Since its inception in 1916, Bank Street has has devoted its efforts to the education of children by combining progressive educational philosophy with innovative practices. Nearly one hundred years later, innovation remains our watchword.
Bank Street was first established as the Bureau of Educational Experiments by the visionary educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell (herself the first Dean of Women at the University of California at Berkeley). A group of highly trained professionals--teachers, psychologists, and researchers--met to observe exactly how young children learn. They began to document the learning process in order to determine the environments and educational practices best suited to foster the growth and development of children. Their findings contributed to a fundamental reform in the way children are taught.
The Bank Street approach applies to education of people of all ages and in all learning environments: to adults such as teachers, administrators, and principals; to children in the classroom, home taught, and other; and to the community at large, through educational institutions and community-based organizations. Since the dawn of television, and later the computer, Bank Street has eagerly incorporated such media and technology to achieve greater access to innovative practices for the community at large, here and abroad. The Bank Street approach, also known as the "developmental-interaction approach," focuses on child-centered education and improving the quality of classroom instruction.
The innovative nature of Bank Street is evident from its accomplishments: Bank Street helped create The Little Golden Book series, bringing opportunities for reading into the home at a low cost. It developed the Bank Street Readers, books for the classroom that focused on the lives of inner-city children. And Bank Street helped develop the national Head Start program .
Until 1970, the Bureau was located in lower Manhattan. It set up shop at 9 Bank Street in 1930, and remained there until 1970, when it moved to its present location, on West 112th Street. Today, Bank Street comprises a Graduate School, to train teachers; a full program of children's services, including the famed School for Children; and many outreach programs for educators and the community at large.
Bank Street has been a trusted name in education for nearly a century ˘ and it continues to maintain its national and international reputation as the gold standard for learning in and out of the classroom.
Today, Bank Street is still experimenting.
Read our complete history in PDF format:
A Brief History of Bank Street College.