In 2013, two BASIS schools, Arizona’s Tucson North and Scottsdale, were ranked among the top seven high schools in the nation by Newsweek. One year prior, a number of 15-year-olds from BASIS Tucson North took a key international exam and outperformed the entire world, including students from a top-ranking school in Shanghai, China.
Thrilling stats like these are simply the latest in a string of achievements that are so outstanding they’ve made BASIS one of the most widely-regarded networks of schools in the country. And they haven’t even been at it for long. Founded in 1998 as a single school in Tucson, BASIS was launched by two economists—Olga and Michael Block—who fell in love. After looking around for a strong school for Olga’s daughter, they decided to create the kind of program they ideally wanted—one with the academic emphasis of European and Asian schools paired with an innovative American spirit. The combination of the two sensibilities has been so successful that today the BASIS network includes 12 charter schools, located in Arizona, Texas, and Washington D.C. Plus, two new independent schools—one in New York City and one in Silicon Valley—are planned to open in September 2014.
“We wanted the two flagship schools to be in the most culturally and economically dynamic regions of the country,” says Mark Reford, the Chief Executive Officer of BASIS Independent Schools.
The NYC flagship, located in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, is called BASIS Independent Brooklyn. Its 85,000-square-foot light-filled building is presently under construction to include the kind of state-of-the-art educational amenities that one expects from a top private school. But the school’s biggest selling point to interested parents is, of course, the extraordinary BASIS track record for cultivating students who are high achieving and enthusiastic learners.
What’s it all about?
“We describe ourselves as a STEM-focused [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] liberal arts program,” Reford says. “Liberal arts in the United States have become synonymous with the humanities, but we go back to a much older model where science and mathematics are at the core of liberal arts as well.”
To bring those disciplines (and others) to life, Reford explains, the school hard-wires its curriculum with rigor, connectivity, and collaboration. Among its standout features is the fact that the primary school engages two teachers in the classroom—a learning expert and a content expert. Starting in kindergarten and continuing through fourth grade, students study Mandarin. In first through fourth grades, students take a special “connections” class in which they are presented with a creative challenge that they have to collectively problem-solve using elements from their studies. The project, Reford says, helps to prepare them “for an intellectual world where more and more you can not answer questions by sticking with one discipline.”
Beginning in the sixth grade, students take three laboratory sciences (chemistry, physics, and biology). By the eighth grade, a year-long introductory-level economics course is required, and, by twelfth grade, students take the equivalent of upper-level college courses, having already completed the graduation requirement of six Advanced Placement (AP) exams.
To teach to the ambitious standards of its curriculum, BASIS has recognized from the start that they need great teachers. Or, as Jill McConnell, the Head of School of BASIS Independent Brooklyn, says: “Our classes cap at 25, but it’s really about the quality of the person at the front of the room not the number of students in the seats.”
To ensure that they have teachers of excellence, BASIS employs a four-person recruitment team who look for three things: an expertise in a given subject as reflected in an undergraduate degree, a master’s degree, or a Ph.D; a passion for the subject; and above all a love of kids. Before being tapped to lead the BASIS flagship in New York, McConnell was Head of School at BASIS Mesa in Arizona—though she also boasts a varied professional background. “I was working on a Ph.D in medieval literature, and I chucked it and went to Africa to help set up a medical dispensary, so my story is not very linear,” she says. McConnell also spent many years as a grader for the AP exams, and she recalls that one of her first conversations with the Blocks was about the AP program, which she values for the critical thinking it demands.
Speaking about what she likes most about the BASIS approach, she says that, in addition to its curriculum and its teachers, the other core ingredient is the student body.
“The BASIS student is someone who is curious, who is innovative, who loves to ask questions,” McConnell says.
Standardized testing is not a part of the admissions process. And BASIS is not a program that’s purely for math and science geeks. “We’re all of it—we have a fifth grade program in classics, we have Latin as part of our curriculum, we have an amazing humanities, English, and history program,” McConnell elaborates.
BASIS has another aspect that will certainly strike a chord with parents: its price. At $23,500, its tuition is almost half that of many of the city’s elite independent schools. And for many families—and especially families with more than one child—that kind of savings, over time, could mean the difference between being able to afford to raise children in the city or needing to move to the suburbs. BASIS will also be offering scholarships for kids in kindergarten from the local Red Hook area, and, in the school’s second year, the plan is to offer merit scholarships—not financial aid—to students from around the city.
Presently, BASIS is accepting applications for grades K-10, for the 2014-15 school year, with the intention of growing up to a full K-12 school in the years that follow. They plan to provide bus service—and even, in some areas, water taxi service—so that students from all around the city can attend. When the students arrive in September, they can expect to find a brand-new school that is outfitted with, among other things, science labs, music and art spaces, a full-sized gym, a 350-seat black box theater, and an industrial arts and design lab where students will be able to perform cutting-edge computer science and programming. With a seasoned BASIS hand like McConnell at the helm, students will also find a school in which a love of learning is so palpable it all but infuses the air.
When asked how one sparks a true curiosity in a student and not just a drive to get good grades, McConnell quotes Plato as saying that “knowledge is the highest form of pleasure.” “[At BASIS], the conversation is always ‘What did we get out of this assignment? What did we learn from this experience?’ And not ‘What is the grade we’ve gotten?,’” she says.
As its existing schools around the country have proven, the end result of a BASIS education is almost always a motivated child heading to a college of personal preference.
“Our students aren’t only going to engineering schools, they’re also going to the Rhode Island School of Design and to Parsons,” Reford notes.
The 106 students to graduate from BASIS schools in 2013 were accepted into 540 colleges and universities throughout the world, from Stanford to Oxford, and they earned more than $14 million in merit scholarships.
Reford expects much the same for BASIS Independent Brooklyn. “Our goal is to be the very best school in New York City,” he says with a mix of pride and expectation.
McConnell herself couldn’t be more eager to begin leading a school in the city. “We’re a model that’s going to redefine what American children can do,” she says.
For more information about BASIS Independent Brooklyn, contact Alexandra Hancock, Director of Admissions, at [email protected] or 929-210-1362.
