Review of Leonard Covello’s The Heart Is the Teacher
(Calandra Italian American Institute, 2013)

Leonardo Covello was born in 1887 into a large, poor family from the town of Avigliano in one of southern Italy’s humblest regions, Basilicata. Like other struggling Aviglianese seeking to improve their lives at that time, his father set out for America where he worked many years before sending for his family in 1896. Covello arrived when he was nine with his mother and brothers and settled in East Harlem. Hungry for food but a far greater craving for knowledge drove this Southern Italian immigrant schoolboy on a remarkable journey. Of all the paths he could have taken, he impacts the lives of countless Italian American immigrants and becomes one of the most significant contributors to the field of urban American education in New York City from the 1920s to the 1940s.

He lost the “i” in Coviello when he attended school in New York City. One of his first teachers, Mrs. Cutter, found it easier to pronounce without it. Leonardo and Narduccio were replaced with Leonard. He tried to explain to his outraged parents he was becoming Americanized and that’s the way things were. Anna C. Ruddy, a missionary working among the Italians in East Harlem became his mentor and friend. She greatly influenced him academically and spiritually. If becoming American meant you had to give up your name and be ashamed of your parents, then that’s not what he wanted. He rejected this and fiercely embraced his heritage, though he converted to Protestantism.

At its peak in the 1920s, 90,000 Italians called East Harlem their home, making it the largest Italian community in the country. Yet the area lacked a comprehensive high school and Covello began his teaching career at New York City’s De Witt Clinton HS on Manhattan’s West Side. Founded in 1897 as a boys high school, it was a highly regarded academic institution. The Italian students who attended were troubled, fearful and unwelcome. He saw it as his moral responsibility to resolve their specific educational problems, yet that never got in the way of his being a compassionate teacher and principal.

As the first Italian American principal, Covello realized his dream of community-centered education in the creation of Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem, a school that celebrated the contributions of immigrants and advocated the maintenance of their culture and languages. His memoir, The Heart is the Teacher, published in 1958 and reissued through the Calandra Italian American Institute in 2013 reflects the passion and love of a boy who as a man refused to accept the fatalistic attitude of his people, “Lo volanta di Dio!” or “It is the will of God” that immigrants’ lives could not be changed for the better.

While attending school in Avigliano, Covello learned “Lo studente deve soffire” or “The student must suffer to learn.” This proverb struck at the heart of his existence. From the time he was a child, his love of books and learning sustained him, but the severe dictates of southern Italian life and tradition put education at the bottom of a long list of obligations to his family, his relatives, his neighborhood and his town. The purpose of living was to be of service, to sacrifice. As the firstborn, he knew his place, he knew his duty. “E il tuo dovere” “It is your duty!” The student must suffer to learn.

Appreciating the virtues of struggle and sacrifice, Covello never forgot these lessons and they would become the core of his principles of community-centered education. He states, “What was applicable to me as a child in the little Italian mountain town of Avigliano holds just as firm today; the child must be inculcated with a responsibility toward his family, his elders, and the community in which he lives. In turn, every member of the community has a responsibility toward that child.”

When he left Avigliano, his grandmother Clementina told him, “The gold you will find in America will not be in the streets . . . . It will be in the dreams you will realize, in the golden dreams of the future.” Covello’s golden dream was to be educated and to educate others. His dream was never to rise above the southern Italian immigrants or their children whose lives he touched, but to rise with them, never forgetting who he was. In his lifetime this gifted intellectual and multilinguist had opportunities to pursue lucrative careers and to teach in academia but instead he chose a life of service.

Life for the Covello family in their East Harlem tenement was dismal. With no central heating, shared sanitary facilities, a sickly, depressed mother, a father gone most of the time working for meager wages to support six boys and a young girl, Leonard felt compelled to leave school. Many years later, he would remember the bureaucratic impersonality of his school, where not one person tried to talk him out of quitting. He vowed he would never allow that to happen to his students. Anna C. Ruddy and close friends helped him to return after a year and he excelled. The impoverished boy who came to America unable to speak a word of English applied for a Pulitzer scholarship to Columbia University and was accepted in 1907. The same year his mother died. He remembered his mother’s blessings: “Narduccio, my son. It has happened. You will go to college.” He went on to major in Romance languages and to graduate Phi Beta Kappa in 1911 and took his first position teaching French, at De Witt Clinton High in 1913. He had proven another world existed beyond the tenements.

It was at Clinton HS that Covello’s vision of a community-centered education crystallized. Frustrated and angry that his Italian students were failing, he knew things were being overlooked that would enable them to succeed, factors they had no control over: their home life, their neighborhood, their companions, their origins. He believed strongly that “the unit of education was not merely the child but the family” and reached out to involve them in their children’s education. Questionnaires were used to elicit information regarding conditions that prevailed in the Italian home and community. In addition, he visited many homes and consulted with parents, speaking to them in their language, about what their children were studying at school, specifically the importance of the study of the Italian language. Many could neither read nor write and were greatly astonished by his initiatives.

Covello would also intercede when his students were in need of help. One student, Nick Barone, worked on an ice wagon and smashed his hand when a big block of ice toppled over. He landed in the hospital and did not show up at school for a couple of days. Covello visited his home and found the boy’s family carrying on so much, he thought Nick had died. They hadn’t even visited him believing, “Everyone knows what goes on in a hospital — the last stage before the grave.” Speaking to them in Italian, Covello managed to calm their fears. They finally visited their son in the hospital and saw he was on the road to recovery.

It was through such efforts with the Italian community that Covello established and understood the vital importance of language as a bridge from the classroom to the community. As a result of these overtures and his work with civic leaders, interested citizens and members of the Italian Teachers Association, the campaign to teach Italian alongside German, French and Spanish reached a momentum. Its omission had shown a glaring disrespect for the new Italian immigrants and their language. In 1920 with the backing of his principal, he became “the first teacher to teach Italian in perhaps the only Italian class in any public school in the country at that time.” Concerned about the problem of the rapidly increasing number of students of Italian origin coming to Clinton from all over the city, their low graduation rates and the problems they caused, his principal put Covello in charge making him their “father confessor.” Covello found a small room in a corner of the old De Witt Clinton building and “the first office of the first Italian Department in the public schools of New York City” was established. In May 1922, The Board of Education placed Italian on an equal footing with other languages and was being taught throughout the schools of New York City.

Vito Marcantonio, who was to become well-known to New Yorkers as East Harlem’s congressman for seven terms from 1934 – 1950, was enrolled in Covello’s first Italian class in 1920. Covello described Vito as a “volcano of energy . . . . Involved in everything that had to do with Il Circolo (an Italian club) and the Italian Department . . . always discussing world affairs, politics and labor conditions.” He would enlist him, first as a high school student, and later as a rising political star closely associated with Fiorello La Guardia, to help remedy the poor academic progress of Italian American students. They were brought closer together when Marcantonio’s father died while he attended Clinton HS. Marcantonio began referring to the childless Covello as “Pop” and soon all of Covello’s boys were using this term of endearment. Further similarities cemented their relationship. From the early thirties they were neighbors living in adjacent brownstones on East 116th Street where they remained in their East Harlem communities all their lives.

The first meeting between Fiorello La Guardia and Vito Marcantonio occurred when Covello asked La Guardia to speak to the students at Clinton HS. Marcantonio preceded La Guardia at the podium and so impressed him with his passionate speech on the subject of old age pensions and social security that LaGuardia resumed the topics when it was his turn to speak and used it as the basis for his own speech. Marcantonio went on to work in La Guardia’s law office, manage his congressional campaign and to win his seat after La Guardia became mayor. Covello, LaGuardia and Marcantonio would establish lifelong friendships but more importantly, longstanding collaborations that would help improve the quality of life and education of the people of East Harlem.

Deeply principled and devoted to helping the Italian American community, Covello furthered his education and reached out beyond the walls of De Witt Clinton. A pioneer in Italian American studies, he gathered research over a period of many years and earned his doctorate at NYU on the cultural and ethnic factors in education entitled The Social Background of the Italo-American School Child: A Study of the Southern Italian Family Mores and Their Effect on the School Situation in Italy and America and taught a course on the same subject along with courses in Spanish and Italian. Among many other projects was the Boys Club Study that examined the high incidence of juvenile delinquency in East Harlem and set out to evaluate the effect of a local boys club program upon a local community and its problems, and Casa Italiana, the new Italian House at Columbia University, serving as a central clearing agency for all information concerning the Italian in America.

By 1931 a movement to create a comprehensive high school to service the needs of the burgeoning immigrant population of East Harlem was underway. There were no guarantees that an academic high school would be built in this poor, tough neighborhood and Covello campaigned, along with major support from Vito Marcantonio, that this high school “must have all the dignity of a seat of learning. It must reflect its influence into the community and be the center for its improvement.” With the election and support of Fiorello La Guardia as mayor of NewYork City, approval was given for the establishment of Benjamin Franklin High School. The creation of this high school was inextricably linked to Covello’s life and career and his work was rewarded by being appointed in 1934 by the Board of Education to become the first Italian American principal of a new academic high school, a position he held for 22 years. Working closely with Marcantonio and LaGuardia, a permanent home for Benjamin Franklin on 116th Street and Riverside Drive was completed and dedicated in April of 1942, at the same time the United States became involved in WWII.

Benjamin Franklin High School’s programs were designed “to promote the well-being of the community and the expansion and preservation of the principles of a democratic society.” East Harlem had no newspaper, so the school created the non-profit East Harlem News and copies were sent to soldiers overseas. Community concerns were health and housing, so students and teachers developed detailed maps of their neighborhood and worked with other community agencies to realize such projects as a new hospital, a playground program and low rent housing units. Franklin HS opened a number of satellite centers in reconditioned storefronts to link itself with its surrounding population. Besides the regular school program, the Second World War brought additional responsibilities and the school became the center in East Harlem for war activities. Operating 24 hours a day, it fulfilled the ideal of community service to which it had been dedicated and was used by all community organizations, ultimately serving more members of the community in adult education classes than matriculated students.

Covello’s long rewarding career, living to the age of 94 and serving as a teacher and principal for 45 years left an enduring mark on the lives of Italian American immigrants and other ethnic groups. After his compulsory retirement in 1956, he devoted his service to the Puerto Ricans who settled in East Harlem in the 40s and 50s. He became the educational consultant in New York City to the Migration Division of the New York City Department of Labor of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and summarized his mission in these words: “I am trying to give the latest of our migrants – the Puerto Ricans – what I tried to give to the Italians and the Negroes, to the Irish and Germans, to the rest of the nationalities and races that make up the human mixture known as East Harlem: my time, my affection, and above all, my understanding.”

Gerald Meyer, Professor Emeritus of City University, in his Afterword to The Heart is a Teacher informs us of Covello’s last years. In 1972 at age eighty-five, he moved to Messina, Sicily, to serve as a consultant in the Center for Study of Action, founded by the famed social activist and theorist Danilo Dolci. Meyer states, “With Covello’s last remaining breaths, he returns to Italy to try to help the poorest of the poor, the unemployed day-workers of Western Sicily.” He died in Messina in 1982 where he was buried.

A native son of both Italy and East Harlem, he has been described by Meyer as the Renaissance man of the Italian American experience, but his legacy goes beyond their experience. In light of the ever-increasing ethnic diversity of America’s public school population, Covello’s groundbreaking educational theories demand reexamination. His pioneering vision carved out paths in the fields of social science, social psychology, social history and social activity as well. But what he would want to be remembered most for was his role as a teacher. The Heart is the Teacher reinforces the democratic ideal of the school as the most powerful Americanization force in the immigrant community and the teacher is at the heart of this force. He asked, “Does Americanization demand a renunciation of the culture of the immigrant or does it seek a fusion of his culture?” To the latter, he overwhelmingly answered, “Yes.” Coming of age as a first generation Italian American on his own personal odyssey, Covello’s noble experiment to educate students as community-minded citizens and to never lose sight of their individuality, place him on a distinguished stage of excellence as an educator and a human being.