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[quote=Anonymous]This thread is pretty lame.

1) If your kid is not academically inclined and you are only sending your kid to BASIS because your in-bounds school is really bad, it is probably not going to work out for you.  Also, if the reason you picked BASIS is just because your kid didn’t get into Latin, that is another bad reason.  Please do your research before you send your kid to BASIS and make a different choice.

2) Sure, there is a lot of attrition at BASIS but that is only because 1) BASIS generally doesn’t admit after 5th grade; 2) they don’t socially promote; and 3) they don’t backfill.  Moreover, kids that leave the school depart for many reasons.  Some leave because they can’t handle the curriculum (see #1 above).  Those parents didn’t do their research and made a bad choice.  Others leave for Walls, private, or some non-DC school elsewhere in the region, U.S., or overseas.  Some of the kids who leave BASIS are struggling.  Others are excelling. The fact that high school classes are smaller than middle school classes just reflects the situation that BASIS finds itself in DC and its charter; it says nothing about the merits of the school.

3) While BASIS isn’t perfect, it is far better than the alternatives for an academically inclined kid.  That is reflected in the PARCC scores for BASIS, which are significantly better than other public schools in DC, especially after a few years.  Since a couple of posters mentioned Latin, just look at the 4+ PARCC scores for those 2 schools for high school, after kids have been at the schools for a while:

BASIS

ELA 4+ 92.06
Math 4+ 66.12

Latin

ELA 4+ 70.71
Math 4+ 30.47

Anyone claiming that Latin is on par academically with BASIS is just wrong.

4) BASIS parents can attest that the curriculum at the school is very rigorous and kids are learning a lot.  Anyone asserting that the curriculum is “narrow” is way off the mark.  BASIS kids learn a huge amount of advanced material and the curriculum is far broader and more comprehensive than any other public school in DC.  For instance, kids start taking physics, chemistry, and biology in 6th grade and continue through 12th grade.  That is hardly “narrow.”

5) People complaining about the curriculum ignore the fact that all BASIS schools, public and private have the same curriculum.  BASIS has 11 schools in the USN&WR top 100 public high schools in the country, including the #1 school in the entire U.S., and Niche ranks BASIS McLean as the top private school in the DMV--ahead of Sidwell, GDS, and STA/NCS.  The BASIS curriculum is fine.

6) Basically, a lot of these posts are just sour grapes: parents sent their kids to BASIS without doing their research or because they didn’t have good middle school options (their in-bounds middle school was bad, they didn’t have money for private, or they didn’t want to move to the suburbs).  They then come to DCUM and bash the school to cover up their poor decisions.

Enough.  Just leave BASIS to the rest of us.
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