Martin Luther King Elementary School

I enjoyed my 2 years here, though there could be MANY improvements. PROSMOST of the staff is caring. There are a lot of clubs. Many reasons to take pride in this school. Many opportunities like running for president, vice president, and secretary of school in 5th grade (3-5th graders vote). 3-5 have student council representatives. Too much fundraising (which gets boring to students). Yearly, a famous author (ie David A. Adler, Jerry Pallotta, Marc Brown) comes. Red Grammar performances every 5-6 years. BUT THEY COULD DO BETTER STUFF WITH THE MONEY! CONSTeachers often assume that students know most of what they are learning about. The Edison curriculum is mostly repeating what you learned the year before. It does not take benefit of the Journeys program (mandatory in Middlesex schools). Half of this school has air conditioning and half doesn't. 5th graders get many fun opportunities, but the rest of the years are 'meh.' There is little cultural diversity.

This school takes great pride in its perennial high scores, however our experience as transplants from another state is that the teachers do very little teaching and the impressive scores are a result of home schooling. The over-achieving students come from predominantly Asian families, where academic expectations, competitiveness and pressures run inappropriately high. Many teachers have become lazy and arrogant, pointing to unearned successes as proof of their superior skills. I do not place the entire burden of education on the teachers alone, but I found the opposite to be true: they place the entire burden of education on the parents. Personally, nearly all of the teachers are nice people. I didn't have a single complaint in that category. But when it came to teaching, they were generally unable to guide students who didn't already know in advance the material that was on the schedule for the day or the week. For reference, we are a military family who have relocated numerous times and have passed through a half-dozen different schools. We have had the benefit of comparing schools in too many different districts and states. This one, MLK, was easily our most disappointing, and least educational/most detrimental experience.