Good News: Is This the Most Radical School Ever Built? | A Positive Story

When Sean Tevlin discovered The Group School (TGS) in the 1970s, he found “a much needed safe space.” A struggling teen who had dropped out of public school and battled math anxiety, he arrived at the converted industrial garage on Franklin Street in Cambridge, MA with little self-confidence after a learning disability diagnosis.

But at TGS, teachers engaged with him, patiently tutored him and rekindled his love of reading. “It opened me up mentally and emotionally,” Tevlin reflects decades later from his living room in Cambridge.

TGS, known simply as “The Group” to its students, was unlike any public or private school. “CHANGING LEARNING, CHANGING LIVES” was spelled in giant letters on its white brick walls. Between 1971 and 1982, more than 600 students like Tevlin graduated from this freewheeling schooling experiment, which combined radical democracy, intensive arts programming and a philosophy that embraced students’ working-class background.

Would you like to read more good news about Education, High School, Schools, and Inclusion?

Tevlin grew up in housing projects. His parents separated amid alcoholism, gambling and mounting debt, and he and his siblings were briefly placed in a Catholic orphanage. By the age of 12, he was cleaning offices and accepting whatever menial work he could find, often skipping school for work. “I often felt alienated,” he says. Without TGS, Tevlin’s trajectory could have taken a very different turn.

But at the Teen Center behind a local Quaker school, a new story was emerging. Alison Harris, one of TGS’s founding students and now Tevlin’s life partner, remembers the first meetings in the late 1960s vividly. “In the early stage, we were just a group of kids,” she says. “Pretty soon the topic became what was wrong with our schools.” They met with people from the Harvard Grad School of Education, who came to the Teen Center to facilitate conversation and “essentially try keep kids out of trouble,” according to Harris.

“It was a moment in history, with the growth of a lot of alternative institutions,” says Adria Steinberg, a founding faculty member. “Many of us had been involved in social change movements — anti-war, civil rights — and had a strong sense of inequities in America at that time. We were looking for an educational setting that acknowledged inequity in education.” TGS grew out of these conversations and commitments.

“Historically, the free school movement in America had begun to gel,” Harris recalls of this era of educational ferment. “Discussion started evolving around: Would we like a school? Could we start a school? And lo and behold, we actually did.”

Harris highlights the unusual access the working-class students had to the elite institutions’ teachers: “It’s the most fascinating town-gown story I know. Although it wasn’t official — Harvard and MIT didn’t sanction us — people like MIT professor Bob Langer, the man behind Moderna and nicknamed “the Edison of Medicine,” tutored me for my SATs.” Jon Kabat-Zinn, the medical professor who became world-renowned as the founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts, opened classes with meditations at TGS and taught Harris biology. Both men credit TGS with shaping their outlook and ideas.

Realizing that many of the principles that formed TGS fifty years ago are relevant for educators today, Harris, Tevlin and other alumni are working to preserve The Group School Archive & Resource Center, digitizing yearbooks, curricula, photos and oral histories, and offering resources that still resonate for teachers working with disengaged or marginalized students. TGS’s legacy is a potent and subversive testimony to a fundamentally different model of education, one where the students are in charge.

Teaching at TGS was collaborative and experimental. Steve Seidel, who was barely older than his students when he started as an educator there at age 19, emphasizes the school’s broader educational philosophy: “Because it was really a group of young people who were behind the school, the curriculum had to flow from them.” The school emphasized personal and academic growth, not standardized testing.

For instance, Seidel struggled to interest students in any of the plays he suggested. That changed when they discovered Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets, a 1930s era play about cab drivers planning a labor strike. “It was like we were on a rocket to the moon,” Seidel recalls, his eyes lighting up with enthusiasm. “Every play we did had a strong working-class theme, an awareness of the talents and intelligence — not just oppression, but the brilliance of working people.”

Steinberg, his wife and fellow TGS teacher, describes co-teaching a woman’s program addressing early feminist issues: “We took these issues on very directly in the coursework. It wasn’t necessarily that students were saying, ‘I want a course on X.’ But race, social justice, democracy — these were the issues they were wanting help with and talking about.”

In a 1971 documentary about TGS by an MIT student, a young Steinberg tries to define her role: “You’re not only a teacher, but you’re a member of the community. Or are we all teachers and learners?”

TGS was not only radical in governance but in pedagogy. The Math Survival Skills pamphlet, designed for students who believed they “couldn’t do math,” helped teens like Tevlin who had been told repeatedly they couldn’t succeed. The document also lays out the central principle that embodies the school spirit: “The essential thrust of The Group School approach is the empowerment of the learners. We attempt to begin with and build on the strengths and skills of the students, to help them learn new skills and develop competency in areas in which they feel inadequate or insecure, to counteract the traditional ideology that leads them to turn their anger and despair inward and to blame themselves.”

Seidel who went on to have a decades-long career as the Bauman & Bryant Chair in Arts in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and as the director of Project Zero at Harvard, believes this to be the foundation of any good education: “Human beings know when they are being listened to, heard and respected. If you don’t do that, they won’t learn from you,” Seidel says. “I feel at every age we underestimate the capabilities of all young people. They are capable of more than we assume they are.”

Another innovation was Kitchen Chemistry, a curriculum that brought science into students’ homes and everyday lives, for instance by fermenting and baking bread. Students explored chemical reactions using everyday ingredients such as flour and yeast, making abstract concepts tangible and meaningful.

Seidel emphasizes the lasting relevance: “The acknowledgment that young people are coming in already damaged, thinking they cannot learn, no matter how clever the curriculum is, it won’t work unless you meet them where they are. The principles behind the math pamphlet, Kitchen Chemistry, the arts programming — these are still as useful today as they were 50 years ago.” He will teach a chemistry class at his daughter-in-law’s experimental school this semester, “and guess what I’m going to use for part of the curriculum?” he beams. “Kitchen Chemistry!”

TGS operated by consensus, with weekly community meetings where students and staff debated policies, curricula and school governance. “It wasn’t hierarchical,” Harris recalls, “There wasn’t the presumption that the teachers were right and the students were wrong. We taught each other.”

Despite the initial enthusiasm, the youths still had to get official recognition for their school. In 1970, the teenagers formally organized as The Group, Inc. and won city support for a summer program. Harris recalls a moment that defined the school’s fate. She was hitchhiking, and the local mayor picked her up. “I talked to him about the school and why it was important. He was a working-class mayor, and I helped convince him to support us.” The mayor ended up signing all the diplomas for the duration of his term. This extraordinary act of trust allowed TGS students to graduate with officially recognized Cambridge diplomas, cementing the school’s legitimacy in the community.

The school initially operated in temporary spaces, including a church basement and a recovery center, before purchasing the garage in North Cambridge. Students and faculty worked together to fundraise, renovate the space and create classrooms. Seidel points out the symbolic significance of the building: “It was a mechanic’s garage, a working-class space. And we transformed it into a school and a cultural center.” The facility included a theater, pottery kilns and darkrooms, offering students a full spectrum of arts programming.

Despite its successes, TGS faced financial challenges. By the early 1980s, the political and philanthropic environment shifted. Funding for youth programs shrank. “It was a free school the whole time,” Harris says. “At one point, one of the directors wanted to try charging $10 a month, but it didn’t work and was abandoned in two seconds.”

Consequently, teachers there earned significantly less than public school teachers, and when Steinberg and Seidel had two children together they had a hard time feeding their nascent family. Donors began urging TGS to become part of the public system, even suggesting it be folded into special education. “It went against the ways we’d been thinking about education,” Steinberg explains. “We couldn’t make ourselves do it.”

Seidel reflects on the school’s ephemeral nature: “Schools might have a life, which means that they might need to die. Recognizing that and allowing that, rather than just transforming and mutating into something unrecognizable, was important.”

TGS officially closed at the end of 1981, selling the building to cover the mortgage and ensure current students could finish their education.

Four decades later, TGS’s impact continues to surface. In recent years, alumni and former faculty have reconnected, sharing how the school changed their lives.

Its approach anticipated many contemporary approaches to student-centered learning, competency-based education, restorative pedagogy and trauma-informed teaching. For those building schools today, TGS offers a rich blueprint: How to hold youth in dignity, to center working-class identities, to commit to collective governance and to imagine a school as an ongoing experiment rather than a fixed institution.

Seidel emphasizes its ongoing relevance: “When we look at the example of The Group School and all of its documentation — not with nostalgia, but in solidarity with the work people are trying to do now — we need to be inspired.” He tried to incorporate some of these principles in his work at Harvard.

Decades later, its archive is now a bridge, connecting that daring experiment to a new generation of educators and students who still believe that learning can be a powerful, shared journey.

Special ed teacher Rosalie Fay Barnes recently showed the website and parts of the 1971 documentary to her students at Berkeley High in Oakland because she wanted “to create environments where people feel empowered.” She was surprised at the enthusiastic reactions. “Numerous students said, ‘Let’s do this!’ i.e., let’s start our own school.” When she asked what students needed, she was startled to hear their responses. “Some students wanted more work, more writing, more reading. Many of my students asked me for more.” Since showing the video, “the main thing that shifted is our relationship. I no longer feel like the enforcer of the rules, but the facilitator of a learning journey.”

TGS legacy also lives on in the work of those who passed through the school. After being among the first three students to graduate from TGS, Harris became assistant to Actors Studio’s legendary leader Lee Strasberg and later a publicist at Harvard. She is convinced her career would have been impossible without TGS.

Steinberg retained her passion for education at Jobs for the Future, a national nonprofit dedicated to transforming education and workforce systems. As part of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Multiple Education Pathways Initiative, her team assisted cities to develop blueprints for systematically addressing their dropout problem. “When the system isn’t working for you, make something else,” Steinberg reflects. “We found ways in those institutions to still be true to some of the values we honed at The Group School.”

Tevlin credits the school with giving him a second chance: “It was good for my self-esteem and self-worth. I had worked enough menial jobs to know there was no real future for me.” Tevlin adds that the school’s community was instrumental in launching his 35-year career with the Cambridge Public Housing Authority. “It didn’t feel safe at home all the time, but The Group School meant a sense of community, a safe place to go and to talk and to learn. A lot of kids could use that today.”

Scrolling images courtesy of The Group School.