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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous] ...More would crack the most highly competitive colleges. A few of the most ambitious students wind up taking AP exams in subjects that BASIS doesn't teach at other schools..[/quote]

BASIS kids this year (and in years past) have done very well in terms of college acceptance - especially when you consider the small class size.

[/quote]  Right, no room for improvement at BASIS.  None.
[/quote]

Every school has room for improvement, but for a class of ~60, from a non-application, free high school, they have great results (Yale, Penn, UVA, JHU, McGill, Tufts, W&M, UCLA, UMD, VT, etc.)

You seem to have an axe to grind.  Maybe your kid didn't like it, or couldn't deal with the workload.  That's OK.

[/quote] Different PP here. My kid is a senior heading to a college admitting in the single digits in the fall.

You might be surprised to hear that I couldn't agree more that, with better support for students with unusual interests & backgrounds, greater scope for hands-on learning & more flexibility in the curriculum, BASIS DC could get even better college results without a bigger budget. Significantly better.

Frankly, half a dozen current seniors might have cracked Ivies if they'd been treated more intelligently by the franchise from start to finish (particularly re how senior year is used). It's no joke that BASIS wastes the strong language backgrounds of dozens of DC 5th graders by preventing them from studying languages they come in with at the advanced level prior to sophomore or junior year. BASIS does this because they can, not because it's smart. I say this as a former DCI feeder parent whose kid wasn't remotely challenged in language classes at BASIS.

We're glad to be at the finish line with a program that could and should aim higher. In a nutshell, BASIS is stuck in an earlier decade in its planning for elite college admissions, with parents like me picking up the slack by providing essential (and none too cheap) inputs for years before acceptance notices go out. [/quote]

Would love to hear more about the essential inputs you provided to help make BASIS work for your kid in high school.[/quote]

Kid prepped for AP Drawing and Art History independently by taking local drawing classes for adults and working with a tutor. They attended a 4-wk Concordia camp in MN after 10th. Kid took an AP language exam in 11th. They went abroad for language immersion after 11th as prep for a much harder Cambridge A-Level exam in Nov of sr year (taken at an intl school in another city). Kid is set on college pre-med, so attended the Tufts Mini Med School summer camp. In high school, kid built up to EMT training (to be completed this summer) by taking first aid courses at the Red Cross training center in Rosslyn. Kid volunteered as a patient services helper at two area hospitals. [/quote]

Thanks for sharing this. So it sounds like you had both academics and extracurriculars that you assisted with finding outside of BASIS.

Gulp. I'm not sure I'm up to the task.[/quote]

If that's what you're looking for for your kid, there's no public or charter school in DC that's going to give them that, so you're going to be doing it regardless. But obviously you do not have to. [/quote]

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