KPHO Phoenix has the kind of report about BASIS charter schools I’ve wanted to see in the MSM for a long time. Yes, it says, BASIS schools are strong academically and have a rigorous curriculum, but they shouldn’t be compared directly to other public schools because of their selective student bodies. It’s a point I’ve made many times before, as have others, a point BASIS has worked hard to refute. Now it looks like other are beginning to catch on, and BASIS is being forced to change its “We’re simply doing a better job than all those other schools” tune a bit.
Watch the whole five minute piece. It’s quite good and lets both sides have their say. The intro summarizes the report well:
“They are ranked among the top public schools in the country, and they’re located right here in Arizona. The BASIS schools are also facing some criticism, that they fudge the rankings by graduating only a fraction of the students who enroll.”
A few of the statements in the report that come from BASIS are defensive half truths, but they’re actually closer to honest and accurate than what I’m used to hearing hear from the schools’ spokespeople.
My feeling about the charter school chain is, Let BASIS be BASIS. Let students who benefit from the school reap the benefits. But don’t use BASIS as a way to trash other public schools by saying, “Look, we’re doing it, why can’t they do the same?” Graduates from BASIS are an academic elite, probably even more so than at most top ranked private high schools. They’re the kind of kids who would thrive academically wherever they went to school. If BASIS schools had student bodies like most other Arizona public schools, they would find their sky-high academic expectations would cause frustration and failure for a sizable portion of their students.
This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2015.
Public schools have choen to be inclusive the last 50 years. Leave them alone. It’s what they want to do.
BASIS is a selective school for students in the higher level of achievement. They do not successfully work with children with special needs. Their forte is working with very high achievers and it shows with their success rate. This pulls successful students away from the regular public schools which lowers peer competition as well as the over-all test scores for those schools. So we see a very skewed comparison with this specialized school in relation to the regular public school achievement rates. For those who are interested and CURIOUS (vs those who are closed minded and fall for the pablum from many news sources) I suggest you research multiple resources so you can receive an accurate and unbiased view of the sad state of our regular public schools. I know money does not solve all….unless your are being starved to the point where our high quality teachers are fleeing the state in horrible numbers due to the poor pay/respect…thank your legislators and, if you are the uninformed/selfish voter, yourself for our disastrous state of our public schools.
Re: the last line of the article that implies that many Az. school kids would be frustrated by “sky-high academic expectations”, I have a little bit of a different take. Conversely, if public schools dropped students who didn’t do well they too could graduate a tiny fraction of the students who entered and rely on some other system (what would that be for public schools) to finish out the students’ education. The cruel irony is that even as many use the BASIS experience as a reason why public schools should all be privatized, BASIS itself depends on that same public school system to take the kids it drops. To my mind (throwback to the sixties or to the Constitution of both the state of Arizona and the country that I may be….) the public school commitment to educate ALL children is not a sideline, its the essence of public schools. If BASIS and other charters are to use public money, they should have the same public accountability, and the same requirements (standards) that are set for other recipients of public monies for education (i.e. certified teachers, etc.).
As a parent with a child in BASIS I hope that every parent looks thoroughly for the school that fits the child. We have tried public, private and now BASIS and it is a good fit for us. It disturbs me the negative comments on the school but my child LOVES it. He is in 3rd grade this year and over the summer was able to haggle a price with a shop owner in Mandarin in China town. It is the most comprehensive education curriculum I have been a part of to date. My son can now read sheet music, speak basic Mandarin, divide fractions and understand grammar better than I do now. His teachers are loving and attentive. It is hard work but most things that are worth anything are. Not every kid is going to love it but for children like my son it has been a blessing.
Thank you for being a great parent my opinion.
I like how they didn’t feel the need to get a student’s perspective.
That’s none of their business. The media knows best about everything. Just look at all they have accomplished.
“Let BASIS be BASIS. Let students who benefit from the school reap the benefits. But don’t use BASIS as a way to trash other public schools by saying, ‘Look, we’re doing it, why can’t they do the same?'”
Agreed on the point that Basis’s methods are not generalizable and their results should not be used to denigrate public schools, which, in working with more diverse populations, can’t achieve the same results. (And, as Ms. Putnam-Hidalgo points out, we should keep in mind that Basis’s results are enabled by the fact that they, unlike public schools, have another school system “backing them up” which can receive and educate the students they flunk out.)
But what about the fact that Basis’s methods, which distort the rankings game, are forcing negative changes in other local institutions that feel the need to maintain their rankings? Basis delivers education in a way that addresses a very narrow sliver of the range of needs within the population that must be educated with our tax dollars. Its schools take in hundreds, flunk many of those who enroll out, and graduate classes of between 20 and 30 students every year. Meanwhile, TUSD’s University High School, which currently admits 300-something students every year and attempts to graduate 200-something students, seemingly in an effort not to drop in the rankings vis a vis Basis, is moving in the direction of eliminating non-AP options for its enrolled students. Beginning with the 2013-2014 school year, (which was, coincidentally or not — it’s not clear — the first full school year after the current board majority assumed control of the district) UHS eliminated Honors Chemistry and Honors Physics and began requiring all students to complete AP Chemistry and AP Physics to graduate. These are AP science classes which a large number of UHS’s enrolled students do not want or need to take and in which their previous math experience has not prepared them to succeed.
It is an extremely unpopular policy with parents and students, one that has driven the AP exam flunk rates up and seems to have driven the attrition rates up as well. The policy change has been brought to the Weekly’s attention more than once in these comment streams, but it is never mentioned in Weekly pieces about UHS and Basis. In theory, this publication supports “progressive” and humane education, but in practice there is little or nothing that TUSD does that violates progressive principles — whether it is implementing Basis-style, rankings-driven policies in its “flagship” college prep or staffing many classrooms in west side schools with a rotating crew of subs and then outsourcing sub recruitment — that will be investigated and reported on here. Strange.
And, to take on a related topic: Salpointe is both more racially integrated and more responsible and humane in its policies as a “college prep” institution that either the charter Basis or the “public school” UHS. It provides a balanced, flexible program which meets the full range of needs in the population it admits, not a “survival of the fittest” experience or a pressure-cooker AP cram extravaganza. But because Salpointe is not a “public” school, the Weekly generally argues that it is not valid for our tax dollars to be spent in tax credit programs that fund financial aid and enable students who are not wealthy to benefit from the kind of education Salpointe provides. Evidently it IS fine for our tax dollars to be spent subjecting students to inhumane programs and policies in charters and public schools that are not sufficiently racially integrated — let BASIS be BASIS, and let TUSD do what it needs to do to keep up! — but it is not fine for our tax dollars to be used to enable students to benefit from a humane college preparatory educational program in a Catholic school with an appropriately ethnically and racially diverse student body.
The value system evidenced here is, in my opinion, somewhat distorted. Whatever the Weekly’s criterion for a “correct” educational policy may be, I’m afraid it seems NOT to be the policy’s ability to support humane conditions or integration in our schools.
I think the media is one sided. I think like any school there are pros and cons. I think raising the bar to higher standards isn’t hurting our kids. My child has special needs and has a 504 plan and is keeping up with the information being taught. I think he’d have the same struggles at public school as well since he doesn’t qualify for an IEP. The school does work to try to help him, but ultimately he has to learn to be organized and responsible if he’s going to be successful so I don’t mind that he has to try harder and find tools to work through his disability. It would have been easy to pull him out and put him back into public school but I think that wouldn’t be in his best interest. This is his 3rd year attending Basis. I have another child in his 3rd year as well who is thriving and is excited about learning.
Choice is what parents are after. One size fits all is not going to work for all so we must support each other’s ability to choose what is best for our own children.
Choice should be supported within a range of options that are academically valid, financially transparent, and humane. There is currently not enough regulation in the AZ education system to ensure that “choices” parents who are not professional educators make are in all cases supporting the best interests of the state’s children, or the common good.
TUSD administrators need to understand that UHS parents don’t want forced change in the school’s policies because decision makers care more about keeping up with Basis in the rankings than they care about maintaining policies that serve the best interests of the population that attends UHS. The UHS parent population is well informed about education and has options. By-in-large, they do not like the Basis model. If they had liked it, they would have enrolled their children in Basis (or maintained their enrollment there — UHS receives many refugees from Basis middle school programs, and often these students have to go back a year or two in math after entering UHS because the math instruction delivered by uncertified teachers at Basis did not provide them with a firm foundation for moving forward in their studies).
Your first sentence has been violated by TUSD. They seem to know less than parents do. The UHS parent population is not much more informed than any other involved parents. I would bet that some home schoolers, private school parents, and some charter parents are milesahead of them.
Ah, the “competition” mentality rears its ugly head again.
There should be no competition between parents utilizing different school systems to demonstrate who is “more informed” and who is “miles ahead” of whom.
The point that UHS parents are “well informed” and “have options” was not made to provoke Basis parents to engage in competition with UHS parents. It was made in the direction of UHS / TUSD admin, to point out what attrition rates are no doubt already demonstrating: UHS parents will move if policies at UHS continue to trend in the “Basis” direction — those with options will move (and some HAVE been moving) to Salpointe, to The Gregory School, to Green Fields, to Tanque Verde, to Catalina Foothills, etc.
But it’s quite possible that some decision-makers are more interested in maintaining UHS’s rankings than in keeping down attrition rates at the school. Sadly, I can’t say that whether or not policies are HUMANE seems to be much on the view screen these days in our public school systems. The reasons for that are complex and some of them are lodged in the business community and in the legislatures. It’s not an easy problem to solve.
I teach for BASIS and I can tell you right now that we do not select our student bodies. From the large pot of applicants a computer generated lottery is run. We still have students with special needs, 504s, IEPs, you name it. The reason we have a small graduating class is because those students started with BASIS years ago when they would only enroll maybe 20-30 into a grade level. Due to the rigor of the curriculum we cannot bring in a student midway between 5-12 or K-12 as they most likely would not have the academic background or prereqs to succeed. Therefore, those graduating classes have not been filled out more as they reach 12th grade. As BASIS has grown larger we have enrolled larger quantities of students in the lower grade levels, so in 5-7 years BASIS will have larger graduating classes. The attrition rate is only around 10%, which would happen to any school except we cannot bring in students to replace them as other schools can. Whether or not you agree with the rankings, BASIS works. Just ask any of the college counsellors who can tell you how many millions (yes, millions!) their seniors all together earned in scholarship money (even with “such small graduating classes”). With so much complaint about the low quality of education in AZ, I am amazed about how much more complaint I am seeing when BASIS strives to reverse that trend. We as BASIS teachers push ourselves to reach every single student in our classroom, and I have seen so many struggling students who end up thriving once they realize their own strength. Also at BASIS, we as teachers hold office hours several hours a week where students can come in and get extra help on topics. We also devote a half hour each day with them just for organization checks and study skills. We don’t throw a tough curriculum at them then hang them out there to dry. If a student does not take advantage then that is their choice, but how many public schools give extra support like that?
David — if you are still reading the comments on this piece, do you have any data on the actual attrition rates at the various Basis campuses?
Ashley, what you said about the graduating classes being small because the original elementary school classes for those groups were small is incorrect. Let’s look at BASIS Scottsdale, one of the newer BASIS schools in Arizona. The most recent graduating class of 2015 had 44 students. When that same Class of 2015 was in the 5th grade, it had 127 students. So the graduating class was about a third the size of the original class. The Class of 2014 had 121 students in the 6th grade (its largest year) and graduated 35 students. The Class of 2013 had 101 students in the 7th grade (its largest year) and graduated 30. The Class of 2012 had 53 students in the 6th grade and graduated 19. The Class of 2011 had 62 students in the 7th grade (its largest year) and graduated 20.
You can find similar numbers at other BASIS schools. Student attrition, which is largest from the 8th to the 9th grade — middle school to high school — is built into the BASIS model especially since, as you say, BASIS doesn’t replace students who leave. That makes for an increasingly selective student body.
Ashley it doesn’t matter what the truth is. You are dealing with fairness freaks that would give nukes to the Iranians. They refuse to believe the truth.
“Ashley” writes, “BASIS works. Just ask any of the college counsellors who can tell you how many millions (yes, millions!) their seniors all together earned in scholarship money (even with “such small graduating classes”).”
She is no doubt doing what many high schools that aggressively recruit students do: adding together all the “offers” graduating seniors receive, though each senior can only accept one of those offers. The actual amount of money granted and received is much smaller than what is advertised to prospective parents in misleading statements like “how many millions (yes, millions!)…seniors…earned in scholarship money.”
What a sad commentary on what “education” has become in this country, that “YOU CAN EARN SCHOLARSHIP MONEY” is waved in the face of parents to try to attract them into a school system.
The cost of the most competitive colleges has skyrocketed, but most of them don’t offer merit aid — they offer need-based aid, so what the academic performance of seniors is may matter in admissions, but it matters little to how much families end up paying at the so-called “best” colleges.
The success of an educational program should not be gauged by the amount of scholarship money the graduating class earns, and education should address the “whole person,” not just the academic side of the student. Education should be about developing curiosity, engaging in meaningful inquiry, and learning to think and write critically, not about passing multiple choice AP exams in every subject and writing acceptable cookie-cutter “essays” on the exams’ “free response” sections. A “successful” secondary high school program should allow time to engage in athletics, the fine arts and community service, and should promote students leading balanced lives, not exhausting themselves in cram sessions for “AS-MANY-AP-COURSES-AS-YOU-CAN-POSSIBLY-TAKE!!!” “AP-COURSES-IN-EVERY-SUBJECT-AREA-WHETHER-IT-PLAYS-TO-YOUR-PERSONAL-STRENGTHS-OR-INTERESTS-OR-NOT!!!”
The sad FACT is that the existence of Basis and the way its methods inflate its rankings puts pressure on other schools within the system to adopt the same methods, methods which in my opinion do not serve the best interests of students or of the broader community.
(FYI, I did my due diligence before enrolling my children in middle school, and observed at a Basis campus. I had an interesting conversation with the 20-something-year-old head of school, who had no degrees in education and had never taught, but she had an MBA, and that’s what matters in schools, right? She explained to me that (at that time) Basis teachers were not required to have teaching certificates or to have taken courses in pedagogy and child development, but they did have a brief summer “boot camp” in classroom “management” before they started teaching. I also observed in three BASIS classrooms. Perhaps Basis has changed in the last seven years, but what I saw at the time was some of the worst “teaching” I have ever had the misfortune to observe, and, as a teacher with two master’s degrees from the institution where John Dewey taught and wrote, I’ve seen a lot. This was not — and is not — the sort of “educational” program I want my children to participate in. Maybe it works for some and maybe it produces good results in the all-important RANKINGS, but the conversations I’ve had with a number of Basis parents and former Basis parents indicate that a number of those for whom this school “works” are hiring expensive supplementary tutors and many are foregoing or severely limiting the types of activities that usually go into preparing the kind of well-rounded people most competitive colleges are looking for in their applicants.)
This comment will no doubt be copiously “disliked” by BASIS fans and will generate all kinds of negative blow-back in this comment stream, and that’s perfectly fine with me. BASIS parents, teachers and administrators can like what they like in “education” and tell anyone who will listen to them all about it, as they commonly do. But occasionally those with different opinions — and direct experience of better educational philosophies and methods — need to make their voices heard.
One of my gripes with BASIS is the salary that the Blocks take and their non-transparent corporation that funds the schools. When we knew how much they were making, it was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Money that comes from taxpayers should be completely transparent.
And Dewy Fan, thanks for mentioning that Basis doesn’t have certified teachers. That’s another way the Blocks get more money for themselves. Others might read some teacher comments at: http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/BASIS-ed-…
Many of us fought against the “establishment” when we were young. Now it seems that some of us have become the establishment defending the past instead of wanting to see change and progress. Basis is an experiment that should be replicated with other kids who have different skill sets instead of defending a failing model.
Is there anywhere other than charter schools where an entity that is 100% supported by our tax dollars is not required to reveal salaries? I’ve been wondering about it and have not seen much written.
One of the commenters here opines, “Basis is an experiment that should be replicated….”
And should we also experiment with staffing hospitals with those who don’t have M.D.’s? No doubt some patients will survive when treated by those who have no medical training.
There is a knowledge base in the field of education that matters. Though this is true in all the subject areas, it is especially true in the case of math pedagogy. Having a degree in math is not enough. Whether, before beginning to teach, you have spent a sufficient amount of time under the direction of a qualified university faculty member studying how children learn math concepts and mastering the use of effective classroom methods and materials for building math competence will make a difference in the quality and effectiveness of the math instruction you are subsequently able to deliver to students.
A recent reference check for a U of A grad student who tutors in math and science found that the majority of the tutor’s clients were employing her to help their Basis middle school students understand the math being “taught” in the school.
Is a hospital effective when you have to hire a doctor on the side to supplement the treatment it offers? No. And a school that doesn’t find itself able to deliver classroom instruction in a way that meets the learning needs of most students should not be considered effective, either.
Do public schools have to publish pension incomes?
Do public schools have to publish pension incomes?
FYI…. David S was making the point, which many missed. BASIS should not be compared to regular public schools because of the selectivity of BASIS. (Yes they admit many of varying levels of ability but how many make it all the way through the school?)
There were some negative comments about UHS. As of the printing of the publication, UHS ranks 17th in the nation in achievement. Now, compare the teacher/student ratio of UHS to all the other schools listed . UHS is 34/1. Every other high achieving school on the list has less kids per teacher. The closest that I saw was 30/1 and that too stood out tremendously in the schools who ranked highly. Most teacher/student ratio was much lower. Interestingly, under that category BASIS does not have the information available. Surely they knew when this was published how many students and teachers they have. http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-… .
There should be no discussion about comparing the schools. They are very different. UHS does extremely well. http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-…
I am happy for those that are happy with BASIS and they feel their children received a good education. I want that for all children. However no one should trash UHS or other public schools in comparison.
Guardians, you are correct that UHS does well, but do not forget that UHS has admission criteria that includes entrance test scores and GPA. BASIS does not screen out those who apply in anyway, so you are correct, comparing a school that screens with one that does not is not fair.
Yes but many drop out of Basis because of the standards set which are the same for all (which is a passive screening) whereas UHS is clear that it is a school for the gifted and talented as part of TUSD’s bigger mission to fill the needs of all children. If there are special needs or diversity of instruction is necessary there are many choices in TUSD schools and parents are guided to those programs.
There are many different programs in TUSD with people certified in those areas whereas BASIS does not have that to the best of my knowledge. That is why, and I repeat, the schools and focus of those schools are different. They cannot be compared.
I love TUSD because of the vast range of children they service. I shared a little while ago that my son works with someone who has a 4-year-old who (now diagnosed) is autistic. Because my son called me and I knew about ‘Child Find’ that child was put in a preschool Sp.Ed. class within weeks of the father’s call. Now TUSD doesn’t diagnose because they are Sp.Ed. teachers but they do know where to send parents for a diagnosis who are lost and do not know where to get help . Like David S. says… no comparison what BASIS does and UHS/TUSD does.
Guardians: David S. and others in the anti-Charter camp have been making the point that Basis is selective for so long and so persistently that at this point NO ONE has missed the point, not even the mainstream media. The fact that David’s point (which contradicts charter movement propaganda but is as obvious as the broad side of a barn to anyone who knows education and has gotten anywhere near BASIS) is finally becoming more broadly understood is the subject of this post about the Phoenix TV station.
There’s not much to be said about BASIS’s selectivity any more except, “Congratulations, David. Thanks for gathering data on BASIS and flogging that point repeatedly until the media finally started catching on.”
(If you’re interested in this subject, you might want to read David’s April 2014 post about the rankings, UHS, and BASIS:
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2014/04/23/basis-and-university-high-are-top-us-high-schools-which-means
Here he points out that both UHS and BASIS are selective and thus neither of them should be compared in rankings with non-selective schools that deal with more cognitively and socio-economically diverse populations. So it’s clear that he is NOT of the opinion that there “is no comparison” between what UHS and BASIS do.)
FYI UHS’s US News & World Report rankings dropped from #4 in spring 2013 to #7 in spring 2014 to #17 in spring 2015, if I recall correctly. UHS fell in the Washington Post’s rankings from from # 28 last year to # 37 in 2015. In this context, some parties would like to find ways to counteract drops in the rankings. One way to do it is to increase the # of students taking AP exams and decrease the # of seniors.
The point of the posts in this stream which refer to UHS — a point which you seem to have entirely failed to understand — is that a desire to counteract drops in the rankings seems to be forcing changes to policies at UHS which used to be flexible and appropriate, given the known characteristic of gifted learners. (Gifted learners evidence something researchers refer to as “asynchronous development” — i.e. they are usually advanced in some subject areas but not in others; they almost never show uniform advanced development in every subject area.) Most people in the gifted education community are not in favor of “All-AP” curriculums like the one at BASIS, and many people at UHS are opposed to the policy changes made beginning with the 2013-2014 school year — policy changes which bring UHS closer to BASIS’s mode of operating, which is viewed as developmentally inappropriate.
Unless you know UHS and / or the field of gifted education well, it would probably be best for TUSD’s overall reputation if you refrained from commenting on these topics. You have written elsewhere that you work for the district. Your two posts above give a bad impression of one district employee’s current level of understanding of issues relating to gifted education and gifted program policies.
Correction to Guardian’s UHS Student : Teacher Ratios —
in US News and World Report’s 2015 Rankings:
University High School in Tolleson Arizona is listed with a student : teacher ratio of 34 : 1
TUSD’s University High School in Tucson Arizona is listed with a a student : teacher ratio of 21 : 1
Update from UHS: the interim principal, appointed in June, has (at least temporarily) corrected the bad policies discussed in this comment stream.
Let’s hope that appropriate gifted education policies (not BASIS-copycat policies) are maintained at UHS, going forward.
Salaries for all charter school employees, especially administrators, should be published because we all are paying them and have the right to know. Pensions for public school workers at all levels, on the other hand, are based on public information salaries from which they paid into a managed system that is also far more open than charter school administrators. Tax records should be open and available for all so that investigative journalists can publish them. Charter school salaries should not require a subpoena to be known to the taxpaying public.
As a student who recently graduated from BASIS, I think this article makes some good points. BASIS, especially going into the future, is going to be extremely selective in its student base. When you start teaching children mandarin in the 3rd grade for example, it’s impossible to join the system later on in one’s academic career because there is just too much catch up work to do. So unless you blossom academically in elementary school, you can forget ever attending BASIS. I can assure you I would have been completely unprepared to take the kind of academic load that BASIS offers in elementary school. By starting such an advanced education with such a limited scope at such a young age, BASIS will alienate any student’s who might have been prepared to take on a more advanced load later in their academic career.
It’s tragic, snobby, and inevitable.
I think basis is a terrible school honestly! Because if you think your child is such an achiever look at every great person in history most of them failed school. So have fun thinking your child is this perfect thing.
I had two children at Basis schools. One graduated and is in an excellent college with academic scholarships. The other one didn’t like the Basis experience and opted to go to a regular public high school instead. That one almost failed 5th grade at Basis and she would not have been dropped, as claimed here. Basis would simply have required her to repeat 5th grade, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
As someone who has graduated from basis I can attest to what a lot of people on here are saying. I did see a lot of my class leave, I started in high school and graduated with 25 I believe, but those whose left didn’t leave because they weren’t smart enough or capable enough, they left because they didn’t like the rigor that was present. I really do think that almost anyone could go through basis and succeed but that isn’t what everyone wants to do. I know people who thought about basis for high school but ultimately chose the public school because they wanted that experience. On On the other hand yes, a lot of people do have to higher outside tutors for especially the math classes but I think that this is a good thing and doesn’t show that the system is failing. I think it shows that these people who would have gone to a public school and taken the math that they were most comfortable taking, now have the opportunity to learn information that they wouldn’t otherwise have learned. And yes, sometimes that means an outside tutor or going to teachers office hours, because they are always there, or even getting help from the students in the class who do understand the material, but is that a bad thing? I think it teaches people first of all how to ask for help and second of all tragedy them that if they set their mind to something, they can do it. As for not producing adults who know how to think, I also think that is false. So many times in my classes I had great debates to really help foster my education and I think that the teachers really tryto keep everyone engaged. Now this is just me, and I know people who disagree with me and sure the basis model really isn’t for everyone but I don’t think of it as throwing them back to the public schools but more more so letting them so to an environment that they feel more comfortable in and can thrive there. What is wrong with a school catering to people who want to learn, get college credit, and really get a grasp for how much they can know if they put their mind to it? I am for the basis education not because how much scholarship I got for college how how many aps I took but because I do feel that it helped me on my path to becoming an intellectual. I really think about the information that I am given more than I did when I went to a public mmiddle school, and for that I hank basis and the wonderful teahers that I had there.
“a lot of people do have to higher [sic] outside tutors for especially the math classes but I think that this is a good thing and doesn’t show that the system is failing”
What about families that can’t afford to hire outside tutors? Is the BASIS system failing them, perhaps?
In a publicly funded school, whether or not the classroom teachers hired by a school system are able to make optimal use of the CLASS time given to them with students, and whether or not the concepts taught can be delivered successfully to the majority of students enrolled during the CLASS time allocated are factors relevant to assessing the quality and appropriateness of the education offered. If significant professional outside help is needed by the majority of students enrolled, there are problems with the competence of the classroom instructor and / or with the pace of instruction and / or with the quality of instructional materials used. Publicly funded K-12 classes in which you cannot succeed without expensive supplementary tutoring must be regarded as discriminatory by income level.
It cannot be true that “almost anyone could go through [B]asis and succeed” when you have provided testimony in your own commentary that many enrolled students rely on tutors to learn the content being taught. And if tutoring is needed in to succeed in math, then it’s a prerequisite for succeeding in science as well. You can’t master the content in AP science courses without understanding the math concepts these courses build on.
My child had an “accommodation” and BASIS was as responsive about it as other charter schools he had attended before a new BASIS school opened near enough that he could commute to it; I don’t think they neglect “special needs” any more than the average school, but this is not an area of excellence. Basis is not for everyone because it focuses almost solely on teaching classes, which means not limiting its teacher selection to union members or those with lots of “credentials”. Good teachers are asked to stay on, others fail their probation. Schools have a gym but no playfields and sports programs are at modest intramural level. Students are not “driven out” and those struggling academically are offered many hours of free tutoring plus mentoring by classmates a few years ahead. There is no tolerance for bullying and more than that, there is no bullying. None. The guiding belief is that raising expectations will raise performance. Students leave because they are free to embrace an easier lifestyle that involves less study and more time to play and socialize — the drop out rate is very high for the middle school to high school transition because students know they can coast through high school given their BASIS middle school education, that puts most of them at a junior or senior level in the average high school, there is that much difference. My son learned Chinese from a native speaker who taught it every day. A neighboring school offered this language but the teacher cam in once a week. The students got together and petitioned admin. to offer a computer science course and the school went out and contracted a qualified programmer to teach it. Most establishment educators are not keeping up with reality and sit in room full of politically correct buzzwords embracing “diversity”. BASIS is very “diverse” if one usen an ethnic filter, but it is not the politically correct diversity: it is the diversity of legal immigrant parents who know the value of a good education and who come from countries where good education is very expensive and hard to get. Graduating from BASIS high school means having so many college credits from the Advanced Placement tests that every BASIS student must take (and BASIS pays for the tests, not you) that your child can get a 4 year college degree in 3 years. That saves a ton of money parents must pay, or debt burden on the college grad. Going to BASIS pays better than the alternatives, if your student can stomach the workload, an irrefutable fact parents may wish to consider when choosing a charter school. I was distressed when the current governor’s sole defense of his stand on education on a recent Phoenix tv talk show was that there was no problem with education in AZ because AZ had many slots in the US News “top ten” high school list. These are the BASIS schools. No talk about de-empasizing sports programs, forgoing “frills” like playfields and school libraries and auditoriums, so the school can afford to pay their teachers, not limiting hiring of teachers to the dark pool or “credentialed” (i.e. tenured union) teachers, and not keeping on teachers who are not teaching. Imagine a school where the well performing students are trusted enough by school admin that they listen when the students tell them a teacher’s performance is not adequate, and the admin responds by adding more after school tutoring until they can find a better teacher of the subject. That is what is missing from most schools: ACCOUNTABILITY. Sad to see ASU electing to slide into the abyss of lowered entrance requirements, expansion of fuzzy degrees to graduate students that may lack skills required by employers. That is not the answer, that is the problem.