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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Not going to happen.  BASIS' approach has always been to weed around half the middle school kids out before HS, to grind them into submission by making them miserable. This has been their MO in Arizona since the early 90s.  Trust me, the kids who can't move at a "brisker pace" will mostly be gone by 9th grade.  You simply need to be patient for the Hobbesian results to kick in.[/quote]

BASIS parent in AZ here.  That's not at all how it works, and many of the kids are very happy at BASIS.  Mine absolutely love it!  It is true that the 5th grade class is around 180 kids, but only about 90 seniors graduate per year.  Most of it is not due to weeding out the kids, but rather kids leave to attend the local magnet high school (think TJ-lite), move out of area, want a new social scene, or want competitive high school sports teams.  None of these reasons for leaving are that the kids were weeded out.  I would imagine that DC BASIS is similar, where many families use it for middle school and then switch out for high school.

The main reason BASIS graduates only half of their starting kids is that the system is set up to make it nearly impossible for new kids to join after maybe 6th grade.  If a kid leaves after 8th grade, they can't simply offer the slot to another kid.  [b]Few kids would meet the pre-requisites if they hadn't been in BASIS all along.[/b]  At least at my kids' school, to join in 9th grade, a kid would need to be ready for pre-calculus, be ready for an AP level history class, and have a full year of high school level foreign language.  There isn't a lot of wiggle room to accommodate kids who aren't at that level.

[/quote]
Nonsense. BASIS exceptionalism gets old. It's not all that unusual for students in DC privates to take, and excel at, calculus by 10th grade, along with a few at Walls and Wilson.  The foreign language requirements at BASIS are light (absurdly so) for kids coming in from strong K-8 language immersion programs, years in weekend heritage schools, bilingual and bilterate homes etc.  AP history in 9th or 10th grade is nothing special in the District.  There doesn't need to be wiggle room if BASIS DC would bother to identify and admit 9th graders who could handle their curriculum, which is hardly stratospheric.  Some private school parents would switch to public if 9th grade at BASIS were an option, to save dough.

PS. I've interviewed one or two Basis DC applicants for my Ivy every year for the past five years. None has been admitted.  I've interviewed a few stronger applicants from Walls and Wilson who were admitted.  [/quote]

I interview for an Ivy too and Basis DC kids seem fine.  For instance, this last year, kids were admitted to Yale and Harvard.  I guess you didn't go to one of those schools and/or didn't interview those kids.

For a school that opened only 9 years ago in DC and has a senior class of around 50 kids, Basis DC has nothing to worry about. [/quote]

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