Anonymous
10/24/2014 12:44
Subject: How was the meeting with the admin meeting last week at BASIS?
"FYI, from what I've seen in DC, the percentage doing well (i.e. 90s club) is significantly higher than 5-15%" - I think that may be a middle school vs. high school thing. 5-10 APs per year really separates the students out.
"In terms of economic reality, I get the sense that their planning, projections and models anticipate and factor in attrition, and as such I really don't get the sense that student attrition catches them off guard" - agree 100%. My point is that this planned for attrition has real world consequences for the students that don't make it. They get hurt. I've seen it happen. And don't forget the ones that hang on but just barely. Filling the seats in the lower grades is an economic imperative for BASIS. My problem with the school is that not testing for admission with their current model accepts that many who enroll will fail. And I cannot endorse an open-enrollment public school that accepts that as a baseline reality.
Also - I feel slightly bad about hijacking this thread. Re candy-gate I think it seems clear the guy put his foot in his mouth and said something dumb. Happens to all of us. The correct response, however, for teachers/admin (and parents) is clear. It is to lead by example and quickly and sincerely apologize to the students. Also, as has been mentioned, if I were using candy in class I would expect and be happy for none to come back.
"In terms of economic reality, I get the sense that their planning, projections and models anticipate and factor in attrition, and as such I really don't get the sense that student attrition catches them off guard" - agree 100%. My point is that this planned for attrition has real world consequences for the students that don't make it. They get hurt. I've seen it happen. And don't forget the ones that hang on but just barely. Filling the seats in the lower grades is an economic imperative for BASIS. My problem with the school is that not testing for admission with their current model accepts that many who enroll will fail. And I cannot endorse an open-enrollment public school that accepts that as a baseline reality.
Also - I feel slightly bad about hijacking this thread. Re candy-gate I think it seems clear the guy put his foot in his mouth and said something dumb. Happens to all of us. The correct response, however, for teachers/admin (and parents) is clear. It is to lead by example and quickly and sincerely apologize to the students. Also, as has been mentioned, if I were using candy in class I would expect and be happy for none to come back.
Anonymous
10/24/2014 12:42
Subject: How was the meeting with the admin meeting last week at BASIS?
The general point you seem to be making is don't criticize BASIS in a way that you find unhelpful. That doesn't seem reasonable to expect on a discussion forum about charter schools. Unhappy parents want to vent. And don't forget of course the yang in BASIS boosters. If you are really happy about your school, why hang out of internet fora defending it?
As a teacher the fact of the matter is that I saw many many students leave (almost 15% of one 9th grade class) but for each student that leaves many more struggle on for whatever reason. Leaving a school is a difficult choice for many parents and kids, there are limited options, there are many pros about BASIS, tough to leave friends, etc. Some parents even forced their kids to remain. It happens. In short, I personally was very distressed as an educator and human being seeing the damage inflicted on more than a few students by the BASIS program. No hyperbole, not even pointing fingers since the faculty and admin at my school by and large were excellent. Just the simple fact that a sizable number of kids are not able to thrive, and in fact barely could survive the BASIS curriculum. That is what I saw. That is why I left.
In terms of being able to survive the curriculum, if you are teaching here at a "normal" school - not the JKLM Deal Wilson, you can see how woefully unprepared the vast majority of our kids are for a BASIS type education.
In DC, in 3 years, almost 80 students have been retained (not promoted to the next grade). Their parenst and/or the kids think they are doing the right thing. It seems like you would disagree.
And then of course, there was that one mom this year who found out her child's comp retake had been misgraded, and that child got to move up but we weren't told about it until the parent piped up on the list serve.
The good news is at the meeting Mr. Aiken said they are thinking about offering a summer school option for kids who failed, in addition to the STARS program. Because in DC, some of the parents cannot help their kids academically. Heck, how many parents speak Chinese at Basis? Not many.
So they are thinking about trying to help the kids who struggled all year, but went to teacher hours, did everything they could, and still failed, over the summer. That would be a big improvement from a bunch of us parents watching our kids struggle and not being able to help them, while the Honors student who offered to help us worked so hard........
Anonymous
10/24/2014 12:34
Subject: How was the meeting with the admin meeting last week at BASIS?
Anonymous wrote:For crying out loud -- does any ADULT really think that they will fail an entire chemistry class over behavior issues? OP is being as hysterical as an eighth grader. Stop whipping up your child into a frenzy.
The rookie mistake was by the unqualified dean who made a threat he can't deliver on -- I hope he becomes yet one more in a string of supposed male role models who aren't the right fit for this school.
Wow that is a bit harsh and very quick to judge. I have had interactions with the Dean and was quite impressed. Even if he misspoke or was out of line, I really do not think it is fair to call for his dismissal over something like this that is alleged to have occurred at all. I do not know anyone who has not had any hiccups on the road in any new job at all including myself. Geesh
Anonymous
10/24/2014 12:29
Subject: Re:How was the meeting with the admin meeting last week at BASIS?
As for your previous comment about the "rare" student populace, consider this: unlike some of the other BASIS locations, DC also has a very unusually skewed populace at both ends - while we have 40%, predominantly low SES who drop out, at the other end, given Washington DC's unique position and role where it comes to national and international policy, it's filled with think tanks, research organizations, et cetera and has a disproportionately high number of A-type, and PhD type families (one of the highest concentrations of PhDs in the nation) who've come to DC from all over the nation, and all over the world - that are highly motivated and driven and who are perfectly fine with the acceleration, expectations and workload that BASIS puts on kids - it's not such a "rare" thing here, and certainly a very different demographic, culture and mindset from the southwest, where I also lived for a while.
NP here: That may be the case, but many of us who do have a Ph.D. don't support the mad rush to teach calculus to 8th graders, to take 5 AP classes in 10th grade, etc. We want and expect our kids to excel academically but to also have time and energy to be in the school play, join the cross country team, learn to paint, read for leisure, and yes, even play travel soccer. We don't want to raise automatons who can excel in cram schools (see the many articles about kids pushed too far, too fast by these in, for instance, S. Korea); we want well-rounded, well-adjusted, and happy children who can do quite well in math and science while also writing 20-page papers on Plato, learning an instrument or two, and having some semblance of a normal teenage lifestyle. I know Basis has a plan for the math and science, but I am much less sure about the other things. Having visited the school fairly recently, it's quite clear that the other departments--especially English, visual arts, music, and languages--are way behind the game vs. many other schools (public, private, and charter) in the area. Yes, I know that they have a drama club, etc., but what they're offering is not going to meet the standards of many parents who want well-rounded kids AND who have choices, and that may well be why they're losing rising 9th graders. The program just seems very extreme and one-dimensional.
Since there are now, happily, several good choices available for many incoming high schoolers, there's no reason that Basis wouldn't be carefully considered by those who are exclusively interested in STEM--except that Basis doesn't accept ninth graders. In the end, Basis in DC might have a very, very small group of kids, and so might not be able to weather the storm financially.
Anonymous
10/24/2014 12:25
Subject: How was the meeting with the admin meeting last week at BASIS?
For crying out loud -- does any ADULT really think that they will fail an entire chemistry class over behavior issues? OP is being as hysterical as an eighth grader. Stop whipping up your child into a frenzy.
The rookie mistake was by the unqualified dean who made a threat he can't deliver on -- I hope he becomes yet one more in a string of supposed male role models who aren't the right fit for this school.
The rookie mistake was by the unqualified dean who made a threat he can't deliver on -- I hope he becomes yet one more in a string of supposed male role models who aren't the right fit for this school.
Anonymous
10/24/2014 12:24
Subject: How was the meeting with the admin meeting last week at BASIS?
Anonymous wrote:There are 25 kids in a class-one they should not result in everyone getting punished. And 8th graders are emotional, irrational and dramatic, so of course they are freaking out.
THANK YOU FOR THAT ASTUTE OBSERVATION. IT IS THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH.
and some of their parents, who care possibly even more deeply about their children's grades than their children, especially those who are not native English speakers, did not get the message from the HOS stupid email that their kids grades would not be affected because it was filled with mumbo jumbo about "messaging their children" and concluded with the inscrutable and inappropriate (given what had happened, given what the email was about) "Have a great week!"
Anonymous
10/24/2014 12:18
Subject: How was the meeting with the admin meeting last week at BASIS?
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:OK, I am not a teacher at Basis but I do teach middle school science and I am cracking up at this thread. This teacher made such a rookie mistake-- I learned long ago that if you are going to use food in a lab, you better make sure it's uncooked beans or something similar, because if you use candy it's not coming back. LOL. Once one of my colleagues had raw potato slices in salt water to show hyper-, hypo-, and isotonic solutions, and a kid actually ate a raw potato slice! Kids that age are nuts, man. (Excuse the pun.) I'm not saying it's okay, and obviously if a kid stole something he or she should be disciplined, but I can believe a kid taking some candy has blown up into some kind of federal case. Goodness.
Yes and no.
I can TOTALLY agree with you where it comes to Elementary School, 5th graders, et cetera. Yeah, kids are nuts, they don't know better, they make lots of mistakes, they don't listen, and you should EXPECT it. Yeah, I can TOTALLY see handing out candy for a class experiment saying "This candy is for an experiment, and before you even touch it, we're going to count/measure..." but before you've barely even uttered two syllables, little Johnny Turbogullet has already in nanoseconds gorfed his down in one swell foop without even chewing and has shot his hand up, saying, "Umm, Ms. Crabapple, I already accidentally ate mine..." And yeah, that's cute/funny/and totally to be expected.
But this is different. That's not what happened here. These are teenagers, 8th graders, who at that age should be well into knowing better. It's a kid who stealthily and deliberately took something that they knew wasn't theirs. It's a kid who selfishly decided, "rather than the class sharing in a tasty treat, screw them all, I'm taking it all for myself," it's a kid who basically said "F-U classmates, F-U teacher, F-U class experiment." It's behavior that I would never tolerate from my own kid at that age, and I am not at all alone in that regard. If, by the time kids have gotten to be teenagers, are still engaging in that kind of selfish behavior, and at that point still don't have any regard or respect for others or the property of others, then the grownups have failed them and have likely set them up for a ton of future failure, and that's serious and sad business.
The above teacher teaches middle school - read, one step below high school, including 8th grade. She is telling you that kids do this. Another is telling you that MS kids are just "crazy." Basis is not a reform school.
Would you really want the Dean to say "I will mess with your grades" to your child, who had just searched high and low for the "lab materials?" Yes there are some hungry kids, there are even some badly behaved kids still at Basis in 8th grade, but she made a "rookie" mistake according to veteran teachers, you do not know if the "criminal" as another pp called the candy-eater, was aware the candy was intended to be used by the teacher as part of a lesson or even whether the child was aware that the candy was the teacher's. Yes, theft at Basis is fairly rampant, and it is a "serious and sad business" sometimes, especially expensive prescription glasses, but in a school where the best advice parents get is to tell their kids to take everything to the bathroom with them if they need to go, rather than leaving it at their desk why didn't the teacher take that into account when she left the candy somewhere it could be stolen without the stealer being seen?
Anonymous
10/24/2014 12:14
Subject: How was the meeting with the admin meeting last week at BASIS?
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:
OK glad you don't fall for the marketing, but do you agree that BASIS markets itself as a school for all who are willing to work hard? You are right it is a niche school but the charter model needs bodies in the seats for funding.
I also support charter choice and oppose monolithic unified districts - one size does not fit all.
And I am sure there are many stellar students in DC from across the socio-economic spectrum who will end up at BASIS and excel academically. I still think for them that BASIS's standardized test-centric approach will short change them but whatever, they will do fine. But these sorts of kids will only be some percentage of the student body at BASIS DC or any other campus, and I would expect well less than 50%. For their parents, if that is what they want then that is fine. But I am concerned about out those that leave and those that struggle but remain. Freedom of choice does not alleviate my concern for those that get pushed out for no other reason than "they couldn't hack it". Nor of course does it address the problem of those who remain but are totally overwhelmed. I see this not as a student issue but as a real and systemic problem in BASIS model but they don't see it that way and, because it is a model imposed from the top down and they have their #1 ranking, they are not inclined to change. So I don't teach there any more and I speak out against them from time to time. Truth to power, etc.
I've been lurking here for days, PP, and your well-reasoned posts are refreshing.
However, your perspective as a teacher and my perspective as a parent are quite different. Your teaching career affords you the luxury of moving from school to school over many years in search of a learning environment you consider to be ideal. I must enroll my kids in school now and must select from among those that are available to me today. Having put a lot of thought into this decision, I concluded that BASIS DC was the best choice. Deal MS would probably have been my second choice, but we can't get in. Latin PCS would have been my third choice, but we would probably not have gotten in any way. After that, we probably would have moved to MD or VA.
You argue that the BASIS model is flawed because a large percentage of the kids who attend don't or cannot thrive there. I, on the other hand, would argue that the struggling students at BASIS point to a failure on the part of local public schools. If every middle schooler in had access to a functioning neighborhood MS and HS, those unhappy struggling kids at BASIS would return to their local schools. They wouldn't remain at BASIS simply due to a lack of a reasonable alternative.
I agree with you insofar as BASIS may, due to lack of alternatives, be the best option. HAving a great student body (generally motivated, grounded) and good teachers sad to say can be a rare thing in public schools. And yes this is due in large part to the abject failure of the public school system. But that doesn't alter the fact that the BASIS curriculum is seriously inappropriate for a substantial percentage of its student body but it keeps pushing enrollment because it needs to fill seats to keep lights on (for this reason, too, they insist that class size does not matter which I know to be flat wrong in an accelerated curriculum I don't care how many studies you wave in front of my face!). . Fact of the matter is that only a small subset of the student population is going to be able to handle accelerated math/science curriculum and this is regardless of what other options are out there.
My hippocratic oath for teaching says I cant teach at a place where many students are being hurt or not served by the system. And yes, i had the fortune to be able to move on. If I were a parent and my kid were able to thrive in that model I suppose that problem for others would not be my concern. But frequently parents of kids that are hurting do not realize how common and maybe unavoidable their experience is, so they and the student flail for years to keep the kid above water.
You seem to be suggesting some necessity to be deceiving or misrepresenting themselves for mere fact of "the need to keep the lights on". I really have to take exception to that, I have not at all seen that here in DC in their recruitment and retention. They have been quite consistent in terms of what they are, how they operate, what they offer, what they don't offer, and what their expectations are. No false advertising.
Anonymous
10/24/2014 12:14
Subject: Re:How was the meeting with the admin meeting last week at BASIS?
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:ha ha don't get me started about the ATF (aka parents paying teachers so BASIS can free up working capital to expand the bureaucracy or open new campuses). At least when I was there we had a fixed contract at the beginning of the year. The ATF was not a bonus and if you look at the thin information about it they never claim it is a bonus. I presume it was just used to pay the contractual salary (which did have lots of bonuses built in for things like attendance, student performance on APs, etc.).
are you frigging kidding me? I have a Q&A from the HOS that says different.........
contractual eh?
Not what we were told at all
including a statement that there was a "base" bonus for all returning teachers which I guess means your salary?
HELL NO.
In our ES our PTA money goes in part to insure that there is an assistant teacher in every room so that if one kid is disruptive they can be pulled out and talked to without ruining the entire class time............ and every penny appears in an itemized budget created by the administration with parental input, which is why I have never quibbled about handing over my money (although Janney had a 3 kid cap, and our ES does not.............)
so would you have preferred a $100 gift card at Christmas and then at the beginning of the summer?
(from individual parents, dividing it so it adds up evenly per teacher and kid? We fork over 1800 for one kid at ES, and we figure we owe Basis teachers a lot more, but we did not donate to the ATF last year because it sounded off)
Because if this is really what it is, the organization writ large has to step in and fulfill your contracts, including any obligatory bonus based on a stated formula, whether or not they have the money from the parents, which in DC they never will just because of our population........
Sorry about all these questions but you are absolutely blowing my mind and I will wait with bated breath for your response. No joke.
So are you really going to go on the word of an anonymous DCUM poster who may or may not be an actual teacher and make a judgement based on that alone? I know that it is a fact that DC charters get substantially less funding than DCPS schools. I want to help support our teachers and our school. I also know that no other school in DC will provide the great education that my kid is getting now at BASIS.