“It’s Cool to Be Smart”
That model starts with what BASIS calls a “bare bones” syllabus that’s common to all of the schools and is tested with a common comprehensive exam in the spring. Teachers add to that based on their specialties. Ruggles, the Scottsdale head, has a master’s degree in Slavic languages; the AP literature class she teaches is heavy on Dostoyevsky. In Tucson, Trudie Connolly, a 9th-grade language teacher, is redesigning her curriculum to reflect her interest in the intersection of literature and philosophy.
“We’re economists: we’re output focused, not input prescriptive,” Michael Block told me in explaining the independence BASIS gives its teachers.
About 60 percent of those teachers have master’s degrees; a few have PhDs. Many come from industry or academia. Connolly “flipped” houses. Petra Pajtas, the Romanian-born head of school in Phoenix, was a neuroscience researcher. Bill Weaver, the 5th-grade math teacher in Scottsdale, was a computer programmer.
When I sat in on Weaver’s class recently, his 5th graders were using a Saxon Math book for 7th and 8th graders, the standard BASIS 5th-grade text. Teachers said that such acceleration is central to moving kids through the network’s ambitious math and science programs.
A day earlier, at BASIS Phoenix, I’d sat in on a 6th-grade chemistry class that was practicing converting grams to molar mass with the question, “How many mole of Sn atoms are there in 0.0126 grams of Sn?” The answer, which requires a reference to the molar mass of tin on the periodic table, is 0.000106. The class tossed it off without difficulty.
“They rise to the occasion,” Weaver told me, offering three reasons why they can. “Parents are on top of the situation here. The culture here is you do your homework.” And when a lesson doesn’t click, “we just keep going over and over and over.”
I heard a lot about the BASIS culture: that “it’s cool to be smart,” that teachers “care,” that it’s “not an us vs. them culture.” “If there were popular kids, it would be the geeks,” Alia Gilbert, the Tucson 9th grader said.