almost sound unbelievable. I have to admit I did doubt your first post, especially when you used the word cluster when referring to a JKLM school.

Now I really doubt you, so maybe you can clear up the bolded section above. Which is it? Is your child learning about dysfunctional families through this OOB student "in one of the best DC charter schools" or "in a JKLM school". Because surely, you know from your research that there is no such thing as an OOB student in a charter school.

We have enough trouble in the schools without people making up fake posts on the internet to complain about problems they don't have.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:^^^ NP. Glad you turned out ok. Most of kids I knew with that type of background are in jail and/or dead. Face it. You wouldn't want a kid like that in your kid's class especially if you moved to JKLMM to get away from that.

Thank you very much. My dh grew up in a situation similar to the poster who told me to STFU or go to private school, with two differences - the first is that he did have one strong figure in his life, my blessed mother-in-law. The second is that he was always well behaved, not like the AA kid I am referring to, probably due to his mother and his grandmother - strong AA role models. The third is we can't afford private school and go ahead, call us oreos, (I got that a lot being the only AA in a room of whites most of my life until I went to college), call us whatever.

But have some respect for the fact that although my parents made it to the middle class last generation, his did not, and we are not putting our kids in a school like Wilson where they might discover the wrong kind of roots or adopt the wrong kind of attitudes. They can find whatever roots they want once they are in good colleges (and yes, those colleges could be primarily historically AA and that would be fine with us). So would stepping and fraternities.

DC1, who is now being exposed to a lot of that at the very good (read Latin or Basis) charter school they are at, is old enough to have the sense to see the difference between our family and others, and hangs with the smart minority kids, be they Spanish or AA.

In fact, maybe having this AA OOB badly behaved kid was a gift from God for us - because my dh got to explain that he grew up with a lot of kids like that, and they are all either dead, in jail, or were having babies at 13 (no lie - he ran into one of them). But it was not a gift to anyone else's education. And that is my point. For whatever reason, principals have more power over getting IB kids to shape up or ship out. This kid would do neither, and my kid (and all the other kids) paid for it in time lost with their teacher and some personal harassment and public humiliation - one AA kid to another - mine.

My kid also had another kid tell my kid that he was smarter than my kid last week because "I am white and you are not." Don't know if THAT has anything to do with the badly behaved AA OOB kid in the class, but it sure as heck don't help. We addressed that issue tactfully with the father of the kid, whose first response was "my kid is not white either" (he is foreign) and his second was that he would talk to his child. If there are no parents to talk to, don't know how you really handle these issues.............

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:


You should go private or STFU. Seriously. That kid deserves every opportunity to succeed. He/she deserves MORE because they don't have the advantages at home that your kids do. It's not the kid's fault that their family is trashed. The kid is doing the best he/she can in a bad situation.

I was that kid. My family sucked. My mom was an addict. My uncles were the neighborhood drug dealers. My dad was absent. I was sexually molested by an uncle. I was seriously messed up and struggling to keep my shit together. Despite that, I was a National Merit Scholar and excelled in school. It was tough, but I got my shit together.

From me to you, on behalf of that kid, fuck you. You are in a public school. Everyone has the right to use them. If you don't want to be around rabble like that kid or me, go to private school.

So you think one kid has the right to deprive every other kid in the class of an education?? How is that supposed to help the troubled kid or the rest of the class for that matter. Troubled kids who disrupt on a continual basis need to be educated in a separate classroom until they learn not to disrupt. Every kid deserves an education that is not disrupted by others.

Let's look at some of those statements:
"That kid deserves every opportunity to succeed." - how is he "succeeding"? He's being coddled, his bad behavior is being tolerated when it shouldn't, and he's probably NOT getting as thorough of an education as he should as the time is probably being consumed by behavioral bullshit as opposed to actually teaching content. And why should every OTHER kid in the classroom be DENIED an opportunity to succeed because of this kid's bad behavior?

"He/she deserves MORE because they don't have the advantages at home that your kids do."
Wrong. No kid deserves "more" than any other kid.

Sorry to hear that kids are being raised in such bad circumstances, but frankly that should not be to the detriment of everyone else. Every other kid in that classroom should not be sacrificed and have their futures thrown down the drain, just so that bleeding hearts can think they are coddling some kid who was never properly parented.

Its' not the primary mission of public school to do that, their primary mission is SCHOOLING. I'm not saying that these kids shouldn't be helped (certainly they should) - I'm saying it shouldn't be AT THE EXPENSE of schooling and AT THE EXPENSE of every other kid in the classroom. Social services agencies and organizations that want to help should partner with schools and provide that help in coordination with the schools in a way that does not interfere with teaching. For example, the fight, the profanities yelled at a teacher, the punching a hole in a wall? For that they should get detention and pullouts where they get that one-on-one intervention and are taught the life skills they are lacking.

Don't do it on every other kid's time and cost them an education, too.

[Anonymous]

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa6c3OTr6yA

[Anonymous]

So although this can be done, it's not easy, and the students distract each other. And there's still the problem with gaps in math. Again - why wouldn't true tracking be a better solution?

If not managed well, the students can distract, but that's true for in any type of classroom. They can also be trained to work independently in stations. Some can be pulled out for other interventions.

You didn't answer the question. Why wouldn't tracking be a better solution?

I am interested in the answer to this, if anyone has one. Why is tracking not a better solution?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

So although this can be done, it's not easy, and the students distract each other. And there's still the problem with gaps in math. Again - why wouldn't true tracking be a better solution?

If not managed well, the students can distract, but that's true for in any type of classroom. They can also be trained to work independently in stations. Some can be pulled out for other interventions.

You didn't answer the question. Why wouldn't tracking be a better solution?

I am interested in the answer to this, if anyone has one. Why is tracking not a better solution?

Tracking might be a solution at some grade levels. Generally, it's not a good idea in elementary. Students can acquire skills at different rates. The advantage of flexible groups is that teachers can change groups to adjust to the rate at which individual students are learning. The downside of tracking is that it can be used to predetermine the educational opportunities of some children, by isolating them in permanent tracks. I don't think many educators support this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

So although this can be done, it's not easy, and the students distract each other. And there's still the problem with gaps in math. Again - why wouldn't true tracking be a better solution?

If not managed well, the students can distract, but that's true for in any type of classroom. They can also be trained to work independently in stations. Some can be pulled out for other interventions.

You didn't answer the question. Why wouldn't tracking be a better solution?

I am interested in the answer to this, if anyone has one. Why is tracking not a better solution?

Tracking might be a solution at some grade levels. Generally, it's not a good idea in elementary. Students can acquire skills at different rates. The advantage of flexible groups is that teachers can change groups to adjust to the rate at which individual students are learning. The downside of tracking is that it can be used to predetermine the educational opportunities of some children, by isolating them in permanent tracks. I don't think many educators support this.

Not an expert but I wholly support this claim based on experience. I have children, both of whom are/were at the bottom of reading proficiency by the end of first grade. The older one, now in 5th, is the top reader in her/his class. I wouldn't be surprised if the same happens to the younger one. What if they were 'tracked' into a classroom of lower performing kids starting in 1st grade? That's undoubtedly where they would stay.
I know less about the older grades, but elementary school sure feels like kids develop, leap and bound, in unpredictable ways and at very different speeds.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

So although this can be done, it's not easy, and the students distract each other. And there's still the problem with gaps in math. Again - why wouldn't true tracking be a better solution?

If not managed well, the students can distract, but that's true for in any type of classroom. They can also be trained to work independently in stations. Some can be pulled out for other interventions.

You didn't answer the question. Why wouldn't tracking be a better solution?

I am interested in the answer to this, if anyone has one. Why is tracking not a better solution?

Tracking might be a solution at some grade levels. Generally, it's not a good idea in elementary. Students can acquire skills at different rates. The advantage of flexible groups is that teachers can change groups to adjust to the rate at which individual students are learning. The downside of tracking is that it can be used to predetermine the educational opportunities of some children, by isolating them in permanent tracks. I don't think many educators support this.

Tracking, if done correctly in an flexible manner, does not have to be permanent. I get it that in the past, as in decades, ago, kids were often trapped in their assigned tracks. However, frequent re-assessments and moving students up or down when needed would avoid this. I think it is better for a teacher to be able to focus their efforts for the entire class time for a group of kids with similar abilities.

You say it is not a good idea in elementary and yet many major cities such as New York and areas outside of DC offer at least opportunities for gifted education which can make the world of difference to many kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:and whatever you call it, it's not a bad thing



Except that it totally depends on having a good teacher. Our dc was reading Harry Potter and the 39 clues at home last year and we came in for our conference to find that dc's "just right books" included Frog and Toad Are Friends. To add insult to injury, they told us they had made that decision based on a recent eval and they did not want to retest dc (our suggestion) because dc might get "test anxiety." The librarian knew what was up, and was allowing dc to take out books that were not on dcs "just right" list. We had dc bring 39 clues books from home for reading time for the rest of the year, but REALLY....

the problem with this kind of system, which I approve of in the absence of ANYTHING better, is that it totally depends on the teacher to do accurate differentiation. Also, the school (a JKLM) does spend a lot of time dealing with some PARTICULAR problem students, and they have been that way since they arrived at the school. They are OOB and the teacher takes them out in the hall to speak with them privately about their bad behavior, but where does that leave the rest of the class?

PS, my dc is now finally in the highest reading/English group this year and the spelling and vocab words are a joke. DC is capable of way more. We joke about the "wordly wise" book because there is nothing else we can do, and try to get dc to ask when we use words dc does not completely understand, encourage the reading of newspapers, etc. DC aces the spelling and vocab tests. One of the more asinine exercises is spelling a word and then taking off one letter each time so that the result is a blank word instead of what you started with. DC has to do this with each word dc already knows how to spell and knows the meaning of.

Good at math but no one would know it because dc is getting 3s - as a matter of policy this school just seems not to award 4s until the end of the year. I honestly do not understand how so many kids from dc's school are getting into privates with their 3s until the last grading period of the year policy, and we DO have another child who is in trouble but you would never know it because the grades are the same and the comments are all positive. With basically one teacher all year one teacher can ruin a year or make it the best year of dcs lives.

We mostly have good teachers, probably because we are in a JKLM and the teachers who are crappy mostly wash out after a year, but this is the school cluster that everyone seems to want to get into, that feeds into Deal and Wilson. So I just cannot imagine what is happening elsewhere where there are more problem students and less reading proficiency. My dc has scored 100 percent on the DC CAS since the first year dc took it, so I can only conclude that it is basically a joke as well. The idea that some schools had to cheat to get their scores up not only disgusts me because of the immorality of it, it makes me really really worried for the kids at those schools whose answers needed to be erased because they were wrong....



I was with you PP until you described the children in need of redirection as OOB (as if that moniker had anything to do with your point). It sort of tainted your whole post for me.



Sorry but there is ONE child who has been OOB since K, been in my child's class every year, and is physically and verbally abusive to teachers and students alike, and has consistently taken the teacher's time away from the rest of the kids. Furthermore, this kid thinks pulling my kid's chair out from under him/her is funny. We had to switch tables.

Yes we also have our fair share of IB troublemakers, the difference is that when those parents get pulled in, they listen to the principal. The kids go to the guidance counselor. They get in trouble with their parents. They get private counseling if necessary. They repeat a grade if necessary. Heck sometimes when one of our dc is having problems with a particular child, we talk to the parents ourselves and that is the end of it.

This particular OOB kid apparently has no one - father dead, mother incarcerated, cries when no one shows up for performances. I am not saying I do not feel sorry for this child, and one of my dc is now learning a lot about dysfunctional families in one of the best DC charter schools, but I just think that this kid should not have been in the school in the first place, and the vast majority of misbehavior that happens and continues year after year is from OOB kids who do not seem to have family support to come down hard on them early. We are talking 1st grade here folks in a JKLM school.

My dcs can learn how lucky they are to have an intact family where no one calls the police on the other parent once they get to middle school (and they have). But we deliberately moved to this neighborhood to try to avoid this kind of dysfunctional behavior so early that one of my dc is having trouble learning how to read due not to snotty embassy kids or others who think they are better than everyone else but due to a single OOB kid (there are only like ten max in the entire school), and the worst behavior that cannot be corrected comes from them. And yes before you ask they tend to be minority children, and so are mine. It is, for lack of a better term, "ghetto behavior." But please don't judge so quickly. I don't want these kids as the "only" other blank race/color/national origin kids in with my children, so that they are lumped together by the teachers, or more often, just plain ignored by the teachers because they are so busy dealing with these single OOB kids, who are incorrigible sometimes. Someone said a rising tide raises all boats? One bad apple can destroy even a good teacher's ability to teach the rest of their class.

Wow, PP, you sure do know a lot about how conflict is handled at your school, right down to who gets counseling and who repeats a grade for bad behavior. This is especially amazing since your DC is only in first grade. You almost sound unbelievable. I have to admit I did doubt your first post, especially when you used the word cluster when referring to a JKLM school.

Now I really doubt you, so maybe you can clear up the bolded section above. Which is it? Is your child learning about dysfunctional families through this OOB student "in one of the best DC charter schools" or "in a JKLM school". Because surely, you know from your research that there is no such thing as an OOB student in a charter school.

We have enough trouble in the schools without people making up fake posts on the internet to complain about problems they don't have.

I am not a fake poster, and you are quite frankly a disrespectful idiot who did not read either of my posts carefully. I never referred to JKLM as a cluster, I don't think. No one calls it that. The only time I hear that term is with respect to Capitol Hill and since I am not there I have not bothered to figure it out. Fine, question my truthfulness. I call BS. I question your intelligence, your agenda, and your reading comprehension skills.

Has it ever occurred to you that maybe I have more one child? More than 2 children? I do. Dc1, who was at Washington Latin and is now at BASIS DC, was punched in the stomach in K in our JKLM school by a kid dc thought of as a friend. That kid was IB, saw the school guidance counselor, for all I know sought outside psychiatric help, and repeated K the following year at the request of the dc's very involved parents. That is what the parents of that dc did for that troubled child because they cared, were IB and in touch enough with the school and their child to address the issues. And the kid was doing fine last I saw/heard. I do also now have a 1st grader who is losing out to a badly behaved OOB AA kid, the only OOB kid in the class. The teacher constantly has to pull the kid outside in the hallway to talk.

This punching in the stomach at recess incident happened so long ago that dc1 is NOW in BASIS DC, a great new (this year!) charter school learning about dysfunctional families and mature enough to have chosen a social group made up of minority kids who stick together and are smart. They may be poor, like my dh was, and at least two of them have had their parents call the police over domestic violence issues, and some of come from Anacostia, some from Mount Pleasant, but I could not wish for a better peer group. And I hope they all go on to graduate from 12th together and then go to the colleges of their choice. They certainly have the potential, and they are getting a great education. And BASIS DC charter school instills a culture in the school where smart kids are cool. They have honors ceremonies after every grading period and at least half of the kids up there every time in my dc's class are not white.

I also have a third child, the last-year Harry Potter reader who was stuck in the reading group of "Frog and Toad are Friends," whose misguided/not great teacher would not move dc up in the reading groups so we just had dc bring books from home. DC has now moved on to other books - we are ALL still hooked on the 39 clues, and I highly recommend the board game because it teaches you - as the books do - a lot about geography. And THAT child also has had an an OOB AA troublemaker who has been in dc's class every year SINCE K, whose father is dead, mother in jail, and who my dc and the other kids in the class regularly lose out to because this kid is disruptive, whatever the kid's background and race, and whose behavior may have contributed to another kid commenting to my kid "I am smarter than you are because I am white and you are not." And our family is one of the few AA families at the JKLM school, which is not an idyllic paradise but offers a pretty good education (as long as there are no disruptive OOB kids - as I said earlier, the IB ones, and they do exist, get handled by a concerned school, a good guidance counselor, and their concerned parents).

Not true at our charter, where, as you so snarkily pointed out to try to prove that I was a "fake poster", there are "no OOB kids," but again my kid is old enough (this is not even dc1s first year at a charter) to NOW understand that the kids who say "I am so ghetto" are not the ones dc wants for dc's peer group. So I have given enough identifying information about my family because I do not want people to dismiss my observations as "fake posts" due to your baseless allegations. We have 3 or more children, which already makes us a bit of a rarity. We are AA in a virtually all white neighborhood to be in boundary for a JKLM school and we chose to do that because as another poster observed, my dh, whose ma and grandma and his well-behaved self (plus G&T programs for OH DEAR only minority students in inner city schools that tested him in 2nd grade (obviously not Washington DC), and he tested well) got him out of his ghetto in another city and we met in college. And seriously, most of the kids he went to ES with are either dead, in jail, drug addicts, and or have a couple of baby daddys for their dcs who have many other baby mamas. So enough.

Attack my opinion, not my authenticity. And although my information is anecdotal, we have been in DCPS since PreK (over 6 years now), all different grades, all different quality teachers, and two charter schools, and have now found a charter that actually will have a decent middle school and high school - BASIS does that. My dc1 there tested into the highest math group they had this year and is doing Algebra II. Next year dc will be able to take a language other than Latin if they do not want to continue with Latin - Chinese, French, but I have the feeling dc will choose Spanish because of who dc hangs with - a great group of kids of color who are smart and not embarrassed about it and have each other's backs, including helping each other with particular classes. So we have found our multicultural great education paradise, and even if dc could have gotten a free ride to a DC private, and dc1 probably could have, I would not want dc in with those kids either, because dc would be one of the only AA's like I was, and because I don't want my kids to grow up with a bunch of spoiled rich kids who had the world handed to them on a silver platter when they were born and BTW, are not all that smart anyway...

So let's talk for a moment about TRACKING. BASIS DC TRACKS.

Anyone want to talk again about tracking? BASIS tracks. In math before you get there (you get diagnostic testing and the option, even if you score way ahead of the pack, of going to summer school to get to know the teachers and some of the other students). They track in summer school. They start tracking in English (unheard of at any DCPS or other charter that I know of, even Latin and Deal do not do this) in 7th grade.

Best of all, they honestly help kids who start from behind, but in 6th grade and every year thereafter they have comprehensive exams at the end of the year. They are not that hard, mostly. Physics and Math were the two hardest for my dc, and dc along with dc's friends is on the honor roll and trying to help dc's other friends get there. But if you fail the comps, you go to summer school/have the opportunity to take them again at the end of the summer. If you fail them again, you can either repeat the year (I would do it for any one of my dc in 6th if necessary just because this is such a good school academically and a unique opportunity), or leave the school.

BASIS has been accused of being racist. Apparently, so was Two Rivers when they first opened. Two Rivers (according to a poster on DCUM who seemed to know what she was talking about, but with all these "fake posters" like me, who knows), was actually sued for racism (the case was dismissed). So BASIS is here to stay, they have been very proactive about fixing mistakes they make (removing the first head of school and having a meeting to air complaints about this year with the new head of school there to hear those complaints, hiring a new experienced SPED coordinator who will start next year), and my child has a great peer group - by virtue of the content of their characters, not the colors of their skin - who are all minority, all smart, and all motivated, even the ones whose families are out of hand. So we are very happy. Just thought I would add the bit about tracking because BASIS will undoubtedly get sued for something. But hopefully they will win, because they are our one (not so white) hope for our kids education, and we, as has been pointed out, have quite a few kids.

[Anonymous]

I've had gifted students in my DCPS classes. I was able to engage and challenge them using content from the CK Sequence. Based on my experience as an educator, I think all of our students would benefit from richer content offered at younger grades. I don't think we need a stand-alone g/t program. I do think we need to offer richer content. And I think every student would benefit from being offered Latin.

[Anonymous]

Thank PP for explaining the situation with your 3 kids. I completely agree with you. I also am not so sure that the troublesome OOB kid is served by being in a classroom where the vast majority of the other students are operating at an academic level far above his -- just as a really smart kid isn't served by being in a class with substantially lower performing kids.

Given the disfunction of DC and the apparent assumption that honor or test-based or gifted programs smack of racism, what do you think the answer is?