Reply to Homework load in 5th and 6th grades at basis dc?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Planning to move to VA or go private for an International Baccalaureate HS program which teaches our family's language at a level one or two years past AP.

What I find about DC public schools is that the high needs population in the city, in both traditional schools and the charter sector, motivates school leaders up and down the chain to ooze paternalism, e.g. you have to study a language for years in school, or calculus, or whatever, or you won't be able to ace a slew of AP exams. Total BS.

BASIS assumes that kids starting after 6th grade couldn't handle the science and math curriculum, so none can enter. Nonsense. There are more high-powered public middle schools than BASIS in this Metro area and in other US cities, e.g. [b]the one I attended in NYC (Hunter College Middle School). [/b][/quote]

Talk about "high needs population" and look no further than the NYC magnets that base admission on a single high stakes test and the supporters who fight tooth and nail and the state level to preserve the status quo, no matter how paltry the number of resulting black and hispanic accepted. Historically black and hispanic students are systematically overlooked and never given the necessary support to seek out and secure these opportunities, no matter how academically capable they may be.[/quote]

You won't hear this lady of color who grew up in a (housing) project criticize her NYC magnet MS or HS.[b] I wasn't "systematically overlooked" - teachers volunteered to knock themselves out to help me prep for admission tests, and I took advantage of free test prep offered by the City. The necessary support mostly comes in the form of adults turning off the TV and making kids read and do some extra math.[/b]

What BASIS DC does is worse than what NYC does.  They let kids enroll in an advanced program, decide some students can't cut it once they hit 7th or 8th grade (even if they're working hard), relentlessly stress them out, and in so doing, persuade them to bail.
[/quote]

that's great that it worked for you, but the numbers don't lie. Stuyvesant has 29 black students out of 3300 in freaking NYC.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/nyregion/stuyvesant-high-school-black-students.html

This is the money quote from a current student:

“I have so much trouble believing that of all of the top students in New York City who are able to change the world, and are able to perform the best in this really rigorous environment, that only seven of them are black,”[/quote]

or this one -- 5th grader who got in had never even heard of the school

Venus Nnadi, 18, a Stuyvesant graduate who is a freshman at Harvard, said she remembered when a fifth-grade teacher pulled her aside at her Catholic middle school in Queens Village and encouraged her to consider an elite public school.

Ms. Nnadi, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, had never heard of Stuyvesant, but she bought a test preparation book and started taking practice exams. She thinks often of her classmates who didn’t have the same guidance.[/quote]

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