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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Students at Basis have one thing in common regardless of race SES or any other demographic slicing and dicing: they have someone in their corner who enrolled them in a demanding school.  That is why all this ugly about picking a school based upon racial composition is so wrongheaded.   [/quote]

Wrongheaded, right, when the NAEP results for 2010 showed white DC public school students testing "advanced" at around 20 times the rate of blacks at both reading and math at the 4th and 8th grade levels across the city.  This was a wider gap than seen in any state, and any other city.  Grow up folks, you can hardly expect to improve public schools without contending with facts on the ground.  Racial composition iin city schools is a very real issue for many of us mainly because the great majority of upper-middle-class blacks abandoned the system long ago.  Basis can't perform miracles in the face of the achievement gap.  I don't see ugliness on this thread; I see logic, honesty and justifiable skepticism that open admissions is going to work well at yet another charter MS.

[/quote]

Basically, you are still suggesting that it's strictly about race, and that is indeed ugly.

As stated, Basis has students of all demographics and socioeconomic strata, and from all parts of the city.  BUT, there are some key differences with regard to open admissions - the families that are there are there because they want to be there, they want the challenge, and they want the change.  It's not as though a net was cast which caught a purely random sampling of families, or that anyone was forced to go there, or that it's "the neighborhood school" - it is an entirely self-selected population.  That is not at all insignificant.

Yes, the "facts on the ground" do include many problems in the low-SES AA community, problems which primarily a.) start at home and b.) start in early childhood - problems which are way beyond the scope of any charter, particularly one which begins with MS - so if that's your point, sorry, no, Basis does not address that, but neither does any school in the District, to include PCS elementaries and DCPS.   You seem to be looking for a magic bullet in the form of a school - and that's the part which defies "logic and honesty" and where anyone who truly knows the facts is right to be justifiably skeptical of your viewpoint on that.[/quote]

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