EDUCATING THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR

As a Ford Foundation Program Officer in Urban Education and Community Development, Henry Saltzman gave a series of fourteen talks in the 196o’s, collected here for the first time. He sets forth a full range of specific strategies and techniques whereby major city school systems could improve the quality of education provided to children in deprived communities. In addition to the original texts, each section includes an introductory “lookback”, a retrospective commentary on these papers with the perspective of the sixty years which have passed since they were written. The reader will note that almost every recommendation he made has been implemented, to one degree or another, in national, state and city policies and programs. The basis for the most important educational reform of the twentieth century, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, including Head Start, reflected much of his thinking in terms of funding and programming. It is interesting to note how controversial his emphasis on early childhood education was considered at the time.

Henry Saltzman was born in Brooklyn and spent ten years as an English teacher and guidance counselor in junior and senior high schools as well as in a number of parochial schools. He organized the first high school remedial reading program in New York. In cooperation with the Concord Baptist Church, he established a community-based remedial reading and arithmetic program, the Bedford Stuyvesant School, which led to his being hired by the Ford Foundation as Secretary to the Great Cities School Improvement program in ten of the largest American cities. Later, he moved to The Netherlands to become executive director of the Bernard Van Leer Foundation which focuses its funding on early childhood education programs in twenty-eight countries. After returning to the United States, he served as education advisor to Mayor John Lindsay; president of Pratt Institute; and director of the Citizens Committee for Children. In 1995 he founded a privately held international fundraising company which worked with non-profit organizations in the United States, South America and Israel. Mr. Saltzman is very proud of his three children, five grandchildren, and five great grandchildren.