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

With all due respect, that is a really dumb question. Of course they do. That's true of every school on earth. If a kid wants a robust arts and theater program then BASIS is a bad fit. If they want to play D1 sports in college it is a bad fit. If they want a large school it is a bad fit.

I was educated in elite prep schools. It was the best education money could buy. And kids left for larger public schools, or better sports programs, or to go to other elite prep schools with larger theater budgets, or because they didn't have the friend groups they wanted/needed. [/quote]

The point is, when comparing PARCC scores, you have to take into account the fact that BASIS controls the composition of their student body in a way that a traditional neighborhood DCPS school cannot. Some students who leave BASIS for academic reasons go to their DCPS school which takes all comers who are IB, whatever their strengths/weaknesses, whenever they show up. BASIS does not have to do this. They don’t even have to backfill with the next student on their lottery waitlist. Their model depends on DCPS being there to absorb at least some of the kids who leave.

BASIS is a good school and does well by its students. It is a particular model that works well for some and it is a good thing it is available for those students who thrive there. [b]BUT comparing BASIS PARCC scores with schools that do not control who sits in their classrooms to the same degree is not useful[/b].

Agree with this, and this is part of why I am wondering when we are going to see the data that breaks down scores by 4s and 5s.  Currently, "4/5" is one category.  What I want to know is how many 5s a school has, because that is what is going to tell me if my kid is going to have the cohort that he needs.  I don't give a damn if it is at a school like BASIS that might have 40 5s, 40 4s, and a small handful of 3 and below because they counsel out their low-performers, or a comprehensive school that also has 40 5s, but has a much larger population with a high percentage of kids scoring in the 1-3 range.  I want to know that above-grade-level learning is possible where I send my kid to school.

It was not a stupid question; it was a leading question that you followed.[/quote]

Useful for whom or for what purpose? This is the crux of the issue and why there exists such a disconnect. It all depends on why you are looking at PARCC scores. For people trying to assess the overall academic success rates for students with an eye towards the population as a whole, the fact that BASIS is a self-selecting (and regressing) population causes people to say "apples to oranges". I think that's fair. But if you aren't trying to solve for larger issues and you want to know where your kid is going to be surrounded by top performers and working with advanced and high caliber students, you don't give a damn why there are mostly high performers. You just want your kid an an environment surrounded by high caliber students. In that use case the explanations and excuses don't matter; there is nothing you can say to me that will make me feel better about a HS with less than 1/2 of the kids scoring a 4 or better. And even that's a frighteningly low bar.  [/quote][/quote]

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