Community in the Classroom: Mapping Parent-Teacher Teams in Harlem
View FullscreenParent-Teacher Teams: Using this Map
This interactive map was designed to accompany the exhibit "Community in the Classroom: Parent-Teacher Teams in Harlem." The exhibit contains detailed information about the program depicted here, and a brief description of the program can be found below.
This map can be explored in several ways. The map itself can be manipulated much like other online maps, by zooming, dragging, scrolling, and clicking. Viewers can also move through the map by clicking through the "Waypoints" listed on the right. Clicking on a waypoint will re-orient the map, pull up information on the topic and highlight the dots or shapes referenced. Clicking on these dots/shapes on the map itself will also pull up the information associated with with each dot or shape, but without re-orienting the map. Most waypoints include brief descriptions and oral history clips. For more information on each group or institution that appears in these waypoints, read on below.
MAP KEY:
Blue dots: Home addresses of 47 community-based paraprofessional educators who worked in Parent-Teacher Teams pairings
Red dots: Home addresses of 47 teachers who worked in the same Parent-Teacher Teams pairings
Yellow shapes: Participating schools
Orange shapes: School district offices
Green shape: Harlem Youth Opportunities, Unlimited (HARYOU) offices
Blue shapes: Institutions associated with Columbia University
Parent-Teacher Teams: A Brief Introduction
The Parent-Teacher Teams program was developed by a coalition of parents, teachers, and institutions in New York City's Local School District 5 in 1967. The program employed local parents as paraprofessional educators alongside teachers in third-grade classrooms, while providing on-the-job training in education and classes toward high school diplomas and college degrees at Teachers College, Columbia University. A council of 12 parents was elected from among these paraprofessionals to advise and help govern the program.
The creators of Parent-Teacher Teams cited three interconnected goals for the program:
- improving instruction and pupil achievement,
- facilitating communication and cooperation between schools and their surrounding communities, and
- creating job and training opportunities for neighborhood residents
The program received rave reviews from parents, teachers, and administrators during the three years it operated (1967-1970). At its height, the program employed 130 parents serving 3,900 children in 27 local schools.
Reshaping the Social Geography of Schooling
Parent-Teacher Teams was one of thousands of programs created across the nation in the late 1960s to employ local parents in public schools as paraprofessional educators. This "paraprofessional movement" was, in many ways, a response to geographic segregation and spatial inequality in American cities, which sorted people by race and class at many levels.
Discriminatory policies and practices in real estate segregated residential neighborhoods and housing across and within metropolitan areas, separating many educators from the schools and neighborhoods where they worked. Coupled with administrative decisions about school zoning, these policies segregated schools in New York City. Residential and administrative segregation also limited the political power of working-class Black and Latino/a New Yorkers.
Discriminatory hiring policies segregated the teaching corps; when Parent-Teacher Teams began, 91% of teachers and 97% of administrators in New York City were white, while 58% of the student body was not. Public and private discrimination also segregated the workforce more broadly, both by directly preventing Black and Latino/a New Yorkers from being hired or promoted, and by shifting jobs from the center of the city to the suburbs and from the Northeastern United States to the South and West.
In several crucial respects, the goals of paraprofessional programs like Parent-Teacher Teams were spatial. Parent educators acted as conduits between schools and communities; the brought local knowledge and culture into schools to improve instruction and connect teachers and students, while explaining official policies and projects to skeptical parents. Hiring local parents desegregated the faculty, while their presence in classrooms and on the Parent Council included parents in educational decision-making and the political process. Jobs and training, meanwhile, provided economic stability and educational opportunity for parents in neighborhoods where both were increasingly scarce.
Exploring Parent-Teacher Teams through Mapping
Mapping the people and institutions that participated in Parent-Teacher Teams helps to visualize and explore the ways in which this program reshaped social and institutional geographies of schooling and learning in Harlem and on the Upper West Side, as exhibit creator Nick Juravich and longtime paraprofessional Shelvy Young-Abrams do in the video above. This map shows the home addresses of 47 parent educators (in blue) and 47 teachers (in red) who worked together in third-grade classrooms in seven schools (in yellow). Parents, teachers, and schools were organized into two "Centers" for administrative and training purposes: Center B, in South Harlem, and Center C, in the neighborhoods of Morningside Heights and Manhattan Valley, part of Manhattan's Upper West Side. The map also depicts District 5's two offices (in orange), Teachers College (in light blue) and Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited - Associated Community Teams (HARYOU-ACT), a local community action agency that helped select and train parent educators in Harlem (in green). This map prompts viewers to explore the location of all of these peoples and places in relation to one another, and to consider the ways that these relationships impacted schooling and learning.
Clicking through the list of people and institutions on the map provides brief descriptions of each and links back to the larger exhibits. More extensive descriptions are listed below. Zooming in and out allows viewers to shift scales from individual buildings, blocks, and schools to wider views of the neighborhoods, city, and metropolitan area in which Parent-Teacher Teams took place. While the dots on this map that represent parents and teachers are static, viewers are asked to remember that these people were in motion. Parents and teachers moved from their homes to their schools, and moved around their neighborhoods to shop, worship, and socialize. In the context of the program, parents and teachers meet together at schools for professional development workshops, attended Parent Council meetings at District Offices, and traveled to Teachers College for high school and college classes.
How did this program, and the movement of people through it, shape new kinds of schooling and learning processes in Harlem and on the Upper West Side? The list below offers some answers. For more information, read through the "Community in the Classroom" exhibit and the suggested readings and links at the end of it.
On the Map
Parent Educators
Each blue dot represents the home address of one of 47 mothers hired to work as paraprofessional educators in the seven schools on this map. Parent educators lived very close to the schools where they worked, often within a few blocks, and saw their students and their parents regularly outside of the classroom, in supermarkets, parks, and places of worship. Parent educators were intimately familiar with their neighborhoods and brought local knowledge into schools. Once employed, they carried understandings of official policies and practices with them into formal and informal conversations with students, parents, and community members beyond schools. Thus, these dots represent community connections to schools and nodes of outreach for schools. Each dot also represents a new job and new training opportunities for a working mother.
Participating Teachers
Each red dot represents the home address of one of 47 participating teachers. Scattered across the metropolitan area, these dots illustrate the suburbanization of the teaching workforce in the 1960s. However, many participating teachers lived on the Upper West Side, some walking distance from the schools where they worked. This may have been on account of teacher self-selection: it would have been easier for teachers living nearby to participate in a program that demanded significant after-school training commitments. Teachers living in close proximity to their schools may also have been more sensitive to the need to connect to local communities. At the same time, only one teacher lived east of Morningside Park, and those who lived on the Upper West Side typically lived west of Amsterdam Avenue. Comparing the home addresses of teachers and parent educators reveals local patternings of class and race at several scales.
Center B Schools
Center B was an administrative cluster of four schools in southern Harlem: PS 113, PS 184, PS 185, and PS 208. 26 of 27 parent educators working in these schools lived within a square quarter-mile bounded by Central Park, 117th Street, 5th Avenue, and Manhattan Avenue, while only one teacher did. In Harlem, the effects of long-running neighborhood-level segregation are visible in the distance between teachers and their workplaces. As one report explained, employing a parent-educators who "can understand and relate to children whose environment she shares" was meant to bridge this distance.
Center C Schools
Center C was an administrative cluster of three schools in Morningside Heights and Manhattan Valley: PS 145, PS 165, and PS 179. All 21 parent educators lived within a few blocks of their schools, but so did many teachers, with some parents and teachers living on the same blocks and, in one instance, in the same building (on 104th Street). Spatial inequality is still present in this neighborhood; most parent addresses are clustered to the east, on the borders of Harlem and down the hill from more elite addresses on Broadway and Riverside Drive. Eight parent educators lived in public housing, while no teachers did. However, boundaries are more uneven in this cluster of schools, and the presence of parent addresses west of Amsterdam Avenue reveal that parents in Parent-Teacher Teams were not a homogeneous group, but came from many racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds.
New York City Board of Education, District 5 Headquarters and Storefront Office
Parent-Teacher Teams was administered by the New York City Board of Education’s Local School District 5, which was headquartered in a school building on 96th Street. The District’s boundaries stretched roughly from 59th Street to 125th Street on the Upper West Side and Harlem. The district opened a storefront office in 1968, shortly after Parent-Teacher Teams began, to better connect with parents and community members in the district. While it was more accessible than District 5’s Headquarters, the storefront office remained at a distance from Harlem.
Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited - Associated Community Teams (HARYOU-ACT)
HARYOU-ACT was a pioneering antipoverty organization founded with federal funding in 1962. HARYOU coordinated the use of parent educators as teacher aides in afterschool programs in Harlem and called for parents to be hired as teacher aides in local schools in their 1964 report, “Youth in the Ghetto.” When the Board of Education authorized the hiring of paraprofessionals in 1967, they required Local School Districts to work with city-recognized Community Action Agencies (CAAs) in planning programs and hiring parents. HARYOU-ACT played this role for Parent-Teacher Teams in Harlem, recommending half of the parents who were hired. Though their offices were at 142nd Street and 7th Avenue, HARYOU-ACT ran programs for young people throughout the neighborhood.
Teachers College, Columbia University (TC)
Teachers College is one of the oldest and most prestigious schools of education in the nation. Historically an elite institution, TC opened its doors to parent educators from Parent-Teacher Teams in 1968, at a time when Columbia University was locked in a bitter fight with Harlem residents over the construction of a new gymnasium in Morningside Park. Parents took high school and college classes at TC, and gained access to its library and recreational facilities for their families. TC training director Hope Leichter remembers this process as “more democratic than we could have planned,” in that it helped break down barriers between the institution and its surrounding community.
Morningside Heights, Inc.
Morningside Heights, Incorporated, a community development organization founded by Columbia University in 1947, reported on the Parent-Teacher Teams program to the University, the Board of Education, and the wider public. They also kept a record of its progress. All of the archival materials used to produce this Neatline exhibit are housed in the collections of the Morningside Area Alliance in the Columbia University Archives, whose finding aid describes the organization as follows:
Morningside Area Alliance was founded as Morningside Heights Inc. in 1947, out of the recommendations of two Columbia University-instituted committees … By the end of 1948 Morningside Heights Inc. made the decision to work towards neighborhood improvements by focusing on developing public housing and improving public schools. In addition the organization's housing-improvement mission, it was decided that Morningside Heights Inc. would act as a "clearing house" for all real estate purchases and transactions by the sponsoring institutions. To aid in this task, the stock corporation Remedco was founded in 1949 to act as the real estate arm of Morningside Heights Inc. The next largest area of Morningside Heights Inc. work was aid to public schools and programs for Morningside youth. The organization funded a music program in PS 125 and PS 165 from 1954-1958, and advocated for years on behalf of the effort to build another elementary school in Morningside Heights. Throughout its existence Morningside Heights Inc. worked to revitalize organized extracurricular youth activities in the neighborhood as part of a program intended to minimize the perceived causes of juvenile crime.