The Lang School is a private, nonprofit, K-12 school for gifted and twice exceptional students located in New York City's Financial District. It was the first K-12 school to specialize in educating twice-exceptional students, though it later came to include a wider range of gifted students.
Mission
The Lang School offers high ability, gifted, and twice exceptional learners in grades K through 12 a child-centered, empirically validated, STEM- and STEAM-driven education. They embrace each student’s individuality – cognitively and affectively – and empower students with self-knowledge and problem-solving skills through a collaborative, scalably supportive, differentiated approach to learning. At Lang, they teach the whole child and students thrive — often for the first time — learning at their level with ability and affinity peers in classes of no more than 12 students. Their standards-based, multi-sensory academics evolve to both challenge and support students as they develop self-regulation and independence. Their capstone Talent Development Program is designed to inspire passions, creativity, and a sense of purpose; to identify and deepen areas of interest and strength, transforming native promise into talent; and to facilitate early specialization and the acquisition of professional-level skills and commitment. Lang is an alternative school designed to prepare tomorrow's leaders and innovators.
Curriculum
Lang's interdisciplinary MESH™ curriculum culls benchmark “thinking and doing” skills from The Common Core and marries them to a framework that emphasizes depth over breadth, process over product, and Socratic dialog over rote learning. MESH is powered by STEM, driven by the humanities and arts, and evaluated by ethics. Through research-based best practices that are flexibly deployed by Lang's experienced teaching and therapy teams, students’ skills related to organization/planning, failure-tolerance, perseverance, self-advocacy, self-esteem, and empathy are grown.
Students
Twice exceptional students are identified as being gifted/talented and diagnosed with specific learning challenges, such as ADHD, dyslexia and other language-based learning disabilities, anxiety, high functioning autism, social communication disorder, or sensory processing challenges. These students are often unable to master curriculum to their potential in a traditional classroom; they are often labelled "lazy" and misunderstood by teachers, administrators, and peers. Identifying 2e students is difficult, because a gifted child's strengths often mask their needs for supports or remediation, and their attentional or behavioral challenges might obscure their strengths. These children are eligible for special educational services under the IDEA Act, but they often face difficulties accessing these services, because their "special needs" can be difficult to recognize.
History
The Lang School grew out of the founder's frustration to find an appropriate school placement for her two sons. It opened in September 2010 with two classes totaling 13 students. By its eighth year, the school had five classes containing approximately 50 gifted and twice-exceptional students.
Name
The Lang School is named after Cyril Lang, the founder's tenth grade English teacher. Mr. Lang was a suburban Maryland public school teacher who, in 1979, taught what the localBoard of Education deemed overly challenging material to his "ungifted" students, engaging them in Socratic debates about Machiavelli’s The Prince and Plato’s Republic, texts normally limited to 12th-grade Advanced Placement classes. Although the school where he was working threatened to fire him if he did not teach what was commonly considered 10th-grade material in more traditional ways, he persisted. “I made a premeditated, intellectual decision to continue teaching the way I had,” he said at the time. “There’s nothing wrong with the genetic makeup of these students. It’s the educational system that’s declining. We are bearing witness to the triumph of mediocrity.”
