On Top of the News
Brooklyn Private School Looks to Expand to Manhattan
Wall Street Journal | 3/25/2016

Behind the Headline
High Scores at BASIS Charter Schools
Education Next | Winter 2014

BASIS schools started out as a network of charter schools that are routinely ranked among the top-performing schools in the country.

In 2014, the BASIS founders announced that they would create a separate network of private schools based on the same model. The first BASIS private school opened later that year in Brooklyn. BASIS also opened a school in China.

Now BASIS is opening a second school in New York. As Sophia Hollander explains in the Wall Street Journal,

Basis schools are designed to blend the rigor of European and Asian education models with American creativity. Mandarin and engineering classes start in prekindergarten. Students take chemistry, biology and physics every year in middle school, logic in seventh grade and economics in eighth grade. A project-based class called “connections” brings together science, math, arts and humanities in grades 1-4.

In “High Scores at BASIS Charter Schools,” June Kronholz wrote for Ed Next about two BASIS charter schools in Arizona.

The Tucson charter school outscored all 40 countries that administered the 2012 PISA, or Programme for International Student Assessment exams, with a mean math score of 618, 131 points above the U.S. average. Its 10-year-old Scottsdale sister school scored even higher: 51 points above the metropolitan Shanghai area in math and 42 points higher in science.

“The BASIS curriculum and its hard-charging teachers go a long way toward explaining the schools’ success,” Kronholz wrote.

—Education Next