The Colfax Plan
History'The Workshop'

The Colfax Plan

Eighty years ago, the principal of Colfax implemented a new idea for educating gifted students.

Dr. Hedwig O. Pregler (seated) was honored by a group of her former students in 1995, including Marga Silberman Randall, M. (Fuss) Chisick, Sidney Rosen, “David,” Soralie (Levin) Goldfarb, Ellen (Baskind) Langue, Lois Gershuny, and Anita “Nicky” Gordon. Dr. Pregler died the following year. (Photo courtesy of Rauh Jewish Archives)
Dr. Hedwig O. Pregler (seated) was honored by a group of her former students in 1995, including Marga Silberman Randall, M. (Fuss) Chisick, Sidney Rosen, “David,” Soralie (Levin) Goldfarb, Ellen (Baskind) Langue, Lois Gershuny, and Anita “Nicky” Gordon. Dr. Pregler died the following year. (Photo courtesy of Rauh Jewish Archives)

Here’s a name that means nothing to most but a lot to some: Hedwig Pregler.

“Hedwig O. Pregler,” as someone recently corrected me.

If you went to Colfax Elementary School between the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s, you’ll remember Pregler as its legendary principal. You’ll likely also remember The Colfax Plan, also known as “The Workshop.” You might even have feelings about it.

The Workshop was an attempt to address a long-standing challenge in public school education: what to do with students who learn more easily than their peers.

Addressing this challenge was her life’s work. She wrote her dissertation on the issue and co-founded the Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education to promote her ideas. She used her authority at Colfax to test an approach called “partial segregation.”

Pregler was born in the West End in 1903 and attended city schools. She graduated from the Pennsylvania College for Women in 1924 and began teaching in the Pittsburgh Public Schools system. She received a master’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1930 and was hired that same year at Taylor Allderdice High School.

She was becoming a teacher in the 1920s and 1930s as public high school was becoming more common. “Faced with the problem of educating everyman’s child and finding not all of these children able to reach the standards set for those who entered the high school as preparatory school for college, teachers had to lower standards,” she wrote in a 1949 article. “Keeping this slow-moving group of children in school and gearing education down to their level and interests have robbed the gifted child of the opportunities that once were his. The philosophy that made provisions for the lower group in the name of democracy discriminated against the gifted on the same basis.”

Pregler was dissatisfied with all the prevailing solutions. Keeping gifted kids with their normal classes led to “snobbishness.” But pulling them all into a separate “gifted” class made them “self-centered and disinterested in their classmates.” Skipping grades had social consequences, because gifted students were not necessarily more mature.

“Partial segregation” was a compromise. Students with an IQ above 130 or so remained with their usual class for homeroom, music, art and physical education but were set apart with “mental peers” for more academic subjects. There they would fast-track the regular curriculum and then spend the remaining time on special projects.

The students held discussions on world events. They conducted science experiments. They learned new languages. They took trips to museums and cultural sites.

Pregler called her program “The Workshop.” It was supposed to be a neutral term — no mention of “gifted” or “talented.” Her hope was to reduce jealousy.

Did she succeed? Could she have?

In speaking with a few people who attended Colfax in those years, all seemed to have complex feelings about The Workshop. There was appreciation of its innovative program, as well as an awareness of a social cost to sorting children by mental capacity.

Pregler recognized this pitfall. “Just why exceptional mental ability is so often resented is a mystery,” she wrote. “We acclaim and rejoice with a personal pride when a neighborhood child is a musician, a singer, or an artist. It is only brains that we resent.”

There seems to have been some consternation in the mid-1940s about the fairness of this approach. Then came the Cold War with its push for global competitiveness. Pregler once recalled a feeling schadenfreude during all the hand wringing over Sputnik.

She retired in 1966, at the brink of a great upheaval in the Pittsburgh public school system. Soon came teacher strikes, fights over integration, and statewide funding battles. The Workshop was discontinued in June 1972, a relic of a different sensibility.

Pregler could have conducted this experiment anywhere. Circumstance brought her to Squirrel Hill at exactly the era of the greatest Jewish presence in public schools.

According to figures from the Hebrew Institute, Squirrel Hill was home to 1,753 Jewish children in 1930, the year Pregler arrived at Allderdice. By 1958, the total had jumped to 3,841. The early years of that growth came from Jewish families moving into the neighborhood from other parts of the city. The later years were the Baby Boom.

I’ve abandoned a dozen drafts of a paragraph trying to articulate the significance of Pregler doing this work in a Jewish neighborhood after World War II. Each time I bump into some generality that confirms stereotypes but falls short of real research: that Jews are smart, that Jews are ambitious, that Jews are heavily invested in education.

And so I readily admit: I cannot fully explain the relevance of the Workshop to local Jewish history. That it must have some relevance, though, seems undeniable. The hundreds of Jewish children who grew up in that part of Squirrel Hill in those years must have feelings about the school and its approach. So instead of guessing, I’ll just ask. If you attended Colfax during Pregler’s tenure, what did “The Workshop” mean to you? PJC

Eric Lidji is the director of the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center and can be reached at rjarchives@heinzhistorycenter.org or 412-454-6406.

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