The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies,

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Alternative Schools of the 1970s: Did They Survive?

Elizabeth A. Meador

To cite this article: Elizabeth A. Meador (2020) Alternative Schools of the 1970s: Did They
Survive?, The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas, 93:5,
220-224, DOI: 10.1080/00098655.2020.1794673

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00098655.2020.1794673

Published online: 25 Aug 2020.

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THE CLEARING HOUSE
2020, VOL. 93, NO. 5, 220–224
https://doi.org/10.1080/00098655.2020.1794673

CENTENNIAL FEATURED ARTICLES

Alternative Schools of the 1970s: Did They Survive?

Elizabeth A. Meador
Boise State University, Boise, Idaho, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
In an article written for The Clearing House in 1974 titled, “Alternative schools: Can they Alternative schools; social
survive?”, Gerald Brunetti described features of schools that served as an alternative to movements; free schools;
mainstream public education. He raised the question of whether or not such schools would street academy;
digital divide
continue to exist in the future. A search of the literature reveals a thread that links the alter-
native schools of the 70s to the schools of choice that are available today, although the
social context, educational policies, and funding priorities have changed since then. The
issue of inequality in schools that resulted in the alternative schools movement is apparent
in today’s schools of choice, in particular for communities of color. The recent development
of emergency online learning as a result of Covid-19 has shed light on the digital divide
and unequal access to technology for culturally and linguistically diverse students and their
families. If online learning is to continue as an option for flexible and innovative learning,
then issues of equity must be resolved so that school choice in the 21st century is available
to all families.

In 1974, Gerald Brunetti wrote an article for The
Clearing House titled, "Alternative Schools: Can
they survive?" Brunetti, now Professor Emeritus
of Education and Liberal Arts at St. Mary’s
College, argued that public schools will never
serve all students. He asserted that alternative
schools operating outside of the mainstream of
American education tended to serve two
extremes. One extreme included middle- and
upper-class families turned off by the lockstep
blandness of public schooling; the other extreme
referred to families in poverty wanting education
in the skills and competencies necessary to sur-
vive. To resolve this tension, he hoped that a
comprehensive network of alternative schools
would be developed within the public school sys-
tem so that access to options for learning would
be widespread. He also hoped that in the long
term, the existence of alternative schools would
nudge mainstream schools toward the values of
social emotional learning, cooperation over com-
petition, and shared authority among teachers,
parents and students. Fifty years later, what have
we learned from the Alternative
Schools Movement?
The socio-political context of the 1970s
We can’t examine Brunetti’s central question
regarding the influence of alternative education
on mainstream schools without looking at the
general social context of the 1970s, the period in
which Brunetti’s article was published. Schools
were contested spaces as strategies for desegrega-
tion were implemented differently across the
states. The nation was ripe with political activism,
including the Chicano Movement, the Black
Power Movement, the Red Power Movement, the
Antiwar Movement, and the War on Poverty, all
demanding social change. It was, as Goodridge
(2019) explains, a “divisive ideological atmos-
phere” (Goodridge 2019, p. 288). At the time,
school reforms were advanced to “fracture the
exclusive franchise of the state in matters of pub-
lic education” (Goodridge 2019, p. 288).
Alternative schools such as Free Schools and
Street Academies allowed families to remove

CONTACT Elizabeth A. Meador elizabethmeador@boisestate.edu Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA.
ß 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

themselves from the mainstream and embrace
an education
that was democratic, relevant, and humanistic.
In many respects, alternative education in the
1970s was a social movement that was deeply
critical of mainstream public education.
Street academies and free schools
Street Academies, also called Storefront Schools,
were alternative schools that provided mentoring,
dropout recovery and tutoring services, to disen-
franchized, urban youth in community sponsored
locations. Businesses, foundations and in some
cases, federal grants and universities provided
funding. In the article, The Storefront School,
Nelsen (1971) described the fragile economic
condition of Street Academies such as the
Harlem Prep School and the New York Urban
Coalition. Like Brunetti (1974), he questioned
how alternative schools could survive without a
close alliance to public education, the very insti-
tution that activist educators sought to change.
He counseled Street Academy leaders to develop
models that might fit neatly into a public educa-
tion system, while also seeking to create change
from within.
Similar to Street Academies, Free Schools held
tightly to the value of parental and community
control over their operation and mission.
According to Swidler (1976), students in Free
Schools maintained a similar level of academic
progress as their peers in mainstream schools.
However, these alternative schools differed from
traditional schools in their emphasis on commu-
nity, cooperation, and group interaction skills.
Such practices as All-School-Meetings, group
projects, and shared decision making were the
norm. Individual accomplishments were second-
ary to successful group events. Teachers and stu-
dents developed trusting, non-intimidating
relations. Free Schools promoted respectful, egali-
tarian interactions and utopian-like school com-
munities that allowed personal growth and the
development of self-confidence among students.
In spite of the political and social upheaval of the
time, the values promoted by the Free School
Movement focused more on personal empower-
ment than political activism. Free School
THE CLEARING HOUSE 221
educators believed that participating in a demo-
cratic community, engaging in self-directed learn-
ing, and collaborating in non-authoritarian
relationships with teachers would allow children
to reach their human potential (Miller 2002;
Neuman 2003).
Swidler (1976) argued that the values Free
Schools embraced were most compatible with
upper-middle-class families, while parents from
lower socio-economic groups wanted an effective
education system that led to social mobility.
Educational activists promoting alternative
schools like the Street Academies were focused
on the dream of an equity-based public education
system. These competing interests led to multiple
types of schools under the alternative education
umbrella. As Raywid (1999) described it,
By the mid-’70s, a substantial number of alternative
schools dotted the educational landscape across the
country, but they hardly appeared a single species,
even those serving essentially similar populations.
Many of them have taken pride in their uniqueness.
They have appeared from the start, however, to be
divisible into three types, according to what they were
trying to change: the student, the school, or the
system (p. 1).
Thus, the socio-political context of the ‘70s
allowed alternative schools like the Free Schools
and Street Academies to flourish.
The federal government steps in
Since 1974, when Brunetti’s article was written,
lawmakers issued educational policy and funding
priorities that jeopardized the self-governance
afforded to alternative schools of the 1970s.
Emphasis shifted to strict accountability measures
and defined standards for curriculum and peda-
gogy. As a result of policies such as A Nation at
Risk in 1983, which called for innovative solu-
tions to mediocre public schools, and No Child
Left Behind (NCLB) in 2001, which required
accountability for annual yearly progress, the def-
inition of and funding for alternative schools has
changed. An emphasis on the federal role in
accountability for student achievement fully
raised its head when NCLB legislation required
that states test every public school student in
grades three through eight, and once in high
222 E. A. MEADOR
school, and then report student progress annually
to receive federal funding.
These developments involved the federal gov-
ernment for the first time in core matters of
school governance—such as academic standards,
student assessment, teacher quality, school choice,
and school restructuring—and fundamentally
altered the relationship between the federal gov-
ernment and the states in education policy
(McGuinn 2012). The result of these policy
changes was to redefine alternative education as
schooling that benefited special populations, typ-
ically in secondary settings. This narrow defin-
ition allowed schools to access Title 1 funding,
designated for low achieving, economically disad-
vantaged students. Typical populations in alterna-
tive schools post-NCLB included teen parents,
adjudicated and incarcerated youth, and students
recovering credits after dropping out. This ver-
sion of alternative schools looked very little like
Free Schools other than the shared values of care
and concern for the lives of children and
their families.
School choice in the 21st century
The Alternative Education Movement impacted
public education by creating expectations of
school choice held by ideologically diverse coali-
tions across various regional contexts. Charter
schools formed, not to create academic success,
but rather to return agency and voice to stake-
holders, particularly communities of color
(Goodridge 2019). As families looked for the
results of the Brown v. The Board of Education
decision to create equitable educational opportu-
nities in African-American communities, the
lived experiences of youth in poverty neighbor-
hoods encompassed trauma and disengagement,
and schools failed to provide a remedy.
Recently, increased attention has been paid to
the social mission of schools. Services located in
the school building provide dental care, mental
health support, and economic assistance to fami-
lies. Community Schools, an approach that fos-
ters connections among schools, families and
nongovernmental agencies (NGO’s) that serve
families, are emerging in areas where families are
in dire need of support. The goal is threefold,
according to Jacobson et al. (2018). Those include
a dedication to effective teaching and learning,
wrap-around services that meet the needs of stu-
dents and families, and family engagement. The
whole child approach is designed to improve
attendance, reduce the dropout rate, and increase
achievement. Perhaps this movement can be
traced back to the Street Schools of the 1970s,
when community organizations and schools in
storefront buildings and church basements
offered to serve the needs of urban children of
color living in poverty.
What is left of the Free Schools? Some still
exist in modified versions (Kavner 2012). As a
case in point, the Alternative Education Resource
Organization listed over 100 democratic schools
in the United States. These schools are described
as, “Education in which young people have the
freedom to organize their daily activities, and in
which there is equality and democratic decision-
making among young people and adults”
(Alternative Education Resource Organization,
n.d., para. 1). Some free schools chose to seek
charter school status to gain state and federal
funding, although local and state boards of edu-
cation required adherence to a certain level of
academic performance, which diluted the philo-
sophical emphasis on passion-driven learning.
Charter schools and magnet schools created pro-
grammatic diversity in public education, but they
did not necessarily take up the moral vision of
the Free School movement, which embraced self-
actualization as a primary goal of schooling
in society.
Schools such as High Tech High (http://www.
hightechhigh.org), Project-Based Learning
Schools (http://www.pblworks.org), Expeditionary
Learning Schools (http://eleducation.org), and
those listed by the Alternative Education
Resource Organization, create important and
innovative options that echo the student-centered
learning of the Free Schools. These schools share
a common philosophy of learner-centered educa-
tion that encompasses democratic governance,
student choice, personal interest, and active,
hands-on learning (Scogin et al. 2017; De Mink-
Carthew and Olofson 2020). In these schools,
authentic application of content to real-world sit-
uations leads to student-created projects,

products and performances. In addition, group
projects and team-building activities enhance the
sense of community that is highly valued, much
like the value placed on the collective by partici-
pants in the Free Schools.
The humanistic thread that tied alternative
schools together is recognizable in many schools
despite the pressure to perform academically on
the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
Strands of social-emotional learning, pockets of
cooperative learning rather than competitive, per-
sonal relationships with teachers, experiential cur-
riculum and project-based learning exist in spite
of the drive to achieve notions of academic excel-
lence held by many school districts. The values of
alternative schools live on the edges of efforts to
both standardize and customize learning for chil-
dren (Cuban 2012).
Rapid social change in the form of a pandemic
In Brunetti’s article, he wonders whether schools
in their present form will survive rapid social
change. Nothing has been quite so rapid as the
onset of Covid-19 and global pandemic, with the
closure of every school in America, and the sub-
sequent attempt to deliver emergency remote
learning during the spring of 2020. Schools have
been forced to distill important learnings for each
grade level into manageable chunks so that stu-
dents learning at home are not so overwhelmed
that they cannot possibly succeed. Teachers have
realized that if the lesson is not engaging, it is
not going to reach their students. And parents
are learning how truly complex the job of teach-
ing can be.
Online learning as a result of Covid-19 has
exposed a vast digital divide in a society that
relies on social media to communicate. The
stakes are high for students that aren’t able to
access wifi, lack computers with cameras and
microphones, find navigating among websites to
complete an assignment confusing or impossible,
or simply don’t have a homelife that supports
dedicated time for online learning. The issue of
the digital divide in schools is only exacerbated
by language. The impact of Covid-19 on cultur-
ally and linguistically diverse families is complex
and the toll on communities of color is out of
THE CLEARING HOUSE 223
proportion with white America. How will society
reckon with the digital divide and the implica-
tions for students who are caught in this unfair
circumstance? On the one hand, online learning
presents incredible opportunities for flexible
scheduling and innovative programing. On the
other hand, the privilege to choose remote learn-
ing is limited to those who have the resources to
engage with a screen larger than a cell phone.
Online learning may become the new school of
choice. However, once again, middle and upper-
class families will be the beneficiaries of such
options unless educators advocate for access to
technology for underprivileged students and
their families.
Conclusion
Clearly, the answer to Brunetti’s question regard-
ing the survivability of the alternative school
movement is yes, there are still alternatives to
traditional schools. These alternatives bring atten-
tion to the dual mission of schools, social and
academic. As Brunetti states, “The notion of
offering people choices seems in itself to be a
very valuable thing in a pluralistic society” (1974,
p. 59). In addition to creating choices, the alter-
native school movement of the 1970s sought a
redistribution of learning as a result of inequit-
able policies that oppressed and marginalized
families. Unfortunately, mainstream, independent,
and alternative schools continue to be divided
along the lines of color and class, with basic skills
and competencies stressed on one side of the line
and critical thinking, problem-solving, and ana-
lytical reasoning on the other. We continue to
see the very rich and the very poor being served
differently in schools as we innovate; however,
meaningful change must include an equitable dis-
tribution of substantial educational resources for
all of our nation’s children.
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