Reply to Basis Charter School - Experience and Insight Requested

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]BASIS DC only has 47 in the graduating class but here is a selection of colleges to which kids were admitted (some were admitted to more than one of these).

Per capita, no other public school in DC comes close to these results.

Bryn Mawr
Carnegie Mellon
Cornell
Dartmouth
Duke
Edinburgh
Elon
Emory
Georgetown
GW
Harvard
NYU
Northeastern
Northwestern
Oxford
Pomona
Smith
St. Andrews
Tufts
UC Berkeley
UPenn
U Mich
UT-Austin
UVA
Wesleyan
Wisconsin-Madison
Yale

[/quote]

If you kicked out all of the kids who aren’t in AP classes at the other high schools they’d have similar numbers.

BASIS does a good job on those 47, but the real advantage is shaking off the ones who aren’t top tier students.

It’s such a simple sleight of hand trick, it’s amazing that a school so famous for its math slips it by so many people. [/quote]

You keep saying that. But here are a few questions for you:

Can you acknowledge that the curriculum at BASIS differs from DCPS? (Requires you to just take a cursory look at the required classes to know this is true, but if you saw the syllabus, as parents do, you would know it's dramatically different and BASIS teaches much more content).

Do you acknowledge that it's possible that the kids who survive BASIS might be learning more than they would have through DCPS?

Can you acknowledge that many of the kids who make it through 8th and then decide to leave for Walls or Private (about half the kids who start) were actually pretty well served by the middle school curriculum?

And now these 50 kids who make it all the way through to graduate -- yes, I agree that these 50 probably would have been successful anywhere. But maybe, just maybe, they actually like the curriculum at BASIS. Maybe they had opportunities there they wouldnt have had at a different school. 
[/quote]

Yes - it looks like Basis is doing well by the kids that leave earlier for Walls, Banneker, and privates. Maybe they didn’t like Basis as an experience (or at least had their full of it), but they certainly landed well and compiled good enough academic records while at Basis, painful as it may have been.

Combined with the 1/3 of kids that make it all the way through, it’s quite likely that Basis does well by a strong majority of kids. Basis can’t really advertise (or defend) itself by its middle-to-HS school “exit” options but it does matter for families weighing it as an option.

None of this is necessarily to defend Basis as a model that should be supported by public tax dollars. I’m conflicted about that…

(P.S. - plenty of private school families hire tutors; same with TJ families.)

[/quote]

Anecdotally it is a stretch to say the kids who exit early have been well served. A good friends daughter was so discouraged and sad and anxiety ridden after her sophomore year - her older sibling graduated but was deeply unhappy. Of course some kids are happy and there are plenty of schools that are tough, it just seems like people forget how hard and discouraging it is for a lot of the kids who have to leave early - and no one plans that when they start. They really should market it more clearly - “it’s more likely than not, you will leave”[/quote]

To be fair, they really do try to market it as an advanced and accelerated and very difficult curriculum. They say it many times in many different ways to prospective parents. It's often the parents fault for pushing their kids into a situation where they will fail. [/quote]

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