IndiaParentMagazine

New School Set to Redefine Education in Silicon Valley

BASIS Independent Silicon Valley, a new private middle and high school opening in San Jose, takes a remarkablysimple approach to educating children: focusing purely on student learning and the classroom experience. Its program of study produces students who perform significantly above their peers both nationally and globally in math, reading, science, and more.More vitally, it ignites a desire to meet academic challenges, surmount them and establish a pattern for lifelong learning. 

Igniting Inquiry
BASIS Independent starts with the greatest resource in the classroom—the teacher.

Great teachers go above and beyond with the idea that all children have the capacity to succeed if presented information in the right way. At the same time, students learn time-management and goal-setting skills early, which empower them to succeed.

With a STEM-focused liberal arts and sciences curriculum, BASIS Independent Silicon Valley produces truly well rounded students, capable of meeting and surpassing their peers throughout the world.

By graduation, students are well on their way to excelling in college and university and becoming tomorrow’s leaders and innovators. BASIS Independent holds teachers and students accountable, which fosters a culture of support. It’s not about competition; it’s about working with each other to see one another accomplish their goals.

Entrepreneurial Approach to Excellence in K-12 Education
BASIS began with two world-class economists concerned about the state of American education. They created a school with a challenging curriculum to match the best systems in the world, ingraining an institutional culture of mutual support in pursuing excellence. BASIS Tucson, founded in 1998, produced spectacular results. Model in hand, they picked the highest-performing district in Arizona to test their program in the state’s most competitive market: BASIS Scottsdale opened in 2003. Ten years after opening the first school, it topped Newsweek’s national rankings, earning the number one spot in 2008; both schools consistently rank in the US News’ Best High Schools top-10.

Proven Results
The Organization for Economic Co-operation andDevelopment identifies academic excellence by school through its Test for Schools Based on PISA, a test taken around theworld by fifteen-year-old students. PISA reveals which schools and countries educatestudents to best prepare them for their futures.

PISA does not test rote knowledge; memorizingalone will not get a student a high score. It assesses problem-solving skills, critical thinkingabilities, and thinking beyond the boundaries of individual subjects to see how they relate to each other in a real-world problem-solving context. In essence, the exam tests the very core of a school’s academic program.

When the two flagship BASIS schools, using the same course of study as BASIS Independent, participated in the 2012 exams, the students hadresults described as “breathtaking” by AmandaRipley, the author of a new book, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way. BASIS Scottsdale ranked in the top one percent of the world’s schools in math and reading and top five percent in science; BASIS Tucson North ranked in the top five percent of the world’s schools in math, reading, and science. PISA showed a largepercentage of American high schools lagging behind similar schools in Singapore, Finland,Korea, and Germany, but BASIS students were a refreshing exception, leading the pack.