Space Age Schools: SUPRAD and Integrated Quality Education

Abstract

Established in 1957, Harvard University's School and University Program for Research and Development (SUPRAD) was a school reform project that brought together Harvard's Graduate School of Education and three Boston-area school systems. Over a fifteen-year period, SUPRAD educators developed a distinctive pedagogy that cohered around dual promotion of flexibility and differentiation, whether in school design, teacher deployment, or instructional practices. Initially intended to alleviate a perceived teacher shortage, SUPRAD evolved into a wide-ranging school reform project that took aim at many aspects of the traditional grammar of schooling, targeting in each case an element premised on there being one best system for all students. The Space Age was a time of great uncertainty, as technological and social advances heralded new possibilities in many fields, including education. Excited by these new possibilities, SUPRAD educators designed schools (including educational parks) whose design features and instructional practices were seen to promote delivery of integrated quality education. Drawing on documents archived at Harvard University and elsewhere, this thesis argues that SUPRAD was an important school reform project, noteworthy for both in its enlistment of elite actors and its promotion of a vision of schooling where egg-crate schools with interchangeable students and regimented staff would be replaced by free-form facilities built for maximum flexibility. Intent on remaking American schooling, SUPRAD educators such as Francis Keppel, Harold Gores, Neil Sullivan and Robert Anderson directed a succession of projects in a series of cities (Boston; Newton; Farmville; Fort Lauderdale; Berkeley), aspiring each time to construct Space Age schools.