Reply to BASIS charter expansion is up for public comment

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Reply to "BASIS charter expansion is up for public comment"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OK, so as children of immigrants, you know that school is much harder in other countries, especially Asia and Eastern Europe, so BASIS rigor makes sense to you.

I'm an immigrant from East Asia who didn't find half as much rigor in the BASIS middle school experience as I thought I would. Rigor relative to other DC public middle schools, OK, at least for math and social studies. But the writing instruction wasn't good and language instruction didn't exist for no reason that made sense to me. Kids who came in with strong background in French, Spanish, Chinese weren't allowed to study any language at school before 8th grade because BASIS said so (never mind liberal learning, no learning of languages was de rigueur). In 8th grade, all the kids could only study a language at the most elementary level, no matter how advanced they might have been in a language or multiple languages. In my elementary school in a small town, we studied a foreign language seriously from 4th grade and many of us learned two foreign languages from 7th grade. The much-lauded science curriculum was so repetitive that extreme boredom by high school seemed to be the desired result. We had two science teachers quit mid-year. We also had teachers right out of grad school who'd cry in front of classes (with kids going nuts). If my observations count as "poison," fine, but I believed in BASIS in 5th and 6th grade. By 7th grade, I wanted off BS Team Block.  [/quote]

Ok this is all deeply alarming. I actually have to make the decision this week (to keep him enrolled at BASIS or accept another offer for a path to a medium-good DCPS middle). Truly not sure.[/quote]

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