Groton School
Groton School is a private, college-preparatory, day and boarding school located in Groton, Massachusetts, United States. It is affiliated with the Episcopal tradition.
Groton enrolls about 380 boys and girls from the eighth through twelfth grades, dubbed Forms II–VI in the British fashion. Its $475 million endowment enables the school to admit students on a need-blind basis. Typically, 40–44% of students are on financial aid. Students with family incomes under $150,000 attend for free.
The school admitted 8% of applicants in 2022. Its list of notable alumni includes U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Nobel laureate John B. Goodenough.
History
The Peabody era, 1884–1940
Groton School was founded in 1884 by Endicott Peabody, an Episcopal priest. Peabody was backed by Harvard president Charles Eliot and affluent figures of the time, such as Peabody's father Samuel Peabody, Phillips Brooks, William Lawrence, William Crowninshield Endicott, and J. P. Morgan. The school also enjoyed the patronage of the Roosevelt family, as Theodore Roosevelt was one of Peabody's close friends.File:Interior, Saint John's Chapel, Groton School.jpg|left|thumb|262x262px|The design of St. John's Chapel reflects the school's low church tendencies. Its architect, a high churchman, proposed adding an ornate reredos like the one he built for St. Paul's School, but Endicott Peabody vetoed it.
Peabody served as headmaster for 56 years. A proponent of "muscular Christianity," he instituted a Spartan educational system that included cold showers and dormitory cubicles instead of individual bedrooms. He successfully attracted the children of wealthy families, whom he hoped to toughen up through this program of "corrective salutary deprivation."
Under Peabody, Groton sought to inspire its students to serve the public good, rather than enter professional life. In peacetime, many graduates were involved in public affairs, but the alumni typically gravitated to business, finance, law, or similar professional positions. In wartime, the school's ethos of public service played a more prominent role. Of Groton's 580 military-age alumni, 475 served in World War I; 24 died and another 36 were wounded, at a time when the graduating class contained roughly 27 students. Roughly 700 alumni served in World War II, with 31 deaths.
Peabody also expected his students to "be ready for advanced courses at the universities." He sought to improve the academic qualities of the student body, introducing competitive entrance examinations and a scholarship program in 1907. Since even Ivy League universities could not always be counted on for financial aid at the time, Peabody also helped certain students pay for college. Chauncey was able to transfer from Ohio State to Harvard after Peabody arranged for a Groton donor to subsidize the cost, and Peabody gave the 1940 valedictorian and future Nobel laureate John B. Goodenough a tutoring job to help make ends meet after the latter was admitted to Yale.
The Crocker era, 1940–65
Peabody was succeeded by John Crocker '18, the Episcopal chaplain at Princeton University. Crocker's 25-year tenure overlapped with the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1952, Groton accepted its first African-American student. In April 1965, Crocker and his wife—accompanied by 85 Groton students—marched with Martin Luther King Jr. during a civil rights demonstration in Boston. Crocker also significantly expanded the school's financial aid program; by his retirement in 1965 approximately 30% of Groton students were on scholarship.Co-education and change, 1965–77
After Crocker, Groton cycled through three brief Headmasterships: Bertrand Honea Jr., Paul Wright, and Rowland Cox. These years were marked by disputes over how to implement co-education at Groton. Honea proposed either merging with a girls' school or formalizing a sister-school relationship with Concord Academy, a well-regarded girls' school twenty miles away. Following Honea's departure, Wright successfully proposed an organic transition to co-education by expanding the student body from 225 to 300 students; this plan limited the number of boys that would be rejected under the new system. After Wright reached Groton's mandatory retirement age, the school tapped Cox to implement the plan. Groton welcomed its first female students in 1975. Applications tripled, and today, Groton's student body is evenly split between boys and girls.The new headmasters also relaxed some of the more Spartan aspects of Peabody's Groton in response to changing preferences within the American upper class, which increasingly favored private day schools over boarding schools. They replaced the sleeping cubicles with proper bedrooms, added more holidays to the academic calendar, relaxed the dress code, authorized a school newspaper, and gave students more free time over the weekends to explore the town of Groton or their own personal interests. However, some traditions remain, such as the school's commitment to public service, its small community, and its attachment to the Episcopal Church.
Contemporary Groton, 1977–present
Groton reached its modern form under William Polk '58 and Richard Commons, who significantly upgraded the campus' buildings and grounds and internationalized the admissions process; and the current Headmaster, the South African Temba Maqubela. In recent years the school has focused on broadening affordability. In 2008, Groton, Andover, and Exeter began offering free tuition to families with household incomes below a certain threshold, initially set at $75,000. From 2014 to 2018, the school conducted a $74 million fundraising campaign that allowed it to begin admitting students on a need-blind basis.In the spring of 1999, the Middlesex County District Attorney began investigating the claims of three Groton seniors, who alleged that they, and other students, had been sexually abused by other students in dormitories in 1996 and 1997. During the school's investigation of the matter, another student brought a similar complaint to the school's attention. In 2005, the school pleaded guilty to a criminal misdemeanor charge of failing to report the latter student's sexual abuse complaint to the government and paid a $1,250 fine. The school issued an apology to the victims, and the civil suit stemming from the first student's complaint was settled out of court. In the fall of 2006, as part of the settlement, the school published a full apology to the boy who first alleged the abuse in 1999.
Members of the Groton community continue to play a notable role in the secondary school community. At present, former Groton masters are the heads of school at Cranbrook, St. Paul's, Roxbury Latin, Dana Hall, Salisbury, and Brewster International, among others.
Academics and reputation
In 2024, Niche ranked Groton as America's top private high school. In 2016, Business Insider ranked Groton as the most selective boarding school in the United States. In 2024, the website Private School Review repeated this ranking, although it did not say whether it confirmed this information with Groton.Curriculum and test scores
The Form of 2023's average combined SAT score was 1490 and its average combined ACT score was 33.5. The school's 4:1 student-teacher ratio allows the school to offer a variety of courses and an individualized study program for seniors whose academic interests have gone beyond the regular curriculum. Although not every academic department offers Advanced Placement classes, Groton students took 2,582 AP exams from 2018 to 2022 and passed 93% of them.Role as feeder school
Groton has historically served as a feeder school for Harvard College. From 1906 to 1932, 405 Groton students applied to Harvard and 402 were accepted.There were at least three major reasons for this level of success. First, even Ivy League schools accepted most of their applicants until the second half of the twentieth century, when the government expanded the pool of students who could afford college by backing student loans and providing G.I. Bill funding for veterans. Second, Groton students often performed well on college entrance examinations. From 1906 to 1934, only six students received perfect scores on the English component of the College Boards, and four were Groton alumni. Third, even when Groton produced middling students, elite colleges were often willing to admit them anyway because of their parents' legacy status, wealth, or connections. One especially rich Groton boy did so poorly in school that Endicott Peabody threatened to ban him from applying to Harvard. Despite "appalling" scores on his entrance exams, Harvard admitted him anyway.
In 1953, McGeorge Bundy '36 became the faculty dean at Harvard, a role which gave him oversight of undergraduate admissions. Although he became a Groton trustee in 1957, he believed that the college entrance exams of the time were doing a poor job of identifying the most talented students, and concluded that "he untrained boy of real brilliance is more valuable to than the dull boy who has been intensely trained." In 1958, Bundy commissioned a report urging Harvard to diversify its student body and to give greater weight to raw academic talent in undergraduate admissions. The share of prep school graduates at Harvard declined from 57% of the freshman class in 1941 to 32% in 1980. These changes were not confined to Harvard. In 1960, Groton's 75th anniversary book accurately warned that prep school students were now "challenged... by boys who come from public schools all over the country. As one dean said to me, 'There has been a dramatic rise in the academic competence of Yale's students during the last few years. The best of the present are no better than the best of previous years; there are simply more of them.'"
From 2019 to 2023, the ten most common destinations for Groton graduates were University of Chicago, Georgetown University, Yale University, Harvard University, Boston College, Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Brown University, and Columbia University.
From 2023 to 2025, the twelve most common destinations for Groton graduates were University of Chicago, Harvard University, Tufts University, Dartmouth College, Stanford University, Brown University, Georgetown University, Boston College, Yale University, Vanderbilt University, University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton University.