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[quote=Anonymous]Would you like to hear from a graduate?

An Arizona transplant my parents know in DC sent me the link to this board.  Good that you folks are facing the music early on.

I was a member of one of the first graduating classes of Basis Tucson.  I graduated from Stanford, majoring in economics, and now work in finance in NYC.

Am I grateful for the middle and high school education I received?  Yes, absolutely.  Do I think that I could have received a better public school education?  No question.  How do I know this?  Mainly because I had college classmates who graduated from superior public schools for the math-oriented, particularly Thomas Jefferson, Bronx Science and Bronx Tech.

My experiences at Basis lead me to favor selective admissions for most public middle and high school programs.  Basis' approach to admissions is inefficient and unkind: slowly weed out those who aren't cut out for the education on offer, but, for the most part, lack better options so they turn up as long as they last anyway.  The "self-selecting" mantra simply doesn't work well as it promotes waste of scarce public resources and an undercurrent of meaness.  It's parents who select in most cases, not kids, and parents often aren't the best judges of what their kids are capable of.

Basis would have been far better off subjecting us all to a battery of tests to determine if we had the right stuff at 11, and aggressively recruiting low-income students who could cut it, than to cull around half of our classmates as the years went by.  Also, we really should have been put on one of two tracks, a math/science track or a humanities track, not lumped together as potential quantitative stars.  I lost close friends to the culling machine and grew to resent the way the school worked.  A charter school open to everyone.  Only in theory.  If you didn't have a great memory, a good head for quantitative work, and a mentor or two who took a shine to you (or a family member who could mentor) you didn't thrive, or necessarily even last, no matter how hard you tried.  And we weren't steered toward creative projects like the NYC magnet school kids are.  It was a solid education but not a terribly dynamic one.

I've read that humanities AP tests are being modified to make scoring high less contingent on rote learning - amen for that because it means that Basis will have to adapt, and improve, like it or not, to continue to meet with success.

Good luck all of you.  Don't be afraid to question and pressure the imported-from-AZ machine.  The model needs tweaking in a big way.

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