Can someone please tell me about the Brooklyn New School.
I hear that it is a good school but why? Is it academically challenging, or is it more geared towards the arts. Do the DC’s get into the top Middle schools?
I hear that it is a good school but why? Is it academically challenging, or is it more geared towards the arts. Do the DC’s get into the top Middle schools?
That’s a one mile radius. It’s my kid who’s the math genius, not me ; )
My kid was at BNS – she’s almost 21 now, but many of the same teachers and families are still there. The school depends on a high degree of parental involvement, in fact its existence depends on it.
BNS has offered a strong after school program, which made it a good choice for working parents. Also, since it was a lottery school (not sure if it’s still lottery admission), its students from OUTSIDE district 15 became de-facto district 15 members. These children could later attend district 15 middle schools without jumping through the hoops other out-of-district kids did. BNS also provided a free school bus for children who lived outside a 1 mile circumference of the building.
Since district 13 now has stronger school choices and parental OVER-involvement has become common enough that it causes sniping matches about the future of certain district schools and programs, BNS might become a less desired choice.
I’d still recommend it to anyone. My kid loved BNS, my husband and I loved BNS, my kid’s math education sucked, but she could write like a goddess and she can still speak spanish. She’s a physics major at a great college now, so she caught up with the math somewhere along the line.
BNS is a good school, in the same way that many other neighborhood elementary schools are good. The school does have a more holistic, project-centered curriculum, and the students do more out of school learning (like field trips) than some of the other good elementary schools. Some parents complain the math is the weakest part, but let’s face it, elementary school math doesn’t go into the most advanced concepts anyway, so that’s not going to be a problem for most kids who don’t struggle in math.
Mainly, BNS is considered a good school because it has an educated, reasonably affluent parent body, many of whom work in the arts. The school goes out of its way to attract a racially diverse population, but I’d venture to say that all the students are similar because they all have parents who are interested in their kids getting a good education.
Because there are so many more good elementary schools now than when BNS was first established, the school is less likely to be a choice for families zoned for a great gen ed. There are still many parents who choose BNS anyway because they like the philosophy, but many of the parents I know who are looking at it now live in neighborhoods where their zoned elementary is not very popular. There are still enough of these families that the BNS is always oversubscribed and getting in is difficult.
BNS kids get into the same middle schools as all the kids at all the good gen eds in D. 15. The ones who excel academically get into the most desirable middle schools, as would be the case at most other schools.
BNS has a holistic, project centered curriculum. They are not enamored of testing, and are focused on the individual development of the student.
I suspect you will get more responses from the neighborhood parenting blogs. Although my son goes to PS 261, I hear that BNS continues to offer a more self-directed curriculum than some other schools. One family I know moved their son from the dual language (Mandarin/English) in Chinatown to BNS because they felt the former was too much of a pressure cooker.
My now 28 year old son went there for two years when the BNS first started (@ PS 27, in Red Hook) in the late ’80s. We removed him because it seemed too unstructured for his temperament. Of course there must have been many changes in the last 20+ years.