Around a crowded, cozy dining table in Roland Park, laughter rises above the clatter of silverware dishing up corn, asparagus, tomatoes and burgers.

There’s discussion of an upcoming family wedding: the last-minute dress alterations, the backyard-grown flowers that weren’t enough and the music played by someone from, of course, a city school.

As always, education has quickly crept into the conversation. It’s the theme of the Hornbeck family’s everyday lives, the thread that stitches their family’s past and future together.

Around the Hornbeck family table are two Baltimore school principals, a former Maryland state superintendent of schools, a city schoolteacher and a private schoolteacher. Three generations of Maryland educators, two generations who live and work near each other.

“There are few people who have had as a big an impact on Baltimore as the Hornbeck clan,” said Jason Perkins-Cohen, who grew up with brothers Mark Gaither and Matt Hornbeck and is the deputy secretary of the Maryland Department of Labor. The three generations of Hornbecks have shaped the lives of thousands of young people, he said.

The patriarch, David Hornbeck, was Maryland superintendent from 1976-88, before he became superintendent of Philadelphia schools. He was never a school teacher or principal.

David likes to say he and his sons are in education, but his sons like to correct his observation. Sometimes they tell him “the difference between us is that they know what they’re doing,” said David, 83.

In the last decade, David has switched to advocacy, spreading the word about things such as restorative practices, which involve teaching students to resolve their disputes peacefully. He also lobbied for community schools and founded Strong Schools Maryland, an education advocacy group, in 2017.

The family business might not have been education if David had gotten the job he wanted. He’d hoped to be a pastor and went to Union Seminary in New York City, but when he graduated in the 1960s, the conservative Presbyterian churches in his home state of Texas would not hire and ordain him because he had come from a liberal seminary. He eventually got a job in campus ministry at Temple University.

His sons, Mark Gaither, 58, and Matt Hornbeck, 56, went to city schools and made their way into teaching after college. (Mark took his wife’s last name when they married.)

Mark remembers not knowing what he wanted to become after Bowdoin College. “It was the first year that Teach For America was a thing, and they came to campus,” he said. They offered him a third-grade teaching job in downtown Los Angeles, but he deferred a year, thinking he was in love with a woman in Philadelphia. It turned out she wasn’t the one.

The teaching did stick, however, but only after years in Pennsylvania and California schools, a master’s in education in New York and a slight veer into sculpting. He wondered “if I was a teacher who sculpted or a sculptor who taught,” he said.

Matt and Mark’s careers took them to schools in different places, but eventually their paths both led to East Baltimore schools just a mile from each other. Each has spent more than 20 years as a principal.

Matt is at Hampstead Hill Academy, an elementary/middle school on Patterson Park with an enviable mix of students of different races and socioeconomic backgrounds and some of the highest achievement in the city.

This past year, Hampstead Hill’s middle school students had the highest test scores in the city in math and English, and its seventh-grade students had the highest math scores in the state for the second year in a row.

Mark is at Wolfe Street Academy, a small elementary school in Upper Fells Point with a successful record of educating Hispanic children, some of whom are just learning English. Both schools are outperforming most elementary schools in the city.

Matt’s daughter, Holly Hornbeck, who graduated from city schools, began teaching not far away at City Springs Elementary near Little Italy several years ago. It’s close enough that, on a recent morning, her father dropped in on her classroom on the way to a meeting.

All three schools are run by the Baltimore Curriculum Project, a charter school operator that converts existing public schools into charter schools, and draws students from the surrounding neighborhoods.

“I have known the Hornbecks as friends and colleagues for decades. What you see is what you get,” said Laura Doherty, CEO of the Baltimore Curriculum Project. “Always concerned about Baltimore, always trying to do what is right for the benefit of others. They really care about kids. Everybody’s kids.”

The family connections don’t end when they leave their schools each night. Their life seems a small-town existence inside a big city.

From the back of Matt’s kitchen in Roland Park, he can see his parents’ house in one direction and almost see his brother’s house in another. They drop by each others’ houses and run into each other at the grocery store.

They didn’t start with the intention of having each other so close. Each family purchased a house nearby over the years, as they trickled back from Philadelphia or California or other parts of Baltimore.

The Roland Park community provided what they needed nearby. The children could walk to Roland Park Elementary/Middle School, and the grandparents could host family dinners each Sunday.

“They see each other constantly. It is like an old-world kind of dynamic that is wonderful to see,” Perkins-Cohen said. Matt Hornbeck and Perkins-Cohen have breakfast together many Saturday mornings before Matt heads to a weekly gathering of car enthusiasts at a mall parking lot.

The family gives each other space. His parents are dropping by once a week this fall to watch “Slow Horses” on television, he said, but once the season is over he may not see his parents for a month. Still, he recognizes the gift of a life in which you and your brother have the shared experience of running a city school.

Many summers, the entire clan travels together. Last summer, they went to Acadia National Park in Maine to hike.

The family members say their work lives and their personal lives aren’t separate when they are together. “There are no hard lines,“ Mark said. ”It just flows. ... I mean to the point where we have joked about having our own podcast where we sit around and be funny (and we think we are) and see how it goes.“ Laughter erupts again from everyone around table.

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.