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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, if you're going from the BASIS middle school to a private, the most important question to answer is how good a fit the private is for your kid.

If the private is WIS, stressing fluency in languages, that's one situation.  If the private is a parochial offering no more than AP Spanish and French as languages that doesn't knock it out of the park on STEM but expects students to write far more than any DC public school, another situation altogether.

You see what I'm getting at. Plan accordingly.[/quote]

This. If you've lived in DC, you have played this game of finding the best school for your kid multiple times already. Do the same for private school, and your kid will be set.[/quote]

The biggest adjustment for our family from BASIS to GDS has been on the reading and writing front. In the BASIS middle school, our kid was given writing assignments that were corrected and graded maybe once a week, if that. At the new school, he's graded on writing, often fairly brutally, almost every school day. The math and science aren't as tough as at BASIS, but everything else has been a real step up. He has to read at least twice as much as he did at BASIS and annotate reading assignments in detail. Overall, his classes are better taught, generally by older, capable teachers who've been on the scene for a long time. GDS doesn't do AP classes, which we like. He's had to adjust to a system where he selects more than half of his classes, and is in much smaller classes, which he found intimidating at first (nowhere to hide). GDS is much more diverse than BASIS geographically and ethnically, with many foreign and bilingual (and trilingual) students enrolled, another adjustment. We're grateful for the math and science he learned at BASIS, but even more grateful to have been able to afford to leave (we get good fi aid at GDS). In our experience, at a private, you can raise any issue you want with admins, or elected parent leaders, and get a fair hearing, not our experience at BASIS. We're not the only BASIS family at GDS.[/quote]

Considering making this switch and this is very helpful. A deeper focus on writing is one of the reasons we are looking elsewhere. [/quote]

I have a 9th grader in Basis and there is a lot more writing than there was in middle school. I wish they had more in middle school, which also would have made the transition less traumatic. The first month of this year, we heard a lot of "Oh my god! I have to write an entire paragraph tonight!" There are certainly advantages to private, but if one of your concerns is the lack of writing, do know that it improves in HS. (Granted, I have no idea how the Basis HS writing instruction and workload compares to that in a private HS.)[/quote]

True enough.  I am sure that the writing instruction is better at GDS than Basis but, hey, that is part of what you are spending $50,000/year for.

If you are that concerned, you might as well stay at Basis and use some of that $50,000 for a writing tutor.[/quote]

I'm the PP thinking about switching. Stronger writing focus is only one factor we are considering in our decision to leave. [/quote]

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