Sounds Like a Good BASIS for Education

From Naomi Schaefer Riley at the New York Post:

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While America is falling behind globally — we were ranked 24th in the world on the most recent Program for International Student Assessment scores — BASIS is soaring. In math, reading and science three BASIS schools ranked above Shanghai, Korea, Finland and Singapore. If BASIS schools formed a country it would be ranked top in the world. Even compared to students whose families are in the same income brackets, BASIS is still performing 18 percent better on average.
But there’s a catch. If you’re looking for a place that will coddle your kids, you’ve come to the wrong school. As headmaster Hadley Ruggles tells me, “Brooklyn is a progressive place, and it looks like we have rolled back the clock.”

The students are taught grammar. Math in the early grades involves drilling. Students are required to take three years of Latin. Writing is focused on analytical work, not “journaling.”

... Students as young as eighth grade are taking APs and scoring well. Plus, middle-schoolers take biology, chemistry and physics classes three days a week each.

The teachers have come from top college and graduate programs, and many have left their own fields to teach.

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5 comments:

Texan99 said...

All the out-of-fashion stuff, getting great results.

Tom said...

Yeah, this is what has always worked. I keep telling my fellow education students that, in the end, we'll just go back to this. (Usually after some mediocre class discussion of the latest greatest theory on teaching.)

They may think I'm joking. All of this stuff BASIS is doing that works has been thoroughly debunked by education research, don't you know. Teach grammar? Horrifying! Math drills? My word, are you trying to kill the poor darlings!?

Gringo said...

Yeah, this is what has always worked. I keep telling my fellow education students that, in the end, we'll just go back to this. (Usually after some mediocre class discussion of the latest greatest theory on teaching.)

Indeed. Formal classroom instruction has been around for over two thousand years, which should provide plenty of evidence about what works and doesn't work in formal classroom instruction. Instead, Ed School profs are more concerned with the "latest greatest theory," a theory which usually has been researched very little. That lack of research doesn't stop the Ed School profs from pushing that "latest greatest theory" on their students. Five to ten years later, research has debunked the "latest greatest theory." The "latest greatest theory" is dead. Long live the new "latest greatest theory."

They may think I'm joking. All of this stuff BASIS is doing that works has been thoroughly debunked by education research, don't you know. Teach grammar? Horrifying! Math drills? My word, are you trying to kill the poor darlings!?

For example, consider the brouhaha between Phonics and Whole Language Learning as ways to teach reading. From what I have read, Phonics is a superior way to teach reading, as it enables students to apply a word sound to many words: "th" is found in hundreds to thousands of words. By contrast, Whole Language Learning is applicable only to the word you have learned.

There are a lot of drills and repetition involved in Phonics, as students learn to associate word sounds with letter combinations. Adults do not like those drills and repetition involved in Phonics, just as adults get tired of reading the same story night after night to their preschoolers. However, students like those drills and repetition. The child likes to have the same story read in the same way every night, as that helps to reinforce the child's small learning base. Just try to read a different story, or read the same story with different wordings. Invariably the child will not like it. "You're not reading it right."

Similarly, children like the drills in phonics. For one, they get to speak instead of BEING QUIET.

What adults like is not necessarily what children like.

Anonymous said...

The school where I teach is like the one in the article, although we don't have a grade school. Latin is required for one year, then there is a Spanish option, but language is required. Writing is emphasized, math means lots of homework and drills, and all 10th-12th grade classes are AP, including Latin. As of December, all the 12th graders had been accepted to at least one college and the cumulative scholarships were over 1.2 million dollars. And all our graduates finish college in four years, some in fewer years.

LittleRed1

Texan99 said...

"What adults like is not necessarily what children like."--This is exactly why I'm an ineffective dog trainer. Dogs need training with a lot of extremely consistent repetition, but I get bored.