Reply to Teacher turnover at BASIS

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Teacher turnover at BASIS"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You make the best of things at BASIS. What you want are better facilities, trained college counselors, a library and so forth on top of all the good rigor. But you can't have all that without moving to the burbs or paying for a private, so you make the best of things. That's all you do. You came here and boost and rationalize away without changing that. [/quote]

The BASIS facilities are given an unfair bad rap, particularly considering the location -- blocks away from museums, the mall, everything that DC has to offer.  As far as a on campus library, what is a waste of resources when we are a couple blocks from the MLK library.  I'd personally rather my DC learn to use a real library that they can use for the rest of their life that has so much more to offer than a limited school library.  Trained college counselors?  That is the last thing on my "wish list."  I would like more sports teams, a leadership class, and a parent google group.  Expert college counselors are easy to outsource if you aren't happy with the in-house options.

BASIS is better than many of the burb schools or the privates.  Maybe not compared to Sidwell, but that can't be the standard since 99% of Americans cannot afford to send their children to Sidwell.  DC should be commended for having a public school like BASIS available, particularly with the rich NoVA burbs paying for the private equivalent.  DC doesn't appreciate it, because we see schools like Sidwell, Georgetown Day, etc, but if I lived anywhere else, I'd knock DC parents on top of their heads for having any complaints about a public option like BASIS.  Friends that rubbed in their admissions to Latin now wish they had ended up in BASIS, IB Deal parents tell me that they had considered BASIS, the K-8 charter schools wish they could compete with a school like BASIS.  Those who got in should be counting their lucky stars.[/quote]

I don't know a single person, of the dozens of people I know who have kids at Latin, who wishes they had done BASIS instead. Plenty of friends of my kids at BASIS still wishing they had gotten into Latin instead. DC#1 got into BASIS, but we ran screaming when they described the lack of physical movement, the fact that they didn't waste time going to the museums or Mall (I'm paraphrasing but that was the distinct gist), and showed their inability to deal with kids with non-academic special needs. When DC#2 came along to BASIS age, we happily picked another school without ever looking at BASIS again. I know people who have kids who are happy at BASIS, but I know a lot more who are themselves miserable with the program or whose kids were either miserable and left or who are not all that happy there. I also saw for myself an example of a friend's kid being failed despite no grades below an 80 documented in the CJ or anywhere else. Lower income AA family. Funnily enough, when Mom went in to question it, they stated that the teachers made mistakes on the grades and changed them all to passing. So either the teachers were so negligent that they accidently gave 20's on report cards for a passing student or they had a student who was secretly receiving failing grades but never indicated such in the CJ nor communicated with the parents, nor approached the child, etc. Or they wanted this kid, who lives in subsidized housing, out of the school because standardized test scores would be average not superior and grades would always hover around 85% or so. In other words, a perfectly lovely kid doing a slightly above average job. Mom was thrilled to pull her kid out and said kid now attends a private high school on a huge merit scholarship which is richly deserved.

I think it's great that BASIS offers accelerated learning. DC#3 is advanced and such a program could be a great fit. However, not understanding child development, maintaining a happy and supported teaching staff, retaining adminstrators, special education, the list goes on -- that doesn't work for me. We will, happily, continue to pursue our kids' education elsewhere, thank you very much.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics