Draft:Progressive Education: A Second Wave (1970 - 2025)

In 2002, educator and school reformer Deborah Meier wrote in The Power of Their Ideas what became a mantra for the second wave of progressive education in the U.S.:

"There's a radical - and wonderful - new idea here... that all children could and should be inventors of their own theories, critics of other people's ideas, analyzers of evidence, and makers of their own personal marks on the world. Its an idea with revolutionary implications. If we take it seriously."

Beginning in the 1970s, newly created schools like Meier's Central Park East in Harlem sparked a revolution on the margins of mainstream public education in America. They resurrected, too, a century-long tug-of-war with traditional, standardized schooling.^[1]

Where it came from

The first wave of progressive schools in America extends back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. John Dewey (1859–1952) is often considered the founder of American progressive education, championing democratic learning environments and hands-on, experiential curricula. He no doubt would have agreed with the famous Plutarch quote: "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."

Yet Dewey was far from alone. Francis Parker, called the “father of progressive education” before Dewey, pioneered child-centered instruction in the late 1800s. Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner shaped alternatives to conventional pedagogy from Italy and Germany. And Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) introduced critical, dialogic frameworks that resonated deeply with social justice–minded American educators.

By the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement and countercultural currents fueled renewed interest in schools as sites of social transformation. Grassroots “freedom schools” emerged in the South, while an experimental “free school movement" appeared in multiple regions. Though many were short-lived, they provided the seeds for a new generation of public-school innovators.

A new wave: the 1970s

The 1970s marked a dynamic period for rethinking American public schools. Disillusionment with rigid, bureaucratic curricula and a desire for more human-scale institutions led pioneering educators to create small, alternate schools within - or adjacent to - traditional public systems. While decidedly not mainstream, these alternatives gained traction.

A 1981 article in the New York Times noted:

"When 150 students abandoned their classes in Philadelphia public high schools in 1969 to study their communities and use the city as their classroom, few thought that such an alternative to traditional public education would last. But Parkway Program - as this school without walls was named - survived and it has now become a model for other urban school systems. And, more importantly, it is now a national symbol for those who advocated options in public education. Now, 12 years later, alternative public schools have increased from but a dozen to an estimated 10,000 across the country, many of them in 80 percent of the nation's larger school systems. They include schools without walls, magnet schools, street academies, specialized career schools and the newest phenomenon, schools that stress 'basic'' skills.'"^[2]

Few cities equalled Houston, Texas in its embrace of alternative schools - in this case, as part of an effort to increase integration. Beginning in 1972, public schools in Houston evolved into 65 elementary magnet schools and specialized high schools in the performing and visual arts, engineering and health professions with an operating budget of $14.5 million.^[3]

These locally driven, often teacher-led, reforms formed the nucleus of a larger movement. The National Diffusion Network (1974-1995) was the first federally sponsored effort to identify and spread innovative education programs to America’s schools.

The schools that emerged: common beliefs

The estimated thousands of schools that emerged in these years (save, perhaps, magnet schools)^[4] shared a set of core commitments, even when they looked very different from one another.

Small, community-centered schools. Progressive reformers believed that large, impersonal schools undermined meaningful relationships. Small schools - often enrolling a few hundred students - could promote close teacher-student connections, create individualized programs, and involve families in meaningful collaboration.

Democratic and student-centered learning. Building on Dewey’s vision, these schools emphasized shared governance. Teachers, students, and parents partnered in decisions about curriculum, daily operations, and assessment - through weekly community meetings, student committees, and teacher autonomy over what happened in the classroom.

Relationships as a cornerstone. One of the intentional benefits of small schools was the possibility of making student-teacher relationships central. Progressive educators often nurtured close bonds through advisory systems that paired small groups of students with a dedicated faculty advisor for multiple years, one-on-one conferencing focused on academic and social-emotional growth and, when it came to teaching, employing team teaching.

Project-based and experiential learning. In place of rote-learning, memorization and standardized testing, these schools favored hands-on, interdisciplinary projects. Students explored local environmental or social issues, engaged in real-world problem-solving through community partnerships, and presented portfolio exhibitions showcasing their mastery over time.

Equity and social justice. While some early progressive schools served predominantly white, middle-class populations, by the 1980s and 1990s there was a deliberate shift toward serving marginalized communities. These new practices included the eschewal of tracking, which for decades had sorted students by their alleged abilities, typically mirroring social-economic status and race; the introduction of culturally responsive curricula, and the development leadership pathways for educators of color.

The educators who led it

As was the case with the Progressive Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this new wave spurred new leaders. They included:

Exemplars: schools that showed it could work

As the movement grew, so did its exemplars: "existence proofs" that these new schools benefitted students, teachers, and parents alike. Some of the most notable - all but one of which still exist - included:

Central Park East (1974) sparked national attention by succeeding in a low-income, urban district historically characterized by high dropout rates. Collaborative teacher teams designed curriculum without standardized scripts. Performance-based assessments replaced traditional testing. Leadership was often shared or rotated. High graduation rates, high college attendance, and strong family-community ties fueled the replication of “East Harlem small schools.”

At High Tech High (2000) in San Diego, developed by a coalition of civc leaders and educators, project-based learning joined design thinking. It was guided by four connected Design Principles: Equity, Personalization, Authentic Work, and Collaborative Design.

The first International High School(1985) in New York City offered a school for newly arrived immigrants built around integrated language learning, belonging and becoming (students participating in small, interdisciplinary teams that stay together), and an asset-based approach that saw multilingualism as a resource rather than a deficiency.

Under the motto "One Student at a Time," The Met (1996) in Providence centered individualized learning plans that built around that student's needs and interests, while incorporating rigorous learning goals. Students devoted two days a week to internships aligned with personal passions, participated in advisories, and presented portfolio-based exhibitions.

The K-8 Mission Hill School (1997) in Boston featured child-centered inquiry with thematic units shaped by student interests, multi-grade classrooms, and collective decision-making involving teachers, families, and students.

St. Paul Open School (1971) in St. Paul, Minnesota started as a K-12 option for parents, citizens, and students (starting with six people and growing to 1,000) who believed in the importance of helping young people, through personalized education, develop skills, abilities, and attitudes that would make them constructive citizens of the world.

Urban Academy (1986) in New York focused on inquiry, critical thinking, and problem-solving. It championed portfolio-based graduation, waived from most Regents exams.

Supporting actors

Key to the success of these schools and the thousands of schools nationwide that they spawned were the breadth and depth of the supports they engendered.

Teacher-led initiatives underpinned the movement. Teacher Inquiry Groups and regional workshops helped educators share successes, troubleshoot, and build partnerships. These decentralized, peer-driven structures sustained reform on the ground.

Philanthropy played an amplifying role. Grants from Annenberg, Gates,, Carnegie, Hewlett and other foundations helped schools pilot new designs, invest in professional development, and document what worked.

Perhaps the most important ingredient in sustaining and expanding the movement, however, were the school networks it engendered (still the case today). These networks connected and supported educators, advanced progressive pedagogy, promoted equity and democracy, supported professional development and resources, and shaped school culture.

For years, the Coalition of Essential Schools, formed in 1984, was the premiere network. It united hundreds of schools - urban, suburban, and rural - under principles like “Less Is More” and “Student-as-Worker, Teacher-as-Coach.” Its annual Fall Forums drew thousands of educators to share strategies and research.

Other networks followed, with the largest including: Aspire Public Schools, Big Picture Learning, Expeditionary Learning, Internationals Network for Public Schools, New Tech Network, and New Visions for Public Schools.

Regional hubs kept the energy concentrated. New York City’s District 4 in East Harlem incubated numerous small schools. Chicago hosted a strong small-schools movement supported by local universities. The Bay Area School Reform Collaborative linked progressive educators across Northern California. Boston developed Pilot Schools with district-approved autonomy.

The Cross-City Campaign for Urban Reform united parents, educators, and community organizers to help drive system change. Active in cities like Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, it pioneered frameworks that linked grassroots organizing directly to improved student outcomes and school equity.

The Small Schools Coalition and the National Writing Project were additional partners.

Founded by Milwaukee public-school teachers in 1986, Rethinking Schools became a magazine and publishing house promoting social justice education with teacher-authored articles, lesson plans addressing race and class, and calls for grassroots reform.

Edutopia, created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation in 1991, showcased innovative schools via video and online resources, introducing progressive concepts to a broad audience.

Peak momentum: the 1990s and early 2000s

By most accounts, the second wave of progressive education reached its peak in the 1990s and early 2000s.

In the mid-1990s, philanthropic interest and grassroots energy around Progressive Education coalesced. Perhaps the most ambitious effort was Walter H. Annenberg’s $500 million Challenge to reform American public education - the largest private initiative of its kind in the nation’s history. (Annenberg required that its grants be matched 2 to 1 by local foundations yielding a pool of close to $1.5 billion.) From 1994 to 2000, the Annenberg Challenge stimulated large-scale reform in the country’s ten largest school districts, along with a national initiative connecting rural schools with their communities. Alongside Annenberg, the Gates Foundation and other philanthropies further accelerated the movement.

Widely publicized successes - Central Park East, The Met - helped shift public perception of progressive methods from “alternative” to viable. Media profiles highlighted improved engagement, college acceptance rates, and positive community relationships.

By the early 1990s, the nation's largest progressive school network, the Coalition of Essential Schools, had grown to include over 1,000 schools. Its annual Fall Forum drew thousands of educators nationwide.

Funds from the Annenberg Challenge supported new networks including the Rural School and Community Trust, which ended up impacting over 700 rural schools across the U.S. - schools that had been largely left out of the progressive education landscape.

Headwinds

At the same time that the movement was reaching peak momentum, it started to face real headwinds.

The 1990s saw significant growth in standardized testing and standards-based reform (e.g., from the 1980s), creating a conflict with the performance-based, qualitative assessments that progressive schools championed. The influence of progressive ideas not withstanding, the latter part of the decade saw the rise of federal and state accountability legislation focusing on basic skills. The 2001 landmark U.S. education law, "No Child Left Behind," which mandated annual testing based against measurable goals, took center stage. It eventually gave way to the "Every Student Succeeds Act" in 2015, which still measured student achievement through periodic national testing.

The substantial reliance of small schools on grant funding meant when that when these funds started to diminish in the 2000s, maintaining staffing and programming became a struggle. (The Coalition of Essential Schools, which for years had benefitted from substantial financial support, ended its 33-year run with its final Fall Forum in December 2016.)^[5]

Questions of equity that ran through the movement’s history raised its head, too. Early iterations were criticized for insufficient attention to racial justice and cultural relevance. In a 2018 interview with the journal, "Cult of Pedagogy," the distinguished professor of education at UCLA, Pedro Noguera, outlined ten ways educators can take action in pursuit of equity.^[6]

There was competition for attention. The growth of charter schools and corporate-driven reforms overshadowed progressive approaches, even though some charters embraced progressive designs.

And there was dissent. Prominent education historian Diane Ravitch, for example, traces "contemporary school ills" to the progressive movement. "How Progressive Education Gets It Wrong," a writer for the Hoover Institution explains. Striking a different note, author and lecturer Alfie Kohn explains why progressive education is hard to beat but also hard to find.

What endures

Despite the waning of this second “golden era” of progressive education, the movement left an indelible mark. Student-centered learning is now a staple in education discourse. Social-emotional learning, once a hallmark of progressive schools, has found its way into mainstream education. Small schools have earned a permanent place among the options that draw students and families. Team teaching has become common at all grade levels. The requirement that high school students perform community service as part of earning a diploma reflects a recognition that contributing to one's community must be part of the "curriculum." The practice of grouping students into "advisories" that carve out time each week for a small group of students and a teacher to connect and support each other reflects the increased appreciation for how relationships fuel learning. Networks like Big Picture Learning, Expeditionary Learning, New Tech Network continue to prove the viability of alternative models.

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