<p>Paminaz, what is there for the kid who likes English and Social Sciences as well as Natural Science and Math? How is the instruction? Are there ECs like newspaper and yearbook for them? What is the attrition rate at BASIS? Why do kids leave and how do they do in their new schools? </p>
<p>We recently got BASIS where I live. My kids are too old and/or too happy where they are, but I am curious about the school. Unlike the OP, we have pretty good publics here. Kids can get the math and science offered by BASIS in the non charter public schools. Our public schools are very big, so that is a point of difference.</p>
<p>The curriculum for the humanities is as rigorous as the Math and Sciences. In freshman year, students take Honors Literature and Honors Language. In Sophomore year, they take either AP Lit or AP Lang, and Junior year, they take whatever they didn’t take as a Sophomore. And Senior year there is a choice of Capstone English or History. For History, the students all take AP Euro, AP Government, AP US History. There are electives as well - like Comparative Gov, Econ (Micro/Macro), Intro to Law and a few others I can’t recall. There are also ECs that are more humanities based - like WordMasters. As far as the instruction is concerned, I have been happy with it for the most part. </p>
<p>There are some clubs, like Science Bowl, Speech and Debate, yearbook and newspaper, but certainly not on the scale that you might find at a large school.</p>
<p>The attrition rate from 8th to 9th grade was large but for the past few years, it really has dropped significantly. Kids leave for a couple of reasons. They want the big school/high school experience, or they just don’t want the rigor of the curriculum through high school. If the student has made the choice to stay in 9th grade, they most likely will be there for the 4 years. To be honest, I haven’t really followed what happens to kids if they decide to leave. I do know a lot of the public schools don’t recognize our curriculum and can’t accommodate an incoming Freshman who has had advanced classes, so assimilation into a traditional program can be challenging. A few students who left went into an IB program and have been successful.</p>
<p>Since the OP’s child seems to be especially strong in math, I checked for BASIS schools in two national math competitions. They participated in one of them, the interstellar <a href=“http://in-ter-stel-lar.com/math_madness/about”>http://in-ter-stel-lar.com/math_madness/about</a>
This is a bracket-style competition, with a qualifying round to get into the brackets. The structure of the competition is a little complicated and you can read about it on the site if you are interested. As far as I can tell, three BASIS schools participated. In one bracket, where the top 5 student scores constituted the team score, the top 10 schools were:
The Harker School (Saratoga) San Jose, CA
Academy for the Adv. of Sci/Tech Hackensack, NJ
3, Thomas Jefferson H.S. for Sci/Tech Alexandria, VA
Irvington H.S. Fremont, CA
Lynbrook H.S. San Jose, CA
Buchholz H.S. Gainesville, FL
Detroit Country Day School Beverly Hills, MI
Phillips Academy Andover Andover, MA
Henry M. Gunn H.S. Palo Alto, CA
Ladue Horton Watkins H.S. St. Louis, MO</p>
<p>BASIS Tucson North came in 43rd in this bracket. The other two participating BASIS schools didn’t make the top 50 in their brackets as far as I can tell, apparently one qualified to participate and one didn’t qualify at all. Nothing wrong with any of that, but it’s not the kind of performance I’d expect from a school/program where all students are heavily accelerated in math and where the school is touting itself as one of the best in the country. I assume the winning school in this bracket is the same Harker school that people were talking about on the other thread? No shortage of silicon valley schools that distinguished themselves in this particular competition and also in the larger team competitions.</p>
<p>Also interesting is that Cupertino MIDDLE school ranked 8th in the top20 competition, going up against high school students. Perhaps the common core has not yet destroyed all the middle schools in silicon valley?</p>
<p>Yes, Harker is an established elite K-12 school. It has extensive AP and advanced non-AP course offerings in the various usual high school subject areas (e.g. computer architecture, multivariable calculus, discrete math, signals and systems, organic chemistry), plus some less common academic elective courses (e.g. business, forensics, philosophy, international relations, choice of topical 12th grade English, kinesiology, topical foreign language literature courses, technical theater, stone carving, etc.) and physical education activities, but students are not required to be advanced in any particular subject (like Basis requires students to be for math). One would expect that most students are advanced in at least some subjects, though.</p>
<p>Note that the #4 and #5 schools are non-magnet/charter public schools which are not the highest API schools in their districts (although both have high APIs, particularly #5).</p>
<p>Currently, Harker is few known non-parochial HS in the area, so they feel they can demand whatever they like. Harker fees is twice that of Basis, so I question if they provide twice as much ? Harker has g+ and g++ to advance kids one or two level higher in Middle school Math. If you live in decent public school their g+ will similar to what you can get in your public school, g++ will be similar to the advance Math if offered(or what was offered before common core).</p>
<p>Harker suggest kids to take 4(or 8 max) AP courses. Contrary, Basis is suggesting 11 AP courses and capstone courses. I enrolled my DD Harker’s summer program it wasn’t that intense. Administrators claimed they intentionally make it easier in summer which I doubt. </p>
<p>I’m not concerned about common core, but way it’s taught. Last year, the school didn’t have new books and I don’t know what they are teaching, so I don’t like to be in dark. This year will one more pilot year, so I’m hoping my child wouldn’t lose much by changing schools. </p>
<p>@paminaz, Basis don’t have a Trigonometry course. how do they work around it ? </p>
<p>I was reading in other thread that Basis teachers don’t like to give recommendation for kids who are trying to leave after middle school. Is this true ?</p>
<p>Most algebra2 textbooks have a few chapters on trigonometry. I think there is also some trigonometry covered in precalculus. I don’t think traditionally it’s been taught as a separate class (it wasn’t in my home state, and we had I think a pretty standard state-defined curriculum), though apparently that seems to be more common now. My impression is that these separate classes are being offered because so many students have weak math skills.</p>