The First Classical School On Capitol Hill

Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments for allowing Oklahoma to fund a Catholic charter school. Two days later, President Donald Trump proposed a budget that would cut the Education Department’s budget by 15 percent. It was the latest in his plan, announced at the end of March, to close the Department of Education entirely.

“After 45 years, the United States spends more money on education, by far, than any other country,” he said. “But yet, we rank near the bottom of the list in terms of success.”

That’s almost true. Government spending on education has risen significantly over the years—we now spend $20,387 annually per pupil, more than anybody except Luxembourg and Norway. But our test scores have remained stubbornly in the middle of the pack—the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests found American 15-year-olds are average in science, a little above average in reading, and significantly behind in math.

Average doesn’t sound too bad until you realize the global average for all three subjects has been dropping steadily ever since the PISA began in 2000. And the Department of Education’s own “report card”—testing done on 9- and 13-year-olds each year—also shows declines in math and reading since 2012. The steepest drop-offs have come, not surprisingly, after COVID-19. (When Rahm Emanuel was asked what the Democrats should say to parents about years of school closures, he responded, “We’re sorry. We made a mistake.”)

In Washington, DC, Haigh and Laura Thornton noticed their third grader was behind in reading. But they didn’t stress about it too much—he was in one of the best public schools in the district, and besides, both Haigh and Laura are more math-brained, so genetics weren’t on his side.

But when their first grader, Jayden, came home from school repeating antiracism philosophy—in his understanding, that black people were extra special and white people were bad—Haigh and Laura knew they had to make a change. They’re both white, and Jayden, their adopted son, is half black. They also didn’t love the way his teacher handled discipline—by isolating Jayden without telling them—or the quarterly protest marches in favor of liberal causes that were part of the curriculum.

CHCA teacher Melissa McCay, three students, and Annie Hsiao at the White House / Courtesy of Annie Hsiao

When the Thorntons began to look for other options, they quickly found Capitol Hill Christian Academy (CHCA), one of the newest classical Christian schools in the country, a few blocks from their home. CHCA was started in 2023 by Annie Hsiao, who’d spent most of her adult life working in the upper levels of federal education initiatives and belonging to Capitol Hill Baptist Church.

After Haigh and Laura enrolled Jayden in CHCA, the change was rapid and remarkable—not only did he shoot ahead in his math and reading ability, but he now knows enough about the Bible to answer questions in Sunday school, and in a recent storm he asked his family if they could pray for safety.

Those results are wonderful, and probably similar to what you’d get from a lot of classical Christian schools in this growing movement around the country.

What’s interesting about CHCA is its location, said Robert Ingram, who has been involved in classical education since he helped found the Geneva School in Orlando back in 1993. The first classical Christian school in urban DC sits two blocks from the Capitol and half a mile from the Department of Education.

Looking for Options

Before last year, Haigh and Laura didn’t think too much about where they were going to send their kids to school.

“We pay a lot of taxes for the public school,” Haigh said. They do: DC spends significantly more per pupil (more than $27,000 in fiscal year 2022, compared to a national average of about $16,000) and per teacher (DC’s average teacher salary is $86,000, compared to a national average of just over $72,000).

“Plus, I went to public schools, and Laura did for high school,” Haigh said. “When we bought our house, it was like, ‘Well, we’re right down the street from one of the top-ranked public schools in DC, so we’re all set. This is a great spot.’”

It wasn’t until spring 2024, when Jayden was in first grade, that the Thorntons started to sense that “the most important thing about Jayden at Maury Elementary was [that] he was black,” Haigh said.

Frustrated, Laura complained to a friend, who pointed her to Annie Hsiao.

Annie Hsiao

Hsiao’s résumé looks like it belongs to a character on The West Wing or Madam Secretary: starting with an internship at the White House, a master’s from Harvard, then the roles of director of government and community relations at the National Endowment for the Humanities, program officer for the Walton Family Foundation, senior advisor at the Department of Justice, deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Education, and deputy chief operating officer of the Baltimore city public schools.

She’d just helped Baltimore’s 140 public schools get up and running after COVID-19 when a few of her friends from Capitol Hill Baptist reached out.

“You should really just start a school for our kids,” they told her. They were worried about the education quality and values of the DC public school system, and they didn’t want to have to move out to the suburbs if they didn’t have to.

If you’ve ever started a school, you know it’s not a step up the career ladder from helping to run the entire Baltimore City public school system. It’s all-consuming, outrageously expensive, and emotionally draining. You have to raise money, find space, get zoning permits, hire teachers, build a board, figure out the curriculum, and write policies and practices, among a hundred other responsibilities. Then you have to convince parents to take a chance on you.

In the end, you’re doing all that work for a class of five 5-year-olds.

Who would do that?

Gunpoint

Hsiao came to Christ after being held at gunpoint for eight hours.

She’d grown up in church, and she knew all the right answers. She knew so many right Bible answers that she won the California Bible Drill Championship and a free trip to a Southern Baptist camp in Glorieta, New Mexico. And she knew so many academic right answers that she’d tested out of high school and was invited to go directly to college. (On the advice of a teacher, she decided to go to high school.)

The day after her eighth-grade graduation, Hsiao’s mom picked her up from ballet practice and drove home. When they pulled into the garage, two gunmen appeared and ordered them to get out of the car.

“It was the first time I’d seen a gun,” Hsiao said. “They got us into our living room and started asking questions about when my dad was going to arrive.”

Hsiao’s dad was a businessman and had a stock of computer hardware and microchips that this gang was trying to steal.

Hsiao spent the rest of the night tied up, blindfolded, and worrying about the answer to this question: If you die tonight, will you go to heaven?

Eventually, her father came home and was captured by the gang. He managed to untie himself and call the police, and a SWAT team freed the family without any loss of life.

A few weeks later, at the youth camp in Glorieta, Hsiao realized that knowing the right answers and trying hard to be good wasn’t the same thing as being a Christian. Confronted with her sin and her Savior, she became a believer.

Chasing Education

In college at UCLA, Hsiao joined Grace Community Church, learned good theology, and met a Grace member who’d studied education policy at Harvard.

“I thought that was really a good combination of disciplines—you have to be a jack of all trades in education,” she said. Hsiao headed to Harvard, then built her career in the top echelons of public education—working to get art into schools, to fund new charter schools, and to find and test new educational ideas. She traveled with First Lady Laura Bush to talk to students about historical art, reviewed hundreds of business plans and bylaws for proposed charter schools, and wrote about policies from school choice to the Common Core.

When her friends asked her to start a school, Hsiao was intrigued.

“Let me do some research,” Hsiao told them. She did.

And then the woman who built her career in top-level public education opened a tiny, private classical Christian school.

School on the Hill

DC public schools are struggling academically. In 2024, just 34 percent of students met expectations in English language arts and literacy. Even fewer—less than 23 percent—met expectations in math.

But if you ask Hsiao why she picked a classical Christian model of education, she doesn’t even mention grades.

“We’re a classical school because the classics have done a great job of staring at life, at humanity, and at the world so closely and intentionally,” she said. “They’ve asked the best questions of eudaimonia—what is the good life?—and of what is good and right and virtuous.”

But that’s only half the equation, she said.

A CHCA student praying on the first day of school in 2023 / Photo by Karl Magnuson

“We’re a Christian school because the Bible has provided all those answers, and so much more,” she said. “We teach what is good and true based on what the Bible teaches us is good and true. And we teach what is beautiful by holding out to students the beauty of Christ and the beauty that can be found in this world.”

Sounds good—in fact, it sounds so good you might wonder, Why isn’t there one in DC already?

Because it’s expensive, Ingram said. Because the city is unusually transitory—every few years, people (and their staffs) are voted in or out of office. And because the culture is unusually liberal—in every election since DC received the right to vote in 1961, the city has voted overwhelmingly Democratic. (Last fall, Kamala Harris won 90 percent of the vote there.) That means the city isn’t friendly to private schools—for example, churches are automatically zoned for use by public schools but not private ones. Hsiao had to find commercial space instead.

On the other hand, DC offers unique educational advantages—you can study art at the National Portrait Gallery or history at Gettysburg. It also opens up unique opportunities.

“In this political climate, there is such a lack of civility,” said Keith Nix, head of the Veritas School in Richmond, Virginia. “A good classical K–12 education in that city can cut through a lot of that noise and provide a place where there is meaningful dialogue around great ideas. What if there was a school in DC having conversations around important ideas? It could be really unique, really important.”

What If?

In March 2024—most of the way through the school year—the Thorntons enrolled Jayden in CHCA.

“It was amazing,” Haigh said. The class was racially diverse, but the focus was on honoring each person because they were made in the image of God.

And academically, “we saw exponential growth,” Haigh said. “By the end of the year, he was reading and doing simple math. In the first two weeks, he was coming home singing little chants and rhymes to help him remember things.”

First first day of school for the brand new Capitol Hill Christian Academy / Photo byKarl Magnuson

Haigh remembers sitting at the table with Jonathon, their third grader, who was struggling with writing a paragraph.

“You have to start your sentence with a noun,” Haigh said.

“What’s a noun?” Jonathon asked.

“A noun names a person, a noun names a thing,” Jayden sang. “A noun names a person, place, or thing, and sometimes an idea! Person, place, thing, idea! Person, place, thing, idea!”

Whoa, Haigh thought. Is my first grader teaching my third grader about the parts of speech?

He was. Jayden could also explain pronouns, verbs, and adverbs.

Haigh and Laura asked Jonathon’s teachers about this.

“Jonathon doesn’t know the parts of speech,” they said. “How is he supposed to write a sentence without knowing that?”

“Oh, we don’t teach parts of speech anymore,” the teachers explained. “That’s not part of the curriculum.”

Uh-oh, thought Haigh and Laura. CHCA didn’t have third grade yet, so they googled classical Christian schools and found Veritas Collegiate Academy in Crystal City. When Haigh and Laura took Jonathon for a visit day, his class was diagramming sentences on the board.

“I don’t think the decision can get much clearer than that,” Laura told Haigh. They transferred him the next day.

“It was 100 percent the right decision,” Haigh said.

Hard and Beautiful

In its second year, CHCA now has nine students in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. Next year, Hsiao plans to launch third grade, then continue adding on a grade or two each year.

“At least once a week I get an email saying, ‘Will you have sixth grade next year? Will you have seventh grade? Will you have fifth grade?’” she said. “We want to focus on quality and creating sustainability and establishing a really strong academic and cultural foundation of behaviors and habits.”

Starting a classical Christian school can feel impossibly hard—after months of work, Hsiao’s first location—a church basement—fell through. Two weeks before classes started in August 2023, her first teacher quit. She kept going by remembering that God cares even for the birds of the air (Matt. 6:26). Then, on the first day of school, a bird died right on the school’s front steps.

“Each night that first week of school, I watched a different Rocky movie for the inspiration, the motivation,” she said, laughing. “Because it was like a fight.”

The work is also more ministerial than bureaucratic, which means Hsiao carries the emotional and spiritual weight of caring for small souls. “This is the first time that I’ve worked in a Christian ministry—it’s really different and really hard,” she said. “I care a lot about our school. I care even more about the children. At times, it can feel uniquely discouraging.”

CHCA / Photo by Karl Magnuson

But she can also see the Lord’s faithfulness. CHCA didn’t end up in a church basement but in a beautiful space full of natural light, in a safe neighborhood, just two blocks from the Capitol building. The substitute teacher Hsiao found for the first few weeks of the year was so excellent that Hsiao kept her on part-time for the rest of the year. Even the dead bird on the front steps was swept away by a musician Hsiao later found out is also a Christian.

“It became a reminder to me that nothing is too hard for God, and that he can easily sweep away anything that can discourage us,” she said.

Best of all is the growth she sees in the children. When one little boy was constantly discouraged with his writing, Hsiao told him she tries to pray when things are really hard for her. Later, a teacher told her she saw the boy become frustrated, lay down his pencil, close his eyes, and silently move his lips in prayer before trying again.

Another day, two boys were growing angry with each other. One told the other, “I don’t like you.”

“We’ve talked about vengeance, and leaving that to the Lord because he is just and righteous,” Hsiao said. “So this other little boy, with tears welling up in his eyes, took a deep breath and said, ‘Well, I like you.’”

“It’s been faith-building for me,” Hsiao said. “I’ve seen how the Lord has provided, answered prayers, and worked in and through this school.”

CHCA in DC

Because Hsiao started CHCA, Haigh and Laura don’t have to move their family to the suburbs in search of Christian education. As the school grows, the hope is that more families can either stay on Capitol Hill or move in—or at least, that the lack of Christian education won’t be the thing that keeps them away.

While CHCA’s location is unique—“We don’t have another city in the country like DC,” Nix said—it’s also part of a larger trend. The classical school movement began in the suburbs, with people who had the space and resources to try something new. As it matured, more schools were started in urban and in underresourced places, Nix said.

Annie Hsiao and her students this year with David Campaigne, a senior financial advisor at Blue Trust, dressed as Abraham Lincoln / Courtesy of Annie Hsiao

One example is the Spreading Hope Network, which began in inner-city Minneapolis after a John Piper sermon. In 2017, they set a goal to help start 10 schools in urban, underresourced neighborhoods in 10 years. They’ve already started more than 20.

And in some cities, like Nashville or Richmond or even Chicago, the market has grown enough to support a second classical Christian school.

When Nix gets together with other leaders in the movement, they’re “bullish,” he said. The demand and available resources aren’t going to be the biggest problem—it’s going to be finding enough qualified teachers and administrators, he said. In recent years, Veritas in Richmond has added a fellows program, while schools like Eastern University and Gordon College have added graduate degrees in classical education.

“The Lord has been very good to us—kinder than we deserve,” Nix said. “He’s honored and blessed the work of people who were willing to do the work but who didn’t always know what they were doing—myself included.”

Most of the time, that work isn’t as exciting as announcing a new master’s degree. It’s more like talking to four kindergartners about the perseverance of the prophet Zechariah.

“But, you know, Zechariah says to not despise the day of small things,” Hsiao said. “God is the One who is working.”