Some Montgomery County high school students will have the opportunity to take courses focusing on hip-hop, the Jewish experience and social justice following the Montgomery County school board’s approval of several pilot courses.
The development of pilot courses and topics are driven by student interests and supported by teachers, Peggy Pugh, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) chief academic officer, told the school board during its Nov. 7 session.
“The great thing about the pilot course process is that it allowed students choice and voice,” she said. “It allows them to develop courses that may represent them in ways that our existing core courses do not.”
Irina LaGrange, MCPS director of the college and career readiness department and districtwide programs, said the pilot course development timeline is a two- to four-year process with the goal of a pilot becoming an official class that can be offered at other schools.
In the first year, students and staff at a given school begin the pilot course development process after gauging student interest. An approved pilot course is implemented at the school in the second year and monitored for two years to learn from student feedback and to ensure the class is following education standards. In the fourth year, the pilot course may be eligible for school board approval to become an official class.
No additional funding is provided for schools that offer pilot courses. The courses are electives, so staffing is determined by enrollment, according to school board documents. Schools can offer a pilot course only if it has sufficient enrollment, so the course doesn’t “pull staffing resources from other noncore elective classes,” the documents state.
The pilot courses
The school board approved three pilot classes for the 2025-2026 school year. “Hip-Hop Poetics and Rhetoric: Exploring the Golden Age of Hip Hop” to be offered at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring for its first year in the pilot program. “Jewish Peoplehood Throughout History” at Blair and “Social Justice Through Public Policy” at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda will be in their second year of the pilot process. Those two courses are currently available to students.
According to school board documents, the course on hip-hop poetics and rhetoric will explore the “literary aspects of hip-hop culture” from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. The curriculum includes analysis of lyrics, music videos, documentaries, cover art and memoirs.
The class is a companion to the existing hip-hop history and culture course, which examines hip-hop culture using a sociological and historical lens. This class, according to the documents, will explore hip-hop through a literary lens.
The Jewish peoplehood class “seeks to help all students understand the uniqueness of the Jewish experience in a way that will unpack the intersectional nature of the Jewish identity,” according to school board documents.
The course goal, the documents stated, is to help students understand Judaism from multiple angles including race, ethnicity and religion.
According to school board documents, the aim of the social justice and public policy class is to “empower students to understand and productively engage in the public social policy process” in America. Students will learn about the process of creating public policy while learning “how to advocate for social policies to advance social justice.”
Other courses approved
The school board also gave final approval for several courses that have already successfully completed the pilot process, including ethnic studies at Poolesville High School, Global Climate Change at Northwood and Walter Johnson high schools and Principles of Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality Design (AIVR) at Northwood. Walt Whitman is in Bethesda and Northwood is currently located at Charles W. Woodward High School in Rockville while the Silver Spring school is being rebuilt.
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