BASIS schools are known for their high standards and their high attrition rate. There is a BASIS school in Washington, D.C., where students are taking very hard courses and “many”withdraw in January (and, according to Guy Brandenburg) “because they realize that they are on track to fail one or more courses for the semester and will therefore have to repeat the entire grade — something that would not happen at any other school that I know of.” The answer, Mathews suggests: more elite, highly selective schools. This, of course, leaves the public schools worse off, with only the students who can’t meet the high standards.
Jay Mathews of the Washington Post argues here that low-income students are up to the challenge of the most rigorous schools. Apparently the problem with public education is that schools have low expectations. Make the schools harder, and the students will rise to the challenge.
If that were true, perhaps the “failure” rate on the Common Core tests would not be 70%, including 97% of ELLs in New York, and more than 80% of black and Hispanic students.
The biggest problem in education is not what to do with those low-income students who can meet the highest standards, but what to do to help those who cannot. That was supposed to be the purpose of charter schools–to find innovative ways to educate the kids who are failing and unmotivated–not to provide an escape for the most talented students.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I just read this article and definitely disagree with nearly everything in it (except that part of offering lower income students opportunities for rigorous work)..
Mathews cites BASIS, a school that I have seen first hand as focused on memorization and test taking as opposed to higher order thinking. This is not the type of school that appreciates higher order thinking.
Mathews also discusses Benjamin Banneker in DC as a potential role model for schools. Interestingly, the article notes Brandenburg’s issue around BASIS and kicking students out, but Banneker is known for similar tactics. Students who are not doing well in 9th grade (or even 11th grade) will be asked to leave or will leave. Banneker thinks so much of itself that at one point they required separate tests to accept credits in courses (so a student could get a B in a class but then have to take a test to earn that credit at the school)…
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“except that part of offering lower income students opportunities for rigorous work”
Of course that wasn’t happening at all any time prior to NCLB and RaTT
We need to quit reinforcing the edudeformers’ twisted logic discourse.
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“The biggest problem in education is not what to do with those low-income students who can meet the highest standards…”
Of course it is, because they are so valuable. Those who can meet the highest standards can join the power structure and be held up as examples of how much equality of opportunity we have in the U.S., meaning that if you can’t cut it you are a substandard human being and deserve to be poor.
“…but what to do to help those who cannot.”
We know what to do with those who cannot: blame their teachers, insult their teachers, denigrate their teachers, treat their teachers unfairly, and, ultimately, fire their teachers easily (preferably before they are vested in a pension system).
“That was supposed to be the purpose of charter schools–to find innovative ways to educate the kids who are failing and unmotivated–not to provide an escape for the most talented students.”
Apparently, serving failing students isn’t as easily lucrative as providing escape from them. There is no purpose to anything in the U.S. except short-term profit for those at the top so that they can contribute to campaign coffers.
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I am an administrator in a conversion charter school (not for-profit, use to be a regular public school) in Florida. Florida law charges us to be “innovative”. I would love to be innovative and find ways to share our successes with others. That is precisely why we were created. However, we are held to the same accountability measures all other public schools are held to and we are experiencing the strangle hold of too much testing and “accountability” all other public schools are experiencing.
This era of high stakes testing is killing ALL schools by stripping us of our diversity and innovation. We are becoming segregated, competitive, and inefficient. It must end for all of our students!
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If I may correct the first sentence: “BASIS schools are known for their UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS”.
It’s amazing how ingrained the edudeformers’ malapropisms are in almost everyone’s discourse. We need to quit using the edudeformers’ twisted meaning language.
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Duane Swacker: in the center of the bullseye!
It’s like continually using psychometric terms like “performance” and “achievement” instead of “teaching” and “learning.”
As just the comments in this thread remind us, from the POV of self-styled “education reformers” students are meeting expectations when they perform like trained seals [no offense to the seals!], and they are succeeding when they achieve high test scores.
Genuine teaching and learning are impossibly to fully define because they are complex and constantly changing and adapting to new people and situations.
If you want to heave a Rheeal conversation about education: “performance” and “achievement” are your cup of tea. And you can expect to meet your lowered (and very narrow) expectations because the metrics are easily manipulated to ensure the real goal—$tudent $ucce$$ for the chief beneficiaries of the “new civil rights movement of our time.”
If you want to have a real conversation about education: there is no substitute for actually using the phrase “genuine learning and teaching.” And it is a never-ending story because the expectations are not just high but responding to ever-changing circumstances. They cannot be answered by decoys and misleads and distractors [using the psychometricians’ own lingo!] dressed up as numbers & stats.
Thank you for your comment.
😎
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Matthews and his ilk are the only ones saying that low income kids can’t learn, so his admonishment not to trust him is duly noted.
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The link provided to the article isn’t linking for me. Does anyone have an alternative address to suggest?
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Try this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dont-trust-complaints-that-schools-are-too-rigorous/2015/03/08/945c25b2-c3ab-11e4-ad5c-3b8ce89f1b89_story.html
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These notions are eugenics and racist. I know this is wrong because as an ESL teacher I have seen many poor minority, foreign students enter kindergarten with no English. By the time they graduated many of these students were in AP classes and headed to competitive colleges. The way we did it was through a diverse mix of poor and middle class students learning together. Students learn a great deal from each other.(Vygotsky) Mixing students together allows students to gain insights and strategies from each other. It also promotes pro-social behavior. It ensures that no student goes to a poor, neglected school; no students attend a school without adequate resources such as books,technology or a functioning library. Separate is NEVER equal!!!!! I thought we had learned this lesson. Frankly, I think that we should be able to sue federal and state governments for participating in the destruction of integrated schools and promoting the proliferation of segregated ones under civil rights laws.http://www.simplypsychology.org/vygotsky.html
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I so agree with you “retired teacher”. I taught elementary age students. They learned from each other and helped each other. It was so inspirational to see this. However, as teach to the test was added and more children went to charters, it became more difficult to teach a class of struggling children.
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Jay Mathews has been a cheerleader more often than not for educational reform. His name may as well be Michelle Rhee.
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Instead it seems to be turning into the charters take the cream and the public schools must carry the rest of the burden. Segregation is not bound by color.
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Jay Mathews loves BASIS schools and other similar schools because of their emphasis on Advanced Placement courses and tests. These schools score high on Mathews’ ‘Challenge Index’ – a bogus ranking of the “best” schools in America – based solely on their use of AP, since “the Basis schools require students to take eight AP courses before graduation, take six AP tests and pass at least one.”
There is absolutely no question about the fact that Jay Mathews has pushed AP relentlessly. Many, many students and parents –– not to mention school districts and college admissions folks, and teachers –– have heeded his pandering. The problem is that Mathews’ “research” base seems to consist of his own “analysis,” studies funded by the College Board – which invariably find College Board products like the PSAT, the SAT, and AP to be stellar – and a 2004 propaganda piece by Tom Luce and Lee Thompson, “Do What Works.” Mathews links to this piece again and again, as if doing so gives it authenticity.
A 2002 National Research Council study of AP courses and tests found them to be a “mile wide and an inch deep” and inconsistent with research-based principles of learning.
A 2004 study by Geiser and Santelices found that “the best predictor of both first- and second-year college grades” is unweighted high school grade point average, and a high school grade point average “weighted with a full bonus point for AP…is invariably the worst predictor of college performance.” As students freely admit, they take AP courses to make themselves “look good” and to get those bonus points.
A 2005 study (Klopfenstein and Thomas) found AP students “…generally no more likely than non-AP students to return to school for a second year or to have higher first semester grades.” Moreover, the authors wrote that “close inspection of the [College Board] studies cited reveals that the existing evidence regarding the benefits of AP experience is questionable,” and “AP courses are not a necessary component of a rigorous curriculum.”
A 2006 MIT faculty report noted ““there is ‘a growing body of research’ that students who earn top AP scores and place out of institute introductory courses end up having ‘difficulty’ when taking the next course.” Two years prior, Harvard “conducted a study that found students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard” (Seebach, 2004). Dartmouth found that high scores on AP psychology tests do NOT translate into college readiness for the next-level course. Indeed, students admit that ““You’re not trying to get educated; you’re trying to look good;” and, “”The focus is on the test and not necessarily on the fundamental knowledge of the material.” Students know that AP is far more about gaming the college acceptance process than it is learning.
In The ToolBox Revisited (2006), Adelman wrote about those who had misstated his original ToolBox (1999) work: “With the exception of Klopfenstein and Thomas (2005), a spate of recent reports and commentaries on the Advanced Placement program claim that the original ToolBox demonstrated the unique power of AP course work in explaining bachelor’s degree completion. To put it gently, this is a misreading.”
Ademan goes on to say that “Advanced Placement has almost no bearing on entering postsecondary education,” and when examining and statistically quantifying the factors that relate to bachelor’s degree completion, Advanced Placement does NOT “reach the threshold level of significance.”
The 2010 book “AP: A Critical Examination” noted that “Students see AP courses on their transcripts as the ticket ensuring entry into the college of their choice,” yet, “there is a shortage of evidence about the efficacy, cost, and value of these programs.” And this: AP has become “the juggernaut of American high school education,” but “ the research evidence on its value is minimal.”
But a person would never know any of this by reading Jay Mathews, who is the #1 pimp for AP. Meanwhile, the College Board is all-in on the Common Core and says all of its products (PSAT, SAT, AP) are “aligned” with it.
When are students, parents, and educators going to abandon their belief in mythology?
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