Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 1989-08-01

College Bulletin
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SPECIAL
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A ugust 1989

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alog another treasure to the campus’s ver- f t i
iaht landscape, the College dedicated the l l
Testy Shane Teaching Garden in M a& g J
sp S C p d behind the Scott Arboretum’s officesaaBB
gPnnpingham House, the new garden honors Terry^B
Hlft&he (in foreground, with Judy Zuk, director of *
the Arboretum), an avid gardener who helped
jsta b lM the Associates of the Scott Arboretum
in l9727H erson Larry ’56 and his wife,'Marty
Porter Shane ’57, provided a major gift for building
the garden and an endowment fund for its care.

B

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■ BOB W OOD

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AUGUST 1989

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12 Ageless Idea
Simple, healthy, enlightening: Why an
intergenerational child care program
empowers both young and old

Poor children can learn as much as
their more advantaged peers i f
resources—money—fu el the efforts
o f teachers and schools.
B y K atherine C onner ’68

COLLEGE BULLETIN »AUGUST 1989

The Swarthm ore C ollege Bulletin (ISSN
0888-2126), o f which this is volume
LXXXVI, num ber 6, is published in
Septem ber, tw ice in Novem ber, and in
February, M ay, and A ugust by Swarth­
m ore College, Swarthm ore, PA 19081.
Second class postage p a id a t Swarthm ore,
PA, and additional m ailing offices.
Postm aster: S en d address changes to
Swarthm ore C ollege Bulletin, Swarthmore,
PA 19081.

S

Our children will lie in the bed we
choose to make fo r them.

3 Educating Poor Children

Editor:
Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49
Managing Editor:
Roger Williams
Assistant Managing Editor:
Kate Downing
Editor for Copy and Class Notes:
Nancy Curran
Assistant Copy Editor:
Ann D. Geer
Designer: Bob Wood
Cover and illustrations: Children’s
original art photographed from Young
Artists, 1989, the annual show of the
School District of Philadelphia. Cover
by Eddie Gallagher, 2nd grade.
Illustration above by Yolanda Thomas,
1st grade.

S

2 Introduction: The Big Picture
By C arl M. Levin ’56

SWARTHMORE

I

6 Courting Disaster
Why fam ily court foils due process, and
what can be done about it
By E lizabeth Leavelle Bennett ’69

10 Mothers vs. Children
Without affordable, quality care,
the real child care debate may
become a contest
By S andra L. H offerth ’67

By S allie B locksom J ohnson ’64

14 Home Schooling
For three Swarthmore families, the
advantages o f “doing it yourself”
require discipline, time, and one parent
in the home.
By R oger W illiams

17 Lesson from World War II
I f we care enough about our children,
we will invest in their adulthood when
they are still infants.
By F rank A. O ski ’54

18 The “Just D o It” School
Four alumnae who do more than talk
about the problems.

22 W ho Are You?
The College’s 1988 Alumni Survey
offers some surprising statistics.

5 6 The Boys o f Summer
A spray o f photos captures a wet
summer afternoon on Parrish beach.
By Bob W ood

DEPARTMENTS
24 The College
30 Letters to the Editor
31 Class Notes
35 Deaths
52 Recent Books by Alumni

1

hildren’s issues,

the theme of this
A lum ni Bulletin, could not be more timely. The
well-being of America’s children has, at last,
become a major national issue. And it should be.
By almost any indication, our kids are losing
ground. For example, child poverty has risen from 16 percent
in 1979 to 20 percent in 1988. Some other groups may be
experiencing economic good times, but for 13 million children
living in poverty, this is the Great Depression.
So it’s good news that the problems of our children are no
longer being relegated to the sidelines. In last year’s presidential
campaign, both Democratic and Republican candidates issued
fairly detailed position papers on children. This year our new
president and Congress went to work almost immediately on
proposals for improved child care.
O f course, the problems of children are not new. As long ago
as the Colonial period, people we would now characterize as
“activists” were urging an end to the extensive reliance on child
labor in “spinning schools” and textile mills. The 19th-century
industrial revolution pushed more children into factories and
reduced their number in classrooms. Conditions were so bad in
the 1840s that three states— Connecticut, Massachusetts, and
Pennsylvania— enacted laws to limit the hours of employment
of minors.
The federal government, however, viewed the problem as
exclusively a state and local matter. As late as the New Deal era,
the Supreme Court still held that the problem of child labor was
not a legitimate concern of Washington, and, strangely enough
in my opinion, the argument about whether or not the well2

being of children falls under the federal government’s jurisdiction
continues to rage in some circles.
This year, one of the most important pieces of legislation re­
lating to children is the Act for Better Child Care passed recently
by the Senate. The legislation, awaiting action in the House of
Representatives, is a bipartisan compromise designed to provide
a variety of options for families seeking child care. Decisions
about standards are left to the states, and important decisions
about financial assistance will be made by state and local of­
ficials.
Despite the compromise, the ABC bill remains under threat
of a veto by President Bush. The president’s own plan calls for
tax credits that would increase the overall disposable income of
poor families, who could use the money to purchase child care.
Debate on these issues, as on a variety of others, will continue
in a climate of rising deficits and continuing competition for
federal resources. Choices are a basic function of voters in a
democracy and the men and women they choose as represen­
tatives. The administration has signaled its intent to spend tens
of billions of dollars for two intercontinental ballistic missile
systems, the MX and Midgetman. Few believe both are needed,
but the lack of will to choose could lead to a tremendous waste
of resources that could be used to invest in our future.
And the future means one thing: our children. We are the
caretakers of a nation that is challenged in many ways. On any
sensible list of America’s priorities, America’s kids must come
first.
— Carl M. Levin ’56
U.S. Senator from M ichigan
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

by Katherine Conner ’68
remains undiminished, but my hope and
sense of urgency are tempered by my in­
Fixing the program rather creasing understanding of the complexity of
the obstacles to success.
than the kids in the
My favorite way to convey hope is by
telling
success stories. By sharing anecdotes
classroom , the school,
from three levels—the classroom, the school,
and the system
and the school system—I can demonstrate
how well our students respond to favorable
n June 19681 graduated from Swarth- learning conditions. I can also illuminate
more and took a job teaching third what seems very obvious now, but was less
grade in inner-city Philadelphia. As I
so to this eager 21-year-old in 1968: Al­
remember it, the decision to go into though individual teachers can and do make
urban teaching was an easy one. A seminar
a great difference in the lives of children,
in labor and social economics in the fall of their long-term impact depends on the rest
1966 had conveyed the message that govern­ of the child’s school experience. By exten­
ment can and should see to it that decent sion, the effectiveness of the individual
jobs, decent living conditions, and decent school depends in many ways on the support
educational opportunities are provided for and policies of the school system.
all its citizens. (“The education of poor
W hat w orks in the classroom
children should be a national priority.”)
One of the most promising instructional
A concurrent seminar in child develop­
approaches
I’ve seen in working with poor
ment had underscored the great potential of
(and
mostly
minority) children is called
human intelligence, emphasizing the influ­
ence of nurture rather than the limitations of
nature. (“Poor and minority children can
learn as well as any of us.”)
Education—especially urban education
—was “hot,” with books like 36 Children
painting compelling portraits both of needy
children and of teachers struggling to make
a difference. (“I can work for change within
the system.”) Inner-city teaching was an
opportunity to work in an area of social
importance, to prove to myself that I could
be good at something in the “real world.”
And after several years of teaching and time
out to have chidren, I could go on to a “real”
career, like law.
Twenty-one years and several children
later, I am still working in this area of human
and social need, as an administrator of a
program to support school improvement in
low-achieving elementary schools. On some
1 days I feel very good about what I do; on
others I find myself mumbling singer Paul
Simon’s Graceland line, “Believing I had
supernatural powers, I slammed into a brick
wall.” The brick wall, however, is neither
my young students nor their capacity to
learn. My conviction that quality education
for poor children is both possible and crucial

I

AUGUST 1989

mastery learning. This approach begins with
a crucial assumption: All children can learn
a given subject matter to a level of excellence,
and apparent differences in students’ levels
and rates of learning are caused not by their
innate capacity, but by alterable factors
around them. The second key assumption is
that the fundamental job of schools is to
determine what is most important for stu­
dents to learn and to see to it that virtually
all of them do so. While this may sound
platitudinous, it is radically different from
what actually happens, even within a given
school, let alone in two schools with different
settings.
Working from this philosophical base,
the mastery learning approach attempts to
replicate in a classroom the instructional
procedures that happen naturally in a oneon-one tutoring situation: teaching, checking
for understanding, then reteaching missed
material in different ways until the student
has mastered it.

A CRUCIAL
ASSUMPTION:
ALL CHILDREN
CAN LEARN
A GIVEN
SUBJECT
MATTER
T O A LEVEL OF
EXCELLENCE

3

Used sensitively, mastery learning can
produce very dramatic results. For example,
when math is taught with a mastery ap­
proach, I have seen many inner-city classes
in which most students advanced by two or
three years in skill and comprehension; I
have never seen a class advance by less than
a year. What is especially encouraging is not
only how this helps students learn content,
but also how it helps them learn to learn.
Over time with this approach, the differences
in students’ levels and rates of learning
become smaller and smaller.
Many educators consider mastery learn­
ing passé. As a “movement,” it probably is;
education recycles very quickly. As a funda­
mental set of principles, however, it remains
vital. My experience suggests that these
processes anchor most of what works in all
excellent teaching and—for reasons I’ll dis­
cuss later—especially what works in teach­
ing poor children.
W hat w orks in the school

The approach that most impresses me at
the school level comes from a group of
studies and programs collectively termed the
“effective schools movement.” In the early
to mid-1970s, a prevailing view existed that
schools could have little impact on the life
chances of students beyond that determined
by socioeconomic forces. While there was
certainly some descriptive basis for this
view, it was widely interpreted not only as
describing what usually was, but also as
determining the limits of what could be. In
reaction, several educational researchers
began to argue that schools do exist that
effectively educate the poor, and the re­
searchers set themselves the challenge of
identifying those schools and describing
their key characteristics.
The common characteristics usually cited
for these effective schools were the following:
high expectations, instructional leadership,
emphasis on learning, monitoring of student
progress toward goals, and an orderly cli­
mate. With these traits identified, the next
step was to turn them into guidelines that
could help other schools educate poor chil­
dren more effectively.
Over the past five years, I have been
involved in such a program in the school
district of Philadelphia. My colleagues and
I have helped many inner-city schools assess
their needs and make plans to achieve long­
term goals, using the effective schools char­
acteristics as their framework. Over a period
4

of three to five years, we have seen substantial
results across a group of 24 inner-city
schools. The proportion of students reading
at grade level has risen from 26 percent to
45 percent, based on our local measures; in
math, grade-level skill has risen from 23
percent to 40 percent.
Standardized test scores have also risen
sharply. For example, in a school where 82
percent of the students fall below the poverty
line and where the yearly student turnover
rate is about 30 percent, the proportion of
students functioning at or above grade level
more than doubled in both reading and
math. Over the last two years, their national
percentile ranking on standardized tests rose
in reading from 30th to 42nd and in math
from 42nd to 54th.

M y 2 byear-old se lf would
have attributed the suc­
cesses in these schools
entirely to heroic efforts
by the teachers...

W hat w orks in the school system

My 21-year-old self would have attributed
the successes in these schools entirely to
heroic efforts by the teachers; at 31,1 would
have attributed some of the gain to the
principals. My current self—wiser still—
recognizes that these changes could not have
been made across so many sites if the school
system had not played a significant role.
Four steps taken by the Philadelphia
School System over the past seven years
have been especially important in improving
the education of its poorest children. The
first is a clear, repeated statement that all
students can learn and that the system is
committed to providing equal life chances
for all of our students, regardless of race or
socioeconomic status. The second step is a
set of policy changes designed to ensure that
the content and standards across the system
will be consistent and that outcome can be
effectively measured (a standardized curricu­
lum, a promotion policy, and a new testing
program). The third is willingness to commit
extra resources at the neediest sites for such
purposes as full-day kindergartens.
The fourth step taken by the system in
support of its neediest schools is a commitment to monitor continuously their progress
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

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THE
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$ 3 ,5 0 0 PER
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THE CLOSE
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1

and problems and to adjust relevant policies
and programs. An attempt to produce significant change in a subset of a large system
is doomed to failure unless the whole system
can make changes that complement and
support the changes in one part. Throughout
the school improvement effort I described,
school district policy-makers have used the
24 sites as a laboratory setting to diagnose
system needs and measure the effectiveness
of system policies, and when policy or or­
ganizational changes were needed, they were
made. These included changes in labor
contracts, budget procedures, and supervi­
sory staffing patterns. They also included a
concerted (and largely successful) effort to
loosen restrictive federal and state regulations
that were significantly hampering the effective use of outside funds.
W hat we have learned
In my view, several important factors are
common to the successes I have described
across the classroom, school, and system
levels. The first is the belief that poor chil­
dren are capable of learning as much and as
well as the children of the middle class. I
believe that this conviction will always be at
the heart of any approach that is going to
work; it provides the goals, the energy, and
AUGUST 1989

the outrage at the obstacles that will always
arise.
A second factor is the building-in of a
problem-solving mechanism—not sexy, but
essential. The checking-for-understanding
step in a mastery classroom, the monitoring
of student progress in an effective school,
and the ongoing policy adjustments in a
school system are all manifestations of a
crucial process: asking what is working and
what isn’t and adjusting strategies accord­
ingly, rather than proceeding through a
mechanical series of steps.
A third factor is a sense of accountability.
When a class does poorly on a test, the
mastery teacher asks not, “What’s wrong
with these kids?” but “How can I reteach
more successfully?” An effective school is
committed to fixing its program rather than
its students. And an effective system recog­
nizes that it cannot rant at its teachers and
principals for not being superheroic; rather
it must create a context in which being very
good and working very hard are good
enough.
A final common characteristic—and here
my voice starts to rise—is a commitment to
concentrating resources where they are most
needed. At all three levels, these successful
approaches require that, as problems are
identified, there be flexible resources (people,
time, materials—in other words, money)
that can respond. Checking for understand­
ing is useless unless there is time for reteach­
ing. Monitoring student progress will only
create frustration unless students and teach­
ers in need can be given help. And school
systems must be able to respond in some
degree to the key problems that schools
identify as they seek to improve.
There are many who will label the kind
of resource commitment required as too
expensive. I would ask them to consider two
things. First, a set of figures that describes
per capita school expenditures in a metro­
politan area: The city spends $3,500 per
year per student in its schools; the close
suburbs spend $5,500; and the suburbs a
little farther out spend $8,500. What’s too
expensive for poor children?
And second, to bring it closer to home, I
would ask skeptics to think of the money
and time spent on the child of someone they
know, or on their own child, for schooling
before the age of 6. How can we call it
expensive to commit ourselves to spending
at least as much—and we come nowhere

close—on small children who start out with
much less?
Let me be more explicit in conveying my
sense of urgency. What is striking about the
factors I have identified as contributing to
successful educational programs for poor
children is how obvious they are. They seem
like things that should be taken for granted.
Precisely.
These factors, so important in the school
systems of poor children, are ones that are
largely taken for granted in middle-class
settings. In the suburbs, deviation from high
expectations, from problem-solving pro­
cesses, from accountability, or from com­
mitment of adequate resources is regarded as
substandard teaching or management, and
corrective mechanisms keep abuses in
bounds. But when weak outcomes are re­
garded as inevitable because “we can’t ex­
pect any more” of poor and/or minority
children, then teaching, school administra­
tion, and system management tend to change
in both subtle and overt ways and to guar­
antee fulfillment of the prophecy of failure.
But this failure is by no means inevitable;
as a nation, we spend considerable resources
recreating it day by day.
On my office wall hangs the observation
of Ronald Edmonds, a proponent of the

JOSLYN CARPENTER, GRADE 6

effective schools movement: “We can, when­
ever and wherever we choose, successfully
teach all children whose schooling is of in­
terest to us. We already know more than we
need in order to do this. Whether we do it
must finally depend on how we feel about
the fact that we haven’t so far.”
Katherine Conner is program manager;
Priority One/Intensive Service, with the
Philadelphia Board o f Education.
5

by Elizabeth Leavelle Bennett ’69

What really happens to
children and
fam ilies in the courts
n the decade or so that I have practiced
family law, I have witnessed a total
overhaul in state and federal legislation
affecting families.
On the surface of it, this seems strongly
encouraging.
Legislative changes in Pennsylvania have
provided for grandparents’ visitations, shared
legal and physical custody, no-fault divorce,
alimony, equitable distribution of property,
protection from domestic violence, reporting
procedures for child abuse, and protection
of child witnesses in sexual asssault cases.
The federal government has adopted amend­
ments to the Social Security Act that require
the states to beef up their child support
collection procedures. In return, the federal
government has provided that states will be
reimbursed for child support dollars col­
lected from fathers whose children live in
families receiving welfare. The Retirement
Equity Act has provided that nonworking

I

OF ALL
FEMALE­
HEADED
HOUSEHOLDS
W ITH M IHOR
CHILDR EH...
46 PERCEHT
LIVE BELOW
THE POVERTY
LEVEL

6

spouses are guaranteed a portion of the
working spouse’s pension.
The effects of such remarkable legislation,
however, pale considerably in practice.
The revolution in family-related legisla­
tion has arisen out of a combination of fac­
tors: the push of the women’s movement for
gender-neutral regulation of family issues;
fathers’ rights groups and the backlash
against the tender-years presumption that
mothers are better parents than fathers; the
goal of the Reagan administration to be
indemnified for amounts paid to families on
welfare; and the vigilant attempt, by groups
devoted to protecting victims of domestic
violence and sexual assault, to provide for
the first time in history reliable criminal
prosecution of rapists and perpetrators of
incest.
Despite all the “reforms” in the system,
the plight of children in post-divorce families
and in families in crisis is now worse than
it was years ago. A brief review of relevant
statistics brings into sharp focus our failure
to improve the lot of these families.
The House Ways and Means Committee
and the Census Bureau report that 39 percent
of the 32.5 million people who live below
the poverty level in the United States are

children. Of all Americans subsisting in
poverty, 52 percent live in female-headed
households (as opposed to couples or indi­
viduals living alone without children). In
constant dollars, federal spending for chil­
dren declined 4 percent from 1978 to 1987,
while spending for the elderly increased 52
percent. Twenty percent of all children in
this country live in poverty, and the most
devastating statistic for those examining the
impact of separation and divorce is that of
all the female-headed households with minor
children in this country, 46 percent live be­
low the poverty level. Of those, many are the
working poor. But in households headed by
a man, only 7.6 percent live below the
poverty level—approximately one in 12.
It should be noted that the failure to
implement divorce-related legislation is not
the sole cause for the plight of single women
and their children: Federal benefits declined
sharply during the Reagan years. The Tax
Reform Act of 1986, combined with in­
creases in additional payroll taxes (Social
Security withholdings, in particular), has
created increases of payroll withholdings by
46 percent in families existing in the bottom
10 percent of income (families in the top 10
percent of income have enjoyed a 3 percent
decrease in withholdings).
In addition, we have subsidized and tol­
erated life-threatening inefficiencies in the
defense industry, and in earlier precedents
we have bailed out the savings and loan
industry and Chrysler. We have observed an
epidemic of “murders” and acquisitions, to
borrow a phrase from an astute friend, but
we have failed utterly to assist inner-city
blacks whose economic security has been
decimated by the decline in heavy manufac­
turing and domestic service.
In California, where many of the current
changes in family law were initiated, studies
reveal the discouraging destruction of the
quality of life in female-headed households
following divorce. A study by sociologist
Lenore J. Weitzman showed that a father’s
income increased an average of 42 percent
following divorce, while the income for
mothers declined by 73 percent. Psychologist
Judith Wallerstein’s continuing study of
post-divorce families reveals children who
demonstrate serious psychological problems
and dysfunctional behavior—boys immediSWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

FOR SINGLE
MOTHERS
W H O HAVE
THE 2 4 -H O U R
RESPONSIBILITY
FOR SMALL
CHILDREN
PLUS FULL­
TIME JOBS,
CLEANING
HOUSE CAN
BE AN
EXHAUSTING
AD D ITIO N AL
BURDEN

ately following divorce and girls many years
later.
It is estimated, although it is impossible to
be exact, that one in four minor girls has
been the victim of some form of sexual
assault. Estimates also suggest that 80 per­
cent of the perpetrators of those assaults
have been known to the victims, and 9 of ten
perpetrators are men. Boys are not immune;
one in eight may be the victim of sexual
assault. In my experience, only a small
handful of perpetrators of sexual assault are
being brought to justice.
What is the cause of this dismal picture?
Setting aside the growing disparities between
rich and poor, it is clear to me that imple­
mentation of legislative reforms has been
subverted by the dominant white-male cul­
ture. Entrepreneurship and dominance
through wealth and political connections are
the values of that culture, not protection of
the weak, nurturance of the young, and
concern for the family system. Men’s preju­
dices and fears of women, conscious and
unconscious, as well as their lack of famil­
iarity with child-rearing issues, have ham­
pered and ultimately subverted the implemen­
tation of legislative reforms designed to pro­
tect children and their primary caretakers.
When I recently attended a conference in
Phoenix, Ariz., I had the opportunity to
meet several of Beverly Hills’ top divorce
lawyers. I was dismayed to learn that in
AUGUST 1989

California, as well as in other states, children
of divorced parents do not have a legal right
to collect college support from their fathers.
When I asked why, these lawyers speculated
that many of the men in the legislature were
divorced; they did not want to pay for their
children after they had attained the age of
18.
In Pennsylvania, family court is the lowest-status court in the system. Despite its
proportionately larger number of cases, fam­
ily court receives the smallest relative budget
allocation. In many counties in Pennsylva­
nia, family court is held in less attractive
physical surroundings, the caseloads are
mammoth, and there are few, if any, re­
sources—psychologists, probation officers,
and others—available to the court. There
are few judges who actively seek to sit in
family court. At this juncture many judges
are members of an aging generation and
have never had working wives or served as
the primary caretakers of their children.
Substantially all of the economic claims
brought in family court are brought by
women, either for themselves or on behalf
of their children, against men. It is not
surprising that sexism and related attitudes
diminish the importance of family court.
In Swarthmore’s home county, the court
has refused to implement state laws that
provide for the enforcement of alimony
through the domestic relations office, which

collects child support. Thus wage attach­
ments levied by the domestic relations office
are unavailable for alimony collection. In
Philadelphia County, the courts consistently
refuse to award attorneys’ fees to women
who bring contempt proceedings against
fathers who refuse to pay support, despite
the fact that attorneys’ fees are clearly pro­
vided for under state law. These women,
seeking only to have their former husbands
pay what they have been ordered to pay, are
forced repeatedly to take time off from
work, lose wages, and pay for an attorney.
This arbitrary application of the law has
obvious, immediate, and negative conse­
quences for women and children. Undeni­
ably it challenges principles of judicial fair­
ness.
Traditional white-male culture has domi­
nated in large part because women and
blacks with education and ambition are still
not well-represented in policy-making posi­
tions and have been preoccupied with getting
and keeping a foothold in the system. They
have not advocated loudly enough for their
own interests and those of their children.
Moreover, many of the urban minority
leaders appear to have internalized the values
of the dominant culture and have demon­
strated too little commitment to helping
minority women and children. Similarly,
the male-dominated liberal establishment,
embodied, for example, by the ACLU and
7

sei
Ite iÄ

m

K' JE

1

j
■

U-vDYLAN EPSTEIN, GRADE 10

AFTER
DIVORCE,
CHILDREN
ARE FAR
MORE LIKELY
T O NEED
COSTLY
MENTAL
HEALTH
SERVICES

H i
■-a*1

proponents of mediation, has proven bank­
rupt in developing creative legal arguments
to help women and children in crisis.
Attorneys, too, must carry some of the
blame. And the media have promoted while
the public has accepted the view that the
best divorce lawyers are ruthless, devious,
and greedy.
The implementation of the IV-D amend­
ments to the Social Security Act provides an
important example of how, in part, good
legislation can be subverted. The amend­
ments provide for beefed-up collection of
child support and for reimbursement to the
states of monies collected from fathers of
children who receive welfare. Thus, at face
value, the amendments are a creative reform.
And, in fact, they have resulted in dramatic
increases in the collection of child support
across the country. Why, then, have many of
the goals of the IV-D legislation been sub­
verted?
The amendments provide that the relevant
child support dollars reimbursed to the
courts be used exclusively for child support
enforcement functions. Nevertheless, be­
cause there is very little public knowledge
and oversight of the IV-D funding scheme,
courts in Pennsylvania—and I am sure else­
where—have been able to use the child
support dollars for completely different pur­
poses. In Delaware County, for example,
these dollars were poured into the general
8

county fund, poorly accounted for, and
ultimately used, in part, to pay for functions
entirely unrelated to child support enforce­
ment. In Philadelphia County, $5 million
was diverted to plan a criminal justice
center; subsequently the plan was abandoned
as too expensive.
The IV-D amendments also require that
each state adopt guidelines for determining
child support. Guidelines have been based in
a number of states on studies which analyze
the percentage of combined net income that
intact families spent on children. These
studies do not, in fact, provide the courts and
attorneys with accurate cost figures of sup­
porting children in single-parent homes, even
though the use of guidelines has helped
eliminate past inconsistencies.
In intact families there are two adults to
share all of the household and child-rearing
functions. Single parents must take on many
additional tasks that were previously per­
formed by their departing partners. For
example, additional baby-sitting is required
so that the single parent can attend school
conferences, social activities, and workrelated obligations. For single mothers who
have the 24-hour responsibility for small
children plus a full-time job, cleaning house
can be an exhausting additional burden and
thus additional dollars for domestic help
may be needed. Yard work and household
tasks, such as cleaning gutters, mowing

lawns, pruning trees, raking leaves, painting,
and patching, are also jobs that may be too
much for a working single mother to per­
form.
After divorce, children are far more likely
to need costly mental health services. A
woman who has not prepared tax returns or
been responsible for family financial plan­
ning may, at least initially, require the assis­
tance of accountants and financial advisors
to provide the services that were previously
provided by her husband or her husband’s
accountant.
Finally, many fathers have good benefit
packages through their employment. On the
other hand, women going to work for the
first time may not have any benefits available
to them. Women are already at a disadvan­
tage after divorce; they receive on retirement,
at best, only 50 percent of the social security
benefits of their husbands unless they, them­
selves, have made a contribution toward
social security greater than 50 percent of
their husbands’ contributions.
Making sure that there is enough money
in the household for a homemaker mother
to save for old age means that the children
of the marriage are protected from the
burden of having to care for her in her old
age.
We need to listen to single-parent mothers
and ask them what they need for child
support. Moreover, child support cannot be
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

analyzed in isolation from alimony. Since
the advent of no-fault divorce, women are
receiving significantly less alimony for short­
er periods of time, and this, too, affects
children. If one bought a million-dollar race
horse, one would find the best trainer no
matter what the cost of caring for the horse.
Yet we fail to apply the same logic to
children—we treat them worse than we treat
horses because we do not compensate the
commitment, time, skill, and care given by
mothers. The child’s standard of living is
universally and irrevocably tied to that of the
primary caretaker.
As a result of special accounting and
reporting requirements stipulated by the IVD legislators, a child support bureaucracy
has developed within family court. This
unwieldy bureaucracy has fragmented the
system and resulted in the segregation of
support proceedings from others, such as
custody, equitable distribution, and injunc­
tive relief proceedings. The multiplicity of
proceedings in family court poses a burden
on dependent mothers seeking relief through
the courts. It costs money in legal fees every
time one has to go to court, not to mention
lost wages and baby-sitting expenses. I have
estimated that in the city of Philadelphia, a
fully contested divorce involving children,
but no domestic violence, could take a total
of nine different hearings before nine sepa­
rate masters or judges to reach a conclusion.
The bureaucratization of the child support
function is not the only cause for the mul­
tiplicity of hearings—the existing frag­
mented procedures reflect the unconscious
needs of the judiciary. There is a war of
attrition between the bench and litigants.
The judges are exhausted and discouraged
by the emotionalism and perceived pettiness
of the problems presented to them, as well
as the insoluble nature of those problems. In
order to make its days more bearable, the
judiciary has created a system that permits
itself to isolate one tiny aspect of a family’s
problems, hear that, and make a decision.
The current procedure in Pennsylvania pre­
cludes the possibility of a judge ever being
presented with the complete family picture.
Judicial intervention is piecemeal and illinformed, and consequently deadbeats get
away with gross abuses of the system.
In the face of all this, the liberal establish­
ment has failed to posit solutions to the
problems of our children and their primary
caretakers. Many former social activists, for
example, have joined the mediation move­
ment aimed at developing alternate forms of
dispute resolution outside of the court sys­
tem. While this works for many disputants,
mediation in the context of divorce hurts
AUGUST 1989

women (and by extension their children) parent. Consequently, these children are re­
because so many inequities exist in the peatedly denied adequate representation at
predicament of women after divorce. Cus­ critical moments in their lives when they
tody is the only domestic relations area that may be placed in foster homes or more
lends itself to a mediated resolution.
restrictive institutional settings.
In family law there is no substitute for
Children whose constitutional rights are
political activism of the kind used by citizens not protected are less likely as adults to
two decades ago. Courthouses can be pick­ adopt democratic values and to respect
eted; court policies can be challenged, as can other individuals.
the policies of corporations like General
Attorneys who represent children need
Motors or Exxon. Citizen oversight and in­ interdisciplinary skills: They should have
volvement in the system is crucial to the training in the psychology of family systems
successful enforcement of legislative reforms as well as knowledge of the law. Their work
in the courts.
often proves so difficult that they bum out
I served on the board of the American without adequate support. To my great satis­
Civil Liberties Union for 15 years and re­ faction, the Pennsylvania ACLU recently
signed several years ago in a state of despair filed suit against the city of Philadelphia
over the ACLU’s lack of commitment to demanding that children be provided their
civil liberties issues (except for pro choice mandated right to counsel.
and affirmative action issues) affecting
It is my hope that someday soon we will
women and children. The ACLU, for exam­ use IV-D child support dollars not only for
ple, has consistently defended a strict inter­ basic child support functions but also, aug­
pretation of the Sixth Amendment’s con­ mented by additional tax dollars, for a
frontation clause. Their position requires a national child advocacy system free from
face-to-face confrontation between a trauma­ local political control and similar to the
tized child witness and a defendant; they national Legal Services Corporation. Then
have ignored several viable alternative mod­ children will have a voice, and their repre­
els proposed both to protect the child and to sentatives can seek creative new ways to
preserve the defendant’s right to effective make the legal system work for them, not
cross-examination.
against them.
If we do not consider the child victim’s
As a society we must develop a multi­
right to the protection of the criminal laws faceted, nationally organized, professional­
equal to that of adults, a substantial portion ized delivery of services for children rather
of our population will continue to learn at than depend on private philanthropy. A
an early age the bitter lesson of our patriar­ triage approach would hold children and the
chal society—that children, like women, do support of their primary caretakers as a top
not always have the right to control intimate priority.
associations with their bodies.
There is an old wisdom applicable to both
There are other problems as well. Our children and the environment: An ounce of
local ACLU has done little to challenge the prevention is worth a pound of cure. Our
constitutionality of the master’s fee system failure to address the problems of our chil­
in Pennsylvania divorce cases. In some coun­ dren today will cost us far more in the future.
ties the burden of hourly payment for masters The solutions to our problems are not high(court-appointed substitutes for judges) is tech solutions; they are people solutions.
put on the party going forward in a divorce. The research is available, and individual
This system makes it impossible for many commitment to children’s issues exists. Many
women to receive their “day in court”; they lawyers would seize the opportunity to serve
are denied due process and treated as second- as child advocates if decent, paying oppor­
class citizens. No other litigants have to pay tunities existed.
Legislative reform alone is not the solu­
by the hour to get an adjudicator.
In Philadelphia County, despite the statu­ tion. A massive change of consciousness is
tory requirement that there be lawyers for called for—a public recognition and trans­
dependent and neglected children, it is esti­ formation of our patriarchal values. Only
mated that only one-quarter of the depen­ such a change, and the ensuing growth of a
dent and neglected children have an attorney.
new conscience in those who are interpreting
In other counties many children are repre­ and implementing the laws, will make the
difference.
sented by attorneys who never interview
them and take as gospel the word of local
child welfare agencies. Further, most child Elizabeth Bennett, Esq., is a practicing attor­
advocates do not have the resources to retain ney fo r the Philadelphia law firm Dilworth,
psychologists or experts to challenge the Paxson, Kalish & Kauffman. Her expertise
position of the child welfare agency or is fam ily law.
9

Mothers
versus
Children:
The Real
Child Care
Debate
by Sandra L. Hofferth ’67

an mothers who work always
have the best interests of their
children at heart?
Are they sacrificing the good of
the children for their own benefit?
Are they, thus, bad mothers?
The national debate arising from these
questions has proven acrimonious and emo­
tional. Resolving current issues regarding
child care means addressing the real child
care problem in America: the conflict in
interest between the well-being of mothers
and the well-being of children—two funda­
mental objectives that are not necessarily
compatible.
The consequences of employment and
nonmaternal child care may be good for
mothers but not for children, some experts
argue. They take the position that the quality
of care for children matters most and that all
children should be cared for at home by their
mothers for at least the first year of life. After
that, they say, if exclusive maternal care is
impossible, then the highest quality care
must be sought.
On the other hand, if the employment
and self-sufficiency of women is the impor­
tant issue, as others suggest, then placing
children in care would be more important
than the quality of that care, and in fact we
might wish to minimize maternal payments
for child care.
The debate is particuarly difficult because
most advocates agree that improving quality
by providing supply subsidies—funding gen­
erally going to the provider of care rather
than to the consumer and only to providers
who meet certain criteria—will raise the
price of child care. Increasing demand sub­
sidies, so that money goes directly into the
hands of parents, the consumers of care,
allows choice but may not result in the quali­
ty improvements sought. Thus, one may be
good for children, the other for parents.

The interests o f mothers

The recent movement toward increasing
federal subsidies for child care was fueled by
the tremendous increase in the number of
mothers working outside the home. In 1987
50.8 percent of new mothers remained in the
job market, marking the first time a majority
of women reported they were working or
actively seeking employment within a year
of giving birth. The figure was 49.8 percent
in 1986,31 percent in 1976, the first year the
Census Bureau calculated the statistic.
Mothers are at a disadvantage in the labor
market. Because of their responsibility for
the bearing and rearing of children, mothers’
earnings and ability to compete in the labor
force are reduced. If children are a valuable
societal resource, then equity would require
sharing the burden equally among all tax­
payers, male and female, those with children
and those who are childless.
On the other hand, many consider both
childbearing and employment to be family
decisions. Families decide whether and how
to raise children, and the government has no
business facilitating one decision over an­
other. Many families, for example, choose a
lower level of income so that they can raise
their children with only parental care, and
they resent having to subsidize the child care
of high-income, dual-earner families.
Aid to Families with Dependent Children
(AFDC) was originally established by Con­
gress in the Social Security Act of 1935 to
aid widows with children at home, providing
an important social service for poor and
troubled families. In contrast, the Family
Support Act of 1988 requires mothers of
children age 3 and over to work outside the
home, shifting the emphasis from mother­
ing toward promoting economic self-suffi­
ciency.
Research shows that the higher the in­
come of the mother, the greater the employ-

ARE
MOTHERS
W HO W ORK
SACRIFICING
THE G O O D
OF THE
CHILDREH
FOR THEIR
OW N
BENEFIT?

10

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

CHESTER HIGH SMITH, GRADE 12

ment rate. As the price of child care rises,
however, employment decreases. To help
mothers work, we would need to increase
the quantity of care and lower its cost.
The most important federal subsidy to
employed parents has been the Child and
Dependent Care Tax Credit, which is esti­
mated to have cost taxpayers $4 billion in
fiscal year 1988. This is a demand-side sub­
sidy, providing money directly to the parents.
Current legislative proposals in this tradition,
such as Packwood-Moynihan, would ex­
pand the present tax credit or make it
refundable. An alternative proposal (Dole et
al) supported by the Bush administration
would provide low-income families (under
$13,000 per year) who have children under
age 4 and at least one wage earner with a
refundable tax credit up to $1,000 per child.
The interests o f children

1

This employment-focused interest in child
care for employed mothers is relatively re­
cent. Prior to the early 1970s, the interest
was very much child-oriented. The nursery
school movement of the ’30s and ’40s led to
the development of the part-day, childcentered nursery schools. In the 1960s Head
Start became one of the fronts on which the
War on Poverty was waged, joining the
interest in early education for all children
with the added concern about preparation
of disadvanged children for school. Head
Start has grown very gradually to its present
level of $1.2 billion a year; unfortunately, it
still serves only about one out of five eligible
children and is a part-day program at that.
Interest in early childhood programs from
a developmental perspective has increased
recently. The National Association for the
Education of Young Children (NAEYC)
seeks to eliminate the distinction between
the education and the care of young children,
arguing that children learn in all their activi­
ties. NAEYC has developed guidelines for
developmentally appropriate activities for
children and for accreditation of teachers
and programs and has worked for increased
professionalization and recognition of early
childhood education. Furthermore, there has
been an interest in combining the goals of
child care and of preschool programs by
either expanding the length of the day or
adding an extended-day component to the
program.
In addition to the objective of providing
programs of very high quality, a second ob­
jective is to give disadvantaged groups high
priority for such programs.
The major means of accomplishing these
objectives have been Head Start and the
$2.7 million Social Services Block Grant, of
which about one-quarter, or $660 million,
AUGUST 1989

IT IS THE CONFLICT BETWEEN PRICE
A N D Q U ALITY TH AT IS THE CRUX
OF THE CHILD CARE DEBATE
supports child care. In these supply-side
subsidies, the funding generally goes to the
provider of care rather than to the consumer
(though in some states care is subsidized
through vouchers that parents receive). Other
types of activities that might be used to
accomplish these objectives include in­
creased regulation, accreditation, and raising
staff training and pay. The Act for Better
Child Care (ABC) bill, which, among other
things, mandates uniform national standards
for providers, represents this approach.
To promote children’s development, we
need to improve the quality of care. How­
ever, the consequence of increased quality of
care is likely to be increased cost to parents,
unless federal and state subsidies are in­
creased at the same time. It is the conflict
between price and quality that is the crux of
the child care debate.
A resolution

To resolve the conflicts between various
groups debating whether parents can always
have the best interests of their children at
heart, we need to do the following:
1. Analyze the consequences of maternal
employment/child care on children and in­
quire under what circumstances children are
helped or harmed.
2. Increase understanding of the impor­
tance of quality so that parents can make

better choices.
3. Balance the value to children and their
families of the additional income of the
mother, her increased work experience, and
her own satisfaction against exclusive mater­
nal care.
4. Resolve the issue of targeting additional
funds to low-income versus other families. If
the standard of living of low-income work­
ing families were improved, targeting child
care assistance would no longer be as central.
The needs of low-income families and bud­
get constraints must be balanced against the
advantages of uniform benefits in the society
at large.
5. Finally, address directly at the federal
and state levels the benefit to society of the
quality of care that children receive. Only
after we decide who benefits from high
quality care will we be able to determine
who will pay. And only then will we be able
to offer a crucial assurance: that mothers can
participate equally with fathers and nonpar­
ents in the labor force and that children can
receive high quality care.

Sandra Hofferth is senior research associate
at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.,
specializing in the fields o f child care and
adolescent pregnancy and childbearing.
11

Ageless Idea
A n intergenerational
child care program
empowers both young
arid old by bringing
them together
Editor’s note: Due to recent financial con­
straints, the Elvirita Lewis Foundation is no
longer able to support the operation o f the
two intergenerational child care centers
described in this article. A fter successfully
offering quality child care fo r 12 years, the
centers were closed in June 1989. Sallie
Johnson comments: “The teachers have
worked hard to make this a good program,
and we all have deep affection fo r the
children and fam ilies o f the centers. It was
notfo r lack o f commitment or effort that we
have to close the operation. We are all very
sorry to see the program close. ”

by Sallie Blocksom Johnson ’64
When Mary Gessner, a retired store clerk,
arrives for her workday at the Elvirita Lewis
Foundation Intergenerational Child Care
Center in Santa Cruz, Calif., Michael and
April usually rush to the door to give hugs
and greetings. But when Charlie Coffin, an
elder who uses a wheelchair, came to the
center, 4-year-old Nathan, who is highly
active and sometimes destructive, stood
spellbound. As Charlie explained why he
couldn’t walk, Nathan began stroking Char­
lie’s legs, apparently hoping to bring some
life to them. An often difficult child was
becoming sensitive to another person’s
world.
“I hated so having my hair brushed and
braided when I was little; I’d run out of the
house to get away. The day I climbed the
fence and got my hair terribly tangled on the
top rail, it had to be cut free. But I was
happy. I didn’t have so much hair to comb.”

Related by an elderly woman, this tale was
met with obvious relief by her 3- to 5-yearold listeners. Apparently the domestic wars
can be survived. The perspective of older
people seems to make life’s lessons much
more palatable to youngsters.
I work as the director and as a teacher in
the Santa Cruz Elvirita Lewis Intergenera­
tional Child Care Center and alternately in
another intergenerational center in South
San Francisco, where these interactions be­
tween the old and the young occur many
times a day. With a staffing ratio of one adult
to five children, our intergenerational com­
bination of credentialed teachers, trained
and paid part-time paraprofessionals, and
volunteers now provides one answer to child
care for 50 preschool children of working,
low-income parents. Believing that elders
can play a constructive role in helping to
provide a needed community service for
children, we are charged with putting this
theory into actual practice.
In the United States more than half of the
mothers of children under 14 are working
out of economic necessity, but finding quali­
ty child care is a difficult problem. In 1976
a proposal for an intergenerational child

care program was considered “innovative”
enough for funding by the California State
Department of Education. “The segregation
of the elderly [from children] is one of the
most unnatural things in our society,” de­
clared Dr. Wilson Riles, California superin­
tendent of public instruction, at the time of
the dedication of the first center. “We
[Americans] need to experience each other.”
Intergenerational contact is hardly a new
phenomenon. Many societies count upon
the older members of the extended family
for the care of children while parent-age
workers do what is necessary to put food on
the table. During their time together, the
experiences, memories, and cultural values
of the elders are communicated to the chil­
dren. The child gains a sense of group
identity, acquires some life skills, and devel­
ops an understanding of the world in which
he will eventually be responsible for himself.
Although our mobile society has frag­
mented the family geographically, children
benefit from the presence of older people in
their lives. Grandparents can become cere­
monial figures whose personal identities get
lost in the flurry of short visits, festooned
with gifts and turkey dinners. Few grandpar­
ents and grandchildren enjoy the luxury of
long afternoons spent listening and talking
to one another.
At the centers children respond to the
experienced touch, to the “availability,” to

Wonder is an everyday occurrence at the
Elvirita Lewis Foundation Intergenerational
Child Care Center in Santa Cruz, Calif. The
center’s adult-child staffing ratio is one to five.

12

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

the generally unhurried ambiance older peo­
ple can provide. And they can begin to
participate in and enjoy social continuity.
The mixture of ages and physical capacities
helps to develop an increased tolerance for
differences. An older person who is hard of
hearing, is in a wheelchair, or has a slight
impairment is treated with the same matterof-factness as a child with allergies.
Everyone at the centers is expected to
contribute. Children help in setting and
clearing tables for meals and, along with
adults, help to clean and maintain an orderly
environment. These activities of mutual sup­
port provide a familial rather than institu­
tional quality. The environment is rich for its
variety. The cross-section of experience
among the elder workers at the two centers,
most of whom are over 50, ranges from a
former beautician who always wanted to be
a teacher to a retired accountant who missed
raising his own children.
With the annual turnover rate at a shock­
ing 42 percent nationally for staffs of child
care centers, the loyalty of our older workers
is remarkable. Once an older recruit has
some training with us and has weathered a
few months of life in the child care setting,
we usually have an enduring relationship. A
majority have stayed with us for more than
five years. Our centers have found that re­
tirees frequently need to supplement their
fixed incomes with part-time work.
Sally Johnson (above): Many retirees have worked in the center fo r more than fiv e years.
Part-time hours also suit their stage in life,
as when we hear it said, “I don’t want to be expressing fully the genetic information and
I am deeply concerned in the current
full-time anything.” Grandparents and re­ experiences that impact a long life. Negative child care crisis that we maintain the stan­
tired teachers already have participated in stereotypes abound in our current messages dards of quality care that have been devel­
the growth and development of children and about getting older. Just browse the birthday oped and well-documented over the years. I
bring a wealth of experience to the child care card section in a drugstore! What are we am not a child care advocate. I can only
setting. Our centers try to offer very flexible telling our children and what are we telling advocate quality care. Poor care, which can
scheduling. A shift is usually four hours, and ourselves? Instead, the centers have evolved happen whether the child is at home with a
only a few aides work a five-day-a-week into places where differences are treasured, parent or in a center, creates problems for the
schedule. Most often we have someone who where children receive full attention and individual and for the society at large. Can
works a couple of shifts each week. The interest from people dedicated to acceptance, we answer the national need for child care
cook, who is an elder, may be needed from growth, warmth, and structure—intergen- with solutions that are good for us all?
10 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily, which is an awkward erational education for all.
The time I have spent in intergenerational
time slot for younger workers.
child care has been rewarding, entertaining,
A responsible operation must rely on paid
varied, and, to be honest, also exasperating.
and trained workers to care for children. I
Children and older people interact in an
am uncomfortable with the condescending A ging is about becoming
intensely human way. An old Maori proverb
attitudes that older people cannot learn new
reminds us, “Do not think that love is being
tricks or that children just need love to more and more oneself,
discovered today. It is a gift from our ances­
thrive. License grandmothers and grand­ expressing fu lly the
tors.”
fathers? If they work to provide so crucial a
service as nurturing groups of children, why genetic information and
Salite Johnson is founding director o f the
not? They’re up to it.
Elvirita
Lewis Foundation Intergenerational
experiences that impact
Despite the popular stereotypes, aging is
Child Care Centers in South San Francisco
about becoming more and more oneself, a long life
and Santa Cruz, C alif
AUGUST 1989

13

by Roger Williams

Home Schooling
Mavericks or middle-of-the-road
educators, how successful are
parents who step outside the system?

One day a couple of years ago, then 7-yearold Nicholas Early, who has been schooled
at home from early childhood, almost went
to school.
“He’d been watching a yellow school bus
pick up other kids across the street,” recalls
his mother, Anna. “That looked great to
him. But when he went out and discovered
he’d have to say, ‘Good morning, Mrs. So
and So’ with 25 other children every day, he
said, ‘No.’”
Anna and Robert Early ’73, a math
instructor at Indiana University of Pennsyl­
vania, took Nicholas for a long bus ride
anyway because he was fascinated by the
bus and because they have acquired the
habit of seizing their son’s interests and
encouraging them. In all likelihood they
gave him a course in street economics (bus

fare), sociology (neighborhoods appear to
vary significantly from a bus window), and
the history of civil rights (once in some parts
of the country Jim Crow laws existed).
Perhaps not, though; perhaps Nicholas
wanted to know what makes a bus engine
work. The Earlys would have told him, their
explanation realized by the whine and throb
of combusting gasoline and moving cylin­
ders.
For most parents who have never tried
home schooling, the desire of Nicholas to
ride the school bus would raise another
faintly ominous question, one often asked of
home schooling parents: What about the
healthy development and socialization of
their children? What about friends?
The parents’ replies are standard, what­
ever their backgrounds and goals. “In our

Anna and Robert Early 73 watch 9-year-old Nicholas use a paper abacus.
14

opinion,” says Bruce Jenkins ’75, an engi­
neer working for Hewlett-Packard in San
Diego, Calif., “home schoolers can get a
better socialization content than they would
get at a public or private school.” His wife,
Mary, the primary teacher and caretaker of
their five young children, concurs. She ech­
oes the observations of nearly all parents
who continue home schooling: “We don’t
see being isolated in a peer group of third
graders, for example, a developmental ad­
vantage for a child. Our children meet
others their own age in many ways—at
church, or in gatherings of friends and other
families, or in other activities. And they can
interact better in life with a diverse range of
people.”
Gordon Cheesman ’75 and his wife,
Margaret, did not begin home schooling the
oldest of their five children, now 13-year-old
Aaron, until he left the fourth grade. Their
daughter, Joanna, then entering the second
grade, joined her brother. “We were dis­
turbed by Aaron’s attitude toward school,”
Cheesman remarks of his son’s view of a
Philadelphia-area private school. “He was
doing OK, but we felt he had no enthusiasm.
And his self-esteem, a much talked about
thing these days, seemed low. We were
worried.”
According tt> Cheesman, his wife at­
tended several meetings of a home school
support group, and the couple became more
and more convinced that the change would
be worthwhile for their children. They pur­
chased a number of books about home
schooling, developed a curriculum, and
worked with a consultant who evaluated the
children and prescribed certain books during
the first year.
“We bought all kinds of equipment and
informational texts at first—you get very
enthusiastic,” says Cheesman. “But it turns
out that the schooling sort of shapes itself.
You have, essentially, two kinds of subjects:
the skill subjects, such as math, reading, and
grammar, and the knowledge subjects, such
as science, history, literature, health, and the
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

ff

Margaret and Gordon Cheesman 75: Their children have benefited from home schooling.

Bible. And we found that you can teach kids
who are at different levels the same subject.
More and more we did what worked for us.”
These parents are quick to avoid universal
indictments of public or private schools.
They claim, however, that they want some­
thing more for their children. When asked
what, they use such words as character,
enthusiasm, joy, and creativity. “We want
them to be amateurs about formal learn­
ing—amateur means a lover of something,”
explains Mary Jenkins. For Anna Early,
“My original reason in deciding to school
Nicholas at home was the apparent joyless­
ness of public school. It’s robbery of a
birthright to make learning joyless.”
There are other advantages as well, say
the parents. All agree that daily experiences
become teaching and learning opportunities;
the act of using them as such creates a new
vision in both parent and child.
AUGUST 1989

“A lumberyard burned to the ground
recently near our house,” says Robert Early.
“I was out there watching it with Nicholas—
the sky was blue, it was a windless day, and
the heat was intense. Rain started to fall, and
the trees were actually blowing. A little local
weather system had been created, and we
talked about that—we wondered what made
it rain out of a clear sky. Nicholas came up
with the idea that water was evaporating
and recondensing.”
Early, who holds master’s degrees in
math, physics, and counseling, also describes
what he terms “associative thinking” as a
preferable way of learning for his son. He
says that by nature “people do not learn in
a linear or logical way. They jump from
interest to interest, idea to idea. This does not
happen in school.”
To many Americans, nevertheless, home
schooling signifies an eccentric action of

libertarians or religious fundamentalists,
whether or not these parents follow strictly
directed curricula, on the one extreme, or
merely pursue the interests of their children.
And statistical estimates of home schoolers
made by proponents and objective observers
alike tend to agree that religion, for the most
part Christianity, plays a primary role for a
majority of home schoolers. According to
one figure, up to 90 percent of the estimated
200,000 to 300,000 home schoolers in the
country are motivated in part by religious
convictions.
While this is true of the Jenkins and the
Cheesman families, it is not true of the
Earlys. “We feel that support groups are
very, very helpful for parents who try this,”
says Robert Early. “While we know some
home schoolers who are religious in a strict
sense, many others, like us, are not.”
“And if the Christian families in our
group were not religious,” adds Anna of
those she knows, “I think some of them
would home school their kids anyway.”
For religious and nonreligious home
schoolers alike, strong encouragement is
taken from the recent successes of a highly
publicized California family, the Colfaxes.
Three of the four sons, schooled on the
family farm, have been accepted at Harvard
(the oldest has graduated); the fourth son is
12 years old. The two youngest are adopted.
The Earlys, the Cheesmans, and the
Jenkinses all mention the Colfax family, and
all report some of the same experiences.
Each family has outlined a curriculum that
may be more or less directed, but none
attempts to imitate the pattern of classroom
schooling. The parents agree that the oppor­
tunity to encourage the specific interests of
their children not only results in more curious
and passionate students, but offers the chil­
dren a greater sense of self-confidence and
direction.
There are formidable difficulties, how­
ever, that make home schooling impossible
for some families and unappealing for others.
Single-parent families are logistically ex-

The Jenkins children: Oldest child Kelly,
8, holding the baby, has tested out o f the
fifth grade and appears well adjusted

eluded from the option unless the parent
does not work; in two-parent families, one
parent must remain home (nine times out of
ten the woman becomes primary teacher)
without producing a second income.
“This is very hard for all of us,” reveals
Gordon Cheesman, who now lives in Maine,
where he serves as associate director of the
physical plant at Colby College. “The hard­
est part for us was the first year and then the
life changes you have to deal with after that.
We’ve got little ones running around.”
Bruce Jenkins mirrors these observations.
“Home schooling is really a full-time job. In
our case it seems pretty much impossible
sometimes, which is why we’re considering
a live-in. Mary’s favorite thing to do is teach,
and we want to free her up to do that.
“But it will never be easy, it’s a tremen­
dous drain, and there’s no way we would
insist everybody else should do this. Home
schooling is a personal conviction and deci­
sion, but it has an incredible cost in time and
effort.”
For Anna Early, who professes to love
teaching her son at home, there are still
occasional thoughts of a career outside the
home, or of devoting herself to writing. “I
used to feel ‘the father could do this as well
as anyone else,’ ” she remarks. “But I enjoy
this time with my son; it is a career.”
The struggles appear to be worth it—all
three families have outlasted the estimated
one year spent by most parents who attempt
16

school for the first time ever in the fourth
grade,” reveals Gordon Cheesman. “The
two oldest had no problem integrating;
Aaron shows a lot more confidence and
interest than he used to, and he’s getting A’s
and B’s. Joanna is getting straight A’s. Going
back was something the kids wanted to do,
partly because after moving to Maine they
didn’t have many friends. We thought that
was fine.”
The Jenkinses’ oldest child, 8-year-old
Kelly, tested out of the third, fourth, and
fifth grades last year and will continue to
take the Iowa Standard Test periodically to
check her academic progress. Nine-year-old
Nicholas Early excels at nearly everything,
bearing out statistical evidence that home
schooled children almost universally rank
ahead of the academic averages of their
peers.
According to all three families, the legal
requirements they have had to meet—vary­
ing from state to state and school district to
school district—have proven accommodat­
ing. “There is a new Pennsylvania law now
home schooling. Each family encourages its that says our curriculum is not subject to
children outside of the home with ballet approval by a local district, which used to be
lessons, or piano lessons, or sports, or field the case,” notes Anna Early. “We do have
trips remarkable for their adventurism (the to keep a daily log, a sort of scrapbook,
Earlys, for example, spent three days with showing that we are properly educating our
their son investigating marine biology on son and meeting the requirement of hours
Wallops Island, Va., under the auspices of per day. And we select an evaluator of our
choice.”
the Marine Science Consortium).
California, one of the most liberal states
Most important in the eyes of the parents,
- their children are succeeding by almost any in the nation in this regard, requires home
measure. “Aaron and Joanna are back in schoolers only to submit an affidavit, ac­
school after two years of home schooling, cording to the Jenkinses. “But we don’t feel
and our third child, Peter, will begin formal we need permission,” adds Mary Jenkins. In
Maine the Cheesmans must secure the per­
mission of the local school district, whose
Home and Community
responsibility it is to ensure that all children
“Many people think of home schooling
in the district meet minimum requirements
as a way of closing the mind or with­
for subject matter.
drawing; they see it as an isolating expe­
“They can tell us what we need to do, but
rience. In fact, it’s just the opposite. A
we’re fortunate that they appreciate what
better way to describe it might be ‘home
and community schooling’ because al­
we’re doing,” says Gordon Cheesman.
most always home schoolers are exten­
For parents who weigh the increasingly
sively involved in the community and in
popular option to home school their young
activities outside the home.
children against the fear that such an action
“Students may do community service,
will hurt the children either academically or
or take on apprenticeships or internships,
socially, Bruce Jenkins offers advice; “Try it
or pursue the kind of work they wish to
for a year. At the very least you’ll have a
make a career.
“Families who are thinking of home
great year, and you’ll know your child
schooling don’t have to reinvent the
better. You probably don’t want to try it past
wheel because there is a whole commu­
the third or fourth grade unless you’re really
nity they can just plug into. We’re in the
committed. You don’t want to blow it.”
business of helping them, of facilitating
Robert Early is philosophical. “Every
home schooling. We serve as a clearing­
child
has different needs. But it pays to let
house of ideas for anyone who tries.”
them be curious and to encourage their real
— Susannah Sheffer ’86
strengths. And if you require a precedent,
Editor, Growing Without Schooling,
a bimonthly magazine published at
look at people like [Nobel Prize winner]
729 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02116
Richard Feynman or the Wright brothers.
They were home schooled.”
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

|

Lesson from World War II:
How to Raise Money fo r the Class o f 2000
by Frank A. Oski, M .D., ’54

We appear to have given up on our collective
concern for the future. How else to explain
what we have done—or, more accurately,
not done—to safeguard the human resource
embodied by our children?
Almost 4 million of them entered the
[high school] Class of 2000 this school year
and thus should graduate at the turn of the
century. One in four lives or has lived in
poverty, one in five is at risk of becoming a
teen-age parent, one in six is not covered by
health insurance, and one in seven may not
complete high school. One in two has a
mother in the labor force, but only one
licensed day care spot is available for every
20 of these children.
Members of the Class of 2000 have
already surmounted considerable obstacles.
They were born in a country that ranks 21st
worldwide in its infant mortality rate. Worse,
that rate for black American babies exceeds
the average rate in Western Europe, Cuba,
and at least 12 other countries. About 6
percent of the mothers of infants in the Class
of 2000 received late prenatal care or none
at all, and about three in 10 received inade­
quate care. Though we know that prenatal
care reduces thfc risk of premature birth, the
laxity of it here meant that children in the
class ran a 10 percent chance of being born
before term and thus may have a higher risk
of future health problems.
Nearly 25 percent of the class reached the
age of 2 without receiving adequate immu­
nization against polio, measles, rubella, or
mumps, despite evidence showing that $1
spent on immunization saves $10 in later
health care costs.
Fewer than one in five eligible children
from the Class of 2000 were able to partici­
pate in Head Start, although this program
has been shown to increase school success
and improve eventual employability. It has
been demonstrated that $1 invested in qual­
ity preschool education returns almost $5,
because it lowers the cost of special educa­
tion, public assistance, and crime. Only half
the class will receive compensatory educa­
tion, yet indications are that an investment of
$700 annually per child for such an educa­
tion can save the $4,000 cost of a repeated
grade.
AUGUST 1989

For an investment of $39,000, we can
provide a child with prenatal care and pre­
ventive health services through age 18—as
well as enrollment in Head Start, compen­
satory education, summer jobs during high
school, and four years of public college
education. The same $39,000 will support
an inmate in prison for 17 months. (For most
of these statistics, I am indebted to “A
Vision of America’s Future,” an admirable
report just published by the Children’s De­
fense Fund, 122 C Street N. W., Washington,
DC 20001; 202-628-8787.)
The choice we face is blindingly obvious,
but most of our leaders in Washington refuse
to make it, despite all the rhetoric about our
cherished children. So it is up to parents and
others who care about the crisis faced by
children in the United States to move the
federal government to action.
As the critical first step, we should get the
Treasury to issue Children’s Bonds. Back in
the 1940s, millions of Americans bought
War Bonds at $18.75 and received $25 at
maturity. Children saved their pennies to
purchase these patriotic instruments, which
were also considered a perfect birthday gift
for them. We believed in a cause then—
defeating the Axis powers—and eagerly
bought bonds to help underwrite the mis­

sion. We should bring back the opportunity
to demonstrate such a national commitment.
Cynics will say that it is easier to raise
money for bombs bursting in air than for an
abstraction like our children’s future. But
most Americans do believe in rescuing our
kids and together would purchase millions
of dollars in Children’s Bonds if given the
chance. Certainly they would buy them far
more enthusiastically than the Defense Bond,
that descendant of War Bonds that now
helps fund unscrupulous military contractors
and their cost overruns.
Children’s Bonds would support pro­
grams—and only those programs—deemed
worthy by Congress. As War Bonds did,
they would provide a rallying point for
citizens who now feel helpless in dealing
with a problem that seems intractable. They
would offer millions of people an opportu­
nity they would find hard to refuse: a chance
to focus their investment dollars on our
collective future.
Dr. Frank Oski is the chair o f the Depart­
ment o f Pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins
School o f Medicine and editor in chief o f the
journal Contemporary Pediatrics. This edi­
torial is reprinted from the Feb. 20, 1989,
issue o f The Natioa

^ C h ild ren ’s Bonds,
Wsw as \y ar Bonds did,
would focus invest­
ment dollars on our
collective future.

Four alumnae who act to improve the lives o f children

Advocacy
Marge Pearlman Scheuer *48
keeps up the pressure to
improve the well-being o f
children and families
• Focused attention for the first time on the
exploding problem of pediatric AIDS
• Pushed to move “boarder babies” (healthy
infants who remain in hospitals because
there are no homes for them) into foster care
• Studied conditions of families in Tier I
barracks-style shelters, concluded the shel­
ters did not comply with state regulations
and are highly destructive to children and
families, and now works to persuade the city
to close these shelters
• Is developing model temporary housing
that will include social service components
for homeless families—The St. John’s Place
Family Center
• Is conducting study of the support services
in elementary schools (as well as a study of
the LYFE program in the high schools,
which enables teen-age parents to complete
their educations by providing day care for
their infants)
• Serves as convener for Energy Alliance
Coalition for Homeless Families and Chil­
dren, composed of 65 agencies all dealing
with the homeless
• Issued a report on mental health services
in the Family Court

Scheuer’s association with CCC began in
1977, when she took its annual community
leadership course. She was appointed chair
of the education section in 1982 and was
subsequently elected to the board and later
appointed treasurer. In 1987 she was named
president. Scheuer describes herself as one
of “the new breed of volunteers—full time,
hard working, and unpaid.”
The mother of four, Scheuer first began
working with children 30 years ago as a
tutor in the New York City School Volunteer
Program. She tutored in reading and English
as a second language. She also headed two
projects: one, funded by the Retired Senior
Volunteer Program, to train and supervise
older people to tutor in the schools; the
second to bring public-spirited retirees of
Equitable Life Assurance Company to tutor
in two Harlem schools. Eventually she tu­
tored children in math at Park West High
School on 50th Street and Tenth Avenue,
working primarily with underprivileged stu­
dents.
“I loved working one on one,” she recalls
with feeling. “I would see the same young­
sters twice a week, and some of the children
would come to school only on those days
when their volunteer tutor was there.”
Scheuer served on the board of the volun­
teers program from 1972 to 1980 and only
relinquished her tutoring schedule two years
ago when she became president of Citizens’

This partial list of recent and ongoing proj­
ects of the Citizens’ Committee for Children

contest with some city agencies, or even
with the mayor. The 44-year-old organiza­
tion serves as an engaged outsider, an obser­
vant and informed witness.
The president of this advocacy organiza­
tion is Marge Pearlman Scheuer. She de­
scribes the organization’s role as “acting as
the conscience of the city on behalf of its
children.”
18

Marge Pearlman Scheuer ’48

Committee for Children.
As CCC’s president, Scheuer is ultimately
responsible for both the work produced and
the funds raised. Writing letters and propos­
als, meeting with administrators, legislators,
and funders, and planning with CCC
members and other advocates take up most
of her time. When possible, she makes site
visits—“nothing beats seeing conditions
with one’s own eyes.” But her annual oper­
ating budget is also of key concern—this
year $780,000, some $300,000 of which
will come from individual gifts and two
annual benefits. The balance of operating
funds is provided by grants for individual
projects and from foundations.
According to Scheuer, the sometimes
startling effectiveness of the Citizens’ Com­
mittee comes from the commitment of its
200 members, individuals elected to mem­
bership for their demonstrated interest in the
well-being of children and for their ability to
give time and expertise in the field. The
CCC includes community leaders, family
court judges, lawyers, pediatricians, psychi­
atrists, psychologists, social workers, educa­
tors, nurses, nutritionists, housing specialists,
and students of public administration. These
members are involved in every aspect of the
committee’s work, from fact-gathering and
field observations, to analysis of the facts, to
well-researched recommendations for im­
provements in services and programs for
children.
Of CCC achievements, Scheuer says she
is especially proud of its report on shelters
for homeless families in New York City. A
page one story published Nov. 17, 1988, in
the metropolitan news section of The New
York Times begins:
“Homeless families entering the city’s
shelter system are often kept in squalid
barracks-style shelters for longer than state
regulations allow, a report by a nonprofit
advocacy group says.
“The report, to be released today, says
youngsters in these shelters witness adult
sexual activity and heavy drug use in rooms
that house as many as two dozen families
living on cots two to three feet apart.
“The study, conducted over the last year
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

by the Citizens’ Committee for Children,
describes roach and rodent infestations,
spoiled food, a lack of heat, and rampant
illness in the city’s five congregate shelters.”
CCC had recognized the problem, set up
a study group under a volunteer member,
assigned a staff associate to the project,
enrolled and trained 40 volunteers to do the
necessary footwork, conducted on-site visits,
and finally made recommendations and
issued a report. With its research carefully
done, CCC was then able to focus public
opinion on the subject through the press and
meetings with city officials and legislators.
“Agencies won’t move unless there is public
pressure,” says Scheuer. In late spring,
Scheuer felt optimistic that the city would
soon close the shelters.
Scheuer has three current goals. First, she
intends to see completed the St. John’s Place
apartment project. Ninety-seven transitional
housing units for homeless families are under
construction by CCC and its co-developers,
the Brooklyn Neighborhood Improvement
Association and the Settlement Housing
Fund at St. John’s Place. The units are
scheduled for occupancy by January 1990.
Scheuer’s second goal is to embark upon
a study of the mayor’s Project Giant Step, an
early childhood program initiated in 1986 to
provide quality education for disadvantaged
4-year-olds. “We have been monitoring this
project since its inception, and now we feel
it is time to put about 30 volunteers into the
field to conduct a definitive study. This im­
portant program could well serve as a pro­
totype nationwide,” she observes. Scheuer is
now working on the proposal for a founda­
tion grant to fund the study.
Her third goal envisions the city’s creation
of an ombudsman agency to which families
and children could turn if they have been
denied service or, in effect, have been abused
or neglected by a city-funded or government
agency. “The issues are very complicated,”
says Scheuer, “and we are working hard to
prepare a viable plan.”
As CCC continues to try to focus public
opinion on children’s problems and to cajole
various city agencies into talking to each
other and working together on common
problems, Scheuer remains philosophical
about the group’s role in New York City. “I
strongly believe in the importance of advo­
cacy. I feel that if we can move the entire
system one inch, we accomplish more good
for more children than some of the individual
programs. What good are projects if the
system doesn’t pick them up? We should be
running an educational system that makes
patch-up programs unnecessary.”
—Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49
AUGUST 1989

LEGISLATION
New York legislator Harriet
Donow Cornell ’54 uses her
position to attack the child
care problem across the board
Harriet Cornell has served as a Democratic
legislator representing Clarkstown in Rock­
land County, N.Y., since 1983, when she
was the sole woman to hold such an office.
A so-called bedroom community of New
York City, the county is prosperous, but
living costs are extremely high. Some county
residents, especially single working mothers,
must struggle to exist.
“In 1980 about 64 percent of women
with school-age children and 40 percent of
women with children in preschool had
joined the labor force in Rockland County,”
says Cornell, who chairs the Rockland
County Commission on Women’s Issues
and has done her homework. “Remember
that the percentages are probably higher
now.”
Two years ago the women’s commission
held a series of public hearings on county
issues. “That’s when I discovered the huge
problems faced by people in need of quality,
affordable child care,” she says. “If you don’t
have two incomes in this county, you might
have a hard time just living. And even if you
do have two incomes, quality child care is of
exceeding importance.”
Cornell understands the pressures on
working parents from experience. She and
her husband, Martin ’55, an attorney in
Rockland County, are the parents of four
children (three of them graduated from
Swarthmore College).
Noting the explosion in the number of
female-headed households in the county,
Cornell also found during the public hear­
ings that the days of work missed by parents
often correspond to the availability and
quality of day care for children.
“The main needs come from people either
training for a new job or at work,” she ex­
plains. “If you can help people in these
positions, you can break the cycle of poverty
in which some of them are trapped. That’s
good for the individuals involved, of course,
but it’s also good for business and good for
the future. It should be clear to everybody
that if you don’t do the right thing by
children early, you pay a lot more later for
treatment centers, jails, and so on.”
Cornell is quick to point out that doing
the right thing by children means all children,
regardless of background. But the child care
package she has sponsored in Rockland

County over the last 20 months or so is de­
signed particularly to help low-income or
single-income families.
In a report to the legislature based on the
public hearings, Cornell recommended first
the formation of a county-wide child care
coalition with representatives from all walks
of life. “By recruiting people from govern­
ment and business and from both public and
private organizations to work together, we
are making it clear that child care is the
responsibility of the entire community. And
every community should work together to
establish a policy of public and private
options.”
Her report charged the coalition to help
businesses and developers plan for day care
sites in new construction, to educate business
leaders in the practical benefits accrued
from providing care, and to seek the increase
of salaries and benefits to day care workers.
Then she attacked the problem on a range
of other fronts, first getting funding through
the legislature so the women’s commission
could hire a full-time staff person to work
with an existing child agency. “This staff
person has been working directly with em­
ployers to suggest that they do two things:
assess the needs of their work force and
explain ways they can help the work force
with day care. Sure, some larger companies
can afford on-site care, but the smaller ones
can’t.”
For the smaller companies, the expertise
of the county’s new staff person may be used
to discover both immediate and longer-term
solutions to some of the care problems faced
by workers. Cornell ticks off several options
for the small business: tax credits, vouchers,
information for employees about where to
get quality day care.

Harriet Donow Cornell ’54
19

“The staff person is also working with
developers of new spaces,” she says. “Office
buildings, supermarkets, shopping malls—
all of these should be designed to provide
space, with a realistic view of the contem­
porary work force and its needs.”
Cornell has strongly advocated thorough
training of child care workers and has
pushed to raise the maximum income level
allowed for parents who try to qualify for
state assistance. “So far I’ve been blocked in
this. But we have found that when the state
of New York sets that income level, it’s too
low for poor people in Rockland County to
get any assistance.”
She has also challenged town and county
governments, who sometimes decry poor
care elsewhere while loudly claiming their
support of children, to examine their own
policies and improve them. Her report to the
legislature did not hesitate to note that of all
employers in the county, the county govern­
ment paid the lowest salary for child care
workers and offered few, if any, benefits
(she has pointedly demanded that health
care insurance be offered to county child
care employees).

Therapy
Therapist Andrea Wolf
Rabinowitz *49 looks at the
emotional development o f
children and families in our
multicultural nation
“You don’t love me!”
“I hate school!”
“Everyone teases me!”
Fleeting frustrations or evidence of deeply
held hurts, these comments may be familiar
and unsettling. No matter the severity, chil­
dren do not consider their problems insig­
nificant. Nor does Andy Rabinowitz, whose
lifelong concern for children has led her to
teaching, then to becoming a trained child
therapist, and now to helping low-income
and minority groups give their children a
strong sense of their inherent value to soci­
ety.
As a professional therapist, she has helped
young children, adolescents, and their par­
ents try to cope with stress, faltering self­
esteem, troubled family situations, and just
growing up. There are often special prob­
lems, due to separation and divorce, single
20

Asked if this is a case of governmental
hypocrisy, her reply is an unequivocal, “Yes.
“In the county in 1987, day care centers
paid the head teacher, at the very highest, $8
an hour. Other certified teachers received
$7.45 or $6.40, depending on where they
were. And assistants, if you can believe it,
received between $3.35 and $5.50 or $6.50.
These salaries came with no benefits.”
So Cornell designed a piece of legislation
assuring $100,000 annually for child care
centers in the county to upgrade teachers’
salaries and to begin health insurance pro­
grams for employees.
For this work and several other strong
Cornell agendas in Rockland County, she is
sometimes strongly criticized. “Some of my
critics still think a woman should be home
taking care of kids,” she reflects. “They don’t
realize that not only may women want to
work, they may have to go out and work to
survive today. But the critics see child day
care as encouraging people to leave homes
and undermining the family, rather than as
an important process of socialization and
critical support for working parents.”
—Roger Williams

parents or step-parents, chronic illness or
death of a family member—conditions that
can beget decided turmoil within families.
After 25 years with an observant eye and
patient ear to the voices of turmoil, Rabino­
witz projects a balanced optimism about the
present state of children’s lives. “There is an
increased consciousness that we are not do­
ing right by our children. We know so much
about children, about the critical importance
of early childhood, the importance of sup­
porting parents and families during those
early years. But,” she concedes, “I don’t
think we are using what we know.”
Illustrating her point, which may mirror
the historically low level of children’s issues
in national priorities, Rabinowitz contends
that “some people are not willing to spend
money [for therapy] on their children, even
though they might go to their own therapists
for years. Most disturbing of all,” Rabino­
witz emphasizes, “is the cut in public money
to support children’s services. There are so
many in need of help who cannot find places
to get mental health care at minimal fees,
when they make the effort to look for it.”
Rabinowitz’s lifelong career has focused
on children and their mental health. She
taught preschool and kindergarten before
receiving a master’s degree in social work in
1969. Later she added training in child
therapy, and in the mid-1970s she studied in
London with Anna Freud and John Bowlby.

Andrea W olf Rabinowitz ’49

However, she states, “My greatest teachers
are my clients and my own four children.”
In 1977 Rabinowitz created the Child
Guidance Center in Seattle, Wash., which
focuses on children and their families,
schools, and communities. Recalling that
her early practice 20 years ago dealt more
with general child-rearing problems—disci­
plining children, establishing routines, help­
ing them do well in school—Rabinowitz
contrasts those challenges with today’s more
severe dilemmas of children experiencing
divorce, full-time working parents, or child
abuse.
Here Rabinowitz reacts strongly: “Abuse
is not new, but we are now handling it in
different ways. One of my real concerns is
that we do a disservice to abused children to
isolate that as the only problem. Children
who are abused have a range of problems
and come from problem families, as do
children who have learning problems or
children whose parents are getting divorced
or whatever. Their internal image would be
enhanced by saying, ‘This is one of the things
that have happened to you, and let’s see what
else is going on in your life.’ Although chil­
dren do need to be protected from the
abusive parents, I feel there needs to be a
family approach.” At present, Rabinowitz
teaches in the Pacific Oaks Teacher Training
Program in Seattle, which trains teachers to
be conscious of the emotional health of
children, as well as their intellectual and
physical health.
“The teacher training program brings a
psychotherapeutic perspective into the inter­
related system of schools, families, and com­
munity. Each child brings his or her own
cultural and psychological milieu into the
classroom, which directly affects the learning
process,” Rabinowitz asserts. “So many
teachers are trained to focus on the intellectual/academic performance work. We must
acknowledge the emotional development of
the child.” From her own counseling pracSWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

tice, she cites an example of a 7-year-old
child whose father had just died. “This child
has more on his mind than practicing his
reading skills. In this case, the child can be
encouraged to use his life experience as his
learning context. This model allows teachers
to serve as facilitators to help children
through major transitions in their lives.”
Rabinowitz recently has served as an ad­
visor to social change foundations, empha­
sizing that our multicultural nation is strug­
gling to change in ways that will meet the
needs of children whose communities repre­
sent a different history and tradition from
that of white, middle-class America. “Indi-

Justice
When push comes to shove,
Ellen Schall *69 heads a
system that helps juvenile
offenders
Ellen Schall lives and works in New York
City, where she is responsible for all juvenile
offenders, those 16 and under, who are
arrested and detained by the city.
As commissioner of the Department of
Juvenile Justice under Mayor Ed Koch,
Schall works with a staff of some 600 to see
each of the 5,000 or so children brought in
annually from the city’s boroughs. The de­
partment operates two facilities, termed se­
cure and nonsecure homes, and a secure
transportation system.
When she took the job in 1983, Schall
was a veteran of more than six years as a
legal services attorney in New York and
three years as the deputy commissioner for
program services and legal policy under
then Commissioner of Corrections Ben
Ward (Ward is now police chief in New
York). Between those jobs she had worked
for the VERA Institute, crafting a settlement
for prisoners in the city jails that included
guidelines for everything from diet to due
process proceedings to separate housing of
prisoners based on sexual orientation.
Schall is experienced and smart about
New York’s indigent people and youth in
trouble, yet she remains an optimist. As she
puts it about the children, “I have a lot of
hope for them. And not a cynical bone in my
body, at least not about them. If I’ve become
at all cynical, it’s directed at the system, not
the children.”
System change was her reason for agreeAUGUST 1989

viduals and communities need to be empow­
ered to work together to heal their problems
from within. In this way, long-held feelings
of helplessness and victimization can be
transformed and children can grow up with
new perspectives about who they are and the
value of their culture; then they can take a
strong role in this diverse society.
“You can’t look at children without look­
ing at the cultural world in which they live,”
says this counselor who seeks to keep the
emotional connections of families intact and
to urge society in general to care more
deeply about children.
—Nancy Curran

ing to become commissioner, a job without
a great deal of security—“I could lose it in
three seconds flat,” she says cheerfully, not­
ing that her predecessor was fired by Mayor
Koch. She has held the appointment for six
years, however, and managed to effect
changes that have received acclaim from
many directions.
“I have learned how difficult it is to im­
plement change in a bureaucracy and how
large a responsibility it is to be the person in
complete charge,” she reflects. “None of this
has been easy, but I have loved it. Our dream
five years ago was that more kids would be
in what we call aftercare than in the facilities
themselves. We created aftercare so kids
would not fall through the cracks after
they’d been in the system and end up at an­
other agency; it works, it’s institutionalized
now.”
She has also turned the city’s secure
facility, Spofford, from a juvenile institution
that once had a terrible, even brutal reputa­
tion into a model facility for juveniles. As a
result of such innovation, the Department of
Juvenile Justice won the prestigious Ford
Foundation Harvard Award for excellence
in state and local government in 1986,

receiving a $100,000 prize. And on Aug. 22,
1989, on national public television, Schall
and the juvenile justice system in New York
will be featured in a film by writer Tom
Peters on excellence in the public sector.
Schall has carried her passion to serve less
fortunate members of society since her days
at Swarthmore. She describes that time in
uncharacteristically halting terms, her voice
laced with emotion. “Swarthmore, for me,
was incredibly intense, all enveloping, a rich,
strong experience. When I got to college, I
thought I’d be a teacher or social worker,
but I realized I wanted to effect wider social
changes. In those days law was seen as a way
to do that, a way to have power. I can tell
you this: I had absolutely no interest in
corporate law or lots of money.”
She went straight to law school at New
York University, working in a criminal law
clinic during her third year. That experience
led to her first job as a legal services attorney
representing 16-, 17-, and 18-year-olds for
$11,000 a year.
“I loved them,” she says simply, “and I
liked the sanctioned aggression of the court­
room. I found I was good at it, good at
advocacy. I was trying to give my clients the
best representation they could get, knowing
they could never pay for it. I thought then,
and I think now, that it’s very important to
provide indigent people with the best possi­
ble care.”
The hope she feels for New York’sjuvenile
offenders is rooted both in realism and in her
sense that individuals must be held account­
able for their behaviors. “It’s true,” she
admits, “that of the adult criminals in society,
most were criminals as juveniles. But it’s
equally true that most young offenders do
not become adult criminals—they get out of
the cycle.”
One thing Schall believes with complete
conviction is that people do know enough
about children today to make a difference in
their lives. “With juvenile offenders you
have to ask both how bad they are and how
sad they are,” she says firmly. “We hold fast
to the seriousness of acts and the need to
hold each kid accountable, but we remember
how hard it is for them.”
Schall will say little about her owirsuccess
unless it is in relation to the larger system.
£ “Yes, as an agency we have been successful,
jr but what is that when the problems figure so
I prominently in the larger society?” she asks
£ rhetorically. “If you want to help, you have
< to pick one piece of the pie and work on it
¡5 and take some satisfaction from changing
§ that piece.”
—Roger Williams

Ellen L. Schall ’69

21

The 1988 Alumni

W ho
A re
Did you ever wonder who you were, or are?
A factor of which subset, or of which set?
Have you quietly eyed that mirror on the
wall to ask how you measure up against
other members of a given society in terms
financial or political, in marital status or
family size, or in occupation, for example?
The College’s recently completed 1988
survey, which assimilated the data provided
by 10,546 alumni respondents (a remarkable
70 percent), may not tell you who is the
fairest of them all, but it might give you some
indication of your place in the Swarthmore
community.
If you’re a Swarthmore alumnus or alum­
na, then you may well be a member of the
most common income group defined in the
survey: those who make $40,000 to $59,999
each year.
Success in America is often measured in
financial terms, isn’t it?
If that’s the case, some 25 percent of you
are eminently successful, with incomes over
$60,000, while 5.2 percent of you earn more
than $125,000 each year.
What are the occupations you have come
to as Swarthmore alumni? With one notable
exception, the top-ten list reads like a litany
of salaried, white-collar endeavors: college
or university teacher (1,012 of a total of
1,606 teachers), physician (743), home­
maker (727), attorney (682), graduate stu­
dent (634), engineer (471), manager (360),
consultant (199), librarian (192), and editor
(182). (In a recent Jobs Rated Almanac list
of 230jobs rated from best to worst—based
on salary, stress, work environment, outlook,
security, and physical demands—five of
these, including engineer, homemaker, at­
torney, college professor, and physician,
ranked in the top half of the list.)
But Swarthmore alumni are nothing if not
diverse: There is one matchmaker, one inves­
tigator, an air traffic controller, a boat/
canalman, a bookbinder, a fisher, a fireman,
and two sculptors and weavers among those
who responded to the survey.
Consider, however, your undergraduate
influences in terms of career. If you were a
biology major, then chances are almost 3 to
1 that academic work influenced your career
more than did extracurricular activities. But
22

You

If y o u a re th e p aren t o f
1.5 ch ild ren , earn m ore
th a n $ 4 0 ,000 e a ch year,
a re m arried , m aintain
p o litic a l a ttitu d e s th a t
a re lib era l to m o d era te,
liv e in a m id -A tlan tic
sta te , an d w ill giv e
p rom isin g youn g p eo p le
sp e c ific d ir e c tio n s to
P arrish b ea ch , y o u are
th e q u in tessen tia l
S w arth m orean .

if you were an English major, chances are
only about 2 to 1 that academics led to a
career. For economics majors the ratio is 2
to 1; for engineers 2.6 to 1; for psychology
majors 2.4 to 1; and for history majors about
2 to 1.
Not surprisingly, extracurricular activities
of students in each decade have changed to
reflect the changing nature of alumni as the
century moved forward.
For undergraduates in the 1930s, the
most popular extracurricular activity was
the Hamburg Show. More than 13 percent
of the 1,880 graduates of that decade par­
ticipated in the show. In the 1940s partici­
pation dropped to 6.9 percent; in the ’50s the
figure climbed to 11.5 percent; in the ’60s it
reached an all-time high of 14.3 percent; and
in the ’70s participation declined again to
9.5 percent. The current decade offers no
Hamburg Show.
Perennial favorites through the decades,
however, include the Phoenix, the College
Chorus, Drama Board or Theatre, and radio
station WSRN.
Which decades appear most concerned
about the welfare of poor or troubled citi­
zens? If you guessed the 1960s and ’70s,
you’re right. In the 1960s both the Chester
Tutorial and Community Project rated
among the top ten nonacademic interests.
And in the ’70s, the Chester Tutorial was
again a favorite. In the 1980s, neither has
made the top-ten list.
The percentages of Young Friends in each
decade at Swarthmore also reflect the chang­
ing characteristics of Swarthmore students.
Seventy-two of the total 1,880 graduates of
the 1930s were members of Young Friends—
almost 4 percent. Of 2,446 graduates of the
1940s, 60 were Young Friends. That per­
centage declined with proceeding decades:
63 of 2,646 in the 1950s; 45 of 2,516 in the
1960s; 34 of 3,142 in the 1970s; and 42 of
the 3,135 alumni who graduated between
1980 and 1988.
A few other noteworthy patterns emerge
in the statistics of activities and interests:
Participation in Mortar Board, Book & Key,
Delta Upsilon (showing a new resurgence),
and Phi Kappa Psi went the way of the ’30s,
as did Gwimp/Kwink (the organization of
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

ni Survey offers some striking statistics to describe Swarthmoreans

team managers), which last made the topten list in the 1940s. The Outing Club was
popular in the 1950s, the Film Society made
its first appearance on the list in the 1970s,
and in the ’80s a new pragmatism about the
cost of education has been suggested by the
most popular student activity to date: the
annual phonathon, in which 10.6 percent of
the students have participated. In the 1980s,
for the first time too, participation in the
Women’s Athletic Association became a
prominent activity of Swarthmore students.
The personal and humanizing nature of
education at Swarthmore is reflected strong­
ly, perhaps, by some 86 percent of respon­
dents who indicated that a teacher, coach, or
staff person strongly influenced their lives.
Some 76 percent of respondents said they
would recommend or strongly recommend
the College to young students, while approxi­
mately 4 percent stated they would not
recommend (or strongly not recommend)
Swarthmore.
Among the most interesting statistics ob­
tained from the Alumni Survey are those
describing the personal status of alumni.
The 10,546 alumni who completed the
survey have brought into the world a total of
16,228 children. Almost 39 percent have no
children, however, while 24.7 percent have
two, 16.2 percent have three, and 10.4 per­
cent have one child. Fourteen of the alumni
respondents to the survey are the parents of
eight children each.
Of 10,514 alumni who identified their
marital status in the survey, more than 63
percent are married. Twenty-two percent
listed themselves as single, 7.4 percent as
divorced, 5.5 percent as widowed, and al­
most 1.2 percent as partnered.
Once and for all, perhaps, or at least until
next time, this survey allows Swarthmoreans
to measure themselves and their political
attitudes against the “liberal” stereotype of
the College community.
The surveyors have compared the current
political attitudes of alumni with their polit­
ical attitudes as undergraduates. For exam­
ple, 56 respondents called themselves apo­
litical when they were students. Today, only
15 remain in that self-described category;
two have become self-described conservaAUGUST 1989

tives, 17 are moderates, and 22 are liberals.
Student moderates have been a relatively
steady group: of 1,582, almost 1,100 remain
moderate, while 326 have become liberal,
and 154 are conservative. Those who con­
sidered themselves conservative as stu­
dents—a total of 904 or some 15 percent of
respondents to this category—have grown
less so. Six hundred remain conservative, but
189 now consider themselves moderate, 110
are liberal, and three categorize themselves
as radical right. Of two who called them­
selves radical right as students, one is now a
liberal.
Those 3,362 individuals whose attitudes

Top Ten Alum ni L ocations
Foreign

Domestic

Canada: 164
England: 109
France: 53
Japan: 45
W. Germany: 31
Switzerland: 25
Australia: 20
Italy: 18
Mexico: 17
Netherlands: 15

Pennsylvania: 2,494
New York: 2,120
California: 1,599
Massachusetts: 1,082
New Jersey: 911
Maryland: 770
Connecticut: 532
Virginia: 476
Illinois: 404
Florida: 403

Top Ten O ccupations
College Teacher: 1,012
Physician: 743
Homemaker: 727
Attorney: 682
Graduate Student: 634

The little Quaker match­
box: 2,383 o f the College's
15,027 living alumni are
married to alumni—
almost 16 percent This
compares with 11.5 per­
cent o f Pomona alumni,
and some 10 percent o f
those from Earlham.

Engineer: 471
Manager: 360
Consultant: 199
Librarian: 192
Editor: 182

have changed the least over time listed them­
selves as liberal undergraduates. Now, 100
have become conservative, 443 consider
themselves moderates, but 2,778 remain
liberal. Thirty-eight lean to the radical left,
and three are apolitical.
As for radicals, only 134 respondents
considered themselves members of the radi­
cal left when students. Today 91 remain so
by their own definition; 40 call themselves
liberal, and one each is self-defined as apo­
litical, radical right, and moderate.
This report on the College’s 1988 Alumni
Survey was prepared by Larry Ehmer ’82,
Lynn Schiller, and Roger Williams.
23

Reflection blended with
celebration marks
117th commencement
In a somewhat reflective
mood, many commencement
participants filed into the Scott
Outdoor Auditorium wearing
white armbands in sympathy
for the Chinese victims of the
Tiananmen Square massacre
the previous day.
Following a welcome to the
322 members of the Class of
1989 and their guests, Neil
Austrian ’61, chairman of the
Board of Managers, suggested
the traditional minute of
silence be used to remember
the fallen Chinese students.
But despite the sombre cir­
cumstances, the ceremonies
proceeded as a celebration of
the accomplishments made by
the graduating class.
“We honor individual
achievement in this ceremony
today,” said President David
Fraser, “but the greater pur­
pose to which our efforts are
aimed is collective. Human
knowledge advances by build­
ing on what has been con­
ceived before.
“Whether our species sur­
vives and our world flourishes
will be determined most likely
not by the virtuosity of a sin­
gle talented individual but by
the constructive cooperation
of many.”
President Fraser presented
honorary degrees to composer
George Crumb, Annenberg
Professor of Music at the Uni­
versity of Pennsylvania and
winner of the 1968 Pulitzer
Prize for his composition
“Echoes of Time and the
River;” Sara Lawrence Lightfoot ’66, professor of educa­
tion and social policy at Har­
vard University, known for
her research on the culture
and organization of schools;
David Conrad Page ’78, asso­
ciate member of the Whitehead Institute and an assistant
24

professor of biology at M.I.T.,
whose research team dis­
covered the gene that deter­
mines the sex of a human
embryo; Barbara Hall Partee
’61, professor of linguistics and
philosophy at the University
of Massachusetts, named this
year to the National Academy
of Sciences; and William
Poole ’59, Herbert H. Goldberger Professor of Economics
and director of the Center for
the Study of Financial Mar­
kets and Institutions at Brown
University and a former mem­
ber of the president’s Council
of Economic Advisors.
In other commencement
activities, John W. Kuyken­
dall, president of Davidson
College, delivered the Bacca­
laureate address. Barry
Schwartz, professor of psy­
chology, spoke at Last
Collection.
G eorge Crumb

“What constitutes a modern
sensibility in music and in the
other arts? It seems to me that
an expanded awareness o f
time and space is a dominant
elem ent.. . . In Mozart’s day,
composers normally would be
fam iliar with only the one or
two decades o f music that pre­
ceded their own periods.
Nowadays, we sense a close
philosophical and spiritual
contact with all the many cen­
turies o f music history. A liv­
ing composer might well be
influenced by music produced
during the medieval period,
where again the spirit o f
Frederic Chopin or Gustav
Mahler could in some curious*
cyclical fashion be reincar­
nated in our own time. We
tend now to see all o f the past
as somehow organically syn­
chronous with the present
moment. A nd o f course ele­
ments o f fo lk music, jazz,
popular music o f all kinds in­
volve periods, can coexist with

two alternative responses— in
the commitments o f fam ily and
in the commitments o f commu­
nity-building.
“Nurturing and sustaining
relationships in fam ilies— the
demands o f intimacy— are fa r
more complicated than the
controlled responsibilities o f
career. The complications lie
in the improvisational nature
o f fam ily life, in the depth o f
love that makes us vulnerable,

George Crumb

Or the ethnic musics o f Asia
and Africa or o f South Ameri­
ca. The beautiful and haunt­
ing sounds o f so-called exotic
musics can ring in our ears
ju st as vividly as a Bach
fugue. It’s as if in this moment
o f time all the world’s music
has become one music. And
ju st imagine the excitement
when earth people first make
contact with extraterrestrial
music. ’’
Sara Lawrence Lightfoot ’66

“Today I ask the question
o f you, ‘Where do you think
you will make your greatest
contributions?’ A nd I offer
you three alternative possibili­
ties. The first and most obvi­
ous response lies in the com­
mitment to a distinguished
career.. . . The career journey
seems like the most natural
extension o f the disciplined,
rigorous work you have done
here at Swarthmore Col­
lege. . . . But I think career
achievement is a relatively sin­
gular and simple path, at least
in its most caricatured form.
For me, the fa r more subtle
and complicated work fo r both
women and men is in the other

PHOTOS BY STEVEN GOLDBLATT ’67

C O LLEG E

these other influences. The
problem really fo r the presentday composer is the problem
o f synthesis: how to combine
diverse influences into a con­
vincing personal style. Exten­
sions o f space have to do with
our greater knowledge o f nonWestem cultures. Just con­
sider how many composers
have been influenced by the
classical musics o f Bali,
Japan, and India, fo r example.

Sara Lawrence Lightfoot ’66

in the daily grinding work that
seems to disappear, in the
mixed, conflicting emotions
that rise up in us like volca­
nos, in the endless forever
commitment that is required
I will always be a mother.
“The third alternative
equally hard to fashion is a
commitment to community­
building. In this age o f au­
tonomous pursuit and rampant
narcissism, the responsibilities
o f creating community are
often abandoned By commu­
nity-building I mean the broad
range—from neighborhood
efforts to global challenges,
from leading the Girl Scouts
and coaching Little League to
fighting poverty and homeless­
ness, from opposing the op­
pressive regime in South
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

T

H

Africa to working toward true
diversity at Swarthmore Col­
lege, from becoming a big
brother to a fatherless child to
directing a neighborhood the­
ater. These efforts involve per­
sonal risk and moral courage;
they are guided by the ethic o f
charity, by recognizing the
value and dignity o f all human
beings. ”
David Conrad Page ’78

“The particular field o f
microbiology in which I work
did not exist when I graduated
from Swarthmore. I did not
know when I entered medical
school that I would end up
pursuing a career in pure
basic research, and I certainly
didn’t have the foggiest idea
that human genetics would

E

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O

so I jumped ship, and basically
what I want to do is urge you
to be prepared to jum p ship.
“How can you be best pre­
pared to seize opportunities
that present themselves? Well,
as much as possible and fo r as
long as possible, I would urge
you to avoid a course o f action
designed purely to yield cre­
dentials or other form s o f se­
curity. Instead, pursue studies
or employment that are inher­
ently o f value and o f inherent
interest to you, and immerse
yourselffully in them. It’s only
when you are fully immersed,
fully invested, fully committed
that you are going to be able
even to perceive, let alone act
upon, the unexpected oppor­
tunities that will present them­
selves to you. ”

L

l

e

answer to every question can
be enormous and can be quite
independent o f whether the
questions have answers or not.
“The temptations are great,
they can easily catch one un­
guarded In activities from
grant-proposal writing to par­
enting, the urge to feel and ex­
press certainty is natural and
strong. It’s hard, fo r instance,
to make it clear that mother
knows best, which is true,
without suggesting that mother
knows everything. Within the
community o f dedicated schol­
ars that Swarthmore provides,
I know you’ve had a chance to
cultivate your curiosity, to ap­
preciate your awareness o f ig­
norance, and to fin d joy in the
knowledge that in the realm o f
ideas, we never run out o f new

Barbara Hall Partee ’61

Barbara Hall Partee ’61

David Conrad Page ’78

offer such an exciting and
dynamic niche fo r me. None­
theless, a series o f remarkable
opportunities, a succession o f
events, each o f which was ex­
ceedingly unlikely by itself,
resulted in my leaving behind
the clinical medicine that I
had come to love and fo r
which I had been preparing.
Quite unexpectedly and unpredictably I found myself with
the tools required fo r a fresh
approach to an old question in
biology: that is, as you’ve
heard, what determines
whether an embryo develops
into a male or a female. And
AUGUST 1989

“My charge to you is this:
Stand up fo r your uncertainty,
trust your hesitations, and
when you think the answer to
some uncertain question is not
known, say so and be pre­
pared to argue so with vigor.
Human frailty is such that
those who offer certainty have
a great rhetorical advantage.
It takes confidence and cour­
age to admit ignorance and
embrace uncertainty. A s a stu­
dent, it’s hard, as you know.
A s a teacher, it’s even harder
but terribly important, since
sharing your attitude toward
learning matters more than
displaying your knowledge.
A nd outside o f academia, be
extra vigilant if you ever get
the status o f ‘expert’ in some
area. The pressures to have an

William Poole VII ’59

frontiers to explore and new
questions to ask. ”
W illiam Poole VII ’59

“Swarthmore teaches toler­
ance that goes beyond toler­
ance with a positive encour­
agement to take on sacred
cows. A nd since I am a prod­
uct o f Swarthmore, let me
[take] some outrageous stabs
at several sacred cows that
provide examples o f weak
social character.
“First, helping thy neighbor
is properly considered an ele­
ment o f fine character in an
individual, but it’s a dangerous
principle fo r government. Fed­
eral disaster insurance urges
people to build on vulnerable

G

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coastal beaches and floodplains.
“Second, as a monetary
economist, I may as well go
after the money interest. The
government has administered
the deposit insurance system
in such a way as to provide
the largest insurance subsidies
to the weakest banks and
S & L ’s. This system has en­
couraged extensive risk-taking
and outright fraud.

“Third, the military indus­
trial complex is a safe target
around here, but not in the
communities with military
bases and companies building
military hardware. In the
name o f saving jobs, we main­
tain bases and procurement
programs we do not need
“I said before that we judge
character, in part, by the way
mistakes are handled Con­
gress is now working on the
deposit insurance mess simply
because the issue has become
too expensive to ignore. A s I
watch, I am hopeful on this
issue and all others, but not
confident Congress and the
rest o f us as citizens neglect
rather than correct many pub­
lic policy mistakes. Public
choice theory explains that we
need some fundamental struc­
tural reforms to deal with
these problems. We need to
change the system. Perhaps
social science can make a dif­
ference. I think so. ”
25

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PHOTOS BY BRUCE REEDY '68

Senior class speaker
Brendan P. Kelly: “A ll o f
us in the Class o f 1989,1
dare say, are literate. We
read faster and with
greater comprehension
than we did fo u r years ago,
and we write with more
efficiency and improved
clarity. We hope. We can
also give a passable pre­
sentation o f a reading after
only reading the introduc­
tion and conclusion. And
we can say absolutely
nothing in two to twelve
carefully worded pages.
The point is that we leave
Swarthmore as better com­
municators, and it is these
reading, writing, and verbal
skills that will be preserved
over a long period o f time. ”

Authors Judith Livant Rapoport ’55 (above right), Christopher LehmannHaupt ’56, and Sue Gilbert Hubbell Sieverts ’56 (below center) welcome
visitors to the Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C.

Book fair
A group of Swarthmore
authors, an editor, and a pub­
lisher greeted more than 150
alumni recently at the first
(annual) book fair for Swarth­
more authors held in Wash­
ington, D.C.
On hand were writer and
editor Charles Sullivan ’55
(America in Poetry)', publisher
Paul Gottlieb ’56 (president,
Harry Abrams, Inc.); and
authors Judith Livant Rapo­
port ’55 (The Boy Who
Couldn’t Stop Washing), Sue
Hubbell ’56 (A Country
Year), Christopher LehmannHaupt ’56 (Me and DiMaggio), Candida Fraze ’67
(Renifleur’s Daughter), Peggy
Bebie Thomson ’43 (Keepers
and Creatures at the National
Zoo), Neil A. Holtzman ’55
(Proceed with Caution: Pre­
dicting Genetics R isks in the
Recombinant DNA Era), Bar­
bara Starfield ’54 (The Effec­
tiveness o f Medical Care),
Tom Simkin ’55 (Global Volcanism 1975-85), and Ralph
Smith ’51 (Smart House).
Other Swarthmore authors
not present were featured in a
bookstore display.
A second book fair is
planned in 1990.

Sartorially honoring Professor David Bowler, the graduating engineers donned the appropriate headgear to say
goodbye— the graduates to begin their careers and Bowler to end his, after teaching at the College fo r 32 years.

26

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

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AHNON LONG

Black and Hispanic
alumni return for a
special weekend
For more than 10 years the
Black Cultural Center has
sponsored an annual Black
Alumni Weekend. This year,
however, as a result of the
newly formed Hispanic Orga­
nization for Latin Awareness
(HOLA), Hispanic alumni
were also invited to the week­
end celebration, held March
31 to April 2. More than 70
black and Hispanic alumni
from various parts of the
country came to Swarthmore
for programs designed to re­
acquaint them with the cam­
pus and each other. Weekend
coordinators were Carolyn
Mitchell ’74, Freeman Palmer
’79, and Gloria Thomas
Walker ’85. This weekend
was also Minority Prospective
Weekend, where black and
Hispanic applicants were in­
vited to experience a “typical”
weekend at the College.
Activities began Friday eve­
ning with a joint reception
with the Alumni Council. On
Saturday morning alumni and
students listened to two can­
did and thoughtful student
panels on the alcohol policy
and multicultural relations at
Swarthmore, prior to a lun­

LEANDRE JACKSON 7 5

cheon sponsored by the
Career Planning and Place­
ment Office. Students, alumni,
and prospective freshmen then
worked off their academic

and professional stress with
some basketball and volleyball
in the afternoon. An informal
dinner at Sharpies and the
annual spring A Cappella
Jamboree in Lang Concert
Hall began the evening, which
was capped by a party at the
Black Cultural Center.
On Sunday more than 35
black alumni representing a
class span of 20 years took
part in a reunion concert of
the Swarthmore College Gos­
pel Choir. The concert, held at
the Friends Meeting House
and directed by Freeman
Palmer, was especially memo­
rable because of the inclusion
of two founding members of
the choir, Cheryl Sanders ’74
and recording artist Vaneese
Thomas ’74. The current
Swarthmore College Gospel
Choir also provided fine selec­
tions.
Black and Hispanic alumni

Top, from the le ft Leandre
Jackson 75, Chip Boykin 77,
Bill K irk 74, Alan Symonette
76, Derrick Gibbs 76, a n d A l
Brown 76; above, Terry White
’80 at the reunion concert o f the
Swarthmore College Gospel
Choir; left, Vaneese Thomas 74
with Freeman Palmer 79.

and students reported that pro­
spective minority students left
with an enthusiastic feeling
about the College. Gloria
Thomas Walker, assistant
dean of admissions and direc­
tor of minority recruitment,
reported that of the 29 black
students and 10 Hispanic stu­
dents entering the freshman
class this fall, 13 attended the
weekend. Planning has al­
ready begun for another Black
and Hispanic Alumni/Prospective Weekend, to be held
March 30-April 1, 1990.
—Freeman Palmer and
Gloria Thomas Walker

PHOTO BY BETH SILVERBERG '89

AUGUST 1989

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Four Retire
Four professors, one each
from the departments of Engi­
neering, Political Science,
Music, and Religion, retired
this spring.
Howard N. and Ada J.
Eavenson Professor of Electri­
cal Engineering David L.
Bowler retired after 32 years
on the faculty. Bowler studied
at Bucknell University, M.I.T.,
and Princeton and joined the
faculty in 1957 as an assistant
professor. In 1973 he was
made full professor. At
Swarthmore he has served as
chair of the Engineering
Department and chair of the
Division of the Natural
Sciences and Engineering.
While at the College, he
taught courses in electronic
engineering and designed and
taught a new PDC course,
Digital World.
Bowler is a member of the
Swarthmore Borough Council
and will also remain active in
the Swarthmore Presbyterian
Church.
His students said goodbye
in their own special way, as
the engineering majors of the
Class of 1989 received their
degrees wearing bowler hats.
Professor of Political Sci­
ence Charles E. Gilbert retired
after 35 years on the faculty
and five years as provost. He
arrived in 1953 to take over a
one-year instructor’s position.
In 1955, after a year at Oberlin, he returned as assistant
professor of political science.
In 1967 he was made full pro­
fessor, and in 1969 he became
the College’s first provost.
After his provostship ended in
1974, he returned to teaching.
Gilbert received a B.A.
from Haverford and a Ph.D.
from Northwestern University.
While at Swarthmore he
earned the nickname “Iron
Man” for his willingness to
put in long hours and hard
work. He set standards on
campus, in both the faculty
and administration, for his
high level of ethics and quality
of work. According to a de28

Top to bottom: Retiring Professors
David L. Bowler (engineering),
Charles E. Gilbert (political
science), Peter Gram Swing
(music), and P. Linwood Urban,
Jr. (religion), p h o t o s b y k a r r y k a l is h

partmental colleague, “He’s
always guided by what he
thinks is the right thing to
do.”
Daniel Underhill Professor
of Music and Director of
Chorus Peter Gram Swing
retired after 34 years at the College. He arrived in 1955
having received a B.A. and an
M.A. from Harvard, and in
1958 he was made the first
chair of the Department of
Music. In 1969 he earned a
Ph.D. from the University of
Chicago.
PGS, as he is known to

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students around campus, was
often seen riding his bicycle
to work. While at Swarth­
more he worked with Peter
Schickele ’57 (P.D.Q. Bach)
to produce memorable con­
certs of the Swarthmore Col­
lege Chorus and to make a
record on the Vanguard labek
He was the first director to
take the chorus to the Acad­
emy of Music to perform with
the Philadelphia Orchestra.
In spite of his many
achievements, Swing seems
most proud of his wife, Eliza­
beth. After raising three chil­
dren, she earned a doctorate in
education and was recently
made full professor at St. Jo­
seph’s University in Philadel­
phia. Next year the Swings
will be in Europe on her Fulbright Senior Research award.
Charles and Harriet Cox
McDowell Professor of Reli­
gion P. Linwood Urban, Jr.,
retired after 32 years at
Swarthmore. He received an
undergraduate degree from
Princeton and S.T.B., S.T.M.,
and D.Th. degrees from Gen­
eral Theological Seminary.
While at Swarthmore
Urban taught a wide range of
courses in Western religious
thought, spanning periods
from Constantine to Martin
Luther King, Jr. Known
around campus for his breadth

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of subject matter, Urban did
not limit his teaching to West­
ern religions. He also taught a
seminar in non-Western
thought that included archaic
and classical Indian traditions.
Along with numerous articles
and reviews, Urban published
two books while at Swarth­
more, A Short History o f
Christian Thought (Oxford
University Press) and The
Power o f God: Omnipotence
and Evil with Douglas Walton
(Oxford University Press,
1978).
According to department
chair Donald Swearer, who is
currently looking for Urban’s
replacement, “They just don’t
come with such breadth any
more.”
—Katie Donnelly ’89

Fall Festival/
Homecoming 1989
Reserve Oct. 7 for a day of
sports events, campus tours,
entertainment, a festival of
foods, or just plain whimsy.
Enjoy an informal concert by
alumni of three recent a cappella groups. Mid-Atlantic
alumni and parents will be
mailed a program. For more
information, write the Alumni
Relations Office, Swarthmore
College, Swarthmore, PA
19081 or phone (215) 3288402.
BETH SILVERBERG '89

right to*
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InA\ i

#A

Some 200 Swarthmoreans—faculty, staff, and students— traveled to the
Women’s Equality March in Washington, D.C., last April, joining more
than 300,000 marchers to support pro-choice in the debate on abortion.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

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Wimbledon or bust
(and other sporting
fancies)
M en’s Tennis (12-9): The
men’s racketeers once more
stormed through Division III
competition but lost the
national crown in the final
against the University of Cali­
fornia at Santa Cruz. Next
year’s team will miss only one
player, Lindsay Williams ’89,
while keeping Andy Mouer
’90 (15th in the nation) and
returning juniors Steve Tignor
(18th), Tom Cantine, and
Andy Dailey. California, here
we come!

Women’s Tennis (12-6):
The Garnet women served up
an amazing season on the
courts. At the MAC tourna­
ment, for the first time since
1982, the team swept both the
semifinals and the finals, 9-0.
Clinching a 7th-place ranking
among 137 Division III teams
(with a 9-1 division record),
the young Garnet now look to
garner another MAC crown
next year.
M en’s Track and Field
(0-5-1): Personal bests were
the measure of success as sev­
eral stars of the winter track
season continued to perform
well al fresco. Returning
junior decathlete Jamey
Clarke finished an unparal­
leled sixth at the Division III
nationals. The team is strongly
set to pull out a winning
record next year.
Women’s Track and Field
(2-4): With a victory over
arch rival Haverford, 81-50,
the women salvaged a sweet
triumph in a season of ups
and downs. Led by captain
Jody Lathwell ’89, the women
displayed amazing versatility
throughout the year. Their
flexibility and youth should
pay off in the 1990s.
AUGUST 1989

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Baseball (13-16-1): Coach
Ernie Prudente led the Sultans
of Swat to another season of
drama, victory, and several
close losses. Theirs wasn’t
quite a “field of dreams,” but
Swarthmore’s sluggers put to­
gether a brilliant second half
of a season (9-5-1), including
a 7-1 trouncing of Haverford
and a tie against Johns Hop­
kins, the powerhouse of the
MAC division, to end the
year.
Softball (7-8-1): The Gar­
net women once more proved
that “diamonds are a woman’s
[sic] best friend,” as a hard­
hitting, hard-throwing season
of softball left them just below
the .500 mark for the first
time in a while. The team
missed ace pitcher Barb
Schaefer ’90, who was study­
ing abroad, but Paige Levin
’90 sparkled as her replace­
ment.

Home sweet home
Are you tired of overpriced
hotels and look-alike, imper­
sonal motels? Would you pre­
fer to spend a night or two in
the home of a fellow Swarthmorean? You might if you
could save money and if some
of the (modest) charges went
to the Alumni Fund. The
Alumni Council hopes to give
you that opportunity.
The Alumni Council is con­
sidering publishing a directory
of Swarthmore people who
are willing to accommodate
traveling Swarthmoreans in
their homes. Travelers would
make arrangements directly
with hosts and pay the host a
fee significantly below com­
mercial rates. The host would
forward all or part of the fee
to the Alumni Fund.
Hosts could set any house
rules they might desire, includ­
ing no pets, no alcohol, or no
children, and they would have
the right to refuse any request
for accommodations at any
time.
Other colleges and organi-

!

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Goif (12-20): The un­
daunted drivers of the Garnet
golf team hit plenty of fair­
ways and quite a few greens,
but too few to keep their rec­
ord out of the rough. The
team unfortunately will be
losing the smooth swings of
graduating seniors captain
Dan Bock (a 73 at Skyview!)

and Tom Lee. Considering the
raw potential of remaining
players, however, next season
looks to be a definite birdie
opportunity.
Men’s Lacrosse (4-10):
After losing their opening
MAC matchup against Drew,
the Garnet men stood at 1-7
on the year and seemed
headed for a dismal season.
But they split the remaining
matches of the season, win­
ning the last three MAC
matches against rivals Haver­
ford, Fairleigh DickinsonMadison, and Widener.
Women’s Lacrosse (7-9):
After starting out the season
with three straight tallies, the
Garnet women ran into some
tough competition (they still
finished at 3-3 in the divi­
sion). The defensive strong­
hold was again led by Robin
Shiels ’89.
— Togo Travalia ’88

zations with similar programs
report great success. Good will
is generated for the sponsors,
money is raised for the col­
lege, and travelers and hosts
enjoy getting together.
The Alumni Council will
compile and produce the
directory if there is enough
interest in the project. Council
now needs a rough idea of the
number of people willing to
be hosts. We ask those who

are interested to fill in the
form below and mail it to the
address indicated. Doing so
implies no obligation, but
please don’t ignore it if you
think you would like to par­
ticipate. With a significant
show of support by potential
hosts, the Council can go
ahead and publish the
Directory fo r Traveling
Swarthmoreans.
— Christopher Kennedy ’54

;—
-- -----------------------.------------------------------------- 1
I am interested in being host to traveling Swarthmoreans. I under­
stand that returning this form is not a commitment and that the
program will allow me to set conditions for guests and to accept
guests only when convenient for me.
PLEASE PRINT
Name
Street address
Town or city _
State_______
Phone numbers:
W ork________
Hom e________

ZIP
Mail to: Swarthmore Travel
c/o Christopher Kennedy
Bristol Road
HC 61, Box 124
Damariscotta, Maine 04543

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LETTERS
BLACK and W HITE
TO THE EDITOR:
I was surprised and dismayed to read that
white and black students at Swarthmore
seem to have more problems relating to each
other than they do in other, presumably less
favorable, milieus. There’s a great deal of
complicated psychologizing going on, but I
don’t hear any echoes of the basic Quaker
principles the College is founded upon.
There is that of God in every man; therefore
all men are brothers (OK, and sisters). Have
the students lost all contact with the Meeting
and what it stands for? Perhaps some sessions
of shared silent worship would provide an
atmosphere of real love and trust. The brains
are well taken care of; it’s the hearts that
need an opportunity to reach out.
LOUISE ZIMMERMAN FORSCHER ’44
Bedford, N.Y.
TO THE EDITOR:
We enjoyed your article on Blue Babe in
the April issue of the Bulletin very much.
However, we had considerable difficulty
understanding what your “A Day at the
Races” was all about.
I assume an African-American is someone
who is, or whose parents are, from Africa.
Yet the conversation never mentions Africa
or African culture. The only references by
the “African-American” students are to
being “black”___
ELIZABETH C. GERHARDT ’54
Saratoga, Wyo.
Editor’s note: In response to an editor’s
letter o f explanation, Elizabeth Gerhardt
offered the following rhyme:
The Perplexed Prefixed American
(On the implications o f references such as
.. Asian Americans, Irish Americans,
Native Americans, or any other Am ericans”)
Egad, now I’m an “any other,”
Born of an ethnic mixed-up mother.
Don’t tell Dad about this shocker;
He’d die if you called him a Plymouth Rocker.
What do you do with an Eskimo?
Is he a “Native from as far north as you can
go?”
Do you have to know where he’s indiginal
To describe a “born in Australia, moved to
New Zealand,
Emigrated to Britain and then to America
Aboriginal”?
When the West was settled, the word was
mum
On a fellow’s name or where he came from
And while I’m at it, it’s none of your affair
If Grandpa was a horse thief from County
Clare.
What’s a black to do if he has white cousins,
Tack on continents and countries by the
dozens?

30

And what about our Cajuns, God bless their
cookin’?
They mixed up French, Canadian, Indian,
black and
who-knows-what-else while you weren’t
lookin’.
I mourn for the paper that’s being used up
to list a man’s countries since his dad was a
pup,
And for computers out of space and slowing
down
If some wag wants to add everyone’s
hometown.
Seriously, I don’t like the implication
Of allegiance to an origin, continent, or nation.
If things in the rest of the world get hot,
America will be the only home you’ve got.
So issue us our prefixes and pedigrees;
If you run out of paper, cut down more trees.
I’ve no chip on my shoulder and no axe to
grind,
So I’ll just stay “American,” if you don’t mind.

BACKGROUND
TO THE EDITOR:
I was very pleased with the report in the
April Bulletin of my talk last fall to Swarth­
more alumni and scientists. I thank you for
all the work that you and your colleagues
did on it.
Readers who saw the photograph (pages
6-7) may be interested to know that the
person in the background is Debra M.
Leibold ’78, a postdoctoral fellow in my lab
at the National Institutes of Health. She
holds both an M.D. from the University of
Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a
Ph.D. in molecular biology, also from the
University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Leibold is one of the younger genera­
tion of exceptional Swarthmore scientists
who view both arts and sciences as integral
parts of a whole body of knowledge.
MAXINE FRANK SINGER ’52
President
Carnegie Institution of Washington
Washington, D.C.

FAMILY TIES
TO THE EDITOR:
I’ve just finished reading the latest Swarth­
more Alum ni Bulletin and am moved to
write you a fan letter. I was intrigued and
amused by the, poem at the end and thought
that you might be interested to find out a
little about Esther T. Moore, who snagged
the learned William Hyde Appleton.
There is some connection between her
name and mine—she is one of the chain of
Esther-Hadassah-Esthers in which I am the
last. I broke the chain by naming my daugh­
ters Emily and Hannah, and Mother forgave
me, realizing that Hadassah is a bit of a bur­

den in this day and age.
Esther Townsend Moore was born in
1853, much the youngest child of Hadassah
Joanna Townsend Moore and Robert Row­
land Moore. Esther was among the first class
to graduate from the new Swarthmore Col­
lege in 1873, the first of her family to attend
college. The family eventually lived in Sandy
Spring, Md., at the farm, Plainfield, from
which several generations of future Moores
also went to Swarthmore. Sandy Spring was
full of Stablers; perhaps the poet Nora Leland Stabler was a relation or at least neigh­
bor.
As Esther and William had no children,
the Hadassah name got passed down to her
great-niece. That was my mother; then I got
the Esther. I can remember being taken to
see Esther Moore Appleton after William
had died, and my recollection is that she was
living in an apartment in downtown Phila­
delphia near where the Friends Center is
now. Apparently the professor had been
quite gaga in his old age and she had a very
difficult time, but Mother had continued to
see her often. She left me six handsome silver
forks from her wedding silver, which remind
me of the name connection going back to
the original Esther Hallett, born in 1778.
ESTHER LEEDS COOPERMAN ’48
Easton, Md.
Editor’s note: Esther Cooperman’s mother
was Hadassah Moore Leeds Holcombe, who
was a member o f the Board o f Managers
from 1938 until her death in 1978. Esther
Cooperman herself was an alumni member
o f the Board from 1979-1982.

FO UN D IN G M O THERS
TO THE EDITOR:
“While Swarthmore’s founding fathers
were engaged in securing a charter for their
new college in 1864, its third president was
completing an undergraduate degree at Har­
vard.” (“A Slender Moment in 125 Years,”
Swarthmore College Bulletin, April 1989)
Please issue a correction or explanation in
the next issue of the magazine—my idea of
the history of Swarthmore includes the
women involved in its founding as well as
the men.
You may want to make reference in the
magazine to the source I checked before
writing: Richard J. Walton’s Swarthmore
College: A n Informal History, published by
the College in 1986 (pp. 1-7).
ALICIA HIGHAM ’88
Pennington, N.J.
Editor’s note: There are at least one dozen
women on the list o f the committee that
solicited subscriptions fo r the establishment
o f Swarthmore College. Thanks fo r keeping
us on our toes.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Way To Go!
It was after final exams, before commencement, that I
came upon a group of mostly seniors who, still driven
by an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, had volun­
tarily set up this ad hoc scientific research program on
the lawn in front of Parrish. Objective: to study the
effect of polyurethane and gravity on the human condi­
tion in the presence of water and laughter. Conclusion:
The liberal arts are alive and well at Swarthmore.
—Bob Wood

KB
The boys of summer
p8ff (back row from left):
wm Duane Seward ’90 and
W 1989 classmates Bob
F McCann, Kevin Hall,
f Jay Peichel, Jim Gunshenan, Robert Barker,
Brian Jones, and (kneel­
ing) Mark Selverian,
Kevin Stiroh.

A very special way
to see the world—
with Swarthmore
alumni as your
traveling companions
and a faculty member
as your guide

Voyage to Classical Lands: Anatolia and the Aegean
M ay 3 to 14,1990
The Greeks implanted along the shores of Anatolia and the
offshore islands some of the most splendid cities to survive from
antiquity. This fascinating peninsula, balanced between East
and West, was at center stage for the ebb and flow of diverse
cultures. Istanbul, the center of the great Byzantine civilization,
is located in a natural setting of extraordinary beauty. Join
Professor Helen North of the Department of Classics in
exploring this remarkably unspoiled region on the Illiria ,
reserved for Swarthmoreans and their guests.

Alumni Office, Swarthmore College
Swarthmore, PA 19081
Please send me details on Voyage to Classical Lands.
Name
Address.

3797LB. a
05-21-flß

Telephone.

Yl

.Class.