Reply to BASIS DC to open in 2012-2013

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[quote=Anonymous]OK then, so the charter probably won't be revoked regardless.  But if Latin continues to struggle to attract whites/upper-middle-class kids to its high school, as I expect, and keep them to graduation, why would Basis be any different?  It's easy, if not always a happy story, for affluent families to jump to the burbs and privates in this particular metropolitan area.  Where is the Gold Medal US World and News Report HS school with a population that's amost entirely black and low-income?  Look carefully at the list, note the percent of white and Asian kids in the top-tier public schools.  Brookings, Cato, Heritage, Urban Institute and other education-minded think tanks have come to the conclusion that low-income minority kids need a critical mass of upper-middle-class classmates to crack Ivy League admissions as much as they need rigorous academics.  So we can expect Basis to become a national outlier, achieving in DC against all odds?

One question I have about Basis is will the school replace kids dropping out?  If yes, up to which grade, and how?  Will kids coming in after 5th, if that's indeed permitted, have to show aptitude, or simply bring the usual lottery luck?  As things stand, the language immersion schools won't take kids after 2nd or 3rd grade, even if they speak the foreign language of immersion well (to quote the Yu Ying principal, in reference to the Mandarin-speaking child of a friend who struck out on the lottery, replacing dropouts with ready-made Chinese speakers would be "terribly unfair to non-Chinese speakers!").  If the school indeed loses two-thirds of the kids along the way, as per the AZ model, how will it function as a high school with a few dozen kids in a senior class?  How will funding work when a cash-strapped charter is down to a handful of kids in most of its AP classes?  There are of course very small independents in the District, but a public school?  How would allowing massive attrition, with a corresponding effort to draw in talent to compensate, constitute a cost-efffective approach to funding Basis, when the school could readily identify and include gifted kids to replace dropouts but for a charter school board/law/city council wedded to the concept of open lotteries at all costs?

Unlike the NYC MS and HS magnets, Basis won't be in a position to feed off elementary talented and gifted programs it probably needs to carry out its mission in serving low-income kids.  To my knowledge, as things stand, "accelerated learning" programs are only being developed in a handful of DCPS schools (e.g. Brent on the Hill - look at the school profile page and see "accelerated programs" advertised) where increasingly well-endowed PTAs raise the money for "pullout" classes for 3rd to 5th grade.  There seems to be no money for TAG programs elsewhere.  Charters may or may not furnish the graduates who have what it takes at Basis partly because they're even less likely than DCPS schools to support formal TAG programs as yet.  NYC may be going overboard in running a good many all-gifted K-5 schools (and perhaps Mo. Co., with its all-gifted grade 4-5 programs), to which kids test in at age 4 or 5, but it's still the city getting the highest percentage of its low and moderate-income kids into Ivies.  I note that Ivies are the only US colleges where a student-loan-free education has recently become the norm for parents earning 4 or 5 figures...

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