Langley High School, McLean | Fees, Rankings, Address, Admission, Vacancies, Reviews & More

I am an alumna — class of 1999, although I did go back briefly for part of my student teaching in 2009. In that time, the basic ethos of the school seemed not to have changed.

In terms of academics, Langley is pretty high up there. I don’t know them to do the IB (International Baccalaureate) program like South Lakes in Reston; but they were beginning to offer AP courses while I was a student, and I suspect that the rate of participation in those courses has gone up since my time. One of the biggest complaints I’d hear while at Langley was one of academic rigor to an extreme, typically from parents, although from students as well. In that regard, Langley has had a reputation for preparing young people for college and professional work. Some of my classmates went on to Ivy League schools and/or became doctors and attorneys. I myself have a graduate degree these days. Langley did a great job — as did our Fairfax County feeder schools in Langley’s pyramid — of laying a good groundwork for us.

As for the teachers, it seemed to me that several had been teaching at Langley for more than a decade, if not multiple decades. The “bad” teachers I have known at Langley — those who can’t manage a class well — in my day were a fluke and typically lasted only a year.

Langley can have a bit of a “sink or swim” mentality to academics. Teachers may generally expect students to turn to peers to get caught up when they’re out sick, because they really don’t have much time to reteach every kid every time someone’s out for something. While this may not be the norm elsewhere, it actually taught us to be disciplined and gave us a taste of the real world. It was stressful, though, especially when we were out sick and fell behind. Still, most of us got it to work. For what it’s worth, I did graduate with a GPA in excess of 3.5; but I had to bust my tail for it. It was probably similar for many of my classmates.

The students I went to school with were more interested in performing strongly academically and going on to college than in getting involved in gangs and strung out on drugs (although some of my classmates would do the underage drinking and tobacco smoking thing). Drugs and teenage pregnancy were so rare when I was there, that they were the subject of gossip, in the form of, “That was so stupid that So-and-so did X. What are they going to do now?” (Note: If a young lady gets pregnant, there is now an organization called Generation Hope that helps DC Metro region college students get through college while parenting. They also support single dads. I recommend reaching out to that organization if this situation arises and the student is otherwise able to go to college locally.)

Langley in my day was a fairly safe and stable school environment — one conducive to learning. Yes, every once in a long while we had two young men fighting in the halls or on school grounds; but staff members would quickly break up those very infrequent fights and discipline the young men. From what I could tell, it tended to be over insults or personal reputation and tended not to involve weapons. Anyone who was good-natured and minded their own business didn’t really have anything to worry about.

For the most part, my classmates were good-natured, respectful kids. Some of them were cliquish and snobbish; but those types also tended to be more insecure than the rest of us, so we would learn to ignore their attempts to feel superior to the rest of us. Many kids I went to school with were actually fairly down-to-earth, despite our parents’ wealth.

With regards to diversity: Langley is not representative of most US communities: they have very few low-income students, and non-Caucasians are often Arab, Muslim and Asian.

Overall, I felt that I got a good education at Langley, and I liked a lot of my more down-to-earth classmates.

I can’t say that every experience I had was a bad one. Sometimes, I had teachers who genuinely cared about how well I did and who cared a lot about helping me. I truly appreciate my experiences with each and every one of these people, as I believe you can work around a lot of (although not always all of,) problems you have in a class or with a teacher’s style or with the course work when a teacher works with you. There were a lot of things that could be worse at Langley. As far as I was aware, there weren’t any gangs, and Langley could have had a worse problem with drugs. However, there was a lot of things that could have been greatly improved.
Most of the time, me and others I have spoken to felt that waiting to see which class you were in was waiting to see how bad of a teacher you got. Most of my teachers did not care how I did in their class, or care to help me when I asked. Sometimes I would constantly go to teachers with questions only to not receive any aid, advice, or answers. Sometimes these teachers seemed upset at me for asking them (during their study hall hours!) for bothering them for help. As an extreme example of this: once I was absent during the introductory unit in Chem class, and when I went in to ask my teacher for help on what I missed, my teacher said that they didn’t want to teach the lesson again and that I should figure out how to do it myself. I don’t feel that this is normal or appropriate. In other classes with far better teachers, I’ve had teachers offer to go over things quickly with me after school and such.
Some of the staff members were extremely rude, and would often take their bad day (or life) out on me. Once when I was sick, I had a staff member accuse me that I was faking my ailments and asked me if I was doing it to receive attention or to avoid the pain of being bullied or friendless (I don’t know why they made such a stretch over me being sick.) I had another staff member yell at me for five minutes over an imagined slight that I apologized for, and basically told me I was a rude person that didn’t care about other people. They also proceeded to ask me what was “wrong” with me. I had another staff member, who was checking me attendance, accuse me of changing my note that said I was leaving early from 1:30pm to 2:30pm (why would I change my note to make me leave school later????) I was mostly fine with them calling my parent to check that the note was correct, but I felt like it was a bit much that this staff member then asked if the person she spoke to was “really my parent” and told me that it had better be.
The students at Langley weren’t particularly a highlight. It’s true that a lot of them are snotty and rude. One time during my freshman year, we had a teacher who was not effective but who was trying. The students in my class for some reason decided it would be appropriate to disrupt the lesson to tell the teacher that they couldn’t teach, and complain about their grades. I’m sure in many ways the students could have been worse. For the most part people kept to themselves and their friend groups, socially. People were extremely self conscious, and sometimes rude to other people, but it could have been a lot worse.
I believe someone pointed out that Langley mostly cares about their AP students and leaves the students in non-APs to fend for themselves, and that is definitely true.