Reply to By the numbers: A dispassioned evaluation of Hardy (compared to Deal and Wilson)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
However, many IB families who avoid Hardy happily enroll their kids in Latin (44% AA) and BASIS (48% AA).  Avoiding the AA demographic must not be the top priority for those families...[/quote]

[b]Right -- The priority could be avoiding the perception of inferiority.  Hardy is perceived as inferior among a certain group of IB parents and Latin and Basis are not.  Hardy has baggage.  The charters do not.  Parents who win the lottery are willing to commute every day to avoid being perceived as being inferior.  Granted, some parents prefer the academic focus of those charters and would travel long distances from any part of the city to send their kids there, but I'm betting that is not the primary motivator for many IB Hardy parents.[/b][/quote]

This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.  We are zoned for Hardy, and Wilson, but never had any intention of going to Hardy or Wilson full stop.  And I do not think we are alone in this in the least.  You speak as if the parents at Mann and Key have not been going to private for years, as if they had no long term plans and then suddenly were faced with Hardy by surprise.  I hardly think that the parents in the Mann and Key neighborhoods lack the ability to think long term when they make decisions about their lives - be they decisions about their professional careers or where to purchase a house.  The economic recession was a surprise, but the market has recovered, most people like us have landed on our feet, and if we thought Hardy was our only obstacle to completing an entirely public school path in the city we would have moved into an area zoned for Deal.

I would hazard a guess that those in Mann and Hardy who were hit hard enough by the recession that they could not afford private school like they expected would have been much more comfortable at places like Pyle and Whitman than having their children ultimately graduate from Wilson.  I may be wrong, but I don't think so.  And this has nothing to do with race - it has to do with economics.  But the fact remains that there are at least 3 public schools ranked in the top 100 right across the river and there are quite a few very decent Catholic schools here in the city with lower tuition - the one that comes to my mind at the moment is St. Anselm's.

Others have "profiled" the Key parents as the wealthiest of all those zoned for Wilson.  What makes you think they ever intended to send their children to Wilson, much less to Hardy?  I realize I am profiling these parents as well as well, and I want to make clear that the statements I am making have nothing to do with race. All of us have chosen deliberately to live fairly far away from metros, in relatively suburban areas of the city, in no small part undoubtedly due to the additional safety it confers. The fact that it has nothing to do with race is confirmed by the poster above who notes the racial demographics of the charter schools in question.  It may, however, have a lot to do with our perception of poverty and all of the bad effects and influences and dangers it brings, as is borne out by the recent fight at Wilson that no one stopped, and the recent robbery spree by a Wilson student.

We would have gone private.  When Basis opened a school here, we took a calculated risk, and now all of our children have a path that we believe will better educate them and perhaps more successfully lead them to University.  I would wager that those who bought in Janney were much more committed to Deal and Wilson from the get go.

[b]I think most of us are secure enough not to care what the rest of you think about the educational decisions we make for our children. That would include being strong enough to send our children to Hardy if we thought that was the best decision for our children.  May I remind you that Washington Latin also has a uniform. [/b] It is often said that Washington DC has the highest NAEP scores in the country (for the white kids).  My impression is that the Hardy kids do not contribute much to that either.  That is not the peer group I want for my children, sorry.  And I don't think there are many advanced scoring black kids, and those racial barriers are hard to break down at a school like Hardy.

That being said, I was absolutely shocked by the amount of veiled criticism of our judgement and outright racism  parents revealed when we told them we were sending our child to Basis the year that it opened.  Granted it was, and Washington Latin was not, a high FARMS school at the time (neither is Deal, for that matter), but the pure prejudice that was revealed by some parents was truly shocking.

I think perhaps they thought we were foreigners and had no idea what we were exposing our child to or what harm might befall them. Some of these parents had children at Deal and are intending to send them to Wilson.  I consider that far more dangerous than Basis will be in high school which usually results in a 30-40% attrition rate because some children (understandably) want a different kind of high school experience.  Many of them last year left for Walls or Wilson, and some went private.

Even our score on the DC CAS our first year, with our FARMS population (third after Deal and Washington Latin) did nothing to stop the questions, but it did subtly alter their nature.  Once the Basis kids proved they were just as good (and last year better than Washington Latin) academically despite our FARMS status, parents stopped bringing it up with us.  I am not sure they stopped thinking about it however.  This year, we have had a shift.  Basis is now only 27% FARMS, and I expect we will do very well on the PARCC.

Basis is a wonderful school.  We have kids coming out of private schools to attend, and I think they are spot on.  We also have a high foreign population, and I think that is because the existence of Comprehensive Exams is much more familiar to Europeans and something we expect and are comfortable with......

But I am still sad about how few kids come from Key and Mann to Basis each year, because we want more Mann and Key kids, and I think they are missing out.  But most of them still go private.  Most of the high SES children we get come from Brent and other schools on Capitol Hill where there are no acceptable MS options.  Quite frankly, given the lack of white kids scoring "advanced" at Hardy, as a family we would not consider it an acceptable MS option, given how few white kids there are.  The bar is so low - our kids have always scored advanced, and I think many of our friends have the same experience, because once a friend's child scored proficient in math and she was furious and brought it up with the school.  Basis is fairly well integrated because the only way to be cool is to achieve intellectually, and kids from every background and color are doing that.

So please, don't go to Hardy, come to Basis.

I think the other myopic part of the above post is that both Washington Latin and Basis go through high school, and many parents do not want their children to attend Wilson.  While it used to be the case that most of the higher SES kids at Washington Latin went private after 8th grade, it appears that more are staying.  We never considered Wilson as an option........We also never considered Hardy or Washington Latin, and not because of the uniforms.

[/quote]

Hey PP, we are several years away from making the high school decision, and bilingual ed is important for us...but your post makes me believe Basis indeed deserves a good look. Thank you[/quote]

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