Studio Demo · Fictional school — Montessori Makers School is a fictional school built by Montessori Makers Studio
Build yours →Home / After MMS
Prepared to thrive wherever they go.
Our children leave at twelve. The question every family asks — reasonably, and early — is whether nine years without grades, tests, or homework leaves a child ready for a school that has all three. Here is our honest answer, with the numbers.
20
Graduates, Class of 2026
7
To CPS Academic Centers
6
To independent schools
94%
First-choice placement, 5-yr average
Secondary placement
Where the Class of 2026 went.
20 children, 20 different conversations. Our students leave at twelve, which means they are applying for seventh grade— so the relevant options are the CPS Academic Centers, the independent schools that take a middle-school cohort, the Montessori adolescent programs, and the neighborhood and magnet schools. Chicago’s selective high schools come three years later.
We do not steer families toward a particular kind of school, and we do not treat selective entry as the only good outcome. What we do is start early — the fall of the final year — and write honestly. Dr. Osei-Bonsu writes for every applicant herself.
7
CPS Academic Centers
6
Independent schools
3
Montessori adolescent programs
4
Neighborhood and magnet schools
Every school our last 5 classes have enrolled in.
28 schools, 96 graduates, since 2022. Listed in full rather than summarized, because a placement list that names only the impressive ones is not a placement list.
CPS Academic Centers
6 schoolsSelective seventh-grade entry, by test and grades. Application opens in the fall of the final year.
- Whitney M. Young Academic Center
- Lane Tech Academic Center
- Kenwood Academic Center
- Taft Academic Center
- Morgan Park Academic Center
- Lindblom Academic Center
Independent schools
10 schoolsMost Chicago independents take a middle-school cohort at seventh grade, which is the natural exit point from a Montessori elementary.
- Francis W. Parker School
- Latin School of Chicago
- University of Chicago Laboratory Schools
- Bennett Day School
- British International School of Chicago
- Chicago City Day School
- Catherine Cook School
- Sacred Heart Schools, Hardey Preparatory
- Chicago Waldorf School
- Lycée Français de Chicago
Montessori adolescent programs
3 schoolsFor families who want the sequence to continue. These are the nearest programs built on Dr. Montessori’s plan for the third plane.
- Near North Montessori, Junior High
- Countryside Montessori School, Adolescent Program
- Forest Bluff School, Adolescent Program
Neighborhood and magnet schools
9 schoolsWe do not treat these as the fallback. Several are among the strongest middle-grade programs in the city, and some families choose them first.
- Oscar Mayer Magnet School
- Alcott College Prep
- Skinner North Classical School
- Ogden International School
- Franklin Fine Arts Center
- Disney II Magnet School
- LaSalle Language Academy
- Lincoln Elementary School
- Nettelhorst School
Enrollments, not offers. Several graduates each year hold more than one place and we count only the one they took. Naming a school here is a statement of where our children went, not a claim of any relationship with it.
The transition
What is genuinely hard, and what is not.
Two things reliably take our graduates a few weeks: timed written assessments, and homework as a nightly volume rather than an occasional purpose. We work on both deliberately in the final year, and we tell families plainly that the first term of secondary school involves a real adjustment.
What does not take adjustment, according to nearly every secondary teacher who has written to us: starting work without being told to, asking for help, managing a long project, and getting on with people who are not like them.
We would rather say this than promise a seamless transition. Families deciding between MMS and a conventional school deserve the actual trade, not a brochure.
What carries over
Six habits that outlast the school.
Drawn from what secondary teachers, and later our alumni themselves, have told us over fifteen years of asking.
They can start without being started
A child who has chosen their own work every morning for nine years does not sit waiting for an instruction. Secondary teachers name this first, and they name it constantly.
They can hold a long deadline
Six-week independent studies, twice a year, from age nine. By the time a term paper arrives, the shape of the problem — scope it, schedule it, protect the time — is familiar.
They ask the teacher things
Nine years of adults who answer questions rather than deliver verdicts produces a child who will put a hand up, and who will say "I don’t understand" out loud in a room of thirty.
They are comfortable with people unlike them
Mixed-age classrooms mean every child has spent years as both the youngest and the oldest. Being the new one somewhere is a familiar, survivable feeling.
They tolerate not knowing
The Great Lessons are deliberately unfinished. A child raised on them treats an open question as an invitation rather than as a gap in the teaching.
They know what good work feels like
Without grades, the standard has to be internal. Our graduates arrive with an unusually clear sense of when a piece of their own work is not yet finished.
Alumni
In their own words.
“The first month at the Academic Center I kept waiting for someone to tell me what to do with the free period. It took me a while to realize that everyone else was waiting too, and I just… wasn’t.”
Nadia R.
MMS 2019 · Whitney Young Academic Center, then Walter Payton College Prep
“I had never taken a timed test until eighth grade. That was genuinely hard for about six weeks. What was not hard was writing fifteen pages about something I picked myself — I had been doing that since I was nine.”
Theo M.
MMS 2018 · Francis W. Parker, now at Oberlin
“My chemistry teacher asked why I always wanted to do the lab before reading the chapter. I did not have an answer then. I do now.”
Priya S.
MMS 2021 · Lane Tech Academic Center, now Lane Tech College Prep