Anonymous wrote:
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.
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