| Contemporary view of the North Wing and North lawn area. Seventy years after the laying of the cornerstone in 1937 the building is still striking. As a post-script it should be noted that "Central ran into difficult times in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as its enrollment declined along with the achievement level of its entering students. The middle-class families that constituted its historic constituency were abandoning the Philadelphia public schools, sending their sons to private and parochial schools..., and moving to the suburbs. Central's position as an elite academic school was in jeopardy. As one teacher put it, "our real worry was that we would be made a neighborhood school" (Mezzacappa 1986). A court order in 1983 mandating the admission of girls helped...but the key was the market-based strategy adopted by the school's new president, Dr. Sheldon Pavel. He initiated an aggressive recruitment campaign, started to enforce the old admissions standards, and, in a dramatic public move, dismissed four hundred low-achieving students. The word went out that Central was once again a selective and academically rigorous school, and students from the old constituency began to return, many of them directly from private schools: in 1983 only 16 percent of the freshman class came from private and parochial schools, but in 1986 the figure reached 37 percent". (Labaree, 180.(Photo A. Hirsh) |
