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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]BASIS is doing fine. They need a real board rather than hand-picked people who Michael and Olga liked and who can play with Craig B. [/quote]

sorry but who is Craig B?  
I thought the line of authority went to Sean Aiken and then Caroline McGarvey (and can never go to Michael Block because he is on the Board of the for profit company), while his wife Olga stayed on the non profit side.  Pretty cosy, but still.[/quote]

Craig Barrett, former Intel CEO, picked up BASIS (and privatization of public schools in general) as a pet project a while back. But make no mistake, BASIS is and always has been Olga Block. Michael (economics professor) is a nice guy but never wore the pants in that relationship and certainly not when it comes to BASIS. Carolyn is Olga's right hand man - no background in education but a powerful (although quite aggressive) personality and fiercely loyal. Sean, like all the other HOS's, was picked out of the teaching ranks (to detriment of teaching ranks) as a nice guy, capable, ambitious but willing to tow the party line and desirous of more than the minimum wage teacher salary. He has absolutely no power to innovate, only to implement the system. If you have evidence to the contrary, I'd be interested in hearing it. As far as I can see, at BASIS, from admin to teachers to parents, you either believe in Olga's system, or you don't. [/quote]

Well if you were at the meeting at the end of the year where Sean Aiken said if there was one statement he could take back as HOS, it was stating in the first meeting that DC is just like Arizona.  [b]DC is different.  We are their only inner city school, we are their only majority AA school, we are their only school that has 40% FARMS, and we are the only school where they have been told quite clearly by OCR and the Charter Board that they MUST deal with kids with IEPs or 504s  appropriately or they will be fined constantly, requests to expand will be denied, and worst case scenario, their charter would be revoked.  They got the message.  And they have changed to meet the needs of the kids who can succeed at Basis despite their disabilities.  If you look at the populations of the schools in AZ, you will quickly realize how different we are.  There are NO kids with IEPs or 504s at the flagship schools in AZ.  Those schools are full of affluent or middle class children that do not at all reflect the geographic area they are in (for example, one of those cities is 40% Latino, and they have about 15%). [/b] Sean Aiken spent a year here as HOS experiencing every single aspect of the DC difference, and he was HOS in Oro Valley before he came here, and he started out as a teacher at Basis.  The last thing Olga wants is to fail here, so I believe that she and Caroline are listening to Sean about the "DC difference."  Olga's way or the high way does not work here, and Sean Aiken knows it, and he has enough credibility with both these people so that they listen to him on critical issues.[/quote]

I'm going to have to do this, I owe it to myself:  I TOLD YOU SO!

I personally told you so, a couple years ago, before you opened, and you were all boostery up-in-arms about how wrong and negative I was, and Basis is the best, and "just look at Arizona!" despite me telling you - repeatedly - how irrelevant Arizona is to your situation.  Your students are not the children of PhDs teaching at the UofA in Tucson.  Now you know.  I. told. you. so.

Now, carry on with your wailing and rending of garments, it's entertaining and your tears are delicious.

[/quote]

hey private school parent (who comes here to reassure herself that she is not missing out),
in our 2nd year we had the highest DC CAS scores except for Deal, and we barely did any test prep
Proving that educated white wealthy parents do not do the only trick in town..........
And that whatever the differences are between here and AZ, we just beat Washington Latin again in the Certamen competition and will go on to compete at Yale (our other 7th grade team won 2nd place but you only get to send one team from each school, sadly........
We beat Washington Latin on the DC CAS last year (our first year, they were second and we were third)
And yes it is a somewhat rough and tumble environment, but that is a learning experience for all involved

Signed,
parents who have a PhD and a JD between them, both Ivy League undergraduates
who are absolutely positive our kids will get into better colleges and universities than the idiot poster who does not know that you "rent" garments, the 'renting' of garments, not the "rending."[/quote]

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