Our Mission

CITY ON A HILL graduates responsible, resourceful, and respectful democratic citizens prepared for college and to advance community, culture, and commerce, and to compete in the 21st century. We do so by emphasizing:

  • Academic Achievement

    Academic achievement means that we strive to maintain high academic standards and ensure results. It means we acknowledge our students' competition and seek to find additional resources to prepare our students to compete.

  • Citizenship

    Citizenship means we strive to maintain standards of civility, promote our students' civic engagement and participation, and link our school to the best of Boston.

  • Teacher Leadership

    Teacher leadership means teachers take responsibility for the performance of students and of our school. It means teachers drive decision-making in doing, building, and growing CITY ON A HILL. It means teachers are reflective practitioners and managers. It means that teachers contribute to urban public school reform in our city, state and nation.

  • Public Accountability

    Public accountability means that CITY ON A HILL expects to show the tax-payer results and to invite the public in to ensure that we are delivering on our promise to educate our students, and engages parents and guardians as key school stakeholders.

Our Vision

CITY ON A HILL prepares students to exercise their rights and responsibilities as American citizens. We foster in Boston youth a curiosity for life-long learning, the habits of hard work and a commitment to public service. CITY ON A HILL emphasizes the responsibility of educated citizens to question, to act, and to avoid complacency.

To nurture curiosity in our students, we make accessible to them the best of human thought and endeavor. We teach the traditions and important documents of our democracy and encourage students to advance and build on those traditions. We seek to ensure that our own conclusions are never our students' starting points but rather, that their skills and questions are honed so that they can go forward and imagine, ask, wonder, and contribute in ways we cannot yet know.

We strive to make our classes, our assessment strategies, and the experiences we offer students as authentic as possible--preparing them to meet the challenges and standards of the real world. To make learning authentic for our students, our school must be a learning organization with mechanisms to take and use feedback. We learn from our successes and failures. We maintain intimate learning environments with classes averaging eighteen students. The process of establishing and building CITY ON A HILL is not a distraction from the CITY ON A HILL education; it is integral to it.

It is the responsibility of parents/guardians, teachers, and the community to work together to nurture the potential of every student. Students are active partners in their learning and ultimately responsible for their own education. At CITY ON A HILL, we seek to connect our teaching to students' experiences and to teach them with a faculty that is representative of their backgrounds. In order to fulfill our civics mission, we believe our faculty should reflect Boston's diversity.

Hard work is important for all members of the CITY ON A HILL community. It means that we teach students to value effort as an essential but not sole component of excellence, and that there are standards to which we must all hold ourselves accountable. Hard work also means that students deserve the experience of accomplishing things they thought they couldn't do. And most important, it means that CITY ON A HILL students earn their diplomas for what they know and can do, and that they are prepared to succeed in college and the workforce. For teachers, hard work means that we practice what we demand of students. Within all this hard work, we remember to be joyful.

To promote public service, we make the City of Boston an extended classroom. Its institutions, neighborhoods, and citizens are important resources accessible to students. Our students learn to value their whole city. CITY ON A HILL graduates citizens who will vote.

As a public charter school, CITY ON A HILL does not ignore the crisis in public education. We disseminate what we learn, and are open to observers. We seek to balance our duties to our own students with our commitment to sustained systemic change in public education.