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I. Introduction
Maspeth High School (MHS) is a New York City public high school serving grades 9-12 that opened for the 2011-2012 school year in Maspeth, Queens. MHS is not a charter school, but a "limited, unscreened high school," that in enrolling students does not screen based on testing or previous scores. It does, however, give priority to students in Queens District 24, particularly to those who attend our regular "open-house" information sessions. Our first class last year had 249 students (54 percent female, 45 percent male), of whom 230 were enrolled in first-year Latin. The student body was 45 percent Hispanic, 30 per- cent white, and 19 percent Asian with fifteen students identifying as either black or other. Of the total, 92 percent were general-education students, and 8 percent required some form of restrictive environment (according to Individualized Ed- ucation Plans). We had thirteen students classified as English Language Learners (ELLs), with sixty-seven former ELLs.
MHS has been dubbed "The Classical High School of New York City " by its founder and principal, Khurshid Abdul-Mutakabbir, whose vision it was to open a large public high school with the study of classics at the core of the curriculum. Principal Abdul-Mutakabbir has expressed his vision in the school's mission statement, and he fleshed out this idea in a short article disseminated to parents called "What is Classical Education?"
In a classical education, we seek to find common threads amongst our various content areas and use inquiry to push students to connect our curriculum to their lives. We stress the open exchange of ideas through reading, writing, and speaking. We will guide our students to mastery of both content and process.1
Abdul-Mutakabbir neatly captures here the rationale behind the emphasis on a classical education at MHS where language-learning is at the center of a more holistic approach to mastering both subject matter and methodology. Thus we continually stress reading, writing, and speaking and, in a sense, may be said to use the traditional trivium of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric as the basis of instruction across the curriculum. This derives from the idea that a traditional education in the liberal arts follows a specific three-part pattern: first, to sup- ply students with data, then to give them...