Basis Oro Valley, Arizona - the Best School In America

Anna was in my MAI class at Copper Creek for two years. Now she is a senior at Basis and she was the speaker at freshman orientation. I'm very proud of her.

I was looking at my friend's daughter's math book and I was very impressed. She goes to Basis in Oro Valley and is in 8th grade. She is thirteen. This is a charter school open to anyone who wants to go there, and the school is free. There is no admission test. These were some of her practice review problems on lesson 61 which is about half way through the text book:

• A car has wheels that have a radius of 16 centimeters and the wheels turn at 40 revolutions per second. What is the speed of the car in miles per hour?
• The central angle of a sector of a circle is 1.6 radians. Find the area of the sector in square centimetres if the radius of the circle is 1 meter.
• The total cost varied linearly with the number produced. When 200 were produced, the cost was $2050. When 30 were produced, the cost was $350. Write an equation that gives cost as a function of the number produced.
• The number of reds varied directly as the number of purples and inversely as the number of whites cubed. There were 200 reds when there were 50 purples and 10 whites. How many reds were there when the number of purples was increased to 60 and the number of whites was decreased to 5?
• How many distinguishable three-digit permutations can be formed from the letters in the word Mississippi?
• Slove cos 3 theta plus the squre root of three over 2 equal to zero give that zero degrees is equal to or lesser than zrro which is less than 360 degrees.
• Shila bought k squared x plus m pencils for d dollars. How many pencils could sho buy for $500?
• Sketch the graph of the function y = log squared x.

I was on the Superintendent's Committee and I don't think there was one person on that committee who could solve these 8th grade math problems.

Why is this school Basis so successful? Why do their students graduate and go to schools like Princeton, Harvard and MIT? Basis is successful because they are not afraid to make the students work hard and to challenge them.

I know of several students from my class at Copper Creek who were average students and they are successful at Basis. What is Basis' secret?

• High standards
• Plenty of practice
• Better text books
• Better curriculum
• Teachers knowledgeable of their subjects

Her daughter does these problems herself, and she has learned to be an accomplished student. Impressive.