PS 25, South Bronx

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2018 P.S. 25, South Bronx: Bilingual Education and Community Control Laura J. Kaplan The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2957 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] P.S. 25, SOUTH BRONX: BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND COMMUNITY CONTROL By LAURA JANET KAPLAN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Urban Education in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2018 © 2018 LAURA J. KAPLAN ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii P.S. 25, SOUTH BRONX: BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND COMMUNITY CONTROL by Laura Janet Kaplan This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Urban Education in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date Ofelia Garcia Chair of Examining Committee Date Wendy Luttrell Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Stephen Brier Johanna Fernandez Heather Lewis John Hammond THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Through a methodology of oral history interviews with primary subjects and archival research, this dissertation explores the creation and evolution of P.S. 25, The Bilingual School, the first Spanish-English bilingual elementary school in New York City, as well as the entire Northeast. The Bilingual School, founded in 1968, was a product of the civil rights movement in the United States and one key manifestation of that movement in New York City, the struggle for community control of schools. Latinos in general and Puerto Ricans in particular have been written out of the official narrative of the educational civil rights movement in New York City, although they played an integral role. This dissertation attempts to examine the contours of their participation through the lens of the creation of a single school, P.S. 25. In so doing, I highlight the singular contribution of Puerto Ricans in changing the educational landscape of New York City. The story of P.S. 25 also contributes to the body of literature that challenges the dominant narrative of the Bronx as solely a zone of destruction and despair during the 1960s and 1970s. P.S. 25 exemplified the ideas of the movement for community control, confounding the conventional wisdom that community control of schools was attempted but failed in New York City. Its story contributes to a new narrative: that social justice movements of the 1960s did indeed lead to successful education reform, creating high-quality schools accountable to the communities they served. An examination of P.S. 25 during its early years gives us an indication of how education in New York City might have developed if the community control movement had prevailed. This dissertation explores why P.S. 25 succeeded in its endeavors whereas schools with similar goals in the same years failed. iv Bold in its efforts to break with the status quo in language policy, pedagogy, curriculum, personnel and parental involvement, P.S. 25 served as a model for future bilingual schools in New York and as a petri dish for the fomentation of leadership in the field of bilingual education. Its history demonstrates how a group of committed educators in one school worked to realize activist goals that have had a lasting impact on the education of Latino and other marginalized students up to the present day. While this dissertation tells the story of the founding and development of P.S. 25, it is at once the story of a little-known manifestation of the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty. The War on Poverty brought not just federal money but a philosophy that enabled communities to forge solutions for educational problems on their own terms. Through an examination of the founding and growth of P.S. 25, The Bilingual School, we can see one such design realized on the ground in the South Bronx. P.S. 25’s restructuring of standing educational paradigms represented a logical outcome of the War on Poverty’s maxim of “maximum feasible participation” of the poor. With autonomy and funding to back them, the founders of P.S. 25 created a prototype that I call a “Latino bilingual/bicultural community school.” For the original visionaries of the Bilingual School, the purpose of bilingualism was not only to facilitate English acquisition and integration into American society but to reinforce the value of cultural and linguistic pluralism for Puerto Ricans and all Americans. At its inception, P.S. 25 exemplified this vision through a developmental bilingual education model and was poised to set the standard for bilingual education throughout New York City. This dissertation examines how upon implementation of the Aspira Consent Decree in 1974, transitional bilingual education programs became the new norm for bilingual students, thus destroying the possibility for a wide scale replication and expansion of the P.S. 25 model. v An analysis of P.S. 25 during its early years gives us an indication of how a school realized the demands of the Puerto Rican community in the 1960s in the form of holistic, decolonizing, community-centered bilingual and multicultural primary schooling. A look at P.S. 25 benefits all those interested in the education of English learners and the creation of bilingual subjects in today’s schools. An understanding of the unique pedagogical model, curriculum and environment established at P.S. 25 can provide social justice educators with an educational alternative that is both practical and additive. Keywords: Urban Education, Elementary Education, Curriculum and Instruction, Educational Leadership, Bilingual Education, Multicultural Education, Puerto Ricans, Latino Civil Rights Movement, New York City History, Educational Administration and Supervision, Language and Literacy Education vi DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my friend and mentor, Jean Anyon, without whose encouragement this never would have been written. Her death from cancer on September 7, 2013 represented an incalculable loss for me, for her students and for the educational social justice community. I also dedicate it to all the administrators, teachers, parents, students and staff of P.S. 25 who at a certain moment in time had the vision and courage to establish a remarkable experiment in learning. vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As a teacher of English to mainly Dominican-born students at Hostos Community College in the South Bronx, I firmly believe in the importance of bilingualism. I encourage my students to maintain and develop literacy in their first language at the same time as they learn English. In my own observations as a teacher of English as a New Language, or English to Speakers of Other Languages as the field was called when I entered it, first language literacy and usage did not hinder English language development as critics claimed but on the contrary, promoted it. While teaching at Hostos I met Jean Anyon, with whom I developed an immediate rapport and friendship. She encouraged my intellectual pursuits, and urged me to apply to the Urban Education Doctoral Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Thanks to her confidence in me and persuasion, I applied and embarked upon the journey that has brought me to produce the present study. During my first semester in the program, I took a History of Education seminar with Susan Semel who impressed upon us the need for writing histories of individual schools, an idea which captured my imagination. After completing my doctoral coursework, I searched for a school to write about, briefly setting upon investigating the history of the Muscota New School, an innovative progressive public school in Inwood, many of whose founders I knew personally. Yet while I found the school of interest and importance, it lacked connection to my own background and passion for studying social justice movements and equitable education for Latino students. In 2012, Ofelia García, knowing of my interest in history as well as in bilingual education, invited me to join the team writing the history of bilingual education in New York State as part of the CUNY-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (CUNY-NYSIEB). viii It was during my investigations on this project that I learned of P.S. 25, The Bilingual School, the first Spanish-English bilingual public elementary school in New York City, established in 1968. Immediately captivated by this bold and imaginative project, I started to wonder how it came into existence at the height of the civil rights movement and was surprised to learn that its history had never been written. I also soon learned that many of P.S. 25’s founders were still alive, although many were in their 80s, and that Luis Cartagena, the school’s second principal was quite ill. I realized that this was a historical study to be embarked upon immediately or else perhaps forever lost. From the beginning, Ofelia Garcia supported my pursuit of this topic. She suggested that I start by contacting Sonia Nieto, one of the founding teachers of the school. Nervously sending out a cold e-mail to Nieto, I was delighted that she promptly responded, with contact information for Hernán LaFontaine in Hartford, CT. I then followed up with a cold call to him and his wife Evelyn Colón who responded receptively to my proposal to write about the school. They graciously invited me to come to their home to interview them, and in this way I began my research on the school in January 2013.

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