Priscilla Ellington
Revson Fellow 2000-2001
Executive Co-Director
The Center for Collaborative Education
Priscilla Ellington is Executive Co-Director of the Center for Collaborative Education. Brooklyn born, and a graduate of Baruch College, Ms. Ellington is an educator and parent activist.
She came to the Center for Collaborative Education in 1990 as Program Director of C.C.E.’s National Elementary School Network School Change Project, where she developed a network of progressive educators that assisted in the creation of the Brooklyn New School and the P.S. 261 New Program, expanding these efforts to a national scale forum that encompassed networks in Wisconsin, New Mexico, Indiana, Colorado, and Ohio.
Promoted to Executive Co-Director of C.C.E. in 1993, Ms. Ellington focused on reform and decentralization within the expanding C.C.E. organization, helping to create a structure that enabled greater democracy and individuality in a network that included over a thousand education advocates and twelve thousand students enrolled in C.C.E. member schools.
Following this success, Ms. Ellington was invited to help in similar reforms within the Coalition of Essential Schools. Through C.C.E.’s Campus Coalition project, Ms. Ellington has been instrumental in developing successful small schools within large, formerly failing high schools, as well as in-school pre-schools for young children of teachers and students, and adult education classes, thus enabling multi-generational education within a single school building.
Ms. Ellington has served as an administrator in the Network School Renewal/Annenberg Project (a joint project with New Visions for Public Education), The Center for Education Innovation, and ACORN, and currently helps administer the Eiffel Project, a federally-funded grant that partners C.C.E., Columbia University, and the New York City Board of Education to expand the technological resources of city schools.
As a Revson Fellow, she plans to develop a model for a community partnership school that would combine neighborhood-based learning, democratic governance, and reciprocal accountability between community, school, and district.
(The Revson Fellow’s biography that appears above was last updated in 2000. Revson Fellows may update their biographies on this site by sending email to: revson@columbia.edu)
The Revson year was an opportunity to recharge mental and spiritual batteries, to deepen my own understanding of important issues at what turned out to be a crucial time in our history, and to do so in the company of committed co-conspirators in the quest for peace and justice. It brings the enormous resources of a great university to the Fellows and time to reflect on how we can best utilize that knowledge to make a better New York City and world.
