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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The Head should take action to ensure that comprehensive parent directory issues?  NAYSAYER!

This thread isn't much fun when diehard boosters get the upper hand.  What I hear from skeptics is not so much direct criticism of Basis as indirect criticism of DCPS, and a society with a high tolerance threshold for[b] extreme urban poverty and underfunding schools[/b].

A very good question goes unanswered.  It is why can't DC support a public middle school that puts a good-sized group of kids on a path to 8-10 AP classes, yet offers a flexible math curriculum, a gym, playing fields/track/courts, a band and orchestra, an auditorium, and fun facilities like a student-run radio station, a greenhouse, and well-stocked art rooms?

Takoma Park MD Middle School has had the facilities enumerated above, with a test-in math/science magnet program for one-third of the students, and more for a long time, and it's not a mile over the DC/MD line.

No school can afford comparable facilities on a DC charter outlay of $9,000 per student and whatever the franchise can afford to add to top it up (not much); MoCo struggles to provide them with nearly twice that allocation.  Enter Basis, in the throes of growing pains outside Arizona for the first time.  Is it any wonder that high-SES pps grumble and worry?

The situation is far from ideal, and hardly Basis' fault.

[/quote]

I have to question those comments above...  With respect to "underfunded schools", DCPS receives more per student than most of the districts in the nation.  The problem is thus not with being underfunded, it's with being mismanaged, as obviously all that funding is not reaching the students.

Second, with regard to urban poverty, what's keeping the seriously poor here, when there are cheaper places to live all around the country?  Clearly it's not work, as work obviously isn't paying well enough to get by.  And arguably it's not a strong community or family network in the area, as if it were truly strong it would have been working to uplift its members out of poverty.  I've spent my own years in poverty in the past, and when things were rough, I at least had the sense to pull up tent pegs and move on to find something with a cheaper cost of living and more opportunity to get ahead.  I realized long ago that it's easier to change myself than it is to sit around and expect the world to change for me.[/quote]

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