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New Histories of Education in New York City: An Introduction

(http://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/new-histories-of-education-innew-york-city-an-introduction)
8/1/2016
2 Comments (http://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/new-histories-of-education-in-new-york-city-anintroduction#comments)

By Nick Juravich

A 1967 Black Panther Party poster

advocating for a school boycott.
(Black New Yorkers for Educational
Excellence)

Fifty years ago this fall, struggles over public education rocked New
York City. Fed up with overcrowded, under-resourced schools and token
integration plans, Black and Puerto Rican parents issued a new kind of
demand, calling for "community control" of the newly built - and newly
segregated -- Intermediate School 201 in Harlem. Their demand sparked
a citywide uprising. In the years that followed, efforts toward
community control generated funding from the Ford Foundation,
massive strikes by teachers and administrators unions, and, by 1970,
partial decentralization of the largest school district in the United
States. In her seminal account of Gothams great school wars,
historian Diane Ravitch declared the events of 1966 an end and a
beginning, heralding the collapse of efforts toward integrated
schooling and the beginning of a battle that unraveled the educational,
political, and social fabric of the city.[1] (https://47448137685092634732970050.preview.editmysite.com/editor/main.php#_ftn1)

For the last fifty years, community control has cast a shadow over education policy and scholarship in New
York. Desegregation never reached the five boroughs. Nor did policymakers seriously consider it after 1966.

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New York, a prominent 2014 study notes (https://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12education/integration-and-diversity/ny-norflet-report-placeholder), failed to integrate a single school, even
as achievement gaps narrowed in desegregated districts around the nation. And while Ravitch described
the fight at IS 201 as an end and a beginning, it still serves primarily as an end in most historical
narratives, auguring the collapse of the school system, interracial civil rights activism, and midcentury
liberalism altogether.[2]
Today, activists (http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2016/07/21/advocates-seize-chance-to-push-for-upperwest-side-desegregation-but-face-stiff-resistance/) and journalists
(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/magazine/choosing-a-school-for-my-daughter-in-a-segregatedcity.html?_r=0) are again challenging educational segregation and inequality in New York City, supported by
a new generation of historical scholarship that highlights the constitutive role of schools in shaping urban
inequality.[3] In light of these developments, the Gotham Center has gathered six graduate students and
asked them to reflect on the legacy of the community control movement, the history of education in the five
decades since it emerged, and how this history might inform current struggles. Our responses, based on our
ongoing dissertation research, are presented in the roundtable beginning today.
The essays range widely across time and space, offering a diversity of new perspectives on the history of
education in New York. They trouble the idea that 1966 represents a clean break between the eras of
desegregation and community control, revealing the co-existence and interrelation of these demands within
long histories of educational activism.[4] As Michael R. Glass writes in the first post, the twelve years of
conflicts that preceded the opening of IS 201 situated desegregation as one of many strategies in service
of a broad, transformative vision of educational equity. In many respects, the IS 201 fight was a long time
coming.
At the same time, a new New York was beginning to emerge in the 1960s, a city much like our own: diverse
and global, yet deeply divided and unequal. The contests over community control were, and are still, cast
primarily as battles between black and white. These posts move beyond the racial binary to investigate the
educational histories and experiences of Latin, Caribbean, and Asian New Yorkers. [5] Mass migration, first
from the American South and Puerto Rico, and then, after 1965, from the rest of the Caribbean, Africa and
Asia, reshaped New York neighborhoods and schools. As Lauren Lefty writes, these migrants deployed
transnational networks and anti-imperial logics in the fight for self-determination in schools. They also
founded independent educational institutions and invested in parochial education, as explored by Barry
Goldenberg, Jean Park, and Dominique Jean-Louis in their posts.
While migrants poured into the city, they confronted the vacuum left by an exodus of blue-collar
manufacturing jobs which had long supported working-class New York. Deindustrialization made publicsector resources -- including schools -- all the more important to community survival. My own post explores
how schools activists, including those at IS 201, envisioned new roles for community members as paid
educators who would improve classroom instruction and connect schools with communities while they
earned living wages and trained to become teachers.
Individually, these posts tease out lesser-known histories; collectively, they help to reframe the history of
community control within the globalizing, post-industrial metropolis. While they do not comprise a new
synthesis of the history of education in New York City, two key themes run through all of them. The first is a
commitment to taking grassroots activism seriously as a force for reshaping schooling at many levels,
particularly the organizing that took place beyond the glare of flashbulbs at contentious moments. We
follow the late Stuart Hall, who argued that social forces which lose out in any particular historical period
do not thereby disappear from the terrain of struggle; nor is struggle in such circumstances suspended.
[6] Much of our work is rooted in the 1970s and 1980s, which we study on their own terms and not solely as
the aftermath of the late 1960s.[7] Even as the state's commitment to providing equal education waned,
wide-ranging, creative efforts at the local level kept the struggle for equity alive across the five boroughs.
While the posts lean hard against declension narratives of both struggle and schooling, they do not do so

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out of the nave belief that isolated or localized community action alone can, or should, provide equitable
education. The organizers under examination here understood the struggle for school equity as a struggle, in
part, for the equal distribution of educational resources. In pursuit of equity, they built multitudinous
alliances -- with unions, with corporations, with global movements, with churches, and with sympathetic
state actors. The commitment of these activists makes the abdication of the state all the more damning.
Despite the recurrence of the culture of poverty thesis, laying the blame for educational failure at the feet
of parents and students, it is clear that New Yorkers have gone to extraordinary lengths to secure the
futures of their children over the past half-century.
Todays activism is, in many ways, a product of the struggles that have continued from the community
control era into our own time. Our roundtable is inspired by this work, and we hope these histories will serve
in turn to further inspire and inform the ongoing struggle for educational equity in Gotham.

Nick Juravich is a Ph.D. Candidate at Columbia University. An Associate Editor, he organized the
roundtable this post introduces.

[1] Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2000).
[2] See, among others, Daniel Perlstein, Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism (New
York: Peter Lang, 2004); Jonna Perrillo, Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School
Equity (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2012); Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York:
Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Ravitch, The
Great School Wars.
[3] Examples include Tamar W. Carroll, Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Matthew F. Delmont, Why Busing Failed: Race,
Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (Oakland, CA: University of California Press,
2016); Ansley T. Erickson, Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (Chicago:
University Of Chicago Press, 2016); Andrew R. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and
the Fate of the American Metropolis (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2015).
[4] In doing so, we draw on perspectives like those developed by Russell Rickford in his essay Integration,
Black Nationalism, and Radical Democratic Transformation in African American Philosophies of Education,
1965-1974 in The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction, ed. Manning Marable and
Elizabeth Hinton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
[5] In studying a diverse array of New Yorkers, we engage with the theoretical work of Andrew K. SandovalStrausz in "Latino Landscapes: Postwar Cities and the Transnational Origins of a New Urban
America," Journal of American History 101 (2014), and draw on recent work on New York City including
Johanna Fernandez, The Young Lords and the Social and Structural Roots of Late Sixties Activism in Civil
Rights in New York City: From World War II to the Giuliani Era, ed. Clarence Taylor (New York, 2011): 141-160;
Joshua Guild, You Cant Go Home Again: Migration, Citizenship, and Black Community in Postwar New York
and London (PhD diss., Yale University, 2007); Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo
and New York after 1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Sonia Song-Ha Lee, Building a Latino
Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City
(Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2014); Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in
Twentieth-Century New York City (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2010).
[6] Stuart Hall, Gramscis Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Journal of Communication
Inquiry 10 (1986). Halls essay is essential reading for all those who seek a dynamic historic analytic
framework for activism in historical periods when retrenchment and backlash are ascendant (including

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the post-1968 urban United States).

[7] In seeking to study education on its own terms in the 1970s and 1980s, we follow in the footsteps of
Heather Lewis, New York City Public Schools from Brownsville to Bloomberg: Community Control and Its
Legacy (New York: Teachers College Press, 2013.
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2 Comments (http://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/new-histories-of-education-in-new-york-city-an-introduction#comments)

Dr, E. Starcevic,

8/1/2016 11:21:03 pm

Is anyone working on the roll of Prof. Lillian Weber who started OPen education in the NYC schools?
So many educators, including Deborah Meier were inspired by her work.
Reply

Nick Juravich

8/2/2016 10:01:53 am

Not for this roundtable, but we'd love to run a post about Dr. Weber if you or someone you know
would be willing to write one.
Reply

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