Parent-Teacher Teams in Harlem: An Introduction
TC Week, February 7, 1969
It "Worked Beautifully": Parent-Teacher Teams, February 1969
In the late 1960s, public education in New York City was in crisis. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Harlem, where a decade of parent-led civil rights organizing had done little to improve student achievement or desegregate the neighborhood's overcrowded, crumbling schools. In 1968, an experimental program of "community control" that included a portion of Harlem and East Harlem had devolved into chaos when parent organizers and the teachers' union clashed over the transfer of teachers. By the end of the year, distrust and hostility between students, parents, teacher and administrators was at an all-time high.
In the midst of this maelstrom, the newsletter of Teachers College, Columbia University ran a front-page report titled “Parents Go Back to School - As Teacher Assistants and TC Students." Over the preceding year, TC had joined parents, teachers, community organizations, and the local school district in building a program called “Parent-Teacher Teams” in the schools of Harlem and the Upper West Side. TC’s role, as the article explained, was “the training of paraprofessional educators … as part of a program that represents a new model for school-community involvement.”
TC Week, February 1969 (p. 3)
“A New Model for School-Community Involvement”
What was this new model? The school district's project proposal from December of 1967 explained that parents would be trained to “work as non-professionals in a teamwork approach” with teachers in classrooms. The proposal cited three additional goals:
- "improve pupil achievement"
- "improve school-community relations through greater communication, involvement, and interaction"
- "create an opportunity for parents to upgrade their academic backgrounds and career horizons" (and possibly to become fully-certified teachers themselves)
Educational scholars, activists, and administrators at the time would have recognized these three goals as the three pillars of the "New Careers" movement in antipoverty policy. The policy scholars who created the New Careers model had developed their ideas while working in community-based organizations in Harlem, the most influential of which was Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Inc (HARYOU). By the late 1960s, federal funds from the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Act provided new opportunities for local schools to put this vision into practice.
To achieve its three goals, the school district partnered with local community action agencies, including HARYOU, to recruit parents. They also created a twelve-member Parent Council, elected from among the participants, to help shape and govern the program. TC helped develop the training program for parent educators, which included sessions at schools and the college.
One year in, TC Week reported that Parent-Teacher Teams was exceeding expectations. Parent educators were teaching their students everything from African American history to the mending of clothing. One principal reported that the project had been “received enthusiastically by the parents and the teachers” and, in her own estimation, it “worked beautifully.” At TC, most parents worked toward high school diplomas, while those who had already graduated earned college credits. Reports from community organizations and the school district echoed TC Week's assessment: Parent-Teacher Teams was improving instruction, facilitating school-community partnerships, and creating jobs and training opportunities for local residents.
Exploring Parent-Teacher Teams
This exhibit uses archival materials, oral histories, and an interactive map to explore the remarkable history of the Parent-Teacher Teams program. This exhibit can be explored both chronologically, through the exhibit pages, and spatially, through the interactive map.
In both formats, primary sources are displayed prominently, including documents, photographs, and oral histories. These exhibits - the pages and the map - offer two ways of organizing this information and telling stories with it, but these sources have many more stories to tell. They are provided here to allow viewers, educators, and scholars to interact and create new narratives with them.
- The exhibit pages tell a chronological story of Parent-Teacher Teams. They begin with the origins of paraprofessional programs in Harlem at the intersection of the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty. From there, the exhibit pages trace the creation, evolution, and demise of this particular program, before reflecting on the wider trajectory of paraprofessional programs in education and their legacy. Moving through the exhibit in this way raises historical questions. How did programs employing parent educators come about? Who supported them, and why? How did parents and teachers work together in the classroom? Broadly, what does this example of parent-teacher cooperation - in a moment of tremendous conflict - reveal about public schools, freedom struggles, antipoverty policy, and urban governance in this era of Harlem's history?
- The interactive map tells a geographic story of Parent-Teacher Teams. By zooming in and out, and by clicking on items on the map and in the menu bar, viewers can explore the relationships between people, places, and institutions that the program aimed to create and promote. The map itself contains embedded text, voices, and images, and links back to exhibit pages for greater detail. Parent-Teacher Teams, and programs like it, restructured the social and institutional geography of schooling and learning and Harlem. In doing so, they raised questions that are often best explored spatially. What relationship should schools and educators have with the students, parents, and neighborhoods they serve? How are wealth and power distributed within cities, and what can schools do to address these inequalities? How do people organize with one another to shape public education, economic opportunity, and urban politics?
At its height, Parent-Teacher Teams employed 130 local residents in 27 schools, where they served 3,900 students. The Program was one of hundreds in New York City, which employed 10,000 paraprofessional educators by 1970. In the three years that it operated, Parent-Teacher Teams received rave reviews from parents, teachers, and administrators, but it was shuttered in 1970 as New York City's school system was restructured and the Ford Foundation and Columbia University ended their support for the project.
However, similar programs persisted in Harlem throughout the 1970s, and paraprofessional educators continue to work in public schools in many capacities. Exploring the Parent-Teacher Teams program does not offer simple solutions or portable models, but it does provide the opportunity to reflect on the possibilities and challenges for parent educators today.
Sources and Method
This exhibit is a detailed case study of the Parent-Teacher Teams program that began as a project in Professor Ansley T. Erickson's "Harlem Digital Research Collaborative" course. The exhibit was originally built on materials contained in a single folder of the Morningside Area Alliance Records at the Columbia University Archives (Series III, Box 55, Folder 16: Parent-Teacher Teams), the contents of which were digitized by the course team for the Educating Harlem Project. It has been expanded here using materials collected as part of my dissertation research, including oral histories, periodical records, and secondary readings. The text of the exhibit does not contain footnotes, but links to specific primary and secondary sources that are quoted or referenced have been provided wherever possible. For more information on these sources, readings, and the methods employed here, please consult the "Sources, Methods, and Further Readings" page at the conclusion of this exhibit, or contact the creator, Nick Juravich.