Elaine Schwartz, who co-founded Center School, a Manhattan public middle school, in 1982 and introduced bold innovations to its classrooms, then served as principal for 40 years and saw many of those innovations become common practice in schools across the nation, died Monday at her home on Manhattan's Upper West Side, not far from the school. She was 92.
Her daughter, Andrea Franks, said the cause was heart failure. Mrs. Schwartz had retired just a year before.
Located on Columbus Avenue West at 84th Street, Center School began as a unique institution in New York City's public education system. Long before the charter school movement, Center School rejected one-size-fits-all teaching methods, embracing instead individualized instruction, small class sizes, and student-driven learning.
Center School came at a critical time for the city. The school-age population was shrinking due to a white exodus, and the school system was straining under the weight of outdated ideas about how children grow and learn. New ideas were needed, and Center School delivered.
Mrs. Schwartz founded the school with Howard Berger and Audrey Feuerstein, but over time she became synonymous with the school. She eschewed an office, sitting instead at a small desk in the corner of a classroom. She roamed the hallways, chatting with students and faculty, and her presence was the glue that held the small community together.
“She was a very solid driver,” Marley Randazzo, who graduated from Center in 2007, said in an interview. “It was definitely Mrs. Schwartz's school.”
As a lecturer at Fordham University's Graduate School of Education in the late 1970s, Mrs. Schwartz learned firsthand some of the emerging new ideas about middle school pedagogy, including the general recognition that grades 5 through 8 are crucial yet often overlooked in typical public schools.
She designed Center School as a remedy to such neglect and as a way to test innovative ideas.Unlike many middle schools, Center School starts in grade 5 instead of 6. The curriculum is three-semester, and most classes include students from all four grades.
Many of her once-radical ideas are standard in education today: students receive story reports instead of simple numerical grades, for example, and are invited to parent-teacher conferences instead of sitting outside expectantly.
“Elaine had her students at the table,” Michael Bebe, a longtime teacher at the school, said in an interview. “Elaine was very forthright in saying that the reason they were at the table was because they were the most important people at the table.”
One of her greatest innovations, and one that remains a unique feature of the school, was the emphasis on dramatic arts. All students are required to participate in two school-wide shows a year. Mrs. Schwartz was less interested in the aesthetics of performance than in theater's potential to help pre-teens become comfortable with their bodies.
“The confidence that kids gain is amazing,” she told the website DNAInfo in 2013. “Kids who've never danced now dance. Kids who've never sang now sing.”
Elaine Judith Goldberg was born on April 5, 1932, in Orange, New Jersey, the daughter of Louis and Rose (Hershkowitz) Goldberg. Her father was a judge and her mother a teacher.
She graduated from the University of Illinois in 1954 with a degree in theater, and married Irving Schwartz that same year. Along with her daughter, she is survived by another daughter, Julie Madison, a son, Ben Barnes, and seven grandchildren.
The Schwartzes settled in New York soon after their marriage, and in the 1960s Mrs. Schwartz worked as a counselor and teacher, and was active in the anti-war group Women's Strike for Peace, advising young men trying to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War.
She worked for Mitchell-Lama, a state program that builds middle-class housing in New York City and other areas, before turning to education, eventually becoming a lecturer at Fordham University's Graduate School of Education.
When she announced plans to open Center School, she faced public skepticism about her plans to open a small, alternative middle school in the middle of Manhattan, and then when it succeeded, she faced community anger over its small size (capped at 300 students) and long waiting list.
“There should be a million center schools,” she told The New York Times. “All we're doing is providing an alternative.”
The school moved from West 70th Street to West 84th Street in 2009, but despite the promise of more space, Mrs. Schwartz resisted the move. She preferred the cramped, chaotic environment of West 70th Street, where chance encounters were more likely to occur, she said.
When she retired last June at age 91, she said she knew “it was time to retire” but even then she was reluctant to leave the school community she had built.
“They were her family,” her daughter Franks said, “and a second family to her.”