Discover what shapes how we talk about schools today by exploring the history of U.S. education reform. Engage with the main actors, key decisions, and major turning points in this history. See how social forces drive reform. Learn about how the critical tensions embedded in U.S. education policy and practice apply to schools nationally, globally— and where you live.
Episode 6.7: Leonard Covello's Community High School in East Harlem
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來自 University of Pennsylvania 的課程
American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice
個評分
從本節課中
The Depression Era
This module looks at the New Deal’s contribution to the education of American youth; the impact of the Great Depression on education; social reconstruction and the schools; schools as social centers, community centers, and community schools; the Nambé School, New Mexico; the Arthurdale School, West Virginia; and Benjamin Franklin High School, East Harlem.
與講師見面
Dr. John L. PuckettProfessor of Education
Graduate School of Education
Dr. Michael Charles JohanekSenior Fellow
Graduate School of Education
Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem applied the community school idea
in an ethnically diverse comprehensive high school that was subject to
the bureaucratic constraints of the New York City school system.
In an urban revival of the Adams Dewey model of the community school idea,
Leonard Covello, principal of Benjamin Franklin High School
focused on the community as a starting point for learning.
Covello emphasized the school as a means for social problem solving and
for training students in effective democratic citizenship.
A southern Italian immigrant,
Covello saw despair in East Harlem's ethnic neighborhoods and
worked to foster the community's social and democratic development.
He believed that the school, which was for boys only, had to be the leader and
the coordinating agency in all educational enterprises.
Quote, the surging life of the community as a whole,
its motion picture houses, its dance halls, its streets, its gangs,
its churches, its community houses, its community codes of behavior and
morals, these will either promote or destroy the work of the school.
>> Mm.
>> End quote.
>> Unlike Elsie Clapp at Arthurdale, or E.
L. Tireman in Nambe, Covello was an ethnic
insider in East Harlem, educated in New York schools and at Colombia University,
a long time teacher of romance languages at Manhattan's DeWitt Clinton High School,
and a community organizer.
He was also a trained sociologist, who, as Franklin's principal, used sociological
maps of East Harlem's neighborhood that identified every apartment building,
including the ethnicity of its residents, every store,
church, empty lot, school, social club, and so on, in order to
understand the social geography in which Franklin's students lived.
He conceptualized community problem solving as a curricular and
co-curricular means to prepare students to be active, publicly engaged citizens.
Covello spearheaded a community organizing strategy that contemporary democratic
theorists labeled public work, activity that harnesses
the cooperative efforts of diverse categories and groups of people,
ones that are often in conflict, to accomplish shared social and civic goals.
Covello and his allies recognized that for East Harlem to effectively press its claim
on the city and state for housing reform, healthcare, education, and economic
development, diverse ethnic and racial groups would have to speak with one voice.
To build a shared democratic vision and the means to attain it
among East Harlem's 34 ethnic and racial groups, students and
teachers at Franklin mobilized citizen action campaigns around education,
health and sanitation, citizenship and naturalization, and housing.
Students participated as researchers, essayists, peer teachers, demonstrators,
and lobbyists, even arguing one case to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.
>> The most notable activity was the four-year housing campaign, 1937 to 1941,
that brought the first low income housing to East Harlem, the East River Houses.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Corvello recognized that the often squalid, congested and dilapidated housing
of East Harlem reduced the impact a school could have in the lives of its students.
He also knew from personal experience the toll it could take on families.
As a youth, he had watched his chronically depressed mother wither away amid the dark
squalor of an East Harlem tenement and
had dropped out of school to help the family cover mounting bills.
Coordinated by the school's housing committee, one of six school community
committees involving students, teachers and community leaders,
Franklin High School sponsored public exhibits and films of housing models,
classroom discussions, and civics, economics and history classes.
Essay contests through the English departments.
Studies of local land values and use.
Public rallies, radio broadcasts,
scale modeling of housing options through the art department.
Forums with local experts and translations in Italian and
Spanish through the modern languages departments.
>> Mm, again, the students often played key roles in
the campaigns targeting community problems, coordinated through the school.
In 1948, for example, a student, reacting to a flurry of negative press accounts of
East Harlem, took to the streets to determine the state of their community.
They did not like what they saw.
>> [LAUGH].
>> Sanitation levels described by the mayor as frightful,
that only exacerbated high rates of illness in the neighborhood,
diminishing student development in school and out.
East Harlem air mail delivery, garbage sent flying from windows,
was one infamous culprit.
In conjunction with local agencies and community groups,
the students organized a sanitation parade complete with a 50-piece band and
5,000 leaflets, a conference led by a local congressional representative,
a cleanup contest sponsored by the Daily News newspaper.
An educational campaign, complete with roving sound truck,
broadcasts a science and social science lesson plan for the school.
And a successful effort to change the city's sanitary code
to enforce more frequent and effective garbage collection.
>> Cavallo's reflective practitioner approach to community
problem solving tapped a multi-method urban sociological research tradition,
rather different forerunner to present-day data-based decision-making.
He, his staff,
including at one point dozens provided by the Works Progress Administration, and
his students orchestrated surveys, case studies, home visits,
interviews, photographs and observations all in an effort to
understand the underlying dynamics of the community in which his students lived.
They also used local street maps that displayed rich social data,
one of which decorated Cavello's office, to provide a detailed
picture of the environment in which his educational initiatives operated and
of the factors supporting or frustrating his success.
Every institution, from residents to deli, was labeled,
the dominant ethnicity of each block identified, and
every student residents represented by a push pin,
indicating ethnicity and immigrant-migrant background.
Covello knew that such details mattered.
>> Mm. >> When fights broke out
along Third Avenue between Puerto Rican and Italian youth
with bricks tossed from rooftops, he not only knew which students lived where, but
with whom he could work on those blocks to resolve tensions.
>> Hm, one distinguishing feature of Covello's community-centered approach was
the street unit, in his words, a unit that functions literally in the street.
Directly challenging and bridging the spacial distinction between a school and
community, the street units housed recreation, research and
educational activities that encouraged community members, business owners,
parents, teachers and students,
including dropouts, to work together to improve the quality of neighborhood life.
Cavello tapped the offsite units to address issues embedded within the fabric
of the community, and to do so in a manner that recognized that many within
the neighborhood community would never set foot in a school building.
Informal leaders could be cultivated and
the relatively neutral ground allowed this school to establish a, quote,
sphere of intimacy with the community it sought to understand and serve.
The Friends and Neighbor Club, for example,
was open to any reputable community organization, and held
meetings of the housing committee, school social clubs, and adult education classes,
which were part of an extensive Works Progress Administration adult school
program, enrolling over 1,700 adults by early 1938.
Other storefronts housed programs for dropouts, as well as social research units
that provided services to Italian and Spanish-speaking community members.
Over 25 research projects were carried out in the first eight years of the school.
Studies included a block-by-block study of ethnic distribution, a,
a study of motion pictures in the life of the school's students,
a study of the home backgrounds of problem students, and
a study of leisure time patterns of the high school students.
As the research and services of the street units grew, Covello integrated
them under an umbrella nonprofit, the East Harlem Educational and Research Bureau,
also initiating the East Harlem News, a school-based local newspaper staffed
with faculty, community members and students, as were all the street units.
Across research, support services, community outreach and
advocacy, the street units reflected Covello's effort to address the various
factors affecting education of the boys under his charge at Benjamin Franklin.
>> Covello's community school project, which lasted from 1934 to
1956 focused on ensuring that community and therefore student needs were met.
As part of the engagement process,
it recognized that the curriculum could play a role in solving community problems.
Unlike other reformers, Covello created a participatory mechanism,
a community advisory council with community advisory committees for
jointly involving community organizations, teachers, parents, students and
at-large community members in communities' problem-solving activities.
To a certain extent, the work of these committees permeated the academic
curriculum, especially at crisis points in the life of East Harlem.
>> Mm.
Covello was committed to holding the school to high academic standards,
wanting to prove that students of immigrant and minority backgrounds could
achieve on the same level as those from more privileged backgrounds.
In many respects, Franklin's differentiated curriculum in the 1930s was
done not through tracking, but rather through a core academic program
with elective offerings for students interested in vocational training.
Ultimately, World War II and the social forces it unleashed
were major factors in diminishing the East Harlem community school.
After World War II, faced with a high failure rate,
Covello grudgingly capitulated to his teachers' demands for curriculum tracking,
an infusion of life adjustment courses to hold potential dropouts in school.
In the 1950s, ethnic conflict in East Harlem and a staunchly conservative
political climate combined to undermine Covello's experiment in civic education.
In our module on the post World War II era, we will look at life adjustment
education and the conservative backlash it spawned in the 1950s and early 1960s.
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