Ethical Culture Fieldston School

Ethical Culture Fieldston School
File:ECFS SunLogo.jpg Fiat lux Let there be light
Address
33 Central Park West New York City, New York 10023 United States
Coordinates
Information
Type	Private Day School
Established	1878
Founder	Felix Adler
Head of school	Joe Algrant
Grades	Pre-K through 12
Enrollment	Approx. 1,600
Color(s)	PMS 021 orange
Mascot	Eagle
Accreditation	National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS)
Newspaper	Fieldston News
Yearbook	Fieldglass
Other publications	Fieldston News The Fieldston LP, Fieldston Lit Mag, Middle School News, Dope Ink Prints, The Hill Chronicle, Inklings
Song	"Fieldston Lower School" (Fieldston Lower School) "It's the Feeling Inside" (Ethical Culture) "I'm On My Way" (Middle School) "Iam Canamus" (Upper School)
Website	www.ecfs.org

Ethical Culture Fieldston School (ECFS), also referred to as Fieldston, is a private independent school in New York City. The school is a member of the Ivy Preparatory School League. The school serves approximately 1,700 students with 480 faculty and staff. Joe Algrant is the Head of School.

The school consists of four divisions: Ethical Culture, Fieldston Lower, Fieldston Middle, and Fieldston Upper. Ethical Culture, located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Fieldston Lower, located on the Fieldston campus in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, serve Pre-K through 5th grade. The two lower schools feed into Fieldston Middle (6th–8th grades) and Fieldston Upper (9th–12th grades)—also located on the Fieldston campus in Riverdale. Ethical Culture is headed by Principal Rob Cousins, Fieldston Lower is headed by Principal Joe McCauley, Fieldston Middle is headed by Principal Jonathan Alschuler, and Fieldston Upper is headed by Principal Stacey Bobo. Tuition and fees for ECFS were $55,510 for the 2020–2021 school year, and are increasing to $63,000 for the 2022-2023 school year.

History

File:301 WORKINGMEN'S SCHOOL, SOCIETY FOR ETHICAL CULTURE, 54 WEST 54TH STREET.jpg

Workingmens school, in 1893

Ethical Culture in New York City

Felix Adler, circa 1913

The school opened in 1878 as a free kindergarten, founded by Felix Adler at the age of 24. In 1880, elementary grades were added, and the school was then called the Workingman's School. At that time, the idea that the children of the poor should be educated was innovative. By 1890 the school's academic reputation encouraged many more wealthy parents to seek it out, and the school was expanded to accommodate the upper-class as well, and began charging tuition; in 1895 the name changed to "The Ethical Culture School", and in 1903 the New York Society for Ethical Culture became its sponsor. Fieldston awards over $15 million in tuition-based financial aid to 22% of the student body.

The school moved into its Manhattan building at 33 Central Park West in 1904. The entire school was located in that building until 1928 when the high school division (Fieldston) moved to its 18-acre (73,000 m²) campus on Fieldston Road in the Fieldston section of Riverdale; the Manhattan branch of the Lower School remained there, and in 1932 a second Lower School was opened on the Riverdale campus. In 2007, a new middle school was opened on the same Riverdale campus, for the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades.

One of the early faculty members was American sociologist Lewis Hine.

In March 1970, about 60 students occupied the administration building in protest to demand that more black and Puerto Rican students be admitted to the school. They also aimed to have a greater number of minority courses, teachers, advisors, employees. The school agreed to some of the student demands.

Recent developments

Beginning in 2015, the school began separating children for mandatory weekly "affinity group" meetings based on their self-identified race, to discuss issues of race and bias. The experimental program met with controversy from Fieldston parents, many of whom compared the meetings to segregation.

In February 2019, a video that is believed to be created years previously was discovered by administrators after it was shared during a dispute between students. The students in the video use derogatory and racist language. Students involved who were still enrolled in the school were punished; however, some 100 students who thought the actions were not enough staged a sit-in reminiscent of the 1970 protest. The students presented the administrators with twenty demands that included increased racial bias training, more faculty of color, the recruitment of more students of color, and a required ethnic studies course; the students' demands were agreed to and are planned to be implemented over the course of 2–3 years.

File:WTM NewYorkDolls 002.jpg

Fieldston Middle

The school also attracted attention in November 2019 after it hosted a guest speaker who compared the Israeli treatment of Palestinians to the Holocaust, a statement which was denounced by many as antisemitic, including two Reform Jewish rabbis who spoke at the school in the wake of the controversy and subsequently published a New York Times editorial about the incident. The school's response to the controversy was sharply criticized as being inadequate and itself antisemitic by many parents of Fieldston students. U.S. Congressmen Josh Gottheimer and Max Rose also wrote its administrators condemning the incident. In January 2020, the school fired a Jewish teacher who posted tweets opposing the invitation of two speakers on anti-Semitism because they were, according to him, "white" and Zionists. There were parents who asked for the teacher's reinstatement.

Academics

Fieldston dropped its participation in the Advanced Placement Program in 2002 to give its faculty the freedom to offer more innovative, challenging, and thought-provoking material. Students can take AP exams, but the school no longer officially sponsors such courses. While there was some concern that college admissions could be negatively affected, Fieldston's college office worked closely with admissions officers of schools across the country to explain the change and to assure that its students would be evaluated on the quality of its courses, even without the AP designation.

Special programs

• Before School and After School – at the two Lower schools, and after school in the Middle School
• Fieldston Enrichment Program (FEP) – tutoring program for selected public school students in preparation of public and private high school entrance exams and requirements
• Young Dancemakers Company – summer dance program
• City Semester – an interdisciplinary experiential-education based semester program for students in their junior year focusing on New York City.
• STS (Students Teaching Students) – a specialized ethics program in which Form V & Form VI students (juniors and seniors) teach middle school students. This curriculum covers a wide range of topics including community norms, relationships, decision-making, navigating choices encountered in middle and high school situations (e.g., around social media, sex, drugs, alcohol, and bullying).
• Bridge to Bridge - a mentoring program for students of color in the upper school to mentor middle schoolers of color.

Peer schools

Ethical Culture Fieldston is a part of the Ivy Preparatory School League, with many of New York City's elite private schools. The three high schools Fieldston, Riverdale, and Horace Mann together are known as the "Hill schools," as all three are located within a short walking distance of each other in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, on a hilly area above Van Cortlandt Park. The three are also involved in inter-school sports rivalry.

Notable alumni and former students

Among its many notable alumni and former students are:

• A. G. Sulzberger – the chairman of The New York Times Company and the publisher of The New York Times
• Jill Abramson – former executive editor of The New York Times
• Clifford Alexander Jr. – former Secretary of the Army
• George J. Ames - former Lazard executive
• Joseph Amiel – author
• Diane Arbus – photographer
• Leon Black – financier, Apollo Management and Drexel Burnham Lambert
• Richard D. Brown – historian of colonial and revolutionary-era America; professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut
• Nancy Cantor – chancellor, Syracuse University
• Roy Cohn – attorney
• Sofia Coppola – Oscar-winning writer/director (attended middle school at Fieldston)
• Andrew Delbanco – critic and author. Director, American studies, Columbia University
• Nicholas Delbanco – novelist
• David Denby – film critic, The New Yorker
• Ralph de Toledano – author
• Glen de Vries – American entrepreneur in the field of medical science and pharmacology
• Joseph Leo Doob – mathematician
• Douglas Durst – real estate magnate
• John Friedman – film producer, Hotel Terminus, winner of 1988 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature
• Rita Gam – film actress
• Jim Gardner – longtime WPVI-TV news anchor
• Alan Gilbert – music director of the New York Philharmonic
• Ailes Gilmour – dancer
• Leonie Gilmour – educator and writer
• Rob Glaser – internet pioneer
• Matt Goldman, performance artist. Co-founder, Blue Man Group
• Maggie Haberman – The New York Times political reporter
• Judith Lewis Herman— psychiatrist
• Susie Linfield - author, critic, editor and NYU Professor
• Charles Herman-Wurmfeld – film director
• Robert Jervis – political scientist. Adlai E. Stevenson Professor, Columbia University
• Elizabeth Jonas (neurologist) – physician, neuroscientist, and professor, Yale School of Medicine
• Rodney Jones – jazz guitarist
• Jeffrey Katzenberg – film producer, media mogul
• Yosuke Kawasaki – violinist
• Sinah Estelle Kelley – chemist
• William Melvin Kelley – author (A Different Drummer, Dunfords Travels Everywhere)
• Charlie King – New York civic leader and politician
• Arthur Kinoy – civil rights lawyer
• Ernest Kinoy – screenwriter
• Walter Koenig – actor
• Joseph Kraft – public affairs columnist
• Louise Lasser – actress
• Christopher Lehmann-Haupt – author, The New York Times book reviewer
• Sean Ono Lennon – musician (did not graduate from Fieldston)
• Eda LeShan – child psychologist and author
• Carl P. Leubsdorf – Washington bureau chief, Dallas Morning News
• Doug Liman – film director (Bourne Identity, Mr. & Mrs. Smith)
• Andrew Litton – conductor, New York City Ballet
• Beulah Livingstone – motion picture publicist
• Douglas Lowenstein – president and CEO of Private Equity Council, founder and former president of Entertainment Software Association
• Douglas Lowy – cancer biologist; director of U.S. National Cancer Institute
• Staughton Lynd – peace activist and civil rights activist
• Jeffrey Lyons – film critic, WNBC-TV, New York City
• Mark A. Michaels- author and sexuality educator
• Bob Marshall – conservationist, writer, and the founder of The Wilderness Society
• Andy Marvel – award-winning musician
• Grace M. Mayer – curator at The Museum of the City of New York and The Museum of Modern Art
• Jane Mayer – best selling author, investigative journalist, The New Yorker
• Zach McGowan - actor
• Marguerita Mergentime – industrial designer
• Nicholas Meyer – film director
• Jo Mielziner – stage designer
• Olivette Miller – jazz harpist
• Marvin Minsky – pioneer in artificial intelligence at MIT
• Tim Minton – television journalist and media executive
• Alfred Mirsky – cell biologist
• Jeannette Mirsky – writer
• Frederic S. Mishkin – governor of the Federal Reserve Board
• Robert M. Morgenthau – retired New York County District Attorney
• Howard Nemerov – former United States Poet Laureate
• Gabriel Olds – actor, writer
• J. Robert Oppenheimer – physicist, Scientific Director of the Manhattan Project, "Father of the Atomic Bomb"
• Eleanor Pepper – architect, interior designer
• Emanuel R. Piore – chief scientist of IBM, and electrical engineering pioneer
• Belva Plain – author
• Susan Poser - President of Hofstra University
• Letty Cottin Pogrebin – author
• Edward R. Pressman – film producer
• Richard Ravitch – business and civic leader
• Nancy Reiner - graduating as Nancy Russek, cover artist of Jimi Hendrix album The Cry of Love (1971), among others
• Menachem Z. Rosensaft – attorney and founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Survivors
• Dan Rottenberg — journalist and author
• Muriel Rukeyser – poet and playwright
• David Sarasohn – associate editor and syndicated columnist for The Oregonian newspaper
• James H. Scheuer – US Congressman (NY)
• Gil Scott-Heron – musician
• Nicole Seligman – lawyer, Sony executive
• Cynthia Propper Seton – novelist
• Robert B. Sherman – composer, lyricist, screenwriter, painter
• Stephen Slesinger – creator of the Red Ryder comic strip
• Tess Slesinger – author/screenwriter
• Jay Smooth – radio host and cultural commentator
• Donald J. Sobol – author of juvenile short stories; creator of Encyclopedia Brown
• Stephen Sondheim – composer; attended the Fieldston Lower School
• Dan Squadron – New York State Senator
• Andy Stein – musician
• Stewart Stern – screenwriter
• Paul Strand – photographer and filmmaker
• James Toback – filmmaker
• Richard Tofel – journalist, attorney, administrator, non fiction writer
• Doris Ulmann – photographer of Appalachia
• Laurence Urdang – lexicographer, dictionary editor
• Helen Valentine – founder of Seventeen magazine
• Elliot Villar – actor
• Barbara Walters – TV news
• Andrew Weisblum – Oscar-nominated film editor
• Chris Wink, performance artist; co-founder, Blue Man Group
• Howard Wolfson – deputy mayor of New York City
• Jane C. Wright – oncologist
• Keith L. T. Wright – New York State Assemblyman
• Sheryl WuDunn – investment banker, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
• Adam Yarmolinsky – academic and author who served in the Kennedy, Johnson and Carter administrations
• Eli Zabar – New York City restaurateur
• Lynn Zelevansky - contemporary art curator and Carnegie Museum of Art director

See also

• Education in New York City

External links

• Media related to at Wikimedia Commons
• Official website
• Ethical Culture Fieldston School records at New-York Historical Society