BASIS Charter Schools reach new heights in 2020 rankings

The network of BASIS Charter Schools once again ranked among the best in the nation – both as a network, and among individual schools which were eligible for this year’s rankings — with a record nine campuses in the top 91 schools in the United States, out of more than 24,000 public schools assessed by U.S. News & World Report.

BASIS Chandler is ranked #7 in the U.S., and is also the #1 school in the state of Arizona, the #1 charter school in the nation, and the #6 STEM school nationally.

The network has eight campuses ranked among the nation’s top STEM schools, which looks at student success by school in science, technology, engineering, and math courses. The STEM rankings include three top 10 STEM schools and five top 25 STEM campuses in the BASIS Charter Schools network.

“We still believe that college readiness is the most vital part of our mission to raise the levels of our students’ learning to the highest international levels,” said BASIS Educational Ventures CEO Dr. Peter Bezanson. “The U.S. News & World Report STEM rankings are for the second straight year the publication’s best pure measure of college readiness. Once again, our schools’ STEM rankings show how true that is.”

All ten BASIS Charter Schools eligible for this year’s US News rankings are in the nation’s 99.1^st percentile. The network’s top nine campuses are ranked in the nation’s 99.6^th percentile, or the top 0.38% of American schools.

Among other U.S. News & World Report rankings data for the BASIS Charter Schools network:

• National charter school rankings: The BASIS Charter Schools network has the #1 charter school in the nation, 3 of the top 5 charters nationally, 6 of the top 10, and 9 of the top 20 (actually, 19) charter schools in the U.S. Read that again: just under half of the top twenty charter schools in the United States are BASIS Charter Schools. Those schools are #1 BASIS Chandler, #4 BASIS Oro Valley, #5 BASIS Peoria, #8 BASIS Flagstaff, #9 BASIS Tucson North, #10 BASIS Scottsdale, #12 BASIS Phoenix, #13 BASIS Ahwatukee, and #19 BASIS San Antonio Shavano.

• National STEM school rankings: BASIS Charter Schools have eight schools in the US News rankings for the nation’s best STEM schools (science, technology, engineering, and math), including five in the top 25 STEM rankings nationally: #5 BASIS Oro Valley, #6 BASIS Chandler, #8 BASIS Scottsdale, #16 BASIS Tucson North, and #24 Phoenix.

• Arizona rankings: The BASIS Charter Schools network has eight schools in Arizona which were eligible for the US News rankings – and all eight are in Arizona’s top ten, including the two top-ranked schools in the state.

• Texas rankings: This is the first year that the BASIS Charter Schools network had a campus in the state of Texas that is eligible for the rankings. BASIS San Antonio Shavano is ranked as the #9 school in the state of Texas – and the only school in Texas’ top ten which is an open-enrollment public school. (The other nine are selective admission.) It is also the #1 school in the city of San Antonio, and the #1 charter school in Texas. The seven-year-old campus (which has had its current name for just three years!) is #91 in the nation, an incredible achievement for a new school in its first year of rankings eligibility.

• Washington, D.C. rankings: BASIS Washington, DC is once again in the top 1% of schools in the United States, ranking #227 nationally. BASIS DC is also the #3 school in Washington, D.C., and the #53 charter school in the entire country.

“These rankings are once again incredible. Our student performance continues to improve year after year, and these rankings aren’t necessarily a sign of precisely what we do, since US News isn’t exclusively focused on college readiness,” said BASIS.ed CEO Aaron Kindel. “But they do show that no matter how you assess BASIS Charter Schools, it is consistently evident that we make students successful.”

This is the second consecutive year that the BASIS Charter Schools network had so many campuses ranking this high despite the fact that U.S. News & World Report changed the way it assesses schools and the methodology by which it ranks them. Through 2018, US News ranked fewer than 3,000 schools per year; in 2019 and 2020, it considered more than 24,000 each year. According to US News, its rankings until 2018 were “based solely on college readiness” – which is precisely aligned with what the BASIS Charter School Curriculum does: prepare students for college. When its rankings were published in 2019, US News wrote that it implemented a “comprehensive ranking methodology which reflects how well high schools serve all students, not just those planning to go to college.”