The Creation of the All-Day Neighborhood Schools in Chelsea

In 1936, Clara Blitzer began imagining what would eventually become ADNS. Her children attended the City and Country School, an independent private school that emphasized learning through play and child-centered pedagogy.Footnote ¹² Blitzer believed these progressive approaches could also benefit children in public schools, and brought the idea to the City and Country School's extension project, which helped outside groups implement the school's methods. Joined by other parents and teacher Adele Franklin, the group sought out a school in which to begin their experiment. They needed to find a supportive principal and a school building that could accommodate them. Franklin reached out to Ruth Hardy, the principal of P.S. 33 in Chelsea, who quickly agreed to work with the group. Franklin and Hardy were both Barnard College graduates who shared interests in progressive pedagogy and were excited to partner with each other. They called the new experiment “the Chelsea Project.”Footnote ¹³

In publicity materials and reports on the project, Franklin and others described their intention to work in Chelsea, where most children were first- or second-generation European immigrants and faced poverty in the crowded, tenement neighborhood. In 1938, a survey completed by school administrators for the Board of Education recorded that 27 percent of the 1,222 students at P.S. 33 were children of white, US-born fathers and 27 percent were children of Italian fathers. The rest of the students were born to other white European immigrant groups. Just 0.8 percent of students were reported to be Black.Footnote ¹⁴ Until immigration restrictions ended most European immigration in 1924, Chelsea had been a popular location for arriving families, who came to work in the nearby shipping docks.Footnote ¹⁵ The children with US-born fathers were likely part of the large Irish community in Chelsea that formed in the nineteenth century. The city's white middle-class, especially urban reformers concerned about public health and social ills they associated with poverty, considered Chelsea to be a “slum” neighborhood.Footnote ¹⁶ In articulating the need for the program, Chelsea Project publications referred to P.S. 33 children as “shabby” foreigners who “swarm the classrooms.”Footnote ¹⁷ The founders of the Chelsea Project, like those who established the playgrounds and settlement houses of the first decades of the twentieth century, proposed an experimental program as an attempt to transform city life by intervening in the lives of poor immigrant children, in this case by increasing the time spent outside their homes.

The Chelsea Project brought recreation and progressive methods into the school building, not only after school but in the school-day curriculum as well. Franklin's 1954 graduate dissertation reflected significantly on this element of the program, recording how after-school learning expanded P.S. 33 teachers’ understanding of child development.Footnote ¹⁸ Over the first two years of the Chelsea Project from 1936 to 1938, a model took shape that engaged teachers in new methods, with added support from Franklin, who took a leave of absence from the City and Country School to work at P.S. 33 full-time. She first instituted an after-school program staffed by the Works Progress Administration. The students who stayed after school participated in dancing, music, and field trips and played with toys such as blocks, tools, and sewing materials. Although they were guided by adults, the freedom of choice was a key priority that served as a point of contrast to their school-day experience.Footnote ¹⁹ According to Franklin, by the third or fourth year the school-day teachers began to implement play and child-centered lessons into their subjects as well. They started to ask her how to teach beyond the three Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic) and added dramatic play and neighborhood walks.Footnote ²⁰ These interactions convinced Franklin that the connection between school-day and after-school learning was being realized at the Chelsea School.

From its start, the Chelsea Project relied on private funding, although the space it used was in a public school, and it would continue to center philanthropy as it expanded. When early supporters of ADNS wanted more institutional backing for their project at P.S. 33, they turned to the philanthropic Public Education Association (PEA). The PEA was created in 1895 by women involved in municipal reform, and it advocated for policies that expanded the school's role in social welfare. By 1938 the PEA supported P.S. 33 as one of its main projects and raised thousands of dollars through grants and donations. Although members of the PEA talked about the value of the Chelsea Project as part of the public system, and began working to turn administrative roles over to the Board of Education, they retained power to influence it from outside.Footnote ²¹ Agnes Benedict, a member who was involved with ADNS, later called the PEA “a great leavening agent in introducing many improvements to New York's educational system.”Footnote ²² Her description of this private organization as the yeast that is vital to making bread rise conveys the PEA's sense that philanthropy and advocacy for new ideas caused change that would not otherwise be possible. As the Board of Education took on more responsibility for the program, the PEA maintained a similar level of involvement.

The next transformation in the history of the Chelsea Project occurred in 1942 when it grew beyond P.S. 33 and became an official Board of Education project.Footnote ²³ The staff at P.S. 33, along with its supporters from the PEA, convinced the Board to take on the Chelsea Project as a three-year experiment. At that time, they renamed it the All-Day Neighborhood Schools.Footnote ²⁴ They continued at P.S. 33 and replicated the program at P.S. 194 on West 144th Street in Harlem as a three-year demonstration project, after which it would be evaluated. In making the program part of the public school system, the Board of Education agreed to provide each participating school with six additional teachers, who would report to school later in the mornings so that they could stay until evening and work in the after-school program. The Board also paid for a clerk for each of the schools, while the PEA funded Adele Franklin's role as director, as well as the roles of social worker, recreation specialist, and resource teachers that were soon added.Footnote ²⁵

Teachers at P.S. 33, and in the new program at P.S. 194, faced some challenges getting used to the new structure. At P.S. 33, the Board of Education involvement meant that after-school recreation was led by newly hired “group teachers,” which some school-day teachers initially saw as competition or as a sign that they were not doing their jobs well. At P.S. 194, the staff struggled to quickly provide training about the new program and to ensure that veterans and new hires maintained a consistent approach with students.Footnote ²⁶ There were also new administrative needs, and during the next year the Board of Education changed two policies, making it possible for each program to have a junior school clerk assigned to it, and providing a greater number of supervisors than other schools had.Footnote ²⁷ These reactions indicated the ways that the program affected the entire school and required a significant shift away from traditional school practices. In taking on an expanded role and responsibility for the experiment, the Board of Education was influenced not only by the positive reviews of the program's start in Chelsea, but also by the needs of the city during World War II.

During World War II, ADNS's function expanded as afternoon childcare grew more significant. The war was a unique moment where mothers’ labor outside the home became more accepted and the state took on limited responsibility for providing childcare.Footnote ²⁸ Although women's employment had long been common, especially among Black and working-class families, this was rarely acknowledged by reformers. Even during the war, mothers were expected to stay home with their children if they could, but new programs opened to aid those who could not. Because more women were needed to support war industries, several innovations changed the opportunities available to children and families. The federal government began to provide funding for childcare centers through the Lanham Act and offered advice for schools to open after-school activities through the Extended School Services program in the Office of Education. New York also offered funding through the Child Care Committee of the New York State War Council.Footnote ²⁹ It was in this environment that ADNS joined the Board of Education, driven by temporary conditions related to the war.

ADNS publicity materials in this period reflected growing interest in after-school as childcare, making it possible for working mothers to ensure the safety of their children in the afternoon hours. This had not been one of the cited aims of the program in its first six years (although it is likely that many of the participants did have mothers who worked outside the home), but became an important feature of the plan and a way to justify its expansion.Footnote ³⁰ An article published on the second day of school in 1942 prominently described ADNS as “Operated to aid children of women in war work.” Adele Franklin participated in public conversations in New York City and nationwide about the ways to meet needs regarding both childcare and education, including, for example, speaking at a Central Harlem town meeting on day care at the YWCA and publishing a book for federal and state policymakers on how to create play centers.Footnote ³¹ While recreation and the extension of school responsibility into the after-school space had been part of Franklin's philosophy prior to the war, she seemed to understand that there was a new opening to convince others of its importance.

World War II also helped ADNS refine its messaging about its benefit to children. As it became an official part of the public schools during the war, the new demonstration program promised to benefit the country by helping its children. The first Board of Education publication about the new project was titled “Education for Democracy,” and it opened by stating that P.S. 33 was “the school of the future. Tomorrow's school—here, today, educating citizens, the little citizens who, now carefree, will tomorrow be facing the gravest responsibilities anyone has ever had to face—no less a task than helping rebuild the world after the great struggle has ended.”Footnote ³² During World War II, supporters used language of “the future” to take Progressive Era beliefs about education for citizenship and adjust them to their current moment.Footnote ³³ As ADNS expanded to a new school in Harlem, they promoted after-school programs as a means to instill democratic values and psychological health in a moment of upheaval.

Bringing the All-Day Neighborhood School to Harlem

The Board of Education's interest in ADNS and the extension of the program into Harlem in 1942 responded not only to New Yorkers’ needs during World War II, but also to neighborhood-specific conditions. Expanding to Harlem not only brought the program to a new neighborhood, but also one with a long-standing Black community.Footnote ³⁴ As the ADNS program continued to grow to additional schools, it would largely serve Black and Latinx children, a result of both shifts in the public school population and choices about which neighborhoods to enter. In Harlem, advocates of ADNS offered it as a solution in 1935 and again in 1943, when uprisings in those years in response to police violence led to renewed conversations on the systemic lack of educational resources for Harlem's Black community. The Board of Education chose experimentation and supplemental programming as a more immediate fix to Harlem residents’ demands rather than holistic changes to the school system.

P.S. 194's student body consisted of children from the surrounding Central Harlem area. In 1940 a school administrator reported student demographics by race and nationality to the Board of Education, listing 1,029 African American students whose fathers were born in the United States and 320 whose fathers were born in the West Indies.Footnote ³⁵ Although it is not certain exactly where the zoning boundaries for P.S. 194 would have been, a Columbia University social work student studying ADNS in 1945 wrote that students lived in the area bounded by 142nd Street, 145th Street, Bradhurst Avenue, and Lenox Avenue. Much of Harlem, including this area, faced poverty and deteriorating housing conditions, which had worsened during the Great Depression.Footnote ³⁶ Racist housing policies, employment practices, and school environments all affected this student population and their families.

There is not a clear record of how the Board of Education came to the decision that the second demonstration project site should be located in Harlem, or how P.S. 194 was chosen. Adele Franklin's 1954 dissertation says only that the Board saw “a challenge and an obligation” because of racial tensions and crowding in the neighborhood. P.S. 194, as a newly built school, was meant to contrast with the decades-old P.S. 33. It was also chosen because its new principal, Daniel Krane, was interested and supportive. Krane had attended a settlement house program as a child and had a personal interest in after-school activities.Footnote ³⁷ In addition, a group called the City-Wide Citizens Committee on Harlem recommended the program as part of its findings in a well-publicized report on improving conditions in the neighborhood. Although ADNS was initially created outside of the context of Harlem, its framing within this call for change and its rhetoric about school and community reflected community leaders’ opinions about how to support young people in Harlem.

In 1941 a group of advocates came together to form the City-Wide Citizens Committee on Harlem, with the goal of improving race relations and conditions in the neighborhood, including the quality of education. Committee members had a range of backgrounds, but most were well-known leaders and moderate reformers interested in using their influence to gain concessions from city government.Footnote ³⁸ Like other education reformers in Harlem who neglected to name systemic inequalities or any discrimination in the schools, the Sub-Committee on Education and Recreation's 1942 report did not criticize the Board of Education, putting the blame for educational challenges on Harlem residents. It did, however, act on Harlem activists’ demands in advocating for a number of changes that would bring increased resources: new schools and playgrounds, improvements to deteriorating buildings, and reductions in class sizes. In line with trends in the 1940s, sub-committee members also called for additional vocational high schools, instruction in intercultural relations, and a system of psychological services. They also recommended that P.S. 194 be designated an ADNS. Unlike their other recommendations, this one had already been approved by the city at the time of the report's publication, with the new ADNS site set to begin operating at the start of the 1942 school year.

Committee members again connected ADNS to needs arising from World War II, noting that the increase in working mothers in the absence of a program like ADNS would lead to unsupervised children and juvenile delinquency. They hoped that the program would be successful and would soon spread throughout Harlem. The committee's report does not say how this recommendation came to be included, but it may have been through sub-committee co-chair Frank E. Karelson Jr., who was also the vice president of the PEA and therefore already a supporter.Footnote ³⁹ The City-Wide Citizens Committee on Harlem had encouraged this significant change for P.S. 194, leaving it up to teachers, staff, volunteers, parents, and students to preserve and expand it in the years to come.

When P.S. 194 became an ADNS site in 1942, the school was only two years old. Opened in 1940 after two years of construction, P.S. 194 was one of a few new schools to be built in Harlem after 1935, responding to pressure over serious overcrowding in classrooms that reached a height in the 1930s.Footnote ⁴⁰ In an Amsterdam News article announcing the approval of its funding, Gertrude Ayer, principal of P.S. 24 in Harlem and the first Black female principal in New York City, said, “It has taken our community a long time to convince the Board of Education and the members of the Board of Estimate that whatever may be true of Manhattan and its declining population is not the case with Harlem. Our community is one of growing population and additional school and recreational facilities should and must be provided to meet our expanding needs.”Footnote ⁴¹ P.S. 194 opened and became an ADNS site amid debate among activists, educators, families, and city officials about racism in the school system and the future of schooling in Harlem.

As Ayer expressed, the school's existence itself was in response to years of activism by Black parents and community members pushing for improvements to Harlem's schools. The new schools that the Board of Education built in the 1940s, like P.S. 194, were the result of pressure for change and hope for a better system. Harlem's youth population needed strong schools as well as other ways to develop through play, learning, and community. Advocates for ADNS and other educational reforms in Harlem stressed the lack of recreational activities for youth and concern that free time “in the streets” led to crime and delinquency.Footnote ⁴² They proposed recreational after-school spaces for supervised learning as a new solution to the problems identified by both activists and officials.

While it may have been true for many children that they needed more options for recreation (for example, there was not a full playground at P.S. 194 until 1967), there were many existing institutions in Harlem that already offered activities outside of school.Footnote ⁴³ Kevin McGruder writes that the establishment of educational and recreational spaces was one way that the emerging Black community in Harlem sought “to form a community of some permanence that [it] hoped would thrive.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In the early twentieth century, Harlem residents established their own youth institutions in the face of exclusion from other organizations. These included the Harlem branches of the YMCA and YWCA, which began to serve children as well as adults by the 1930s.Footnote ⁴⁵ Other children participated in private athletic clubs, glee clubs, and drama clubs, such as those at St. Philip's Episcopal Church.Footnote ⁴⁶ There were also other instances of school-based community activities, such as an Activity Program at P.S. 24 created by Principal Gertrude Ayer.Footnote ⁴⁷ While these institutions offered varied opportunities for youth engagement outside of school, they had limited resources and could not be available to all children in Harlem. By claiming to constitute a new intervention, ADNS ignored other community programs already a part of Harlem. ADNS would provide another option for needed childcare and education, yet this would not amount to a systemic change to the neighborhood.

As the 1942 school year began, the ADNS, having opened two program sites and seeking to use the institutional backing of the Board of Education to expand further, took on a more permanent form. A key goal program partners maintained from the start was to bridge “home and school.” By 1947 this was solidified as a primary facet of the ADNS educational model, so the full program included: school-day enrichment, an after-school program, and “the setting up of closer home-school-neighborhood relationships.”Footnote ⁴⁸ This goal was significant because the Board of Education had long set apart poor, immigrant children of color from their home communities by arguing that these children faced poverty, violence, and weak family ties that led to academic failure.Footnote ⁴⁹ The ADNS model expressed support for “community,” but as an organization built and funded from outside Harlem, it was not certain what that community would mean at P.S. 194. The two main groups that ADNS began to include in the school community were parents and donors, each with a different role to play.

In 1945, P.S. 194 was the first ADNS site to hire a community worker. The PEA wanted to institute the position at each school, but since the PEA had received funding for just one worker through a grant from the Greater New York Fund, only Harlem was assigned one.Footnote ⁵⁰ ADNS administrators based this choice on their sense that there was more of a gap between teachers and families in Harlem than in Chelsea.Footnote ⁵¹ They found that since P.S. 33 had been part of the program for longer, parents had already established their own committee in 1938 and were more regularly active.Footnote ⁵² The community worker opened up a parent room at P.S. 194 to lead meetings and provide informal space for interaction. They served as a liaison between school and neighborhood families, administrators, donors, and other local institutions. Over time, their work involved more event planning and networking with outside organizations in the neighborhood as well.Footnote ⁵³ In particular, PEA supporters hoped that the new role would help parents and teachers communicate better and understand one another. The community worker's presence was a very tangible attempt to disrupt harmful patterns in Harlem public schools and reach out to parents, but one that was not meant to change teacher hiring or placement practices.

Little information is available about the first series of community workers at P.S. 194 or how they approached the job. Later, in the 1960s, this role was held by Louise Gaither, a Black woman who grew up in Harlem and attended Harlem's Wadleigh High School, before pursuing degrees at Hunter College and Teachers College and becoming a public school teacher. Later in her career, she worked at P.S. 194 and was also the chair of the District 5 Community School Board.Footnote ⁵⁴ When Gaither received an award for her work in 1976, the Baltimore Afro-American reported that Mrs. Gaither said of her experience of education in Harlem, “I would like to pay tribute to the women I met through the school system. I learned more from the parents and mothers—they are the unsung people of Harlem. . . . I admit there are many problems, but the greatest asset we have are the children.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Gaither's familiarity and respect for the mothers she encountered stands in contrast to the relationships that other staff members, who lacked Gaither's shared racial identity with and links to the neighborhood community, would likely have had.

The P.S. 194 community worker helped parents find opportunities to participate in their children's school, such as through parent committees and volunteer days. They planned special events and led a 1954 plan to have parent volunteers supervise lunchtime.Footnote ⁵⁶ ADNS staff hoped that these regular interactions would improve distant, sometimes acrimonious, relationships between parents and teachers and would increase continuity between school and the rest of students’ lives. Parents volunteered to run the Saturday Theater Program, which brought free or cheap theater performances to public schools in New York City on the weekends. The program ran through grants to the ADNS Committee of the PEA. Parents arranged the logistics, advertised, acquired cooperation from other community groups, and provided teachers with educational materials to support learning from the plays. P.S. 194 was regularly a part of the program, hosting plays four times a year.Footnote ⁵⁷ Events that took place outside the classroom made space for parent involvement that did not exist in the teachers’ classroom domain. The resources that made them possible, including the community worker salary and supplies for events, were all funded through donations from the PEA and community members and were not available in yearly budgets unless the money was raised. Thus community events remained one of the most precarious elements of ADNS activities.

When leaders of ADNS spoke about “community,” they referred not only to the students and families attending each school, but also to the donors that sustained the program financially. Each school had a citizens committee of volunteers, which included a few teachers but was largely supported by volunteers or philanthropists with an interest in the school's neighborhood. Groups took on activities that included park clean-ups, volunteering at field trips, and sponsoring special events.Footnote ⁵⁸ Each year, the Citizens Committee of ADNS P.S. 194 sponsored a “Cinderella Ball,” where young women competed to be named “Miss Cinderella.” Members sold tickets to raise money and spread awareness. Most of this funding went to keeping P.S. 194 open during the summer.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Citizens Committee for P.S. 194 remained a consistent supporter but was only minimally involved in day-to-day activities. This private funding gave P.S. 194 additional advantages compared with other elementary schools in Harlem.

ADNS's definition of community prioritized contributions of wealthy, connected individuals. Although they were described as local community members, some did not live in Harlem, and they did not represent the school's population. Furthermore, program administrators described the Citizens Committees as innovative and ignored the way that community members were already engaged in education in the neighborhood. Both Black members and white members made up the committee, and many were involved in other philanthropic or social groups. Some lived in Harlem, while others lived in adjacent neighborhoods such as the Upper West Side.Footnote ⁶⁰ The committee also included current or former teachers and administrators from P.S. 194. Although parents and other Harlem residents had some other means of participating in school life at P.S. 194, such as the Parents Association, their voices were not as seamlessly integrated into the ADNS's advocacy.

In addition to the committees set up for each school, supporters of ADNS created a City-Wide Citizens Committee in 1950. This group promoted ADNS to the public, and to city officials who might provide funds to expand it. They enlisted experts in education and child development to support the project and publicize it. They began assembling another group of supporters in 1948 after the Board of Education's budget director had cut a budget item, added by the superintendent, that would have expanded ADNS to new sites. The group found success a few years later at a meeting they had over tea, at which they spoke with Brooklyn educators who then brought news about the program to city officials. In 1954, the city extended the program to P.S. 142 and P.S. 144 in Brooklyn.Footnote ⁶¹ Later, the committee fought against proposed budget cuts in the 1960s by speaking at hearings and writing letters.Footnote ⁶² These instances illustrate the key role the Citizens Committee played in sustaining ADNS. In order to succeed, ADNS promoted a vision for public education that prioritized expert leadership and philanthropic wealth.

Despite having the backing of so many types of supporters, the ADNS program's existence remained uncertain. Teachers, staff, families, and donors all invested money and effort in the fundraising and advocacy that was so crucial for a supplemental program sustained through public-private partnership. Each year ADNS committees wrote letters and spoke at hearings to call for more Board of Education funding, while also using newspapers, letter-writing, and special events to appeal to the public for donations. In the 1950s, they asked for support through references to juvenile delinquency, which relied on negative portrayals of children and the care they received in their homes to make the case for more resources. Although the fear of rising delinquency applied to children of all races and backgrounds, during this period Black and Latinx children were most often criminalized, punished, or sent to separate schools after being labeled as delinquent.Footnote ⁶³ At the same time, New York City schools were increasingly minoritized as a result of migration from the South and from Puerto Rico, as well as housing policies that aided white families in moving out of the city and its schools. Indeed, as ADNS expanded, it added new sites in neighborhoods with significant Black and Latinx populations, including East Harlem, Central Brooklyn, and Morrisania in the Bronx.

Although ADNS publications rarely mentioned race, the organization participated in conversations about juvenile delinquency that contributed to the criminalization of Black childhood.Footnote ⁶⁴ As ADNS advocates praised the difference the program could make for New York City children, it also described their home lives as deficient, and presumed these “deficiencies” would lead to problematic behavior at school were it not for intervention. Adele Franklin's description of the project in her dissertation suggests that she strategically aligned the program with anti-delinquency efforts to gain support.Footnote ⁶⁵ She acknowledged that the expansion she pushed for over decades only came to fruition because of popular fears about young people.

ADNS's efforts to prevent juvenile delinquency rested on claims about families that appear counter to the program's desire to engage parents as partners in children's learning and school activities. At the same time that the ADNS model proposed two-way communication between teachers and parents, advocates also portrayed home communities as the source of children's problems, without acknowledging the role of their schools. They reported ADNS's success in aiding “culturally impoverished children . . . who sometimes resist and disrupt the school process.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In an article for the journal Crime and Delinquency, Franklin highlighted a six-year-old girl who “fought with the children and created disturbances by shouting or running around.” When the school originally tried to help her, it faced a “lack of cooperation from the home,” but only ADNS could bridge the gap and help her succeed in school.Footnote ⁶⁷ As Franklin made these statements, she continued to uphold solutions that were compassionate and enriching for children—program elements that originated with her work at a wealthy private school—and with the belief that they would benefit every child in the city. And yet, by the 1950s, ADNS was no longer described as a realization of the full potential of schools in providing support to their students, but rather as a supplementary program needed for specific communities.

ADNS's work in Black and Latinx neighborhoods did little to question racialized power dynamics, even as the program sought to engage the community. By bringing children and families into greater contact with the school, as they spent more time and received more services there, the program also created the potential for increased surveillance of families. One story published in Parents’ Magazine in 1963 boasted about the way an ADNS group teacher responded to a Black boy's complaint about an incident in which his brother was wrongly accused of a crime by the police. In response, the teacher invited local police to the school to explain their role and invite the boy to participate in the Police Athletic League.Footnote ⁶⁸ As Carl Suddler has argued, the Police Athletic League functioned to criminalize Black youth by increasing surveillance and defining their non-supervised activities as delinquent.Footnote ⁶⁹ Even as they sought to cultivate community, the largely white staff, in their daily routine and interactions and through their knowledge and beliefs, had the potential to harm children and families.

In the 1960s, ADNS joined emerging conversations among city educators about “cultural deprivation” and “compensatory education.” Like national policymakers, teachers and administrators used the myth of cultural deprivation to suggest that the differences in academic achievement among mostly white and mostly Black schools, or between schools with wealthier and poorer populations, were the product of environmental factors in children's homes and neighborhoods. Although this idea represented an important shift away from attributing differences to genetic factors, many still found it harmful because it implied the inferiority of Black culture and home life, placed blame on those living in poverty, and masked the impact of factors related to the schools themselves.Footnote ⁷⁰ Proponents of ADNS widely publicized one such document, an evaluation of ADNS by sociologist Patricia Sexton that called it a “program for culturally deprived children.”Footnote ⁷¹ While other parents and activists fought to disprove cultural deprivation theories and show how they were used to sustain segregation (as demonstrated, for example, in the 1958 boycott of three Harlem junior high schools organized by nine mothers), ADNS administrators did not engage in this struggle.Footnote ⁷² Their plans for students and schools remained centered on their own activities without engaging in systemic education reform and without joining in the struggles that parents defined as important.

Negative beliefs about children and families spurred the Board of Education to sponsor new ancillary programs, called “compensatory education,” that could compensate for supposed deficiencies. Although ADNS was much older than these programs, it fit well into the logic of compensatory education, which prescribed supplemental programs and activities to help students who were not succeeding in school. Experts like Edmund Gordon, an influential Black psychology professor who published Compensatory Education for the Disadvantaged in 1966, wrote about the program as a model example for new endeavors to follow.Footnote ⁷³ Harlem community leaders protested against some of the new compensatory education programs of the 1960s, arguing that they were inadequate solutions to racism in schools. These solutions framed inequality as the results of student deficiencies, rather than discrimination in the school system itself.Footnote ⁷⁴ Activists pointed out that administrators were much more likely to agree to add a new program to a school than to acknowledge the need for desegregation or educational equity. However, there is no record of criticism specifically naming ADNS.

One of the new programs that Harlem community groups criticized was Higher Horizons, modeled on a 1956 experiment at Junior High School 43 conducted by Harlem's Northside Center. This program provided students with guidance counseling, smaller classes, remedial instruction, special activities, and events to engage parents. Three years later, the Board of Education took over the program. It immediately brought Higher Horizons to about fifty schools. The funding per student declined, and the expanded program was not considered successful by parents or journalists (though the Board of Education claimed success when the program closed a few years later).Footnote ⁷⁵ This trajectory differs from that of ADNS, which expanded slowly and only after achieving community and staff support in each of its schools, even though it was run by people from outside the neighborhoods in which it worked.

The fact that two activists who were part of New York City's struggles for integration and community control of schools showed support for ADNS confirms that, at least for some, the program had a positive daily impact on the children it served, even when it shared spaces with more harmful projects. Preston Wilcox, a social worker and activist, wrote, “ADNS has been trying to say something for years—pre-1954, pre-name game programs (‘Higher Horizons,’ ‘Special Services,’ ‘More Effective,’ etc., etc., pre-Open Enrollment; pre-School Boycott and the like)—that large numbers of us did not want to believe was possible, particularly the Board of Education. ADNS has been able to demonstrate its commitment that minority group youth are people—a strange and weird idea in the best and most learned circles.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Ellen Lurie, a parent organizer, echoed these thoughts, praising the genuine involvement of parents and the love teachers showed students.Footnote ⁷⁷ Their supportive praise for ADNS provide evidence of the daily benefit to children that coexisted with conflicting rhetoric from the organization.

Spurred by educators’ and administrators’ excitement over new experiments, ADNS was joined in public schools by a number of new organizations. In neighborhoods like Harlem, the community began to face an ironic combination of a lack of resources and an abundance of competing programs. ADNS struggled to compete with new programs fighting for the same Board of Education funding. In 1967, the Board of Education announced a committee to study existing experiments in elementary schools and develop a new program that would improve upon them. Led by Professor Edmund Gordon, the group developed a plan called the Experimental Elementary Program. Over four years, designated schools would share $10 million to “enrich the program and extend the school day.”Footnote ⁷⁸ The Experimental Elementary Program was influenced by ADNS as well as More Effective Schools, a program designed by the United Federation of Teachers. Matilda Salpeter, who was a member of the City-Wide Citizens Committee for the ADNS, unsuccessfully petitioned Gordon to write ADNS into the plan.Footnote ⁷⁹ The ADNS program continued at a reduced number of schools for two more years but was officially cut from the newly decentralized Board of Education's budget in 1971. Ultimately, interest in compensatory education, to which ADNS had contributed, led to it being pushed out by new programs.

To understand the history of learning opportunities in New York City and the range of functions the Board of Education embraced over time, we must include programs, like ADNS, that remained at the system's periphery. Despite its small size, ADNS had a daily impact on the lives of the children who attended each of its schools, encountering child-centered curriculum, caring adult-child relationships, supports for students and parents, and after-school supervised recreation. Like today's community schools, it developed a model that expanded the boundaries of the school to connect children's academic, social, and physical needs. Yet, while program activities asserted that parents and communities were valuable resources, the writers of publicity materials for the Board of Education and the PEA relied on negative portrayals of children, homes, and neighborhoods to justify the program and explain it to potential donors. This contradiction has remained common among educational programs, particularly those that do not include parents as key decision-makers.

The story of ADNS prompts us to consider what programs and opportunities are considered educational experiments, for whom, and why? The Board of Education kept ADNS small because they understood it as a costly solution to problems inherent to certain children or neighborhoods, not as a part of the schools’ central role. Without full support, ADNS was reliant on private donations and grants, which could not consistently support schools at the level that was needed. The program existed as long as it did because of a group of experimenters—white educators and philanthropists—who chose which schools to focus on, and shaped the conversation about how children should spend their time. As illustrated by P.S. 194, the motivations of ADNS shifted over the decades from a focus on recreation and democracy during World War II, to juvenile delinquency prevention, to compensatory education. Throughout these shifts, the influence from philanthropists and volunteers distanced ADNS both from the communities it served and from the city administrators who had the power to sustain it.