Avery Coonley School
The Avery Coonley School , commonly called Avery Coonley, is an independent, coeducational day school serving academically gifted students in preschool through eighth grade, and is located in Downers Grove, DuPage County, Illinois. The school was founded in 1906 to promote the progressive educational theories developed by John Dewey and other turn-of-the-20th-century philosophers, and was a nationally recognized model for progressive education well into the 1940s. From 1943 to 1965, Avery Coonley was part of the National College of Education, serving as a living laboratory for teacher training.
The school moved to Downers Grove in 1916 and became the Avery Coonley School in 1929, with a new campus designed in the Prairie and Arts and Crafts styles, landscaped by Jens Jensen. Avery Coonley was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.
History
Founding and Cottage School (1906–1916)
In 1906, Queene Ferry Coonley, wife of wealthy Riverside industrialist and publisher Avery Coonley, decided to start a kindergarten program to allow children younger than five years old to attend. Queene Coonley was trained as a social worker and kindergarten teacher at the Detroit Normal School and was impressed by the theories of Friedrich Fröbel, who believed children's early education should be an extension of their lives at home.Coonley persuaded the director of the Riverside program, Lucia Burton Morse, and her assistant, Charlotte Krum, to help launch a new school. Their progressive views on education emphasized an individualized approach to education and children learning from experience and social interaction. Coonley described the new school as "a Children's Community. Its purpose was not so much to teach what others had thought or grown-ups had done, but for the children themselves to do something."
A small cottage on the Coonley estate served as the first school building, and the first name was The Cottage School. The designer was Charles Whittlesey. The estate's main building, the Avery Coonley House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, is now a National Historic Landmark. A new building was completed in 1912 and became known as the Coonley Playhouse. It featured colored art glass windows, flags, balloons, and confetti in what Wright referred to as a "kinder-symphony". Some have claimed that they belong to Wright's most famous windows.
The Cottage School was free to all students, and was supported both by Coonley's own resources and funds raised by the Kindergarten Education Association. In 1915, John Dewey and his daughter Evelyn featured the Cottage School in their book, The Schools of To-Morrow, which examined how progressive schools around the country put new educational ideas into action. The Deweys considered the Cottage School to be an example of training in good citizenship and approved of its mock elections, self-government, and public service.
Junior Elementary School (1916–1929)
At the same time the Playhouse was built, Coonley agreed to build a kindergarten in the nearby town of Downers Grove, which did not have a public school. Coonley purchased land on Grove Street and commissioned the architectural firm of Perkins, Fellows & Hamilton to design the building. The school, led by Lucia Morse, was launched as the Kindergarten Extension Association School in 1912. In 1916, the Cottage School was closed and a first grade program was launched at the Downers Grove kindergarten, which was renamed the Junior Elementary School. To accommodate older students, a second grade class was added in 1920 for students around seven years old, a third grade in 1926 for eight-year-olds, and a fourth grade for nine-year-old students shortly thereafter.The Coonleys moved to Washington, D.C., in 1916. Morse looked after the day-to-day direction of the school. Teachers at the Junior Elementary School were encouraged to find a new way of relating to students, allowing them more freedom. Coonley recalled that "boys and girls cooked, boys and girls did carpenter work, boys and girls took an equal part in all matters of government." Students re-enacted history and literature, composed music, and spent time outdoors. In 1924, Coonley and Morse helped found a journal entitled Progressive Education, in which they published their own practical experiences at the school and articles by educational theorists including John Dewey. It became the leading professional journal of the progressive education movement and was published until 1957.
Avery Coonley School (1929–1960s)
Coonley chose a wooded tract in Downers Grove, adjacent to the Maple Grove Forest Preserve, as the site for the new building, and her son-in-law, Waldron Faulkner, was the architect of the new building project. Over one hundred students attended school in the opened building on September 30, 1929, and it was renamed The Avery Coonley School, in honor of Coonley's late husband, who had died in 1920. Coonley chose as a mascot a seahorse, a unique creature who was also a member of a larger community. The seahorse swims upright, from which derives the school motto: "Onward and Upward".Progressive education, a pedagogy promoting learning through real-life experiences, was at its zenith in the United States in the 1920s and 30s, and the Avery Coonley School was a widely known model of these theories in action. Avery Coonley was featured regularly in Progressive Education and other professional journals, and in 1938, the editor of Progressive Education, Gertrude Hartman, published a profile of the Avery Coonley School in her book Finding Wisdom: Chronicles of a School of Today. She noted, "isitors from all parts of the United States and from foreign countries to see the school—sometimes as many as thirty in a day."
The book described the progress of the students from their first year of kindergarten through their ten years of study, providing photos, stories, and examples of students' work. Finding Wisdom became a classic in the education field and solidified the Avery Coonley School's national reputation as a model of progressive education.
Morse died in 1940, after 34 years as director, and several years went by without a strong local leadership. To ensure a sounder footing for the future, Coonley merged Avery Coonley with the National College of Education in Evanston, Illinois, in 1943. The two institutions had close ties dating back to Morse's Kindergarten College days, and the arrangement took advantage of the NCE's financial and teaching resources while Avery Coonley provided a living laboratory for teacher training and educational research. The school continued offering the curriculum for which it had become known.
Coonley died in 1958. With her donations now missing, ACS began charging tuition in 1929. By 1964, enrollment had reached 200 students.
In 1965, the Administrative Board purchased Avery Coonley from the NCE. ACS joined the Independent Schools Association of the Central States in 1961. ISACS was founded in 1908 to promote best practices in independent schools, and instituted a mandatory accreditation program for member schools in 1961. Avery Coonley served as ISACS headquarters from 1970 until the central office was dissolved in 2000.
Malach also established the Institute for Educational Research in 1964 as a center for educational experimentation. The Institute, headquartered at ACS, was a joint venture with more than thirty public school districts, which collaborated on research projects and shared in the findings. Examples of other projects include kindergarten speech programs, elementary science programs, and speed reading in junior high school.
Gifted education (1960s–present)
The kindergarten reading program was the first step in the Avery Coonley School's transition to a new focus on the education of the gifted. An increasing focus on gifted education in North America was symbolized by the 1972 Marland Report to the United States Congress, which was the first acknowledgment of the characteristics of gifted children and their specific educational needs. ACS headmaster Malach believed that the educational philosophy of his school was well aligned with the most important objectives of a gifted program.In 1960, ACS began screening applicants for high intellectual potential, requiring a tested IQ above 120, achievement test results one and a half grade levels above national norms in reading and math, and intensive in-person evaluations. Teachers began adapting the curriculum accordingly. The core of the gifted curriculum remained the individualized approaches and learning by doing.
Campus
1929 building
The campus occupies off of Maple Avenue in Downers Grove. It borders the Maple Grove Forest Preserve, created in 1919, one of the oldest forest preserves in the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County system. The preserve protects "the largest remaining remnant of the vast maple forest that became Downers Grove", and has been categorized a globally endangered ecosystem. The forest is a refuge for a wide range of birds and trees. The preserve is used by students in their science and nature activities.The designer of the grounds, Jens Jensen, was known as "the father of the Chicago park system." His work became famous for his exclusive use of plants and materials native to the local region, and was characterized by his use of open spaces, flowing water, gently curving lines, and low circular benches, where people can gather. A restoration of Jensen's landscape design was completed in 2006 as part of the ACS centennial celebration.
The building was designed by Coonley's son-in-law Waldron Faulkner with his son Avery Coonley Faulkner. The design in the style of the Prairie School was typical of the American Arts and Crafts style. The easy access to the outdoors, ground floor classrooms, separate science laboratories, and planned outdoor play area are among the features of the design that would later be adopted by schools throughout the US after World War II.
The Avery Coonley School was designated a historical site by the Downers Grove Historical Society in 2006, and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.