Scattered across homes throughout Cambridge are faded curricula, pictures and worksheets stored in boxes that preserve the memory of The Group School, an alternative high school run democratically by students and teachers in the 1970s.
Now, more than 50 years after the school’s founding, these boxes are being opened and their contents digitized onto a new website dedicated to the school’s legacy, with the intention of inspiring educators and students today.
Among those trying to keep this memory alive are two former Group School faculty members and four alumni who met Saturday at a house in North Cambridge to reminisce. Sitting around a small circular table, they listened to a recording of a song they’d produced decades ago. As the tune filled the room, laughter broke out when the chorus rang: “Don’t forget your working class!” It was more than a lyric; it was the school’s essence.
The nonprofit school operated from 1971 to 1982 in locations around Cambridge, eventually settling in an old auto repair garage on Franklin Street in Central Square. Students from working-class families in Cambridge – some with learning disabilities or difficulties at home, many from housing projects – were recruited by faculty and other students, and each year the enrollment grew, ultimately graduating around 600 students who attended tuition-free.
To maintain its democratic system, The Group School held weekly community meetings and set up committees where students held the majority vote, giving them the say in matters like the curriculum, fundraising and evaluations. Class sizes were small, and each student had an adviser and received individualized assistance and tutoring when needed.
The school intentionally explored working-class identity through all courses, from having history classes like “Growing Up Working Class: Hard Times,” to assigning problems and projects related to working-class identity. The faculty used alternative teaching methods to target student anxiety in subjects like math, developing a “Math Survival Skills” course that encouraged students to share their experiences in math classes and assess their own skills.
Although the school shut down more than 40 years ago, its students and teachers have reconnected to share its legacy through a free web resource, The Group School Archive and Resource Center. This online archive includes a documentary of the school, books and pamphlets on its curriculum, excerpts of Zoom conversations alumni and ex-faculty held to reconnect, and written reflections from these members.
Alison Gobbeo Harris, a web team volunteer, was one of the three students who were part of the first graduating class in 1972. She was a founding member who saw the school through its inception in 1969, when it was just a cohort of students at a local school’s teen center.
“One of our teachers used to say we were building the plane while we were flying,” Harris said as she laughed.
As the free school movement of the 1960s encouraged separation from formal schooling, Harris said, Cambridge became a place for The Group School to flourish, encouraged by a liberal school committee and mayor. The presence of major universities was a huge influence, as much of the school’s volunteer faculty were Harvard and MIT graduate students.
“Doors were opening to us, and we were really integrating and unifying across these big institutions – and the city was thrilled about it,” she said. “Doors were opening into labs at MIT, and classrooms and labs at Harvard.”
The Group School provided a safe place for adolescents who came from working-class backgrounds, faced difficult family circumstances like domestic violence or had learning disabilities, Harris said. The democratic nature of the institution allowed for a personalized, inclusive education that went above normal formalities, she said.
A second chance at school
Sean Tevlin was a founding student member of The Group School who had moved through public and parochial schools during his adolescence, when he had been told he had a learning disability. He started working at age 12 and began missing many classes, which eventually led him to stop attending school altogether. He eventually enrolled in The Group School and graduated in 1973. He said it was the only system that worked for him.
“As a student, coming from the public schools, you felt like you were just a number,” he said. “This was a second chance, an opportunity.”
Everything that was most foundational, most important for me as an educator, I learned at TGS. Steve Seidel, professor emeritus at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
The school was dependent on volunteers at the start, but quickly was able to create paid positions for faculty and student coordinators, ending its first year with two staff positions and four faculty members. In subsequent years, it had roughly a dozen paid staff.
Steve Seidel, professor emeritus at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, was 19 when he signed up to teach a six-week theater program at The Group School. He ended up teaching the program for 10 years while also becoming arts program coordinator, a role that he said made him the educator he became for the rest of his career.
“Everything that was most foundational, most important for me as an educator, I learned at TGS,” he said. “Part of what I learned there, is that to create a really strong school, it has to be a place that has clear and strong values and is dedicated to living by those values.”
A break with the traditional
The commitment to its values was shown through the grading process, where students and teachers produced written evaluations of each other.
“It did not make the assumption that is traditional, which is that the teacher knows what the student learned, right, or is even in a position to fully judge the student’s performance,” he said. “The teacher can see things and should say what they see, but it was not built on a fundamentally hierarchical set of assumptions about teacher authority.”
Adria Steinberg, a founding faculty member and academic coordinator at The Group School, said the school had run thanks to volunteer work, and federal and state grants. Although this gave the school freedom, by the 1980s money had become tight, she said. The school closed in 1982.
Still, the topics that the school tackled in the 1970s – such as race, class and gender roles – are equally relevant today, making its curricula valuable to today’s educators looking for change, she said.
“The need to discuss identity and group issues of those kinds is still there, so we knew that a lot of the curriculum would be relevant,” she said. “It just seemed like, rather than keep the stuff in our basement or throw it out, can’t we make it available to people?”
This story is part of a partnership between Cambridge Day and the Boston University Department of Journalism.
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