New Lincoln School | |
---|---|
Address | |
31 West 110th Street , 10026 United States | |
Information | |
School type | private, progressive |
Established | 1948 |
Status | closed |
Closed | 1988 |
CEEB code | 333845 |
Grades | K-12 |
Average class size | 20 |
Color(s) | blue and gold |
Newspaper | Lincoln Live Wire |
Website | http://www.newlincoln.org/ |
The New Lincoln School was a private experimental coeducational school in New York City enrolling students from kindergarten through grade 12.
New Lincoln's predecessor was founded as Lincoln School in 1917 by the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board as "a pioneer experimental school for newer educational methods," under the aegis of Columbia University's Teachers College. [1] In 1941 Teachers College merged Lincoln School with Horace Mann School, which it operated as a demonstration school. When Teachers College closed down the combined school in 1946, parents of Lincoln School enrollees established the New Lincoln School in 1948 as "an extension of the philosophy which made those [predecessor] schools famous," i.e., to carry on the tradition of progressive, experimental education, concentrating on the individual child, offering an interdisciplinary core program as well as electives in elementary grades, and emphasizing the arts. [2]
In 1956, the school acquired the former Boardman School on East 82nd Street and moved its Lower School (through second grade) to that campus, under the coordination of Terry Spitalny.
In 1974, the school moved to 210 East 77th Street. [3] The school merged with the Walden School in Fall 1988 to become the New Walden Lincoln School, [4] which ultimately closed in Summer 1991.
The progressive education movement had a significant impact on curriculum and instruction in American schools. [5] For example, as a demonstration school, New Lincoln, like its predecessors, attracted widespread attention, including about 1,000 visitors each year. [6] Eleanor Roosevelt attended the school’s tenth anniversary celebration and conference and wrote in her syndicated newspaper column that “this day was one of the most stimulating that I have spent in a long time.” [7]
The New Lincoln School building had previously been the 110th Street Community Center. [8] An eight-story building that had been recently renovated and had a swimming pool in the basement, it was further renovated to meet the new school's needs of a cafeteria, classrooms, laboratories, and a library.
After the school closed the West 110th Street site became home to the Lincoln Correctional Facility, a minimum-security work-release center, [9] which itself closed in 2019. The East 77th Street campus has been occupied by the Birch Wathen School since 1989. [10]
The curriculum was centered on Core, a combination of Social Studies and English. Other subjects were tied in to Core as much as possible, for instance, songs chosen for Music class or projects chosen for Home Economics. Each class put on a play each year arising from their Core studies. Core was designed to focus on the real world as experienced by the students. Thus when the 5th-6th grades studied their city, New York, there was a section on Tunnels and Bridges, as well as one on History; and when a 7th-8th grade class studied Japan they built a “house” of homemade shoji screens in their classroom. Science, Art, and Math were generally not linked to Core, but still emphasized hands-on approaches to learning.
Instruction was individualized, with individual exploration and small work groups greatly encouraged. Seating plans were generally informal, and most teachers were called by their first names. Foreign language instruction, French and Spanish, began in the eighth grade.
The arts were stressed. An extensive studio art program explored many media. The ceramics program used kilns and a wide range of materials. The school used a great variety of instruments in teaching, and students played on autoharps, temple blocks, marimbas, and gongs. Singing ranged from folk and work songs to Broadway tunes. Besides Music and Art, all students, regardless of gender, took Wood Shop and Home Economics.
While grade levels were conventional, the Middle School combined fifth and sixth grades and seventh and eighth into two or three groups each. Groups were identified by letters, not by grade level, so that first grade was called Group A, second grade Group B, up to 7th-8th grades, Groups K, L, and M. This was intended to de-emphasize age and grade differences.
Prominent educator William Heard Kilpatrick (a student of John Dewey’s) assisted in founding New Lincoln and became chair of its board. He believed that education was critically important to combat the evil of prejudice. [11] Consequently, in the 1950s New Lincoln’s board included several prominent black people, including Kenneth Clark, psychologist, and Ralph Bunche, Undersecretary of the United Nations. [12] One of the goals for the school was to help students become competent “in relating constructively with a variety of human beings from different economic levels, religions, races, and nationalities.” [13]
Starting in the 1950s, a number of influential Black people enrolled their children at New Lincoln including Harry Belafonte (singer, songwriter, activist and actor), Robert Carter (a prominent civil rights lawyer and judge), Faith Ringgold (painter, writer, sculptor and quilter), and Eileen Jackson Southern (the first black woman to be tenured at Harvard). [14]
Following the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation decision, Minnijean Brown was one of the students who integrated the Little Rock, Arkansas public schools. In 1958, after she was expelled from Little Rock’s Central High School, and at the urging of director John Brooks, New Lincoln offered her a scholarship to attend the school, which she accepted. [15]
Initially only a small percentage of New Lincoln students were Black or members of other minority groups. By 1970, however, New Lincoln had among the highest percentages of minorities in New York private schools (22%) and more than 60% of its scholarship fund was spent to support minority students. [16] In his memoir, then-director of the school Harold Haizlip wrote that, “New Lincoln was firmly committed to integration. Over time, the board, faculty, and parents decided to increase the minority presence in the school beyond a token level and set fundraising priorities and targets to make this possible.” [17] As a result, many notable alumni, such as some of those listed below, are people of color.
Several important leaders of the school were Black. Dr. Mabel Smythe, who was head of the high school from 1959 to 1969, “went to various churches all over Harlem” to look for potential students from that community. [18] (Before joining New Lincoln in the mid-1950s, Smythe assisted Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and after leaving New Lincoln she became Ambassador to Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea. [19] ) Harold Haizlip, director of the school from 1968-1971, later became Commissioner of Education for the U.S. Virgin Islands for eight years. [20] Verne Oliver had a distinguished teaching career at New Lincoln starting in 1957, and became director of the school from 1971–1974. In 1963, Oliver arranged for Ralph Ellison to speak with the senior class about his award-winning book Invisible Man . That same year Kenneth and Mamie Clark (founders of the Northside Center for Child Development, housed on one floor of the New Lincoln School) arranged with Malcolm X for Mamie to take two 12th grade students, one Black and one white, to meet with Malcolm X at a Black Muslim coffee shop on Lenox Avenue, in Harlem. This was a period when Malcolm X seldom spoke to white people. [21]
A benefit concert for the school on April 19, 1959, at Carnegie Hall by Harry Belafonte was one of two such concerts recorded and released as Belafonte at Carnegie Hall . The other benefit concert, for the Wiltwyck School on April 20, netted $58,000 for that school. [39]
The Juilliard School, often abbreviated simply as Juilliard, is a private performing arts conservatory in New York City. Founded by Frank Damrosch as the Institute of Musical Art in 1905, the school later added dance and drama programs and became the Juilliard School, named after its principal benefactor Augustus D. Juilliard. Juilliard is one of the most prestigious performing arts schools in the world.
Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School is the oldest nonsectarian independent school in New York City, located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The school serves grades Pre-kindergarten to 12 and offers a college preparatory curriculum.
Hunter College High School is an academic magnet secondary school located in the Carnegie Hill section of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It is administered and funded by Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY) and no tuition is charged. According to Hunter, its 1,200 “students represent the top one-quarter of 1% of students in New York City, based on test scores."
The Dalton School, originally the Children's University School, is a private, coeducational college preparatory school in New York City and a member of both the Ivy Preparatory School League and the New York Interschool. The school is located in four buildings within the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Bank Street College of Education is a private school and graduate school in New York City. It consists of a graduate-only teacher training college and an independent nursery-through-8th-grade school. In 2020 the graduate school had about 65 full-time teaching staff and approximately 850 students, of which 87% were female.
Eugenio María de Hostos Community College of The City University of New York is a public community college in the South Bronx, New York City. It is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system and was created by an act of the Board of Higher Education in 1968 in response to demands from the Hispanic/Puerto Rican community, which was urging for the establishment of a college to serve the people of the South Bronx. In 1970, the college admitted its first class of 623 students at the site of a former tire factory. Several years later, the college moved to a larger site nearby at 149th Street and Grand Concourse. The college also operates a location at the prow building of the Bronx Terminal Market.
Dwight School is a private independent for-profit college preparatory school located on Manhattan's Upper West Side in New York City. Dwight offers the International Baccalaureate curriculum to students ages two through grade twelve.
Minnijean Brown-Trickey is an American political figure who was a member of the Little Rock Nine, a group of nine African American teenagers who integrated Little Rock Central High School. The integration followed the Brown v. Board of Education decision which required public schools to be desegregated.
The American Negro Theatre (ANT) was co-founded on June 5, 1940 by playwright Abram Hill and actor Frederick O'Neal. Determined to build a "people's theatre", they were inspired by the Federal Theatre Project's Negro Unit in Harlem and by W. E. B. Du Bois' "four fundamental principles" of Black drama: that it should be by, about, for, and near African Americans.
New Utrecht High School is a public high school located in Bensonhurst, a neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. The school is operated by the New York City Department of Education under District 20 and serves students of grades 9 to 12. It is one of the largest high schools in New York City in enrollment.
John Adams High School is a public high school in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, New York City, New York, United States. Planning for the school began in 1927 and classes commenced in September 1930. At around the same time the city built several other high schools from the same plans, including Samuel J. Tilden High School, Far Rockaway High School, Abraham Lincoln High School, Bayside High School, and Grover Cleveland High School.
Harold Oscar Levy was an American lawyer and philanthropist who last served as the executive director of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Having previously held leadership roles as a corporate attorney, venture capital investor and as a manager in the financial services industry, Levy is best known for having served as Chancellor of the New York City public schools, the largest school system in the U.S., from 2000 to 2002.
Shirlee Taylor Haizlip is an American non-fiction author. She has written three books: The Sweeter the Juice, A Memoir in Black and White, In the Garden of Our Dreams, co-authored with her husband, Harold C. Haizlip, and Finding Grace.
Soul! is a performance/variety television program that showcased African American music, dance and literature in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was produced by New York City public television station WNDT, and distributed by NET and its successor PBS.
York Preparatory School, commonly referred to as York Prep School, is an independent, university-preparatory school in the Upper West Side area of Manhattan, New York City, near Lincoln Square.
The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. They then attended after the intervention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Walden School was a private day school in Manhattan, New York City, that operated from 1914 until 1988, when it merged with the New Lincoln School; the merged school closed in 1991. Walden was known as an innovator in progressive education. Faculty were addressed by first names and students were given great leeway in determining their course of study. Located on Central Park West at 88th Street, the school was very popular with intellectual families from the Upper West Side and with families based in Greenwich Village. The Walden School was founded in 1914 by Margaret Naumburg, an educator who later became an art therapist. Claire Raphael Reis, a musician, was also involved.
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Notes
The New Lincoln School has purchased the eight-story building at 210 East 77th Street from Felko Associates, which had recently acquired it...
Two New York City schools--the Walden School and the New Lincoln School--plan to merge as a way of fighting rising costs and shrinking enrollments. The schools' boards approved the merger last month, choosing as the combined institution's name the New Walden Lincoln School.
The Experimental School, Inc., will be opened Sept. 20 at the 110th Street Community Center, 31 West 110th Street...
And the Birch Wathen School will move into the New Lincoln School building at 210 East 77th Street in July when Lincoln merges with the Walden School.
Minnijean Brown attended school here for the first time yesterday since her expulsion a week ago from Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.
She attended the Ethical Culture School and the New Lincoln School in New York.
In her last two years of high school, when she was commuting to the New Lincoln School, on the Upper East Side, she worked as an intern at the Metropolitan...
...and adolescence at the exclusive New Lincoln School in New York City (on which her parents lavished their limited funds)...
The New Lincoln School, 31 W 101st Street, has named E. Francis Bowditch director.