Reply to Lack of Social Promotion at BASIS?

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Reply to "Lack of Social Promotion at BASIS?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.  [/quote]

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.

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