Reply to Basis 8th grade to Walls-vent

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think it's a terrible thing to do to your 8th graders to not give them good recommendations.  I suspect that happened at our school as well (not Basis).  It makes me really angry.  I think the teachers may not understand what a big deal this is and how tanking a kid's chance at the high school of their choice can have major consequences.[/quote]

This is actually on Walls for weighting the recs so (stupidly) heavily in their screening.

It's reasonable for teachers to make an honest assessment, but it's ridiculous for those teacher assessments (especially in the small-ish pool of kids with excellent grades) to DISQUALIFY a kid from a selective high school. By definition, a kid with a 4.0 is submitting assignments, participating in class, and doing well on test. So the teacher rec is really just how much the teacher *likes* your kid.[/quote]

And I will double down on my rant about this. Relying on recs from ELA and math teachers only, at the middle school level when kids might have a great relationship with a foreign language or science or social studies teacher, is an additional terrible layer of a terrible process.[/quote]

I'll pile on! I think weighting teacher recs to be worth 3x as grades was done to try and help them diversify their class with students who may not have the support/family environment to get perfect grades, but demonstrate qualities in class that show they have the same or more potential as a kid with that support.

But this ignores the reality of teaching, especially at the MS/HS level where it is subject based. Teachers are rarely the people best qualified to make an assessment like that, because they have so many students, including many with major issues who wind up dominating their time. A good student who is above the 3.0 threshold but who might be poorly supported outside of school and have very high potential but not be meeting it for equity issues? They are just going to fly under the radar. They are unlikely to have the social skills to catch the teachers attention, but because they are academically solid, also won't be needy enough to qualify for necessary attention. Basically the only way a teacher is going to really see these kids is if they have behavioral issues.

The teacher rec piece feels like it's premised on a Hollywood ideal of what teaching middle school is like. In reality these teachers are exhausted and being asked to do to much, and now you want them to help you identify a diamond in the rough from the 200 students they work with in a year? Really?[/quote]

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