Reply to PARCC results: how will they be communicated to families?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Do BASIS students ever leave for academic or social reasons?  If so, where do they go?[/quote]

Serious question?!  BASIS has been admitting more than 120 5th graders annually for more than a decade and graduating fewer than 70 seniors.

Is BASIS the only acceptable middle school in the DC Metropolitan area for UMC families EotP?  Of course not.  We know kids who left BASIS after 1-4 years for non-sectarian privates, parochial schools, suburban schools, homeschooling, schools abroad, Stuart Hobson, DCI, Two Rivers, Inspired Teaching etc.[/quote]

So BASIS regularly loses a large percent of its students from fifth to 12th grade? Currently, the fifth grade has 143 students and the 12th grade has 50. They have 1% ELL students and 4% students with disabilities.  And they do not backfill or have to take any new students no matter how well those students may test.

Why wouldn’t they score well on PARCC?
[/quote]
BASIS comes under almost no pressure to serve ELL students and those with the disabilities in the absence of other equally high-performing middle schools East of the Park. BASIS requires ELL students to study either their language spoken at home at the beginning level from 8th grade (yes, the beginning level even if a student is fully bilingual and biliterate), or a second foreign language, a tall order for a kid who already faces challenges learning English.  This policy turns many ELL families off, never mind that it's defended tooth and nail by admins and the parent community.  [/quote]

What on earth is the justification for this? Neither option makes sense -- it is not academically sensible to force a fluent speaker into an entry-level course, but most ELL students, while fluent, are often not as fully literate in their first language as they would be were they attending school in that language, so it is more appropriate to take high level language courses in their first language than to start a third language at that age.

It also makes no sense to me because as a school with a MS and HS, it's not like they don't have the high level language courses available, which is the main reason I can think of for doing this.

[b]BASIS sounds like a great school for the right kid[/b] but, even though we have an extremely academic child, there are enough little details like this that just confound me that we are likely going to preference ITS and Stuart Hobson over BASIS in the lottery (Latin being our first choice but of course it's a crapshoot). I think our child would do well there academically but I think it would be a tough fit for our family.[/quote]

Very, very, VERY much so. It is a great for some kids and not for others. As a BASIS parent, one of the things that bothers me about much of the chatter on DCUM is how many people take issue with KNOWN quantities of how the school operates as if the school needs to be all things to all people. It doesn't and it isn't. BASIS is a great fit for the kid I have there now. It would grind my younger child to a stub; she is NOT going to BASIS. As a parent it is my job to know what is and is not a good fit for my kid. Even after the kid starts at BASIS, I need to be aware of what is and is not working. If I need to make a change then it is up to me to make a change. The idea, however, that if a school doesn't work for me that it is somehow a failure of the school is self-centered nonsense. Stuart Hobson would be a bad fit for my kid now at BASIS. It is too large and frenetic and the range of levels in all classes would not sit well with them - they suffered through that in ES. That doesn't make SH a bad school. In all likelihood is going to be where my younger kid goes because it is a good fit for who and what that kid is.

Question to PP: Are you a bilingual ELL family? If not, why would how they address ELL language impact whether you would send your kid there? Is your kid currently on an IEP/504? If not, do you know how well our current school handles those? Do you care? [/quote]

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