THE CITY AND COUNTRY SCHOOL

Founded by Caroline Pratt in 1914, City and Country, which was one of the schools chronicled by the Deweys in Schools of To-Morrow, consciously continues to practice the progressive philosophy and pedagogy Pratt developed.Footnote ¹² The curriculum revolves around block play, jobs, and an integrated, lived curriculum, all of which have attempted to use child-centered interactive pedagogy to build a democratic community. The history of the City and Country School provides us with an instructive study of a progressive school that seeks to maintain its progressive roots and has worked to preserve its philosophy, curriculum, and pedagogy, often at times when progressive education has fallen under severe criticism. That City and Country School has survived, and now successfully grapples with the tensions of continuity and change, speaks both to the vicissitudes of educational reform movements and to the timelessness, resiliency, and flexibility of progressive education.

Caroline Pratt began her teaching career in the Fayetteville school in 1887; in 1892, as the recipient of a scholarship, she set off for Teachers College in New York City.Footnote ¹³ She went on to teach manual training at the Normal School for Girls in Philadelphia, where she met her life-long companion, Helen Marot. Marot was a Quaker and a librarian, interested in social causes and had cofounded a library in Philadelphia devoted to economics and political science.Footnote ¹⁴ In 1901 Pratt and Marot moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, where they believed they could better implement their ideas about social change. After a two-month successful experiment at Hartley House, a settlement house, Pratt decided to open her own school, a play school in a three-room apartment in Greenwich Village. She determined that her school would serve young children from the neighborhood, particularly from working-class families, who would be able to make sense of their environment through play. The school eventually moved to a converted stable, owned by Lucy Sprague Mitchell, and located behind her house.

John Dewey's progressive philosophies are visible throughout the City and Country School. His influence on Pratt's thinking is undeniable, particularly in regard to her approach to curriculum and pedagogy. Pratt noted that the school she founded tried “to fit the school to the child, rather than as we were doing with indifferent success—fitting the child to the school.”Footnote ¹⁵ Moreover, Pratt contemplated her child-centered pedagogy with an embryonic community within the school in which the child could actively participate.

Pratt began her school as a “play school”—that is, a pre-kindergarten school—based on the premise that children learn by play and that for children, play was really hard work.Footnote ¹⁶ Play provided a way for children to learn how to negotiate the world in which they live and to understand how life situations work and how people live together. As an integral part of her pedagogy, Pratt emphasized the use of her ubiquitous plain wooden blocks to help children “sort out and make sense of the world around them.”Footnote ¹⁷ For Pratt, play was, in and of itself, an experience that led to growth.

From the outset, Pratt struggled to attract and retain a student body that reflected the diversity of society. In accordance with her reformist thinking, Pratt began her school with six children from working-class families with tuition funded by outside benefactors; however, she had difficulty attracting and retaining working-class families from the neighborhood. These families did not understand how play provided a learning experience and they feared that the absence of traditional schooling and the “Three R's” would hurt them. Artists and writers were far more willing to embrace Pratt's pedagogical experiment; thus, the composition of the student body changed dramatically during the school's initial years to include the children of Greenwich Village intelligentsia, seeking an experimental school for their children, and some of the local gentry interested in “the new education.”

Although Caroline Pratt began City and Country with a focus upon the early years, she eventually accommodated children through age thirteen. In 1921, Pratt changed the name of the school to the City and Country School to acknowledge the increased emphasis on academic content for older students and to reflect the institution's seriousness of purpose.

The pedagogic practices Pratt developed at City and Country, openly Deweyan in nature, reflected his idea of an “embryonic community” based on the needs and interests of children at various ages and heavily slanted toward both inquiry and experimentation, both book learning and experience. Pratt believed that young children should initially learn experimentally and experientially from their immediate environments, then, as they matured and their horizons expanded, they should be introduced to more sophisticated tasks and materials. Thus, she began the practice of assigning specific jobs “of actual service” to the different age groups, starting in the Eights (eight-year-olds) so that the school eventually functioned as a self-sufficient community. But as even more than a self-sufficient community, Pratt saw her school as functioning as a democratic, self-sufficient community—that is, a model for the future.Footnote ¹⁸

Caroline Pratt remained principal of City and Country until she retired in 1945. Over the next fifty years the school struggled to maintain its financial viability while continuing to remain true to Pratt's progressive vision. In 1999, Kate Turley became principal and remains in that position today. Turley came from an elite independent, traditional, single-sex girls' school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan; nevertheless, her communitarian impetus, her interest in autonomous learning, and her research on gender has made her a good fit for City and Country. Her immediate challenges were to establish consistency and continuity between and among the age groups, address financial challenges, and pay faculty on a scale comparable to their peers in other independent schools. During her tenure, Turley has overseen significant events at the school, including buying back its 12th St. Building, expanding its jobs program, purchasing an adjoining townhouse on 13th Street for an expanded library, and other rooms.

Today, class size averages around eighteen and tuition is $19,000 for two-year-olds to $38,800 for the thirteen-year-olds. Financial challenges remain, as City and Country has always run on a “shoe string” budget. Faculty salaries have improved and school size has grown from 250 to 368. Age groups have doubled in the lower school, always the strongest part of the school, and Turley made the decision in collaboration with the faculty and trustees to continue the school through the Thirteens. The attrition rate in the upper grades remains problematic as parents, mindful of college readiness, are less apt to embrace progressive practices.

Diversity remains an issue, particularly broadening the socioeconomic status of the student body. Because the school begins at two years of age, the children tend to be drawn from the neighborhood, which has significantly gentrified in the past twenty years. Diversity through ethnicity is more prevalent in the Fives as a result of some financial aid grants; however, as the tuition begins to creep up, the number of families in need shrinks. The challenge of diversity remains alongside the challenge of educating parents of the value of an education that is progressive and that has empowering potential for its students.

In 2014 City and Country celebrated its centennial. To celebrate, Turley had two major events. The first, a two-week installation at the Jefferson Public Library branch in the Village, provided a history of the school's first 100 years through photographs organized both chronologically and thematically. It provided a photographic “essay” that examined the contributions and philosophies of Caroline Pratt and Jean Murray, Pratt's successor, as well as how the school has changed since their administrations and how despite these changes, the school has remained faithful to its founding principles. The second was the unveiling of a new edition of Pratt's I Learn from Children.Footnote ¹⁹ In the Afterword to the new edition of I Learn from Children, Turley honors Pratt and signals a continued commitment to her principles.Footnote ²⁰ The book launch appeared to draw a white and upper-middle-class population. Thus, as is the case with other independent progressive schools, the problem of socioeconomic and racial diversity at City and Country remains an important issue. The question is how City and Country students are being prepared to live in a diverse society, when the school does not mirror the society at large?

Over the past century, City and Country has continued to implement the types of progressive pedagogic practices that Dewey advocated. These include block play, which socializes children into an interactive child-centered education in early childhood; an integrated curriculum where the social sciences, humanities, and mathematics and the sciences are connected together; and the jobs program, where students work together for the entire community to create a democratic school. Whereas the school's pedagogic practices remain Deweyan, it has been less successful in creating and maintaining a diverse, democratic community, with its student population still predominantly white and affluent, despite attempts over the past decade to attract more students of color through scholarships.

CENTRAL PARK EAST ELEMENTARY I

CPE1, founded in 1974, was one of New York City's District 4 Superintendent Anthony Alvarado's first new small public schools in East Harlem. The school started with six teachers who were all committed to project-based curriculum, to having teachers create their own curricula, and to teachers' involvement in school governance. They shared a belief that a school needs to be a place for teachers as well as children to learn; they assumed that if teachers stopped learning, the children would not be far behind.Footnote ²¹

Deborah Meier, one of the founding teachers of CPE1, met the five other founding teachers of CPE1 through her work as a teacher-mentor in Lillian Weber's Open Corridors Program at City College.Footnote ²² Meier convinced all five teachers to join in the work of conceiving and building a new school. In September 1974, the school opened with eleven students. Enrollment grew to thirty-five within the first two months. However, during the second year, a crisis erupted that hastened the need for a school director. Meier was the obvious choice because of her relationship with the district office and her political and educational connections in the progressive education community. Even though Meier was the first director of CPE1, it is significant that she began as one of the founding teachers and that the role of director grew out of the needs of the school.

Meier's view of politics and pedagogy was rooted in the classroom. She was focused on finding solutions to problems, even as she insisted that teachers accept responsibility for what happened in their classrooms. In other schools, a teacher might say, “I'd be a better teacher if there wasn't so much paperwork,” or, “The parents are the problem.” Meier looked at the obstacles in the way of good education and asked, “What can we ignore? What do we have to go around? And what do we have to fight?” She refused to accept excuses or to blame parents. Instead, she persistently looked for ways to develop a cohesive community of learners.

Meier had many goals for the school. She wanted to create a democratic school in which teachers developed their own curriculum and parents were a welcome presence in the school. Meier firmly believed that schools could have a large impact on a democratic society. She envisioned a school that empowered its students to develop as leaders in the same way that private schools did.

As the open classroom developed at CPE1, the focus was on each child as a learner. Early childhood classrooms had clearly defined learning areas. There was a large block area in each early childhood classroom, sand and water tables, classroom pets, a dramatic play area, listening, writing, and reading areas. Classrooms for older children had large work tables that could be used in multiple ways; work that tended to be messy was done as close to a sink and as far away from more delicate activities (writing, reading) as possible. Sometimes, the work spilled out into the hallways, because there wasn't enough room in the classroom. In the classroom, there were not a lot of rules. There was, however, structure and a lot of cooperation. Often, people mistakenly think that open classrooms lack structure. Most believe that classroom structure requires strict regimens and adult control. CPE1 structured its classrooms so that students were held responsible for meaningful decisions.

CPE1 drew much of its inspiration from the work of John Dewey. In The School and Society, Dewey rejected the prevalent idea that teaching was dictation by the teacher to students. Instead he believed that teaching blended children's natural impulses with the adult world's structures and ways of understanding.Footnote ²³ For Dewey, the art of teaching was using children's impulses—their natural curiosity and need to explore, to create, and to tell about discoveries—to drive their learning.

CPE1, like other progressive schools, has struggled to fully realize Dewey's vision in today's educational world of invasive rules and regulations. Despite the obvious challenges of designing a progressive public school that fully aligns with Dewey's vision in contemporary society, CPE1 has worked to adapt these progressive practices to today's world.

CPE1 was never a neighborhood school. Students came from all over the city and were of many different ethnic and racial groups. The community was connected through purpose, through a shared sense of how children learn and how schools need to support all of their members. A major way CPE1 developed community was through the traditions it created: “All school sing” happened once a week and was an opportunity for children to create a repertoire of songs. Through class museums, operas, and plays, students shared their work and participated in classroom curricula in other classes. CPE1 always prided itself on its mixture of cultures and the attention it has paid to having students learn about one another through their differences.

Today, CPE1 is still looking at ways to evaluate who it wants its students to be as learners. Dewey recognized that the role of schools had to change so they could prepare citizens for an industrialized society. In our post-industrial society, we struggle for clarity about how to prepare students to be citizens who contribute to society. Despite tremendous changes in society since Dewey's time, CPE1 remains committed to Dewey's goal of creating communities in which the value of children's work is integral to the life of the community.

Therefore, the lesson that CPE1 may have for progressive educators is that schools can evolve if they take the time to look at their learning as a community. Schools have a responsibility to articulate their own values and to look regularly at how their structures and daily practices support or impede these values. CPE1 values democracy, because it is through participation that students learn. So, teachers are charged with developing curriculum with and for their students. Students' voices need to be heard, so CPE1 creates practices where children make choices that direct their study and reveal their interests.

In 2016, an internal conflict over the effectiveness of progressive pedagogy created significant controversy, so much so that it was covered in the New York Times.Footnote ²⁴ A new principal began questioning whether the progressive practices at the school worked for children from low-income families and students of color. The principal sent an article to teachers arguing that such pedagogy was not effective for the students at CPE1 and that a more structured and directed pedagogy was more appropriate. Although this position has been put forth by scholars such as Lisa Delpit and school organizations such as KIPP, veteran teachers were openly critical of the principal.Footnote ²⁵ In addition, the principal argued that the admissions policy had advantaged white affluent children from outside District 4 at the expense of African American and Latino children from inside the district. After a prolonged conflict, including a parent overnight takeover of the school, the principal resigned in May 2017.Footnote ²⁶

For the past forty-two years, CPE1 has continued to offer Deweyan progressive practices to a diverse student body. These have evolved from open classrooms to more structured classroom environments, but ones where integrated curricula are taught in a child-centered manner. At present, the school is struggling with the definition of diversity, with its historically low-income, African American, and Latino student population now including a significant number of middle-class whites. Some veteran teachers question if these more affluent students are part of the school's mission. Additionally, the principal who resigned in May 2017 questioned its progressive teaching methods with respect to whether low-income students need a more structured curriculum and pedagogy. This question goes to the heart of the critique of progressive pedagogy offered by Delpit and others mentioned. As the school moves forward it will have to grapple with the effectiveness of Deweyan progressive education for low-income children. Although Deborah Meier believed strongly in this type of progressive education, it continues to come under attack. Our work on both CPE1 and CPESS (in the next section) suggests that Meier's vision still has much to offer.

CENTRAL PARK EAST SECONDARY SCHOOL

In 1984, Meier decided to create a new school as an expansion of the vision she began with the Central Park East elementary schools. Meier explicitly drew from Theodore Sizer's educational model outlined in Horace's Compromise and implicitly drew from Dewey's philosophy of education to develop a set of principles that would serve as the foundation for CPESS.Footnote ²⁷

CPESS began with a single grade and added a grade each year between 1985 and 1991. Because it grew beyond what founder Deborah Meier considered to be the ideal size, she had to find creative ways to maintain her democratic ideals that were central to the school's organizational structure. For example, as the school grew in size, it was no longer possible to hold whole-school faculty meetings where all teachers could collectively decide on a variety of school-wide topics. Instead, the school staff elected a cabinet of teachers to make decisions with the administrators.

CPESS created a number of structures aimed at lessening teacher workload while simultaneously increasing teacher accountability. The school was divided into Division 1 (D1)—seventh and eighth grades; Division 2 (D2)—ninth and tenth grades; and the Senior Institute (SI)—eleventh and twelfth grades. The first two divisions were also divided into houses. These smaller units generate collaborative spaces for teachers and students to implement democratic practices that drive important decision-making processes.

Another example of a “school shrinking” unit was the advisory. Similar to homeroom in traditional schools, advisory was a place where students within the same division and house met every day, where attendance could be taken, and where students, in their own words, could “debrief” and “decompress.” Advisory gave students a space to form bonds with each other during structured and nonstructured activities. Likewise, being in advisory with the same fifteen students for a year (those students who were in the lower grade of a division would remain in the advisory for a second year while the older students moved on to the next division or to graduation) aided in forming close bonds. As Semel and Sadovnik note elsewhere, although Meier has never acknowledged the influence of Helen Parkhurst's Dalton Plan, advisory was clearly similar to The Dalton School's house system. This house system at The Dalton School, founded in 1919 in New York City, was part of Helen Parkhurst's plan to create a Deweyan child-centered school, where the goal was to create a democratic community. The history of The Dalton School is different from that of City and Country School as it has not in large measure retained its progressive practices.Footnote ²⁸

According to teachers and students, the goal of advisory was to create a space to develop close bonds between students and advisors. For Meier, the importance of advisory is “to have one adult who truly knows each kid and family well and can make the needed connections and adjustments as kids maneuver their way through school and into life. It's also a place for kids to create a group that cuts across kids' usual cliques.” While structures similar to advisory have existed in many forms throughout the history of schooling, CPESS's use of advisory served as a clear model that many New York City public schools have since adopted.

Outside of advisory, the school used other pedagogical innovations to drive the curriculum. Rather than a focus on particular content areas, CPESS faculty and administration used Habits of Mind to determine how classes were taught. The term “Habits of Mind” came from Dewey's work, but Meier spoke about developing CPESS's version of them. As was common practice at CPESS, teachers drove school policy and worked collaboratively to construct a list of CPESS's Habits of Mind. Teachers began by asking what students in each field should know at the end of their time at CPESS, but they soon modified their question to “If you ran into someone at a party, what would tell you that they could use their mind well?” The first two Habits of Mind flowed easily from the school's two essential questions: “How do you know what you know?” and “Is there a pattern here?”

The Habits of Mind emphasized the students' ability

1. 1. to make connections across distinct areas,

2. 2. to see varying perspectives,

3. 3. to collect evidence,

4. 4. to discover significance,

5. 5. and to speculate on other options.

Another component of CPESS was that the school required all students to participate in community service for the entire four years of Divisions 1 and 2. Based on their interests, students volunteered for jobs both in the school and in the community. Students volunteered in the classrooms of the Central Park East elementary schools, in school administrative offices, and in other organizations in the local community. This is similar to the jobs requirement at City and Country and reflects both schools' commitment to a Deweyan democratic community.

During the early years, some teachers thought the content of the curriculum at CPESS was controversial as they thought it had more depth than breadth. The first few years of the curriculum included not only traditional American history, emphasizing the American Revolution and the Civil War, but also topics such as the civil rights movement, Taino and Navajo culture, Central America, immigration, and both forced and voluntary migration. Teachers at CPESS considered these topics as important as, if not more important than, the more traditional subtopics taught in American history; however, some thought it insufficient preparation for college.

Because CPESS focused its attention on studying more marginalized cultures than many other schools, students occasionally reported not having the similar depth of knowledge of European or even “mainstream” American history and culture. Similarly, students' knowledge of traditional literature topics such as Shakespeare was limited.

Students entered the Senior Institute (SI), another unique feature of CPESS, after finishing course requirements through the tenth grade. In the Senior Institute, students spent less time on large projects, as the classes were shorter. Prior to graduation, students were required to complete fourteen portfolios and a senior project. The portfolio areas included Post-Graduation Plan, Mathematics, Science and Technology, History, Literature, Autobiography, Fine Arts/Aesthetics, Geography, Physical Challenge, Practical Skills and Knowledge, Internship, Dual Language, Mass Media, and Social Issues.

Small organizations, in particular, are easily influenced by a change in leadership.Footnote ²⁹ Before departing, Meier appointed Paul Schwartz as a codirector. Once Meier left, he promoted Dave Smith, a former humanities teacher, as his codirector. The loss of her charismatic leadership had a wide range of effects. One measurable loss was that Meier had personal access to resources as a result of her awards and accolades, and these became more difficult to procure as she became more distant from the school. Several of the school's teachers departed soon after Meier and, during a turnover in the city educational administration, in which many of those sympathetic to alternative schools departed, several other teachers also left. Many teachers who left, like Meier believed that the school would survive and that they could spread a well-known educational model to other schools. The school became renowned—seemingly diffusing its theories, methods, structure, and pedagogy across the New York City school system and across the nation. But as the philosophies that Meier put into practice at CPESS spread, the school's own ability to function wavered following the loss of key personnel.

Unfortunately, CPESS no longer exists in the form envisioned by Deborah Meier. In late 2013, parents, teachers, students, and alumni of CPE1 lost their fight to open Central Park East Middle School in the building rather than replicating the East Harlem Scholars Academy that will remain a cotenant through at least 2016.Footnote ³⁰ CPESS, as it was originally envisioned, is gone. The last founding member of the CPESS faculty retired years ago and the students have no knowledge of Essential Questions or Habits of Mind. Furthermore, current students must pass the same Regents exams as most other students in New York public schools to qualify for graduation. Moreover, during the transition period between the school's alternative roots and its more traditional current state, teachers explained that many new staff members participated in the school's innovations without the knowledge of their origins or their purpose. While it may seem that participating in the activities of the school could be useful for their own sake, without awareness of their purpose, this type of bureaucratic inertia can be damaging to the overall school culture.

When the school was forced to implement the New York State's Regents exams, CPESS changed many of the practices that had defined it as an institution. New goals were implemented, centered on guiding students to pass the Regents exams.Footnote ³¹ These new goals, which focus on teaching students to memorize testable facts, conflict with older imperatives to teach students critical thinking.Footnote ³²

CPESS faculty and staff had to change their pedagogy to accomplish their new goals. They no longer emphasized long-term projects that may or may not have included the particular key concepts on the exam that year. The importance of the Habits of Mind, particularly critical thinking, appears to have become secondary to the exam, a policy contrary to the school's long-held principles. As a whole, the practices that made CPESS progressive faded.

CPESS lasted nearly ten years before it transformed into its current, more traditional form. In its original state, the students of the school—mostly low-income, urban, and minority students—applied to, were accepted by, and attended colleges at higher rates than similar students nationwide. Because CPESS sought to minimize the effects of the hierarchical structures of society in the classroom, former CPESS students tended to feel more comfortable in college seminars and other courses emphasizing discussion than their peers from other schools. CPESS students shared similar economic and social issues as their counterparts from traditional public high schools. However, unlike their traditional-school counterparts, they struggled more in lecture courses that emphasized standardized tests and memorization.

Nevertheless, CPESS sent more students to college than most schools serving a similar population of students. Significantly, CPESS teachers believed they had given their students the tools necessary to become public intellectuals who use their knowledge to change the larger world as adults who recognize the importance of democratic values and the responsibilities of citizenship.

Despite some of the problems Central Park East Secondary School confronted, the school proved to be a space within which students who were overwhelmingly underserved by the urban public school system could be educated and prepared for productive participation in life outside of school. It contributed to a dialogue on urban education and was at the forefront of a social movement to address some of the inequalities inherent in the educational system, particularly in providing access and equity to underserved populations. Such practices are consistent with Dewey's vision of democratic education.

For the nearly ten years of its existence CPESS had a progressive Deweyan curriculum and pedagogy, which included an integrated curriculum in mathematics and sciences and humanities, the arts and the social sciences taught in an inquiry-based approach to learning, an advisory system whose purpose was to create a democratic community, a community service requirement; and a senior portfolio project, where students had to demonstrate the ability to think critically. With respect to diversity, its students were largely low-income African Americans and Latinos. During this period a large number went on the college, which Meier believed as evidence of the effectiveness of progressive pedagogy for low-income students. Under its new more traditional state, the school has been forced to prepare students for state Regent's examinations and has thus altered its curriculum and pedagogy to meet these external demands. The fate of CPESS demonstrates the powerful effect of assessments on progressive education.

PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

As we have seen in these three histories, balancing the original intentions of progressive founders with the known demands upon practitioners has been the key challenge some schools have met successfully and others have not. In each history, we see evidence of a struggle to both implement progressive pedagogic practices and provide a “democratic education for all.”

MAINTAINING PROGRESSIVE PEDAGOGIC PRACTICES

In City and Country, we find a school that has managed to maintain Caroline Pratt's child-centered practices. It does so in part, because of its small size and because it only serves children from early childhood through eighth grade, so that parents who are feeling the pressures of college admissions have four more years following City and Country to equip their children with Ivy League credentials. The school also attracts parents who consciously favor a progressive education and who are often alumni. It also selects faculty members interested in, or graduates of, progressive institutions. Finally, City and Country is proud of its heritage, and its leadership is respectful of and continues both to articulate and implement the philosophy of Caroline Pratt.

For CPE1 and CPESS, the accountability and testing movement of the past decades have necessitated less progressive methods. Despite its relatively brief existence, CPESS inspired the adoption of progressive educational practices in countless contemporary schools. CPE1 continues to swim against the tide of the accountability and testing regimes of the past decade.

The legacy of Deborah Meier is evident in the expansion and maintenance of public progressive education. Many teachers at Central Park East went on to found or teach at other progressive public schools, some becoming a part of the New York Performance Standards Consortium, a progressive network founded by Deborah Meier and Ann Cook of Urban Academy.Footnote ³³ Thus, despite the fact that CPESS no longer exists in its original form, its progressive legacy persists in a growing number of small New York City high schools that employ performance-based assessments in place of some of the standardized Regents exams to meet graduation requirements. Meier's work demonstrates the importance of each generation of school leaders passing on their philosophy and methods to the next generation.

PROVIDING A DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION FOR ALL

Progressive education has increasingly come under attack as an elite form of education. The paradox of progressive education has been described as democratic education for the elite, often delivered autocratically as well.Footnote ³⁴ As we demonstrate, this was not what John Dewey had in mind when he opened the Laboratory School, which he hoped to be a model for democratic education. It is ironic that a century later, Dewey's school and other such private progressive schools founded under the aegis of “the new education” have become institutions to educate the elite, all too often in traditional educational settings. Progressive education in the small, child-centered, mainly independent schools founded in the early twentieth century like City and Country overwhelmingly attracted elite, white populations. Today, however, progressive, experimental or alternative education has become accessible to diverse populations, particularly in the public sector. Accessibility to the “historical” progressive schools like City and Country can still be problematic for minorities, even though schools with the financial stability to provide scholarships, like The Dalton School, have made an explicit commitment to change this and have done so with some success.Footnote ³⁵

Though City and Country began as a play school for working-class children in the neighborhood, it did not remain so. Parents expressed concern that their children would not fit into traditional schools later on, and ultimately, they withdrew them from Pratt's progressive school. An influx of affluent neighborhood children from families in Greenwich Village—“the new middle class,” or struggling artists and writers interested in progressive education—quickly filled the vacuum. Moreover, although committed to democratic education, the school has, from the 1970s on, struggled to remain open in the wake of dwindling enrollments. Now it accepts full-tuition-paying students almost exclusively. It has made significant efforts to attract a more diverse student body, but fiscal constraints as well as working-class parents' skepticism about the ability of a progressive school to teach their children basic skills hinders these efforts.

Thus, like so many of the independent progressive schools that depend upon tuition for their existence, maintaining diversity continues to be problematic.

In the public sector, one finds some cause for optimism. Since the 1960s, public progressive education has been overcoming struggles to continue to serve more diverse student populations in urban areas. CPE 1 and CPESS respectively demonstrate how Deborah Meier applied many of the principles and pedagogies of the early progressive schools in schools serving far more racially and socioeconomically diverse students with success.

Finally, the issue of public and private schooling needs to be critically addressed. Independent progressive schools like City and Country are often dismissed because they are private. Such simplistic dismissals ensure that the lessons to be learned from these schools will be ignored. More important, blind praise of public education overlooks their role in the reproduction of educational inequality.Footnote ³⁶ Schools like CPE1 and CPESS originated because of the failures of urban public education in educating low-income students and students of color. Conversely, most suburban schools in affluent neighborhoods are more racially and socioeconomically segregated than many independent schools.Footnote ³⁷ Thus, the racial and social class composition of a school may be as or more important than whether it is public or private to understand the role of schooling in either providing avenues for social mobility or reproducing social inequality.

Critics/Observers should not fault Dewey for the fact that the type of diverse community central to Dewey's writings has not existed in the schools under examination (racial and socioeconomic at all three, although for different groups: lack of students of color and low-income students at City and Country and lack of white and middle-class students at CPE1 and CPESS). Certainly, we cannot blame him for the lack of diversity in American schools, as the historical reasons for this were far beyond his control. Given the current lack of diversity in public and private schools, policy makers attempting to increase diversity should continue to invoke Dewey's philosophies of democratic education from Democracy and Education. There are deep connections between Dewey's vision of “democratic education for all” and the growing body of literature demonstrating the benefits of diversity in schools, making Dewey as relevant as ever.Footnote ³⁸