Anonymous wrote:I read the half dozen posts above. 10:18 talked about how some parents DC parents “advocate” for language learning to start before 8th grade. We wasted our time on such advocacy with other parents last year. My advice to any prospective BASIS parent who’s serious about raising bilingual children and teens is to think twice about enrolling in the first place because the program’s leadership isn’t on your wavelength in DC or Arizona. The new linguistic classes are just silly.

Anonymous wrote:I read the half dozen posts above. 10:18 talked about how some parents DC parents “advocate” for language learning to start before 8th grade. We wasted our time on such advocacy with other parents last year. My advice to any prospective BASIS parent who’s serious about raising bilingual children and teens is to think twice about enrolling in the first place because the program’s leadership isn’t on your wavelength in DC or Arizona. The new linguistic classes are just silly.

Anonymous wrote:The reality is that the bar is set remarkably low on the language acquisition front in DC public schools, other than where a handful of Spanish immersion elementary schools and the advanced DCI Spanish track are concerned. BASIS franchise leaders and DC admins don’t care if students achieve in language learning past the AP level. If you care as a family, you’re setting yourself up for a good deal of frustration if you enroll so, yea, best to make a different plan for MS and HS. In our experience, there’s no point in advocating for language instruction at BASIS before 8th grade, or anything more than beginning instruction from 8th grade. Arizona HQ has never been on board with more serious language instruction, meaning that the concept is a non-starter. No more to be said.

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Anonymous wrote:Surprise, surprise on language study. BASIS leaders believe that students can’t walk and chew gum at the same time (study of a modern language from 5th to 7th grades would interfere with science and math challenge). BS policy that parents embrace for lack of a viable MS alternative.

Wow, this is insane and just plain ignorant. Plenty of research shows benefits of language education in both native and non-native languages. In fact, the single most determinant factor in early childhood cognitive development is shear exposure to words. The more words the better — of any language. Memorizing letters, colors etc does not really do much. I was considering BASIS (MS is a ways off for us) before reading this. Would never send my kid to a school that thinks language education needs to be “held off” until 8th grade?! Lmao. Are they unaware that ROI on language education steeply declines around this age?

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Anonymous wrote:Surprise, surprise on language study. BASIS leaders believe that students can’t walk and chew gum at the same time (study of a modern language from 5th to 7th grades would interfere with science and math challenge). BS policy that parents embrace for lack of a viable MS alternative.

Wow, this is insane and just plain ignorant. Plenty of research shows benefits of language education in both native and non-native languages. In fact, the single most determinant factor in early childhood cognitive development is shear exposure to words. The more words the better — of any language. Memorizing letters, colors etc does not really do much. I was considering BASIS (MS is a ways off for us) before reading this. Would never send my kid to a school that thinks language education needs to be “held off” until 8th grade?! Lmao. Are they unaware that ROI on language education steeply declines around this age?

Anonymous wrote:The BASIS franchise wasn’t founded by educators, it was started by the Blocks, non educators.

Few BASIS parents see anything wrong with their language policy. If you’re the kind of parent who cares about bilingualism, best to stay away. You’ll be treated like a pest at BASIS.

Anonymous wrote:The BASIS franchise wasn’t founded by educators, it was started by the Blocks, non educators.

Few BASIS parents see anything wrong with their language policy. If you’re the kind of parent who cares about bilingualism, best to stay away. You’ll be treated like a pest at BASIS.

Anonymous wrote:Surprise, surprise on language study. BASIS leaders believe that students can’t walk and chew gum at the same time (study of a modern language from 5th to 7th grades would interfere with science and math challenge). BS policy that parents embrace for lack of a viable MS alternative.

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Anonymous wrote:PP isn't wrong that AP language tests aren't tough by high school standards internationally. They're only tough by (low) American standards.

+100. AP tests, especially in languages, are incredibly easy, and don't need immersion, heritage language classes, or anything of the kind to get a 5. Really, no student should be getting less than a 5, but because there are low standards, this is what happens.

Anonymous wrote:PP isn't wrong that AP language tests aren't tough by high school standards internationally. They're only tough by (low) American standards.

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Anonymous wrote:Post above is misleading. BASIS doesn't impress where language instruction is concerned, other than if you're mired in relativism in the DC public schools context. Sidwell does shine, yes, particularly for Chinese.

What happens at BASIS is that 5th graders who rock in after having been in public immersion language programs for many years aren't permitted to continue with the modern languages they've been studying at BASIS in the 5th, 6th or 7th grades. And if they restart a language in 8th grade (the first year BASIS DC permits modern language study), they're treated like beginning students. Object and you're advised to hit the road for DCI. A few BASIS language teachers slip advanced students tougher work than the beginners they're in class with, but the practice isn't authorized by admins.

More than 80% of AP Chinese test takers in this country score 5s, the highest % of any AP exam by a long shot. At BASIS, it's common for juniors and seniors to score 3s and 4s on Chinese, because they're getting too little too late to ace this rather easy exam.

Maybe try therapy to help you get over the fact that BASIS doesn't run its curriculum exactly as you want? Posting multiple times in every single BASIS thread is nuts...

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Anonymous wrote: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.

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.

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.

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

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.)

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.