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Living museum at the speyer legacy school
The Speyer Legacy School (also known as Speyer) is an independent K-8 school in New York City that focuses on advanced learners. The original Speyer school was started in 1902 through Columbia's Teachers College by a financier named James Speyer and became famous between 1935-39 when it was used a "laboratory" to study how children perform when separated by educational ability. It was restarted in 2009 as a two-room school with 26 children in K-2 on 211 West 61st Street. It moved to a larger space at the old Roosevelt hospital operating center at 925 9th Ave in midtown Manhattan and now has over 300 students and more than 50 faculty, administrators, and staff.
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History
The school grew from a "free kindergarten" built by St. Mary's Episcopal Church at 521 West 126th Street. In 1899, the church joined with Columbia's Teachers College to expand the school to include grade-school pupils of what then was a lower-middle-class neighborhood. The original Speyer school was funded in 1901 with $130,000 by a James Speyer, German-born heir to a family investment banking company and a member of the city's Board of Education in the 1890s. According to Jesse D. Burks, the school's first principal, it sought to do "what can be done, under the conditions of crowded city life, to provide some of the first essentials of wholesome living". From 1902 until 1915 it served about 260 underprivileged students in K-8 with exceptional features such as indoor showers and outdoor activities on the roof. From 1915 through 1936 the building became an annex of Public School 43 on 129th Street and Amsterdam Avenue.
In 1936 Speyer building was renamed public school 500 and was used as part of an educational study 225 students to see if separating students based on educational ability would improve their performance over the existing system. There were seven classrooms with 175 students which had an average IQ on the Stanford Binet test of between 75-90 and two class rooms with students that tested at the level of 130+ on the same IQ test.
The experiment was led by Leta Stetter Hollingworth, who was an American psychologist who specialized in education and is credited with creating the term "gifted children." At the time Hollingworth began studying children in New York City in the early 1920s, an influential educator (Lewis Madison Terman) had already begun the process of introducing intelligence testing and ability grouping into the New York City school system. While Terman was known for his revision of the Stanford-Binet IQ test and for initiating the longitudinal study of children with high IQs called the Genetic Studies of Genius, he did not spend much effort on improving how these children were taught because he believed intelligence was largely genetic/innate. While Hollingworth agreed that there was a role for intelligence testing in education, she believed that there was also a major environmental/nature component to intelligence that could benefit from improved education.
Her first long-term study of the gifted began in 1922 with a group of fifty children (seven to nine years old) with IQs of over 155. This experiment was designed to understand their backgrounds, psychological profile, and other physical social traits and what educational strategy worked best for each student. The results of this study were published in Gifted Children (1926). After forming Speyer as collaboration between Columbia's Teachers College and the New York City School District she did another experiment with gifted children at Speyer with learning problems. Special attention was paid to the racial mixture of this student group which was modeled after the demographics of typical New York public school at the time.
The curriculum that Hollingworth was developed was called the "Evolution of Common Things" and was based in part on the observation that children wanted to explore the world around them. It consisted of learning about common topics like food, clothing, shelter, transport, tools, time keeping and communication. This model of learning proved to be more beneficial to the gifted youth than simply introducing them to advanced subjects that they would later encounter in higher levels of learning.
Hollingworth stated that because gifted children progress quickly they need only a half day to master a full day's work and that unless their courses were revised at an early age they would learn to be masterful time-wasters. The results of the several studies conducted by Hollingworth suggested that many exceptionally gifted children suffer adjustment problems due to two factors:
- Inept treatment by adults, and
- Lack of intellectual challenge.
She theorized that adults often ignore gifted children because they mistakenly believe them to be self-sufficient. Her work also dispelled many myths about exceptional children being clumsy, fragile and eccentric. However, she also found that the gifted children often suffered physical and emotional duress because they were unable to fit in socially with their intellectual classmates. Therefore, she made 'emotional education' an important part of the Speyer curriculum. Hollingworth was the first to write a comprehensive book on gifted children, as well as the first to teach a college course about them. She was the first to study children with intelligence quotients (IQ) above 180 with her 1916 longitudinal study.
The original Speyer school was closed for lack of funds shortly after Hollingworth died on November 27, 1939. According to a New York Times article, the experiment at Speyer showed that, "separating 'dull-normal' students from the average students actually slowed them down, but that it benefited the gifted (students)."
Hunter College Elementary School
After Speyer closed, Hunter College created the Hunter College Elementary School (HCES)[13] by adding a pre-K to the Hunter College Model School (which was initially opened in 1870) and transferred the 7th and 8th grades from that elementary school to Hunter College High School[12]. HCES was designed as an experimental center for intellectually gifted children. There was a waiting list for admission when it opened in September 1940 even though it required an IQ test.
Hollingworth Preschool
Founded in 1984 by Teachers College at Columbia University, Hollingworth Preschool is based on a wide range of educational theories and approaches centered on the belief originally championed by Leta Hollingworth that children learn best through inquiry, through play, and through self-reflective experience. Hollingworth Preschool has a dual mission to provide enrichment opportunities for young children while also serving as a lab school site for professional development of graduate students.
The Anderson School
In 1986, parents from several Community School Districts, who were frustrated by the limited number of slots available at HCES succeeded in getting Bernadette O'Brien, then Principal of PS 9, to create The Anderson Program at her school for students who met the HCES standards but weren't admitted due to class size constraints. Anderson began with two kindergartens and two 1st grades in September 1987, composed of eighty students. Several years later Lisa Wright, Ed.D., of Teachers College, Columbia University, performed an evaluation of the pedagogy at The Anderson School and recommended, among other things, that (i) Anderson appoint a Program Coordinator, which Supt. Klein approved and (ii) Anderson establish a Parent Advisory Board (PAB), which the Anderson community enacted. While still a part of PS 9, Anderson added a two section 6th grade in the fall of 2003, admitting about sixty 6th grade students. Anderson extended the 6th to 7th in the fall of 2004, and 7th to 8th in the fall of 2005, graduating its first class of 8th graders in the same year that Anderson became a stand-alone school (2005–2006) labeled PS334 by the Department of Education.
The Speyer Legacy School
Founded in 2009 by 5 professional mothers (Kelly Gerstenhaber, Jennifer Selendy, Malena Belafonte, Jackie Haberfeld, Jennifer Dima) in hope of recreating the more specialized and challenging programs that they all had experienced through their children at Hollingworth Preschool. In fact, the first head of school at Speyer Legacy was Connie Williams Coulianos who had been the director at Hollingworth Preschool. The year Speyer Legacy was founded 14,822 four-year-olds tested for admission to the New York City’s gifted and talented kindergarten programs even though there were only 325 spaces available (fewer than half the number of students who tested in the top 99 percentile). That same year Hunter had 1,832 applications for the 50 spaces open in its kindergarten.
Controversy
In September 2016 a former administrator of the school, Alan Cohen, sued the school for sexual orientation discrimination. In the lawsuit he alleges the school started gossiping about his sexual orientation and subsequently fired him and hired a less experienced, heterosexual, replacement.