Excerpt From ‘A Letter To Our Children (and Other Young Educators)’
by Adria Steinberg, TGS staff member
For Sam, Sunanna, Adam, Ashley, Greg and Carolyn, Adam and Lisa
Intergenerational Dialogue. . . and Why It Matters
Over the years, Steve Seidel and I have spent many engrossing hours with our adult children, their mates, and their friends—many of whom are educators and education/community activists-- around breakfast or dinner tables, on long walks, at playgrounds and on beaches, and over the phone (or more recently zoom) talking about teaching and learning, schools and schooling, new school creation and various incarnations of school reform and redesign. For us, these have been wonderful opportunities to reflect on the work each of us has done and left undone, to hear about the work they are each doing, engage with new ideas and dilemmas that they so articulately describe, and, in the process, get a chance to think about the relevance or irrelevance of our own experiences to theirs. We are deeply grateful for all those conversations.
Recently, this question of relevance has become more salient for us—that is, questions about the degree to which our experiences—particularly our decade plus creating and working at The Group School—might be interesting or useful to younger generations of educators and education/community activists. In part this retrospective has been triggered by our efforts to clean out our Jackson Street home and its spill-over of files, books, and other memorabilia into the basement. There we found a number of boxes filled to the brim with artifacts and papers from the school—everything from the sign that was on the doorway of the building the school bought on Franklin Street in Cambridge to mimeographed course descriptions and syllabi and handwritten board meeting minutes. It was fascinating to once again look through the literary magazines, playbills from the theater program, cassette tapes of interviews with students, and yearbooks full of student writings and photographs, and budgets revealing just how razor thin the shoestring was on which we ran the school.
Also, serendipitously, several of the founding students of TGS got hold of the hour-long documentary that was made of the first year of the school which had been lost for many years, digitized it and put it on youtube. Watching it, we were immediately brought back to the passion with which students, volunteers, and staff approached the task in 1970 of creating an alternative high school for working class youth in Cambridge. And we realized that TGS, like so many other experiments of the 1970’s, was nearing the 50 year anniversary of the founding of the school—an occasion that we thought we would like to mark by holding a reunion for as many alumni and former staff as we could find and perhaps using that gathering to think together about what to do with the various artifacts and files we and others had found.
The pandemic interfered with that dream, as with so many other things, and other priorities took precedence over revisiting something from 50 years ago. But recent illnesses and deaths of former students and staff have reignited once again our interest in honoring and understanding and perhaps sharing what was for us the wellspring of so much of what came after in our lives.
We decided to start by hosting a couple of Zoom conversations with alumni, volunteers, and staff who had been most engaged in starting and shaping the early years of the school. Because we are meeting on Zoom and not in person, it has been critical to hold these conversations in a way that would ensure that everyone has the opportunity to listen and to share. Steve (Seidel) has been using his ninja facilitator skills and his understanding of story circles to provide an inclusive structure for sharing within a 90 minute time-frame.
These are proving to be extraordinarily rich opportunities to hear why students and staff were drawn to this project of starting and keeping alive a new very different kind of high school and how we now—roughly 50 years later-- understand its impacts on our lives. Like all great reunions, we laugh, we cry and we get back in touch with parts of ourselves that had maybe gotten somewhat buried over the years. Former students and staff alike are finding these sessions to be very moving and surprisingly generative. One very unexpected result has been alumni and staff starting to bring things they have written or are currently working on-- poems, remembrances and sections of memoirs that touch on their formative years in the school --to read aloud and share with the group. It’s almost as if the act of remembering the learning environment we had created together has started us on a process of recreating that environment via Zoom.
So why are we sharing all of this with you now? As we said at the beginning, we don’t really know what the relevance of all this might be to any of you. But we see so many connections to the work that younger educators are doing: reinvention and design of new educational environments, helping young people find beauty and strength in their social, cultural and racial identities and construct futures for themselves and their communities, encouraging youth activism based on the profound understanding that things do not have to be the way they are and that we can give ourselves permission to do things differently.
Maybe just seeing how this type of work is understood and appreciated now by those who participated in it 50 years ago, as students or teachers, can provide a bit of inspiration to you on a day when you are wondering why—in the face of so many obstacles-- you are still doing what you are doing and whether your efforts will make a difference. So with that hope, we offer you these thoughts and reflections about our experiences at The Group School and about how we are now coming to understand those experiences from the perspective of 50 years later.
Part I: Origins of The Group School –Fertile and Fraught Ground
Why this time and in this place? Cambridge circa 1970’s
In recent years, it’s been easy to feel down on Cambridge and wonder why we ever thought it would be a good place to live, work, and bring up a family. Walk down Jackson Street in North Cambridge in 2023 (or down many other streets in the neighborhoods of Cambridge) and chances are you will see (and hear) anywhere between 3 and 5 major development or renovation projects going on. Developers are buying up the old workers’ cottages and double and triple-deckers which long housed multi-generational families and building multiple single-family houses on each of these lots.
A month ago we ran into the developer at one of these sites three houses down from us on Jackson Street and our jaws literally dropped when we found out that he is putting the two houses he just developed on the market for 2 M and 2.2 M dollars. Because of the proximity to growing biotech companies behind and adjacent to Alewife MBTA Station, he seems confident that he can get this price, despite the proximity to a large public housing complex and the Rindge Towers, shoddily-built apartment buildings that have long provided inadequate housing to many undocumented immigrants.
It seems to find housing in Cambridge these days, you have to be a highly paid tech worker (or better yet, two highly paid tech workers), have a trust fund, or be poor enough to be eligible for public housing, or desperate enough to live in substandard housing like Rindge Towers. As the working class and professional families that once peopled the Cambridge neighborhoods get old and sell their property, the city is becoming ever more bifurcated. Of course, there is some age diversity. Cambridge is home to thousands of students, drawn there by the various colleges and universities that eat up so much of the prime real estate in the city. For the most part, they live in the dorms or university housing, although some seek out and find apartments that they can only afford by lying about how many of them are living there.
One unexpected result of the conversations with alumni is that it has helped put us back in touch with the very different Cambridge of the late ‘60’s and ‘70’s and helped us remember what drew us there and what made it seem both feasible and urgent for us to create an alternative high school that would draw from North Cambridge, and eventually other working class neighborhoods and public housing projects in the city.
In those years, Cambridge was home to a large working class population—including a mix of French Canadian (mainly in North Cambridge), Irish (scattered throughout Cambridge), Portuguese (mainly in East Cambridge) and African American families (mainly in Cambridgeport). By the early 1970’s, many of these families were suffering the effects of the beginnings of de-industrialization. The brick yards of North Cambridge were gone, and the small factories (like the Necco plant) were starting to shut down as well. It was becoming harder to support a family. Some families managed to hold onto small houses or half of a double decker by earning modest but steady incomes working in city services, like the public school system, waste removal, or road repair, and some in the small businesses (including a fair number of neighborhood bars) up and down major thoroughfares like Mass Ave and Cambridge Street. When times were tough, families lined up for slots in the large public housing projects that dotted the city.
At the same time, the universities and colleges in the city had begun expanding, erecting more dormitories, developing more graduate schools and programs, and attracting more young people. And, this being the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s, many of the students, ex-students and hangers on were engaged in protesting the Vietnam War, whether through draft resistance or marches, or—occasionally—occupying buildings or breaking windows in Harvard Square. With rent-controlled housing available and rents fairly low, young people could stay in Cambridge beyond graduating from college and help to start or find work in various alternative and/or political organizations like the New England Free Press, The Old Mole (where one of our housemates worked for a time, as did I), Angry Arts (where another housemate worked), the Caravan Street Theater (which had been part of the reason Steve left New York for Cambridge), the Radical Law Collective (co-founded by a Group School volunteer), Bread and Roses (the city-wide women’s organization), the Women’s Health Clinic (providing free medical advice and care to women), and the Red Pencil and the Radical Teachers Group (both of which were important to me in my first years as a teacher).
We were exceptionally fortunate—to come of age in the 1960’s, at a moment in history when we felt a kind of permission to create alternative institutions, when you could live on very little income, when you could “borrow” space and the mimeograph equipment, paper, etc. in the basement of a building on the Harvard Graduate School of Education campus to run off copies of a curriculum on the war in Vietnam, living, as a wise older educator complimented us, “off the institutional surplus.” In other words, Cambridge with its opportunities for activism and inexpensive collective living was a mecca for young adults who knew they didn’t want to replicate the lives of their parents and were looking for ways to make a difference.
Of course, there were also many other young people in Cambridge—the teenagers whose families were being slowly (or sometimes not so slowly) pushed out of decent jobs and housing. Group School alumni who were teenagers at that time look back on North Cambridge as being a “tough place to grow up,” “rough,” and “not really safe,” as they reminisce about long nights hanging out and drinking behind the Friends School or at “Shits Creek” near Jefferson Park Housing Project or Jerry’s Pit on Rindge Ave. In the literary magazines and yearbooks produced at TGS students write about hating school and skipping out whenever possible, stealing cars whenever they needed or wanted to go anyplace, and always feeling harassed by police who didn’t want them hanging around drinking and smoking and certainly didn’t want them joy-riding in stolen cars.
Not surprisingly, this “town/gown” split at times erupted in tensions, name-calling, and even active altercations between these two very different communities. This did not sit well with those of us who were active in various radical causes and alternative institutions. As long-term Group School staff member Larry Aaronson recalled about himself, “I was a Marxist and I had never really read Marx.” As aspirational Marxists, we believed in the importance of the worker-student alliance. As young people who didn’t trust anyone over 30, we wanted to believe that we could be part of an inclusive youth movement that united people our age across class and race lines. But, it was not at all clear how to achieve those aims.
One strategy that was attractive to some of us was to look for jobs as teachers or youth workers. It was a way to “use our educations,” make enough money to live on, and reach into the “other Cambridge.” But at the time we were looked upon with suspicion by school officials. When I first tried to get a teaching job in Cambridge in the late ‘60’s, you had to fill out a form that asked how long you had lived in Cambridge, and the message was pretty clear that if you hadn’t grown up there or been living there for a good long time, you might be able to become a substitute teacher but you were not going to be hired to be a full-time teacher in one of the schools. I ended up subbing for a year, mostly in the Boston Public Schools, which was both eye-opening and disturbing. It was just after Jonathan Kozol’s book, Death at an Early Age had come out and the racism and corporal punishment (using the rattan) and nineteenth century teaching methods were all very much in evidence. Although I didn’t get as close a look at the Cambridge schools, I don’t think they differed in any substantive ways.
The Politics of Race and Class in 1970’s Cambridge
From the vantage point of 2023, it’s hard to fathom why TGS in its early years did not more accurately reflect the demographics and diversity of the city of Cambridge. To put it bluntly: why was TGS so white? To understand this, it’s important to understand the racial dynamics in Cambridge and in the entire country in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.
The right to vote and integration—of lunch counters, buses, public schools and colleges and many other public spaces—were very much the focus of the Civil Rights movement depicted in Eyes on the Prize and other documentaries focusing on the period roughly from the early 1950’s until the mid 1960’s. By 1968 and the assassination of Martin Luther King, many veterans of the earlier struggles had begun espousing black power and were telling white activists that what they needed to do was provide material support to the black movement and to organize in their own (meaning white) communities.
It was a hard message to hear for many of us who had come of age during the Civil Rights movement, joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in college and hoped that after we graduated we would find ways to work towards the creation of what SDS called “an interracial movement of the poor.” One faction of SDS (the Weathermen) accepted the Black Panther Party as the vanguard and allied themselves with the most radical edge of that movement. And another faction (the “Revolutionary Youth Movement”) set their sights on organizing high school-aged youth and dropouts in urban low-income white communities. While neither Steve nor I were allied with either of those factions, we were interested in the idea of working with white working class young people, too many of whom were signing up or being drafted to fight the unjust war in Vietnam.
When each of us (separately—we had not yet met) heard about a group of young people and young teachers who were starting an alternative high school in Cambridge, it seemed like a great opportunity to do just that. By the time Steve and I each signed on as volunteer teachers, some of the young people and staff who were integral to the founding of the school had been planning, meeting, learning and working together for several years. This core group, all of whom had grown up in North Cambridge and most of whom—like much of North Cambridge at that time—were white, had hung out together wherever they could avoid being spotted or harassed by parents or police. One of those places was the Teen Center inside the Cambridge Friends School, created by CFS probably in an effort to protect the school building from the teenagers who had taken to hanging out in the vacant lot behind their brand new building in North Cambridge.
In September, 1969, the former director of the Teen Center and a handful of the young people who were “regulars” at the center formed “The Group,” meeting every Sunday evening to discuss issues of mutual interest, which included: education, drugs, sex, war, and race relations. (footnote to Barbara’s History). Over the course of the year, the number of young people swelled to about twenty-five, and several adults were brought in as resources for to their discussions.
In addition to these discussions, The Group started dreaming together about opening a storefront of their own, and possibly a record store. By 1970, they had moved on to talking about how bad their schooling experiences were and how they would do things differently if they were running a school. They began planning and taking a number of trips, including a visit to an experimental college in New York, several camping trips to New Hampshire and Maine, a conference on alternatives in education, and a week-long visit to Philadelphia to see two new alternative schools: the Parkway and Advancement Schools. In raising money for the Philadelphia trip, the young people met with Alfred Vellucci, then Mayor of Cambridge, who was impressed by their desire to improve Cambridge High and Latin, and asked them to meet with him again after their trip to share what they had learned.
It was at this second meeting with Mayor Vellucci that The Group revealed they were actually interested in starting their own school, based on “learning through experience,” language that they had heard in Philadelphia and that they realized described the kind of learning they themselves had done through The Group’s various activities and trips. They told the Mayor they were interested in trying out these ideas in a summer program. He suggested that they write a parallel proposal to one that a group of black students and teachers had already brought to the City Council and School Committee. The black students argued that their needs were not being met in the traditional curriculum and structure of Cambridge’s two high schools (High and Latin and Rindge). The proposal they submitted called for a Youth Leadership Program for black students.
There had been a number of racial incidents at the high schools that year and relations between black and white students and staff were tense as a result. The City Council had responded that they would not support a “segregated program,” but they would consider funding an integrated Youth Leadership Program. The black students had then reframed their proposal as an integrated program with separate Black and White components, with some activities held separately and some together. After a series of tense meetings at the School Committee, the funding was approved but the Committee was not ready to approve the leaders (both of whom were qualified educators) who had the support of the core group of black students.
After hearing about this from the Mayor, The Group approached the organizers of the Youth Leadership Program with the offer that they would submit their proposal for a summer school as the white component of the YLP. Both groups agreed that they would support a leadership position for the black teacher who had been working with the black students and went together to a School Committee meeting to try to get approval. Once again, the School Committee put off the decision. The black students and staff were frustrated—they had been trying for several months to get the directorship question settled so that they could begin planning for the summer, which was fast approaching. The teachers who had hoped to direct the program withdrew their applications, and made plans to look for philanthropic funding to run the program they and the core group of students wanted, with the leadership they wanted, the following summer (June 1971).
At that point, The Group had to decide whether to move forward. After meeting again with several of the student leaders who had developed the Youth Leadership Program proposal, they agreed that The Group would choose a new name for the program they were proposing, the “Summer Education Experience,” and request a portion of the funds that had already been set aside for an integrated version of the Youth Leadership Program.
When the School Committee agreed to fund the Summer Education Experience, The Group and several of the black adults who’d been active in proposing the Youth Leadership Program agreed to submit joint applications for the directorship. If these candidates were accepted, the funds would then be divided between a Black and a White component. The School Department was hesitant to accept this compromise but finally after difficult negotiations a plan was agreed upon. However, because of all the delays, instead of starting on July 6 the program would not begin until July 20.
By the time this agreement was reached, most of the black staff who had worked to try to get support for the YLP had taken other summer jobs, as did several candidates for the directorship of the White component. Many of the young people, both black and white, had also found other summer activities and/or jobs. At first, the numbers in both the White and Black components were quite small, but once the program began in late July, both were able to add to their numbers, growing to include approximately twenty-five students each.
However, given the troubling history of a process that began with black students and professionals submitting a proposal, only to be delayed over and over by the School Committee and School Department until a group of white students and professionals got into the act, it is not surprising that the staff and students in the black component and white component did not have a strong desire to get together. The black and white students who worked together on the joint proposal had come to see that many of their issues with the Cambridge schools were similar, but most of them were no longer involved in the project. For the most part, the students in the two components did not know each other. They came from different parts of Cambridge, with different histories and cultures, and had no reason to trust the other group.
With little time or motivation to plan joint activities, the black and white components went their own ways, setting up their own courses, activities, and trips. The few attempts to bring the groups together were unsuccessful.
The summer program could have been an opportunity to lay the groundwork for black and white students and teachers in Cambridge to try out similar ideas about youth leadership and participation and learning through experience, and then to use that experimentation to build a sense of shared educational critique and mission. But instead, it ended up reinforcing mutual distrust and the feeling among each group that it made the most sense to develop separate programs for black and white kids.
But for The Group, the summer program did provide an opportunity to try out many of the educational ideas they had been percolating over the past year: eg an active role for students in designing and implementing their own program, including hiring the teachers; courses relevant to their needs; classes built around learning through experience; paid jobs within the program for students who need to work. They came out of the summer of 1970 with the sense that these ideas can work and a strong desire to do more projects together.
Part II: Impact of The Group School
Why Students (and Staff) Came to The Group School
When Steve and I each found our way (separately) to The Group School in the summer and fall of 1971, we did not know anything about the racial backstory. In fact, we only learned about it recently from a document in the Group School archive we are assembling that Barbara Gates, one of the organizers and teachers of the summer program (who later became a founding staff member of The Group School) had written in the Fall of 1970 as a report to the School Committee. In that report, she tried to explain what had been accomplished during the program and why the black and white components had not been successful in coming together as the compromise proposal had stipulated.
What we did know in 1971 was that a mostly white group of working class young people from North Cambridge and several young educators were forming an alternative school, with the blessing of but no financial support or oversight from the Cambridge School Committee. And that was attractive to us, as it was to a number of other volunteers, because of our histories in the student movement of the 1960’s, our interest in working with Cambridge youth, and for those of us who had started teaching in traditional public schools, our conviction that schooling needed to be organized radically differently.
When alumni and former staff gathered together on Zoom in the winter of 2022/spring of 2023 for several virtual 50th reunion sessions, we started with reflections on what drew each of us to the school in its early years. The story that emerged was clear, and consistent across alumni and staff:
Jeannie (Sullivan) Ebert had just viewed for the first time the documentary film on The Group School in 1971-72, where she was amazed to see her 17 year old self at the meeting where the School Committee decided to certify the school.
…if you looked at the film that somebody took back in the day and is posted online-- which is unbelievable that it even exists-- … And there was a clip of me when it got certified. I turn to somebody and just light up. And its delightful to watch, even to me. Because what I see is a young person who took a leap of faith, trusted all these strange and wonderful people who were so different from me at the time.
I couldn’t fathom how all of you—I mean you were, what? You were 3 years older than me but at the time it felt like a big deal. And you put your own lives on the line as well. And in that moment when I look back all those years what I see is the utter joy in believing in something and that it actually worked, that there was something behind it that wasn’t just you know, excuse my language, hippy, communist, sort of you know Marxist whatever. There was this solid foundation that was underneath it, because it was the times we were in, so the expression of it would come out in the way that it did.
But the core of it for me were these incredibly dedicated, compassionate, supportive people who decided for that time in their lives to reach into a space and find me because I really really needed it. I was floundering and I needed to be with these people--who happened to be you--to give me something to hold onto, to move forward with. And I have never forgotten it…We did it. We did it! … and I felt like I was given the responsibility to do it with you. I did feel like I was part of it. Not talked down to you, you know. Not ‘let’s find some more at risk youth and do something for them.’ It was real.
Ali (Gobbeo) Harris was one of the early participants in The Group and remembers how excited she was to move The Group in the direction of starting a school:
I was thrilled when discussions began about just taking that teen hangout to a different place because yes I’ve always loved to learn and I was excited that there might actually be people who would grow that in me and be interested in what I wanted to learn. But just hanging out at the Friends School before we had a purpose there, we had some frickin’ rough nights, I certainly did. So for me it was a huge blessing to have it take a different direction.
As I was involved with the counter-culture student groups, constantly getting myself in trouble at Latin.(ed: Cambridge High and latin) . . And as my dad was a janitor there and sometimes would literally have higher-ups say his rabble rouser daughter needed to keep it quiet, he’d be like, ‘what are you up to, what did you do now?’ For me it was that safety factor of not having to just be at a teen hangout where anything went any time and then the direction of being around people interested in my brain and helping me use it.
Barbara Gates and Neil Didriksen, each of whom joined up with The Group in 1970 and became founding staff members of the school, shared their own leap of faith stories:
Barbara Gates: I had been teaching for several years in private progressive schools and then I went on a quest because I wanted to start a school. This was in 1969 I guess. I did what I called Free School hopping. I got someone to pay me to visit all these schools, and none of them seemed right. And then, at a conference in Santa Barbara in California, someone who was also at the conference told me about Mike Lawler in Cambridge (ed: the director of the Teen Center at The Friends School), which is where I lived, and said he's trying to start a school with a group of kids who are working class and some live in the projects. And so when I came back to Cambridge I found Michael Lawler.
I mean I remember the first time I met everybody which was down at Shit’s Creek (behind Jefferson Park). And there were kids there and they were you know drinking beer. We were all smoking cigarettes constantly. I remember that Michael was asking these kids ‘what kind of school would you like to start? What do you want to learn?’ And it was mind shattering because you know there were students there who you know had been kicked out of Rindge or Latin or who were truant most of the time. And people were saying, ‘well I want to learn the history of my family’, or whatever it was, and we were saying, ‘Well, we could have that in a school. And how would you design a school?’ I was had, you know. I mean that's when I knew that I wanted to dedicate myself to working with these people and creating a school.
Neil Didriksen: I had been teaching in Rochester NY in the public school system and…I was very frustrated. Most of the students I thought were interesting people to teach never came to school. I’d see them once or twice a week and I thought, well, damn, this system is really failing many people. And I didn’t know what a system would look like that would not fail people. So I spent a little time looking around the country trying to figure out is anybody doing something interesting? And somebody told me that there’s a group in Cambridge, MA that is talking about starting a school. So I packed up a van and moved … It was with this open-ended, I don’t know what this is going to look like but it felt like I was working with folks who were passionate about wanting to do something. That’s what brought me in.
By the time the school officially opened its doors as a certified school in September of 1971, a number of principles had already been established through the prior activities of The Group and the Summer Learning Experience program. These helped to guide the founding group of students and teachers in setting up processes for running the school. And they will undoubtedly seem quite familiar to innovative educators and educational activists today.
First and foremost, it was to be a place where all students had a voice and where their ideas were taken seriously. This democratic ideal could be seen in the frequent community meetings where all students, staff, and volunteers would gather to share updates and concerns and vote on everything from field trips to school policies, a Board of Directors to oversee grants and budgeting that had students as well as staff on it, and specific committees made up of students and teachers to take care of the core business of running a school, such as approving new classes (Academic Committee) or dealing with issues as they came up (Admissions Committee, Attendance Committee).
A second core principle was that the classes would as much as possible be built around student interests and identities and would feature active and experiential modes of learning. Students and teachers alike could propose courses, and if a student or small group of students wanted or needed a course that none of the staff or volunteers felt qualified to teach, the volunteer coordinator would find someone to teach that course.
Fifty years later, asked to reflect on the features of their experience at The Group School that seem most salient to them now, alumni emphasized over and over how much it meant to them to have teachers who listened to them, valued and validated their experiences, and took them seriously as co-designers of their own learning:
Joe Boyle:
I think as a 16 year old, to have adults who were actually listening to our ideas and what we were thinking. As opposed to, you know like as public schools do, saying “this is the space for you where you fit, and this is what you will do.” At TGS people were saying, ”what do you want to do, where do you think you should fit?” Designing and talking about classes and the kinds of things we would study …It was just a space where even as kids we were welcome to participate fully.
Marilyn (Cuezo) Arrott:
When we went to Cambridge High and Latin it was a very big school, and we felt like very little people, just like we were at Jefferson Park. And so when we went to TGS, we went to a place where people were listening to us. And nobody listened to us really back then. Even though the teachers were different from us, we had people that let us speak and didn’t dismiss us. . .
I didn’t really care about college until I came to TGS and teachers told me I could go to college. I now have my Masters degree and I never thought I would have gotten that back then, if I were still at Cambridge High and Latin and no other options. So I have to thank you all for listening to us and taking us seriously.
Judi Teeter:
I hated Cambridge High and Latin. I was pretty chronically truant. . . regardless of who any of us were none of the teachers or at least none of the teachers I had at CHL, listened to any of us. So it’s not just even a matter of where you come from as much as what the education system is providing… One of the coolest things that happened to me was that I wanted to take geometry and it wasn’t available and there was no one to teach it. And so I got to take geometry because the school hired Mike Riley to teach me and I was the only person in his first geometry class and I thought, “you know what, this is pretty cool. I wanted to take a subject and I get a teacher one on one.”
Brian Burke:
Let me say that TGS for me was like the last scene in the Shawshank Redemption where he’s on the beach and he’s escaping prison. That was really what it was like for me to get out of the public school system. The Fitzgerald school was like the prison, the principal was like the evil warden, and the teachers were like the screws who abused me. I’m only being 50% facetious. Getting to the GS was a real escape for me. I just didn’t function well in the public schools and I definitely wouldn’t have graduated if I went to Cambridge High and Latin. One, because I was really immature and two, because I couldn’t stand not having the freedom just to like kind of walk out of the class whenever I wanted to.
Somebody told me that at The Group School you don’t have to raise your hand and ask permission to leave the class. And I said that is the place for me. And then, as soon as I was able to leave the class when I wanted to, I didn’t have to leave the class anymore. I just wanted the freedom to be able to be an autonomous person.
Katherine (Teeter) Thomas
Well, you know, I think in a lot of ways for me it was actually like the sort of the place that started me on the way that I've lived the rest of my life. Like it was really about the power of connection, and the idea that education and learning is like this lifelong pursuit, and it's part of, who you are and who you become. And you know, being at Cambridge High and Latin had nothing to do with that, was nothing like it. It was completely disconnected from our real lives, from our understandings. and from our relationships.
Michael Pelham:
I never had any good experiences in school really for various reasons, you know… I had some horrendous experiences, so I came to the Group School and I just felt the trust there immediately. And you know a sense of love and acceptance that I really hadn't ever felt in a school. … Getting into the theater program was awesome.. I never envisioned myself able to do something like that…it really encouraged me to, I don't know, whatever it was I was able to open up there, and that gave me the ability to, you know, speak to people, over time. .. a couple of important books in my life, you know the Autobiography of Malcolm X. and On the Road that I read there that gave me whole new perspectives on life and everything.
Many of these same features--the democratic nature of The Group School, the centering of student voices, and the possibility of autonomy, of thinking for yourself and inventing new and better ways of teaching and learning--were also salient to the people who found their way to the school once it opened and then volunteered to teach there or help raise money for the school.
Jon Kabat Zinn:
When I heard about TGS, it was just like, I thought, of course, this is exactly what has to happen. Education in some sense had been corrupted and co-opted. I’d never set foot in CRLS, but I lived right around the corner from it and saw the kids. And I always cared … I thought that since I was trained in science that I could teach science so that anyone would fall in love with it. Not fall in love with science but fall in love with an understanding of the world through certain kinds of lenses that are just completely mind-blowing. And that include yourself, your own mind, your own place in the universe that has nothing to do with who your parents were or where you were born or what your economic situation is but the potential to actually grow into yourself. Which is my understanding of education.
Judy Tharinger:
I came to this school feeling I couldn’t exist in the public schools and that sort of top down hierarchical thing and I felt two things really strongly. Students should have a really strong voice and that the arts were just pivotal in people’s education. It was just a different way to access learning at such a deep level. So when I walked into the Group School I thought, I’m home, this is my tribe. And I had visited lots of middle class alternative schools. My teaching had been in NYC with mainly black and Hispanic kids and I just felt like that’s my group, even though I was from a very different background.
One of the things I took away was actually seeing how much listening to students’ voices, how important that was…that’s been the hallmark of my teaching-- listening to students. I think I learned that from all of you. That you have so much to say as teenagers, you have so much: you have your beliefs, you have your values, you have strong ideas about things, and you need some guidance and people to listen to you. That really was embedded in me in TGS and it’s a hallmark of my teaching ever since. I feel very grateful to all of you students for that teaching. We learned so much from you.
David Kelston:
We all worked together, and sitting around the table in the main room for a board meeting in which everybody was equal: the students were part of the board. The teachers were part of the board. The sort of non-teaching administrative people like me were part of the board. And it's the first workplace I was in which was truly democratic and collective. I always have needed to work in cooperative environments, and the Group School was the beginning of that, and for me a wonderfully successful beginning of that. And it was wonderful to sit around the table and make decisions cooperatively, democratically, and collectively, with people who respected each other and cared for each other.
What They’ve Carried With Them
Whenever one talks or writes about an educational experiment, one of the first questions people ask is: “Yes, but how do you know it worked? What impact did it have? How has it influenced students’ lives?” I still remember hearing Debbie Meier talk about this one time. She explained that 20 years after the founding of Central Park East High School in New York, she had reached out to former students and gathered lots of positive stories about what they were doing with their lives, which she knew that people would dismiss as “anecdotal.” She pointed out, in her inimitable style, that what was not “anecdotal” was that almost all of their alumni were still alive—which was sadly not the expectation for a significant percentage of young people from East Harlem New York at that time.
After 50 years, we have not been able to find enough of our former students to make any claims beyond the anecdotal. But what has been striking is that person after person has talked movingly about the simple yet profound ways that their experiences at the school have affected the rest of their lives. They speak of a number of qualities of experience that educational advocates and activists see as central to educational projects in 2023: a sense of belonging, of self-worth, of possibility, of developing their voices for the first time and feeling the permission and right to speak up. And they also talk about something that is not so emphasized in the education reform movement of today: learning that things don’t have to be the way they are and that you can work with other people to change things for the better. Here’s a sampling of what alumni have offered thus far:
Jeannie (Sullivan) Ebert:
When I met the group school I didn't have very much self-worth… That was the beginning of the journey, and right now I can sit here and look at all of you, and I have a very strong sense of self-worth, and that has carried through. And it continues to grow. It’s a growing thing. It’s a seed that was planted that hasn’t stopped. . . It’s not the background you come from, it’s not necessarily your family, Its not the money that you have. It’s nice to have it but that’s not fundamentally where the value of one’s self comes from. So that’s what I got.
Dave Bryan:
I remember a spontaneous trip, one of the many spontaneous trips up to the White Mountains in the middle of the night. And just thinking that there’s a whole bunch of different kinds of people here. But everybody is pulling together. This place is bananas, but I dig it. And the next morning, I think about this all the time, some of us were sitting around a picnic table and Larry was like holding forth on a couple of subjects. But he’s sitting by a jar of honey and there are bees flying around all over the place and I was getting kinda edgy but what I remember about it was that when Larry was talking he like puts his finger on a bee that’s like sucking the honey out of the jar. That moment just opened up a whole bunch of possibilities; it was absolutely what I didn’t think was going to happen. And it was like wow, you can actually touch something that may hurt you but if you treat it with respect, you may learn something from it. And that’s always stuck with me, it’s just that the school gave me a different sense of not having to be afraid of a lot of stuff. Even though you’re not sure where you’re at in your life. But life has possibilities and they’re not as dire as you might have thought. That’s one of things I’ll always think about.
Marilyn (Cuezo) Arrott:
Everybody was so unique at the school. And we used to laugh and joke about everybody including ourselves, we were just wacky, all of us. One thing I remember is that we used to go into meetings and everybody would be yelling and having heated discussions. But the next day we would be in another meeting; we didn’t take off, we didn’t go away. We came back and we fought it out. And we were all strong. It gave us strength. We got so strong. I got my voice at TGS and I never lost it since. So again, have to say, I am so grateful for growing up in Cambridge. I don’t care if I was in poverty or not. I had, I think one of the most wonderful lives just meeting all of you and meeting different types of people. It’s what gives me strength—I’ve gone all kinds of places and there’s nothing like it.
Alison (Gobbeo) Harris:
Personal, professional, political. . . obviously TGS profoundly impacted me in all of those aspects of my life. What many of you probably aren’t aware of, I would say courage is something really important. Because I actually wound up spending the bulk of my career shaping, molding, and putting out to the media and other venues, ( the work of ) scholars from Harvard, MIT and the world over. How weird is it for a kid from North Cambridge to grow up to actually work at Harvard in 3 roles, be recruited to the Patrick Administration, to actually advise people like you, though many of them not as great or gifted? I think that’s kind of an intense, brief summation. The only other place I ever worked in my life that came close to some of the spirit of democracy and raising voices was Harvard Civil Rights Project, and Steve played a role in helping me land there. And at the Civil Rights Project when actually Justice Kagan was dean of the law school, we were charged with creating a new generation of civil rights leaders and I used all of my theater training to make non-emotive scholars emotive. I had many ways to make their research come alive so it could impact policy and ultimately real lives. And I would tell people, I was made in this incubator, but you wouldn’t believe the people that made me.
Even among the sampling of graduates who are participating in the Zoom gatherings, there’s a big range in what life after high school has held for them. Almost all have sought out further education and/or training since their years at TGS, with varying degrees of success in parlaying that into careers and economic mobility. Perhaps not surprisingly, quite a few graduates have gone into social work of various sorts, as well as into education, and health careers. Others have spent their lives working blue collar jobs. Among the graduates we have been in touch with recently, there are social workers, addiction counselors, youth development workers, public and alternative school teachers, public works workers, a law professor, a communications and marketing professional, construction workers, workers for the railroads. Even those who did not enroll in or complete a college degree and enjoy the economic mobility they believe that might have brought have described being determined that their own children and grandchildren do so. As one alumni put it: “For my kids, it was not a choice.”
A question about impact that is not often asked about educational experiments is how being part of this experiment influenced the lives of those who had taught in and staffed the school. Strikingly, virtually all of the staff and volunteer teachers who participated in the reunion conversations have felt that being part of the school had altered the course of their lives in fundamental ways. Here’s a small sampling of what they have said:
Mark Pawlak:
I was a working class kid who didn’t know he was working class. Got a scholarship to MIT because I was a science geek. Then I dropped out of grad school before even starting it because I realized I was going to end up building bombs. And then I didn’t know what the hell to do with my life since that had been my trajectory in life until then… I kind of hung around (TGS) for a while and since you could kind of propose anything to the curriculum committee, I thought wow, this is cool, I’ll try this. ..I was also becoming a poet, and really trying to learn what it might be to be a poet. And I found my identity by hanging out with the students who were so much like me growing up in the same kind of community. It was the way I sort of rediscovered my identity and my future career. I’ve pursued a parallel career of being a poet and an educator and particularly a math educator my whole career since TGS. So that’s where I found myself. I didn’t want to waste the talents that I had acquired at MIT so I found a way to use those and TGS helped me find a way to explore my identity through poetry as well. Through hanging out with all of you. (Ed: Mark spent the last 4 decades teaching in, developing and running a program to help entering students at UMass Boston develop their math skills and place into credit-bearing courses. He is an Editor of Hanging Loose Magazine and the author of 9 books of poetry, 3 anthologies and a memoir).
Robert Langer:
I think one of the things that was very important to me when I was trying to think what I was going to do when I finished getting my doctorate at MIT, which was, I think you know, right around when I was doing work at the Group School. Pretty much all my colleagues went to work for oil companies. That's what chemical engineers did. And if I look back at that time that you know, probably 95% of the chemical engineering class at MIT work for Exxon or companies like that. And I think because of my experience with the Group school, well, I decided, I wasn't going to do something like that. I wanted to do something that I felt would help people… I did end up, you know, doing work in medicine, and you know even though it didn't pay like the Exxon job, but I just felt it was so much more important, and I think that that it really had a big effect on me and really showing me how you derive satisfaction from doing things that make you happy.
(Ed: Dubbed in one podcast interview as “the Edison of Medicine,” Bob is known in scientific communities around the globe as one of the world’s most cited scientists and the inventor on over a thousand patents. His groundbreaking discoveries and pioneering research on biomaterials has played a crucial role in developing the field of nanomedicine, including advances in mRNA vaccines and tissue engineering. His discoveries in microparticle drug delivery are used in treating cancers, schizophrenia and opioid addiction, as well as in treating type 2 diabetes, the prevention of bleeding and eye disease, and in heart disease. He has co-founded a number of companies, including Moderna, now famous for manufacturing one of the mRNA vaccines for COVID.)
Marion Gillon:
I grew up in Alabama, Birmingham, very poor family. My mother was a single parent, four kids. But I luckily got a scholarship to go to Tugaloo College, I was there the summer of ’64, freedom summer. . . I came up to Cambridge …(some friends) told me about a job at the Friends School for the summer and I got a job working there at the teen center…And after that summer I got a job working at the Sanctuary Hostel and had a grant to be a street counselor. I spent my days in the Cambridge Common and Holyoke Plaza talking to kids about whatever. Anyway, I was working at the Sanctuary when I got a call telling me about a job at TGS that I could possibly get. I went there because I needed a job. I remember my first day there I went to the staff meeting and there was criticism and self-criticism. I said ok, this is where I need to be. .. I was there at TGS for 6 or 7 years , but it really had the most influence on my life, more than any other institution or situation.
(ed: Marion went from TGS to the Massachusetts Department of Education, where he has worked for over 30 years. He spearheaded a number of innovative programs, including an alternative certification process for teachers)
Jim Warburg:
It’s clear that everyone’s experience at TGS had a profound impact on them and informed their practice throughout their various careers. The true legacy is far more ephemeral than any concrete documentation could convey: what we all learned and passed on to our students, clients, children, co-workers, etc., and what they will hopefully pass on to theirs, is the most valuable legacy. How many people have been so lucky early in life as to have had a transformative experience that so positively influenced their futures??? My brief and somewhat peripheral involvement definitely had that effect on me. One of my most vivid memories is a statement made by the late Michael Foley at his graduation. It has stayed with me ever since and probably informed all my years as a school counselor:
“It’s been HELL teaching these teachers to be students!”
(ed. Jim spent 30 years as a school counselor)
Barbara Gates:
I was in education for maybe 7 or so years after I left the school. But then I ended up starting a journal which was run from my kitchen table. It was like the Group School. It was simple. No frills, but had a wide, wide reach. So I think that that's what I'm hearing here. You know that we we were small. We collaborated. We worked together. But then, look at the reach. You can't even track how far this learning has gone, and that was true for me in my life after the Group School: I did something which was small, but reached really really far.
(Ed: Barbara co-founded Inquiring Mind, a semi-annual journal dedicated to deep exploration of themes important to Westerners interested in the teachings of Buddhadharma. It had a circulation of xxxxx. Link to website/archive).
Part III: The “Hidden Curriculum”
Safety, Belonging, and Meaning-Making
In youth leadership and youth development conferences today, it has also become increasingly common to hear people emphasize the centrality of safety, belonging, and meaning-making in their work with young people. Staff at these programs, as well as the young leaders they are working with, understand how basic and important these aspects are. Without them, young people cannot or decide not to engage. Schools, on the other hand, have—if anything—moved farther away from those values over the few decades.
At the Group School we did not have that exact language, but we knew, because our students told us, that many of them had been harmed by prior school experiences, as well as by conflict in their homes and in their neighborhoods, and were harboring feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem as a result. We wanted to create learning experiences that would help them to realize and draw on their own strengths and capabilities, that were active and engaging, and authentic to and respectful of their lived experiences while also giving them the opportunity to see beyond those experiences. We put a premium on classes that would help students find and claim voice, and that would provide a creative outlet that they likely had not experienced before. This was particularly reflected in our theater program and in our writing classes, but also in a variety of other arts courses taught by working professionals who volunteered time (and often equipment) to the school.
The comments made by alumni speaking 40-50 years later throw light on the degree to which the social and emotional aspects of their learning experiences at the school made it possible for them to learn and grow in ways they had not thought possible. Their words about safety, belonging, and meaning-making resonate across the decades.
John Sullivan:
I don't know if I ever had an adult say a positive word to me, and i'm not making that up, until I met Group School teachers. Mostly it was: “You ain't going to amount to nothing. You're gonna go to trade school. You're gonna go to jail. All this crap.” So you know you believe that. That is what you form as your identity. It took me a couple of years into the school to look people in the eyes sometimes. But eventually it was so character-building and so confidence building and so human building that to this day I tell anyone who will listen that the teachers and staff and counselors and many of the students in the group school pretty much saved my life . . .
And it was just a whole amazing experience coming from one year of Rindge Tech, and the M.E. Fitzgerald (ed: Camb elementary school), which was probably worse than my home life. The Fitzgerald. I'll write a book about that somebody. It was just a terrible, terrible place, I think, in my experience. But the Group School was just.. . it was just a bunch of very dedicated passionate people who had a vision and an image of us in a way that we couldn't see ourselves at that time --our potential versus what we saw as our flaws and our handicaps. . . And they would go through a wall for you, and that that's what kept me coming back, because I felt I belonged somewhere for the first time in my life. Actually the first time in my life. And I was 15.
Sean Tevlin:
I decided that you know maybe I would give the Group School a try. . . to this day I still feel like it was the best decision I made, because I didn't really do well in in public school for whatever reason. I mean I probably had a little bit of a learning disability. But I found when I did finally go to the Group School it seemed like an easy place to learn, you know it seemed like a more relaxed place for me to learn. And maybe it was my age. I don't know. Maybe a lot of things. But you know the people that I was working with, were very very helpful and very patient, and worked with me, you know, in . . .getting back into reading. . . And you know, just making learning interesting again. . .
I felt safe and feeling safe kind of opened me up. . . learning how to open up with my feelings or my experiences and through different ways, whether writing or you know I saw people doing drama that they probably never had done before. And all this was like trying to get the inside out, the things that we would normally hold inside. And that’s the part that I love the most about the Group School--it was the growing part of it, you know, having a safe place to grow. and you know, not being in a competitive environment all the time . . . not having a strict environment. It just seemed like it was an easier environment for me to be able to take a step back, take a breath. And just feel my feelings, and be able to share that. And that was you know that was a learning process for me. But I thank you all for that.
Bill Igo:
Once I got into the school there was something about being accepted that you know hadn't really happened the way that I was accepted at the Group. You know you guys encouraged me to do things. I got into drama, which is something that I never thought I would do. I absolutely loved it. I loved even, you know, pretending that we were walking through molasses, or whatever we were doing, the different exercises we did.
Dave Bryan:
Basically what I got out of it and what I still carry with me every day, because there’s usually a part of the day that I’ll think about the school, in some respects. Just about that sense of belonging, it’s like something tangible. I think about certain people, who pop up into my head all the time or I’ll talk with somebody who was like a big part of the school, not even when I was there but after I left. It was the sense that the people that started it, it’s like we grew something and it ballooned and it blossomed…
Marilyn Arrott:
You know we all came from different situations, but we came in with, and Johnny just described many of our upbringings--they were for lack of a better word, they were broken. We were broken. . . I don't want to blame our parents. They knew what they knew. And they did not have a great way of communicating. If you did something wrong you heard about that. We didn't hear as much about positives or strengths that we had as we heard about weaknesses. . . You teachers were so open, kind, loving. You didn't have to be. I mean we were teenagers, and that's how schools act. “You’re teenagers. There are rules. You have to follow those rules in school.” You put up with a lot.
Michael Pelham:
when I was in Catholic school you know I never was told I was smart or worthy, or any of that stuff. It was like, there was a lot of silence, you know. “Just be quiet, and you know, do as we do?” And I didn't function there. I didn't benefit from that type of learning at all and I floundered. . .When I was at the group school. one thing the school taught me was how to open up and speak more and more confident with my speaking. You know I never really had that opportunity. One thing Adria said to me. She said, that my English skills blew her away. I had never heard anyone, you know, compliment me academically at all, and that gave me like a little bit of confidence.
When a friend who is a therapist heard me describe what former students were saying at our Zoom sessions, she said, “Oh, you created a therapeutic environment where the most important thing is to feel seen, heard, and held.” We did not set out to create a school that functioned as a therapeutic environment, but it turns out that former students—no matter what the circumstances of their lives in the past 40-50 years since they graduated—still remember vividly how important it was in the trajectory of their lives to have that time when they felt accepted and respected, experienced a sense of belonging, and had agency and voice.
“It Was Very Personal. . . “
Cynthia (Byrne) Guerrero, founding student
It was very personal… the school wasn’t a structure we had to fit into, we all came with personal needs and they were addressed. . . the structure didn’t exist in the way other schools do. . . Staff and students shared their personal needs and strengths. The structure came after the fact..-- that sense of fulfilling needs ran through the school for 10 years.
--Cindy (Byrne) Guerrero
We didn’t begin with a fleshed out image of the school we wanted to build. Rather, as Cindy notes in the comment above, the basic structures we created together came “after the fact.” We were driven by a desire to communicate to students, from their first day in the school to their last that this was a place where they would indeed be seen, heard, and held. We knew that prospective students would hear about the school in various ways. In the first few years, most of them learned of the school mainly from friends or siblings, but as the years went on school counselors, probation officers, lawyers and judges, and social workers also started to recommend it. Most were coming with a wariness about school—based on bad experiences they had, and many distrusted the very social workers from the child welfare system and the probation officers, lawyers and judges from the criminal justice system who were recommending the school to them.
In the terminology of recent educational reform movements, the structures and practices we implemented would probably be grouped together under the heading of “personalization.”
To draw a sharp contrast to the factory-like batch processing that characterized much of public education over the past century, reformers offer an image of schooling that is more personalized, and where students’ individual needs and skills are taken into account.
From their very first interactions with the school, we tried to make it clear to students that their prior experiences mattered and that we would do everything we could to provide an environment where they could thrive and grow and where decision-making—whether about their education or their institution of the school itself-- was shared. In fact, the only “requirement” for admission into TGS was that prospective students wanted to be part of a community where they would actively participate in the governance of the school and in their own education and where they would explore their identity as young people growing up in the multi-ethnic working class population of Cambridge
During the intake process, a staff member would sit down with and interview each new student, asking the student to give us an oral biography of their prior schooling and to share with us their own assessment of their academic interests and career goals, as well as their strengths, and needs. Based on that conversation, we would select a short passage for a student to read, as part of a reading “informal”. If that passage seemed either too easy or too difficult, we would offer another one. In this way, we were able to get at least a rough idea of the level of material that the student could comfortably work with and could assess with the student whether s/he would need additional help with reading. Similarly, based on what students said about the math they had taken most recently, as well as their feelings about math, we would give the student a few math problems to work on. These assessments would help students and their advisors choose appropriate math courses and would inform teachers of courses heavy in reading and writing about what level of support each student needed.
The Group School was ungraded. Most students came into the school with a pretty clear idea of when they were hoping to graduate. We explained that the school was ungraded, and that a number of factors would go into determining when a student could graduate, including the student’s age, prior schooling, and future plans. On average, students would spend 18 months to two years at the school, completing the high school experience they had begun elsewhere. A small number of students came in after middle school and might spend as much as three years at the school. And there were also some young adults who were ready to graduate after a year.
Students had input into what courses would be offered each term. Their interests, as well as the interests and academic backgrounds of the staff and volunteers went into coming up with a list of courses that would then be approved in a community meeting. Students could then choose which and how many courses they would take that term. If a student was hoping to graduate soon, s/he could take a heavy course-load.
Students did not receive grades in the courses. Rather, each student and each teacher wrote an evaluation: Students reflected on and assessed their own learning during the term, and assessed the class itself, as well as the teacher. Teachers wrote a description of what the course entailed, and then reflected on the student’s progress during the term, their own teaching and how well overall the course had gone. These evaluations were read and signed off on by the students, after an individual meeting, convened by the student’s advisor, with the student and all of the teachers of the courses from that term present.
The advisory system was in many ways the glue for the personalization aspects of the school. The idea of advisors and advisor groups was fairly new to American education in the 1970’s. While some private schools had personalized structures that functioned somewhat like an advisory, most public high schools had “homerooms” which were administrative units used for taking attendance each day and disseminating messages to students. So here, as in many aspects of the school, we had to make it up as we went along.
Advisors were expected to meet individually with students in their group, as frequently as needed, but at least checking in each week. These sessions could touch on anything from challenging or traumatic experiences students were having in their lives that were affecting their ability to be fully present in school to how things were going in specific classes. Because students sometimes came to us with personal and family matters, we arranged for advisors as a group to have regular supervision from a psychiatric social worker, who was also available to consult with us individually in an emergency. This was extremely important in helping us work in a respectful and responsible way with students who were in crisis.
Advisory groups are one structure that actually made the journey from alternative schools like ours that existed on the margins into the mainstream of public education. In the early 1980’s several of us were contracted by the Cambridge school district to share TGS’s advisory curriculum with teachers at the high school. Unfortunately, a lot was lost in the translation. Controversial topics like date rape and teen pregnancy were ignored by some advisors and mishandled by others. Socratic dialogue was replaced by more traditional “sage on the stage” pedagogy. Since that time, interest in advisory groups and support for teachers serving as advisors has waxed and waned in public schools across the country. But such programs almost always get watered down: the time periods for advisory groups become shorter, and the number of advisees per faculty member grow, until advisories become a “glorified homeroom.”.
This Is What Democracy Looks Like
“Well, you know, we spent a whole lot of time talking. . .we spent more time trying to make decisions than we actually made decisions. . . it took us two months to do anything. . . : I still have my diploma, which I know we spent months deciding what (image) to put on it. And then, you know, we finally came up with the tree, and then it was like months later, what kind of tree?”
--Donna Gillespie, Group School graduate
Although I’m not sure how aware we were of this at the time, the democratic governance structures that were a hallmark of the school from its founding by the “Group” served as a counter-balance to the individualization and the sometimes therapeutic work of the advisory program. The young people who were central to founding the school very much felt themselves to be participants in the enterprise of creating and shaping an alternative institution—one that would do things entirely differently from their prior schools. A big part of ensuring that the school would meet their needs and feed their dreams was for everyone—students, staff, volunteers alike—to have equal voice in decision-making and setting policies.
In our recent Zoom conversations with alumni, a recurring theme is how many meetings we had. Like Donna, a number of the graduates talk about this feature of their experience with a bit of eye-rolling. But there also is a lasting impression of being listened to and respected as very much a part of every significant decision at the school.
In October of 1972, the second year of the Group School, the streets around the Roosevelt Towers housing project in Cambridge erupted in five nights of rioting after the death of a 17 year old being held in a jail cell after what residents believed was an unwarranted beating by four city police officers. Dick Cluster, who volunteered at TGS remembers to this day hearing one of the community organizers who was on the street with the youths during the rioting make the comment that: “Those Group School kids—they know how to have a meeting!”.
With democratic governance as one of the founding principles of the school, it made sense for the staff to function as a collective, for staff and students to have equal voting power in the community meeting, and for students to hold the majority on all committees as well as on the Board of Directors. This led to some interesting debates, often ones where staff committee members were more prone to leniency regarding infractions of rules or admitting new students with behavioral issues, or more willing to take risks in the trips we took students on or the political stances we took.
I’m not sure how well, if at all, we understood the reasons behind that dynamic at the time, but now, with the benefit of hindsight and long Zoom conversations with alumni, I can see that it might well have been that the students were more conservative because they had more reason to be. Their life experiences had taught them to be suspicious of a good thing and worried about holding on to anything that was positive in their lives. It wasn’t so much that they were risk averse as that they were simply more tuned into how tenuous the little utopian school community we had created might be.
As Joe Boyle, who later became the president of the teacher’s union he had long been a part of in Corvallis, Oregon, recalled in one of our Zoom sessions:
it's where I first learned to love meetings, I guess. A lot of exploration, you know. Not quite sure what we were trying to build, . . it was pretty wide open. things were a bit sketchy in those early days. .. So, you know I'm amazed now to see the later generations, how things evolved, because this was not a sure thing in those early days. And there are a few times where we just about, you know, hit those points where it seemed to be fading out, but I’m very impressed that people kept it going for so long, and it grew substantially from what it was in the early days, which was really just some ideas.
When we asked on one of our Zoom reunion calls recently for alumni and former staff to reflect on the school governance and what they learned from the particular form of democratic governance we were practicing, they remembered the community meetings, Board of Directors, and various committees as being a central part of their experiences of being at The Group School and incorporated lessons they have carried with them since.
Cindy (Byrne) Guerrerro:
I have to say that there was such a thing as a community meeting which doesn't exist in school systems at all—still today. I would say when we first started, it was more of a planning get together. . . but to have that element, everything else branched off from that nucleus of community meeting, because everything was evolved from that aspect of the school. It does not exist in the school systems today, and we have that. I don't know who made that happen. It was the Group before it was the Group School, and that is the key. I totally appreciate, totally appreciate that was the nucleus of the school, the community meeting. Whether, like I said, whether it was the beginning, creating the school, evolving the school. It was the point that everything that happened at the Group School grew from it. You know, the building, renovating the building, scheduling classes, everything. So I think that was one of the keys to the Group School was having a community meeting.
Steve Seidel:
In my work in education in the last bunch of years I’ve thought for a very long time about how learning happens or doesn't happen in classrooms. But I also think a lot about how learning happens in other parts of the school. And what the messages are that you get, and how you learn, and what you're learning about, by the way that people are, and the way the organization is, or the institution of the school.
While the specifics of what was happening and what was learned through the unusual governance structures of the school may have faded, people have very clear memories of how the democratic values of the school made them feel.
John Sullivan:
I just remember the camaraderie. . .. everyone sitting cross-legged on the floor and you know, and just being communicative and cooperative, and treating us as, trying to treat us as equals, even though we didn't feel that way.
Marilyn (Cuezo) Arrott:
Everybody was so unique at the school. And we used to laugh and joke about everybody including ourselves, we were just wacky, all of us. One thing I remember is that we used to go into meetings and everybody would be yelling and having heated discussions. But the next day we would be in another meeting; we didn’t take off, we didn’t go away. We came back and we fought it out. And we were all strong. It gave us strength. We got so strong. I got my voice at TGS and I never lost it since. So again, have to say, I am so grateful for growing up in Cambridge. I don’t care if I was in poverty or not. I had, I think one of the most wonderful lives just meeting all of you and meeting different types of people. It’s what gives me strength—I’ve gone all kinds of places and there’s nothing like Cambridge.
Mark Pawlak:
I think we all learned that we could argue with people and still be friends. And we could listen to listen to points of view that we didn't always agree with. And we developed great stamina trying to reach consensus, which is a great, great achievement, and a lifelong skill.
Ali Harris:
I think the board meetings were kind of interesting because you know, for a bunch of kids to be on a board. Well, that might happen today almost, you know, out of youth empowerment, some kind of tokenism. Obviously, in our day there was, I don't think, anything else like that,. . . . the board meetings not only struck a chord with me that I think stayed with me through life and colored what I did in my life. But also there were a couple of times we were desperate for meeting places, and we had board meetings at my parents' kitchen. . . After the first board meeting at our house, my father went and broke out his good booze to give to some of the teachers, which I thought was hilarious. I probably had watered it down myself. . . to see this format in which there was genuine, intelligent discussion and planning with the kids at the table. . . was the biggest validation the school could have given to my parents in terms of any questions they had about what the heck we were doing.
Larry Aaronson:
There was something very magical about who we were and what we were doing-- we were inventing. We were building the plane while we were flying it. We made a lot of mistakes, we almost crashed innumerable times but we never did. And what we proved, everyone has said this, is that we had an experience of collaborating, with a great deal of passion, a great deal of argument. Several of us have talked about how many times we said “fuck you” to each other. The important thing is we didn’t just walk out and split. To my knowledge we never did that. We came back because we were so serious and so passionate about this struggle.
Another staff member, Marion Gillon, remembers vividly the day he interviewed for a job at The Group School and sat in on one of our teachers’ meetings. “You all were doing criticism/self-criticism, and I said, “this is the place for me!” Another teacher, Mike Riley, has a somewhat less sanguine memory of visiting the school for the first time and after sitting through one of the heated teachers’ meetings bursting into tears from the tension of it.
Part IV: Teaching and Learning at The Group School
The Roots and Branches of Group School Pedagogy
It’s been HELL teaching these teachers to be students.
Michael Foley, founding student
In one of the early scenes in the documentary of The Group School’s first year, the camera zeroes in on a teachers’ meeting where we are sharing experiences teaching in public school and asking questions like: “Do we want to be capital T teachers? Or can we all be teachers and learners?” Several of us had taught in public schools for a few years and as a result had pretty clear ideas about how we didn’t want to teach and lots of questions about the whole enterprise of teaching. In short, we knew more about the kinds of teachers we did not want to be than about how we did want to handle the role. And a couple of people had some experience teaching in a progressive private school or one of the new “free schools” that were springing up in the early ‘70’s.
Many of us were drawing on the pedagogical ideas being shared by a handful of young American or British progressive educators writing books that we were gobbling up as they hit the bookstores—books that described educational experiments in England (Summerhill; Homer Lane) and books by American teachers who were dismayed by the conditions in the U.S. schools in low-income communities (Kozol) and who were trying new approaches in their own classrooms (Herb Kohl, James Herndon, George Dennison). It’s amazing, looking back on it, how influential books these books were. Some of us also drew inspiration from the Freedom Schools that sprang up during the Civil Rights movement, as well as the writings of Paolo Freire about his literacy and empowerment work in Latin America. Freire offered us a trenchant class and power analysis that seemed appropriate for our working-class students.
Looking over the various pamphlets and other writings we did in the 1970’s about the curriculum and pedagogy we were developing, I’m realizing that many of the ideas we ended up centering in our classes and our teaching are as radical now as they were 50 years ago. And in fact they may seem even more radical now, in an era of standards-based education, standardized testing, and, a political polarization that has led to book bannings, cancellation of social and emotional learning programs, and the evisceration of the United States history curriculum to remove hard truths about the degree to which the United States was built upon a legacy of the genocidal treatment of indigenous peoples and on slavery and its aftermath of white supremacy.
Of course now, as then, progressive educators and educational activists are finding ways to ally with young people in developing more liberatory forms of education—some of which occurs in institutions called schools and much of which happens elsewhere. Often, as was the case for the Group School, these “experiments” or “alternatives” are afforded some kind of marginalized status within public schooling or outside of public school systems altogether. In recent years, a renewed emphasis on youth voice and leadership has emerged in the youth-serving communities of practice. “Nothing about us without us” has become a mantra of young leaders emerging from youth development programs such as YouthBuild USA or from similar programs that any of you have worked to build for young people who are not in “regular schools.” In the 1970’s we didn’t as yet have that mantra, but we understood the wisdom that is held within it.
However, current versions of youth empowerment almost never extend into the school or the classroom. As is revealed in some of the published materials about TGS as well as in the documentation that never made it into a publication such as the notes for teacher workshops that we were running to disseminate the ideas beyond TGS, the commitment to youth empowerment informed the content of the courses developed, as well as the pedagogy employed to engage students in that content.
Students had input into what courses would be offered each term. Their interests, as well as the interests and academic backgrounds of the staff and volunteers went into coming up with a list of courses that would then be approved in a community meeting. Students could then choose which and how many courses they would take that term. If a student was hoping to graduate soon, s/he could take a heavier course-load. If a student needed to work to help support his/her family, s/he could take a lighter course-load, with the understanding that this might delay graduation.
Centering and Exploring Identity
The founding group of youth and adults who started The Group School held tight to the vision of a democratic school, one where teachers and students would work together to create an engaging and dynamic learning environment. A second core principle called for centering identity, which—at the beginning of the school—we defined primarily in terms of social class. For the most part the young people who helped to start the school, as well as those who entered later, did not come with a sense of pride in their identity. If anything, many of them thought of themselves as “project kids” or kids who were, literally, from the wrong side of the tracks.
A number of us on the staff were, as Larry Aaronson aptly put it, “Marxists without having read Marx.” Our analysis of capitalism was crude at best. But we saw one of the missions of the school as offering an empowering education to young people from the working class and low-income neighborhoods of Cambridge. We knew that we wanted students to gain an understanding of how capitalism, sexism, and racism operate to keep many people down (including their own families). And that being “from the projects” (Cambridge public housing), or working class or poor is nothing to be ashamed of. Barriers can be overcome, especially when people work together to push for change.
These goals led us to make working class identity and values a centerpiece of the curriculum. We wanted students to see that working class people in Cambridge and in the United States as a whole had shown over and over again that they could better the conditions of their lives through organizing and struggle. It was no accident that the first field trips were to miners’ strikes in West Virginia and the first play that the theater program put on was Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty, much of which centers on a meeting of cab drivers who are planning a strike.
At the same time, we had experienced and wanted to avoid the sectarianism that had split apart the “new left” of our generation. Although our students sometimes referred to us (affectionately, we hoped) as “commies” or “reds”, our brand of politics was probably closer to hippy utopian socialism. We tried not to proselytize, but we also did not hide our support of and activities in the various progressive movements of the time (eg anti-war, women’s liberation, anti-racism, and gay liberation). We knew that some parents and students might be uncomfortable with that, but we also knew that they wanted and appreciated much of what the school had to offer and for the most part trusted that we weren’t out to “brainwash” anyone.
The commitment to building working class identity permeated much of the curriculum. It was perhaps especially evident in social studies and history courses. In a course we called “Hard Times” students learned about the ups and downs of the unionization movement in the United States, and read sections of Howard Zinn’s People’s History. Another popular social studies course offered students a chance to learn Cambridge history, as seen through the lens of “neighborhood, youth, and class” (which became the name of a publication we wrote about the course). In a course that we called “Close Encounters,” students explored racism and racial dynamics in cities and schools (including our own).
That commitment also influenced the novels we gave students to read: in the Women’s Lit class we read books like “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” and “Daddy Was a Numbers’ Runner”, in which the protoganists were young working class women. In the Prison Literature class, students read excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcolm X and letters from current prisoners. Reading memoirs and poetry by people from backgrounds similar to theirs, students wrote about their own experiences—using the writings of Maya Angelou, Nicki Giovani, Langston Hughes and others as models.
Exploring Identity Through Writing
Everyone at the Group School—students and staff alike—were encouraged to share their writing, not only in class but also in literary magazines and yearbooks that were available to everyone in the school. For many students, this was the first time that something they had written would be published and potentially read by students, teachers, parents, and others. Fifty years later, one graduate still remembered vividly her amazement at finding that her words had found an audience.
Deborah (Stewart) Hubbard:
I don't know exactly what paper I wrote, or what class I took. but I wrote a paper for Sue Klaw’s class. Then, Sue. . .she had a big party or something at her house. And her father came up to me, very statuesque man. Here I am, maybe 15 years old, straight out of the projects, first time seeing beautiful green grass and such. And he came up to me, and Sue introduced us, and he shook my hand, and he said, ‘it's a pleasure to meet you. I've read your work.’ And to this very day I remember that quote that he said. And it made such a huge impact on my entire life… I got so frightened I was so nervous when he said that I just was like, “Thank you!”, and took off. It's like oh, my God! So but for him to say that to me, the first time for an adult that I didn't know someone that wasn't getting paid or wasn't, you know wasn't a teacher, but just nonchalantly just made a quote like that. He appreciated the paperwork that I did so. I was surprised with that.
Another alumni asked after attending one of the Zoom reunions if he could bring the draft of a poem he had begun working on to the next gathering. It was as though he had been waiting for decades to be in a community again where he would have the space and permission to identify himself as a writer and the safety to share what he was writing. The effect on the group was electric. Below is John’s introduction and the first two stanzas of the longer poem he read to us:
John Sullivan:
So just to preface it a bit. It's this: this version of it is a bit somber, basically it's cathartic, and it's been healing for me to get the you know some of the emotions that have embedded in my childhood out. So this is sort of like the writing that's the more serious version of it. So Don't worry all of my life is not this miserable. I swear.
I remember the day that we first moved in.
I remember the smell the feel and the din .
The rental truck, as my dad hit the brake.
Me taking it in. What of this do I make?
I was no more than 2, a child steeped in wonder.
Little did I know. It would all tear asunder.
The hope, the passion, promise, spark
Would soon all be snuffed out by Jefferson Park.
Jefferson Park, Jefferson Park.
It was tough in the daylight and misery in the dark
Fifteen hundred souls, all aboard for the ride,
Functional from the outside, but gutted inside.
The first time Dad hit me I was a mere baby of 4.
He slammed my head off the back bedroom door.
He had come home drunk after working all day.
He was angry at the world, but it was I who would pay.
He worked as a rigger for the old Navy yard.
He had grown up despondent, beaten, and hard.
His father had been murdered,
His job it was cast.
To identify the body. It was a terrible task.
From that day forward he was lost, so they say.
And he looked on with dark eyes, and drank all his pay.
The effect on the group of Johnny reading this very personal and painful poem about his family and growing up in the projects was electric. It led first to a very vulnerable and open interchange among three alumni whose apartments in Jefferson Park in proximity to one another.
Marilyn (Cuizo) Arrott
We were across from the Sullivans, and the Igos were right next to us, so close that we could open our window, hand things out the window. We’d give records back when records were records. We'd give them to each other to, you know trade things, and we would just, we’ve known each other for ever. I wanted to just say that.
Bill Igo:
It's amazing, John. And what it reminds me of is how well of a front that families put up.
You know we didn't know what was going on behind the doors of your house, or you didn't know what's going on behind the doors of my house. Which is similar to what you were just talking about. So it's amazing to hear that you know/ we would never know by the way, your mom and Dad carried themselves outside the door, you know. Same with mine, and i'm sure there are a lot of people like that in the projects. So thanks for reading that, John.
John’s reading also sparked an interest among other alumni in pushing further in creative directions between and during the zoom sessions.
Bill Igo:
A couple of weeks ago. . . we went down to Mark Pawlak’s poetry reading (ed: Mark was a science and math teacher who started writing poetry while teaching at TGS) down in Plymouth, and I read Mark's recent book and it just got the juices flowing again. I'm writing again, just a journal, but it makes me feel like I did. Hearing john it made me feel better about writing again. Just listening to John, just how important those feelings were but yet very cathartic being able to express them. . .It’s just nice to know that I’m doing the right thing by going back to writing. So thanks John.
John’s reading of his poem has also led to plans for creating more spaces for alumni and staff to share pieces they are writing or have written, especially ones that relate to their experiences at The Group School—a totally unexpected outcome of our Zoom retreats. As these sessions have reminded us, exploration of identity is not a one-time thing. There is much to be gained from revisiting and reassessing—even a half-century later-- the ways we experienced the world and the influences on our fledgling identities as children.
Here again, John offered the rest of us some hard-won wisdom:
John Sullivan:
And just to say what I've come to in my life is a deep, deep understanding as best as I can because the child who was going through it doesn't know. But forgiveness, you know, forgiveness of the fact that broken people tend to rear broken people. . .. And actually everyone does the very best that we can. So forgiveness is vital if you are going to carry on as any kind of a decent human being and not perpetrate that down to your children or your friends. I love my parents now as I never did, and everyone else who went through it with me.
Exploring Identity Through Theater Arts
The theater program at The Group School offered another outlet for self-discovery and creative expression. In most large high schools the theater program is the province of the “drama kids”—a group of students who choose theater electives and try out for school productions. For the most part, Group School students had never felt attracted to or welcomed by this type of program. They had not participated in—or even watched—the plays put on by their former schools.
But, starting in the summer program that was the forerunner of the Group school, these same young people found themselves enjoying the freedom of improvising scenes where the only direction from the teacher might be that each person had to respond to what another said with “yes, and. . .” The message was clear—the theater program at The Group School was for everyone, not just a self-selected group of aspiring thespians.
By the time the school opened as a certified institution, students were ready to sign up for more. Patty and Steve, the two drama teachers, continued to use a variety of theater “games” to loosen students up and to make the notion of performing less intimidating. But, they were also both professional actors who realized the value and excitement of entering a text, taking on playing a character, and presenting theater for a larger community. The challenge was to find plays that the students would find interesting and would fit the broader pedagogy and politics of the school.
Waiting for Lefty by the blacklisted Clifford Odets fit the bill perfectly. Students who had stumbled over reading scenes from plays had no trouble reading, memorizing, and becoming the characters in “Lefty”. The actors amazed themselves by performing for a delighted school community, including, in some cases, parents who had never been to a play, much less one starring their children. They also took the show “on the road”—including to a Massachusetts papermill town that was in the midst of a lengthy strike. The next several plays were drawn from the works of Bertolt Brecht—that although a bit less accessible to the students than Odets—nonetheless deeply resonated with their experiences of the world.
Over the years, the program continued to expand and to build an audience that looked forward to the next offering. By the 4th year (?) the Group School had its own dedicated theater space, complete with a set of tin-can lights built by a Harvard student volunteer who also brought us a sound board that he knew the American Repertory Theater was discarding. The theater program also branched out to include playwriting as well. Supported by a grant from the Massachusetts Department of Education, a course called “Plays, Plays, Plays” focused on developing short theater pieces about situations and issues in students’ lives and dilemmas or challenges they were facing that would then be performed in public school and youth program classrooms. Students also performed short plays such as: “He Said, She Said” and “What Do They Want from My Young Life” for teachers and youth workers as part of curriculum and teacher training workshops that The Group School was offering.
Exploring Identity in the Group School’s Women’s Program
While most of us on the teaching staff had come from more comfortable economic circumstances than that of our students, gender offered a potential area of shared identity to explore. In fact, Women’s Literature was the first course that I volunteered to teach in the Fall of 1971. Like my co-teacher, Barbara Gates, and several other women on the staff, I saw myself as an active participant in and supporter of the burgeoning “women’s movement.” We knew first-hand the value of small consciousness-raising groups where we explored sex roles, sexism, and our own sexuality, and we knew the power and excitement of participating in larger women’s organizations, such as Bread and Roses, which at its peak had several hundred members in the Cambridge/Greater Boston area.
The early/mid ‘70’s was a heady time to come of age as a woman. Just a few years before, we had found ourselves relegated mostly to support roles, even in radical organizations like SDS and SNCC. When I was in college near Philadelphia in the mid/late 1960’s, it was difficult to find doctors who would prescribe birth control to unmarried women and even those “enlightened” doctors would also let you know what they thought of your choices. Several other women and I were keepers of “the list”—a highly protected and secret list of doctors in the area, and as far away as Puerto Rico, who would risk arrest by performing abortions and providing medical care for women who chose to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.
In the ‘70’s—especially in places like Cambridge where the women’s movement was thriving, women began to take back control over their bodies. A collective of women that spun off from Bread and Roses became the Women’s Health Collective that developed and published Our Bodies, Ourselves, which after years of being passed around in a self-published version, eventually found a mainstream publisher and worldwide acclaim. A group of women also set up and ran the Somerville Woman’s Health Clinic, providing compassionate reproductive care, including abortions. And, of course, in 1973 the Supreme Court in Roe Vs. Wade established a woman’s right to choose across the United States.
We wanted to bring the excitement we were feeling about the cultural and political shifts we were experiencing into our work with young women in TGS. We set up to teach women-only courses in literature and history and to have a weekly women’s group, modeled on consciousness raising groups, where female students could share more deeply personal questions, concerns and experiences.
We knew how different our lives were from those of our students and their families (especially their mothers). But we also suspected that we had a common base of experience as young women who had to contend with sexist remarks, sex role stereotyping in the labor market, and unwanted advances from men. At one point during that first year of teaching women’s courses, we lit upon the idea of reading passages from Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa which portrayed a society in which young women were more free to express their sexuality in ways that they wanted to, and then writing our own anthropological account of coming of age in Cambridge, circa 1971.
We had so much fun doing that assignment that we decided to make a super 8 film together presenting our “findings.” We filmed it in one of the student’s apartments where we could film one of the girls doing such “women’s chores” as vacuuming and doing the dishes. I can’t remember how we handled telling the story of the sexual mores of coming of age in Cambridge but I do remember the sound track—Aretha Franklin singing Natural Woman.
As the documentary on the first year of the Group School depicts, by the second semester we found ourselves engaged in a debate with several male students as well as several female students about whether these courses should remain women-only. Barbara and I felt it was important to make the women’s courses a “protected space” where the students would feel free to talk about all aspects of their lives as young women. Some of the students felt just as strongly that it was wrong to close these courses to men who wanted to participate. Looking back on that scene in the film now makes me cringe a bit at how taken aback I was and how I let my own feelings get in the way of being able to see this as an opportunity to engage in a positive open discussion of the value of integrated and segregated spaces.
Part V: The Struggle to Survive
Follow the Money
Versions of the ideas and principles underlying TGS design and pedagogy can be found in the most progressive wings of education and youth development programming today. There are echoes in school designs such as Big Picture, the High School of Recording Arts, High Tech High, and EL (formerly Expeditionary Learning), in youth development programs such as YouthBuild and the Corps Network, and in emerging frameworks and models such as liberatory schooling, abolitionist teaching, forest schools, and various home-schooling and backyard schooling designs.
What’s so striking is how simple these ideas are at the core: a safe place to grow and learn, a sense of belonging and acceptance, teachers who listen and provide positive and constructive feedback, the opportunity to find your voice and exercise agency in what and how you learn, as well as how you present yourself in the world. Yet school design is only rarely in service of these core values and principles. And it’s even more unusual to find these ideas making it into the classroom. It doesn’t take a lot of bells and whistles to provide these things, but it does take a fundamentally different approach to education than is evident in most public high schools today.
And, of course, it also takes funding to run a school, even one like the Group School that relied on volunteers for much of its teaching staff. A handwritten budget from one of the first years of the school uncovered in a box in my basement reveals that we were operating on roughly $20,000/year—which mainly came from a few generous contributors. But as the school became more established, although staff salaries remained quite low (even for those times) and many courses were taught by volunteers, the school needed to add more staffing. And then when the school outgrew the donated space in the basement of a church in Harvard Square, we also needed money for rent and eventually to buy our own buliding. To secure that level of funding, several staff members began to work in earnest on securing grants, both from private philanthropies and public sources (mainly from the state).
With students serving on the Board of Directors and a few students each year in paid positions as Student Coordinators, it seemed to follow that they should also be engaged in the fundraising that was essential to keeping the school going. In the first couple of years of the school, fundraising mainly consisted of reaching out to personal contacts of founding staff and early volunteers who might be interested in donating to this fledgling effort.
Although the School Committee had “certified” the school, it was not considered part of the Cambridge Public School System and thus was not eligible for any of the tax levy money that public schools got. It was important to the founding group of TGS that the students come voluntarily, not because they were being “placed” there. A sister school that started around the same time in Somerville made the decision to primarily cater their program to serving students who had IEP’s (individualized education plans). Through an arrangement with the school district, the state funding for special education services followed these students into the school, providing a steady source of revenue.
It was clear to the founding group of TGS that we did not want to test or label students coming to the school in that way, or limit the school to students with special designations. From the beginning, the Group had operated on the principle that it was the schools, not the students that were the problem and that needed to change. Although this decision cut off an important potential source of funding, the students and staff never went back on it. Instead, we set our sights on finding both public and private sources of support, essentially teaching ourselves how to apply for state grants, become a vendor at the city level, and how to begin to penetrate the world of philanthropic foundations.
Here’s one graduate’s recollection of what it was like to be part of these efforts:
Bill Igo
I remember being 16 years old, sitting in an office with Neil Didriksen at the Ford foundation trying to get hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm 16! And when we went in there, because Neil brought me in there and treated me with respect, the people we were dealing with treated me with respect. They looked at me as a young man, not as this punk from the projects. you know so, and that was new that was absolutely new. It's the same thing when I became the student coordinator. You know you actually paid me. . . and that was great, I got to know more of the students that way, I got to know more of the teachers that way.
At one Board meeting, where two people were explaining that they did not think we would get a grant from the foundation they had just visited, because during that visit, the program officer seemed skeptical and “really grilled us.” After listening to this report, another student said, “I think we probably have a good shot at getting this. It’s when they don’t ask any questions that you have to worry.” The truth in this little tidbit of wisdom has come back to me many times in the more than forty years of grant-seeking I’ve participated in at the various nonprofits where I have worked.
With tax levy money not available to us, we knew that we needed to find other ways to enlarge and diversity our funding base. In our search for grant opportunities, we quickly realized that our unusual profile—as a tuition free private school serving low income youth, some of whom had dropped out of high school before coming to us, and some of whom were embroiled in various public systems—child welfare, juvenile justice, etc.—we were potentially eligible for a variety of state funding sources. Since we received no per pupil funding from the school district, we literally had to raise every penny of the operating costs of the school, as well as our salaries.
Massachusetts was at the beginning of a wave of deinstitutionalization, with many of the facilities, including locked facilities, that had housed juveniles closing down. Courts and probation officers were looking for places that could serve young people who were not being welcomed with open arms back into the public schools. At various points we received state grants that involved tracking how many of our students we were helping to divert and transition from the juvenile justice system, and how many we were helping to go through drug rehabilitation. Since our legal jeopardy has long since evaporated, I can admit that our reporting on these grants took the form of broad estimates that we then had to present as concrete data. Given our politics, we had no qualms about doing that.
Becoming an Innovation Lab
We also discovered that another potential funding avenue open to us was to commit our core pedagogical principles and our most popular courses to writing and to build teacher training workshops and institutes that would bring these ideas out to other schools and youth programs and become sources of potential revenue for the school. In looking through the boxes in our basement, I have been amazed by how much of this we did, and how many of the staff, as well as some students, became engaged in these efforts (links to these materials in the archive?).
We were, in effect, becoming our own version of a “laboratory school” that others could learn and adapt course materials from. Because of our unique profile as a non-tuition based private school with public and private funding that did not impact the funding base of the district’s schools, we were mostly spared the ill feelings that teachers in charter schools have experienced. Still, alternative schools and youth development programs were much more likely to express interest in what we were doing than more traditional district high schools.
For example, one grant we received from the state funded us to bring our curriculum materials to five different education and youth development programs working with young people similar to the profile of the students at TGS. We met with leaders of those programs, adapted the materials that interested them the most, and ran workshops for their staffs. As the academic coordinator of the school, it fell to me to identify Group School teachers who were interested in writing up and running workshops demonstrating their course materials. The reports written by the GS teachers at the end of this experience convey both the excitement of sharing ideas developed at the school with a broader audience and the frustration of working with programs with very different cultures from the one we had worked so hard to create.
Although the circumstances are very different today, innovative schools and youth programs continue to face similar pressures to spread and/or replicate their models beyond the original site or sites. I remember thinking, somewhat resentfully, it’s hard enough to do what we do here, but we’re also supposed to somehow find the time to document everything we do and teach other people about it. But now, from the perspective of 50 years later, I am grateful that we were, in a sense, forced to do this documentation and outreach work. Because of the requirements of the grants we were receiving, we took the time to translate and codify our pedagogy and curriculum and to reflect and report on what happened—positive and challenging—when we offered it to other programs with different histories and educational philosophies. Whether or not any of this material proves to be of interest or relevance to educators, researchers, activists today, it feels good/ important to leave a record of this work.
With the women’s movement in high gear, we were able to sell the Feminist Press on the idea of publishing a book describing and documenting the courses and other activities that were part of our vibrant women’s program. Three of us spent a spring and summer writing Changing Learning, Changing Lives. Looking at the book recently, I was struck by how ambitious our vision was: we wanted nothing less than to translate our own developing consciousness about sexism and our exhilaration at being part of a burgeoning women’s movement into a women’s studies curriculum that would be appropriate and empowering for high-school aged working class young women. Doing this meant inventing a pedagogy and a curriculum that would take into account the nuances, complexities and tensions within the lives of our students and that would help them see their own experiences in a larger political and social context.
After introducing composite portraits of students to focus the readers’ attention not just on the personal choices and struggles of these young women but also on the ways in which factors of social class, race, and sex interact to influence their lives, we discuss the pedagogical principles underlying the curriculum as well as ways that teachers in very different schools can adapt and use it. The book then offers 9 curriculum units—ranging from Messages from Society and Early Socialization to Sexuality, Women and Work, and Women Organizing Themselves.
Although the book did not in itself create much of a revenue stream, we discovered that we could monetize our innovative curriculum development through building strong ties to the state Department of Education. Grants from the state became an important source of revenue with fewer strings attached than district funding sources.
Interestingly, one effect of the growing women’s liberation movement was to raise to the fore the issue of gender equity in many aspects of public schooling—from the sports programs to the curricula. As one of the few schools with a vibrant women’s program, we were able to connect with city and state initiatives that brought the possibility of additional funding streams. I managed to get appointed to be a member of the first ever Cambridge Women’s Commission. We also wrangled an invitation to a gathering of the Governor’s Commission on Girls and Young Women chaired by the wife of then Governor, Sargeant. At a meeting of the Commission, we met a woman from the MA DOE who had been hired to/was charged with addressing gender bias in the schools across the state. She was excited to hear we had a full women’s program with curricula for a number of different history, social studies, and English courses. With her support, we applied for and got funding to co-lead an effort to engage district and school leaders and teachers in reviewing and potentially revising their curricula to ensure more focus on the contributions of women in U.S. history and more female authors.
I had frankly forgotten all about this effort, but buried deep in boxes in our basement were carbon copies of letters to the high school Principal and departmental coordinators requesting meetings, and purple ditto-masters of workshop agendas that we were eventually allowed to deliver to assembled history and English teachers. I can only imagine what people made of us—a nervous young woman with hair down to her waist and a less than professional wardrobe, and a state administrator and seasoned workshop leader, with publications to her name and a very professional air about her.
At these sessions, we familiarized people with the laws around gender equity and the case for opening up the curriculum, shared examples of lessons and syllabi from Group School courses that were part of our women’s program (and eventually part of our book), and provided time for people to consider how to make changes in what they were teaching. We probably did not make much of a dent in the high school curriculum or the way most of the teachers in the workshops were approaching their classes, but we certainly learned a lot in the process that I was able to put to good use during TGS years and beyond.
Although the circumstances are very different today, innovative schools and youth programs continue to face similar pressures to spread and/or replicate their models beyond the original site or sites. I remember thinking, somewhat resentfully, it’s hard enough to do what we do here, but we’re also supposed to somehow find the time to document everything we do and teach other people about it. But now, from the perspective of 50 years later, I am grateful that we were, in a sense, forced to do this documentation and outreach work. Because of the requirements of the grants we were receiving, we took the time to translate and codify our pedagogy and curriculum and to reflect and report on what happened—positive and challenging—when we offered it to other programs with different histories and educational philosophies. Whether or not any of this material proves to be of interest or relevance to educators, researchers, activists today, it feels good/ important to leave a record of this work.
