Mission Hill School


The Mission Hill School is a small preK–8 public pilot school in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1997 by Deborah Meier, Elizabeth Knox Taylor, and colleagues, the school is administered by the Boston Public Schools. Meier has publicized the school in many of her works.
The Mission Hill School is a member of the Coalition of Essential Schools. The school has a diverse student body of approximately 220 students, with democratic decision-making at the school and classroom levels, a curricular focus on five democratic "Habits of Mind", school-wide thematic units, a strong emphasis on the arts, and graduation from the school upon creating and defending portfolios of student work for a panel of evaluators. Students are admitted to the school based on a lottery, within the choice system of the Boston Public Schools. Graduates have been found to achieve academic success in high school and college at high rates.
In 2002, Meier's book In Schools We Trust included substantial attention to the Mission Hill School. It argued that the current climate of high-stakes testing makes running a school like Mission Hill much more difficult. She also wrote about the school in her books Will Standards Save Public Education? Keeping School: Letters to Families from Principals of Two Small Schools, Playing for Keeps: Life and Learning on a Public School Playground, and Teaching in Themes: An Approach to Schoolwide Learning, Creating Community, and Differentiating Instruction. The school is also the focus of the book by Matthew Knoester Democratic Education in Practice: Inside the Mission Hill School.
The school was controversially moved to a different location within Boston in 2012, despite resistance from the school community.