In 1964, a typical black student in New York City could expect to attend a public school that was over 90% non-white. Unlike white majority schools, the black majority schools were overcrowded, with as many as 55 students jammed into a single classroom. By the mid-1960s, blacks accounted for about one third of the city's total school population, with white pupils numbering less than half, and leaving the city schools by the tens of thousands. Yet only 8% of New York's teachers were black. By the mid-1960s, frustrated black activists, unable to achieve racially integrated schools, were moving toward the radical strategy of community control. They would center this strategy in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville. The historian, Jerald Podair writes, quote, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section itself symbolized the economic, geographic, political and educational isolation of New York's black community after World War II. Located in east Central Brooklyn, about eight miles from Mid-Town Manhattan, the neighborhood had never been well-to-do. Ocean Hill-Brownsville was predominately white until the mid-1950s, when blacks from the adjoining neighborhood of Bedford–Stuyvesant, itself straining for space due to in-migration from the south, began to move in. Podair tells us that the owners of retail stores, vegetable markets, and restaurants, left Ocean Hill-Brownsville, as did most other white residents. Lacking business skills and access to capital, blacks were unable to revive these businesses. By the mid-1960s, when Ocean Hill-Brownsville's population was 95% non-white, the district was in decline. >> Black activists frustrated at the snails' pace of integration at all levels of public education in New York, and the city's longstanding neglect of conditions in minority, segregated schools formed an alliance with New York's liberal mayor, John Lindsay. Lindsay's progressive business allies and the Ford Foundation to conduct an experiment in community control of public schools in Ocean Hill-Brownsville. The Lindsay-appointed Board of Education authorized the experiment. In the late summer of 1967, Black and Hispanic voters elected a school board for the demonstration district. A local board who begun to circumvent the city's roles and procedures for hiring and firing teachers and administrators. By the fall of 1967, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district board was on a collision course with the United Federation of Teachers, New York's teacher affiliate of the American Federation of Labor. It was called the UFT, founded in 1960. In the spring of 1961, the predominantly white, predominately Jewish UFT had won a city-wide collective bargaining election and claimed authority to represent city teachers in contract negotiations with the Board of Eduction. At the time of the events in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the president of the UFT was the politically savvy, indomitable Albert Shanker. Shanker and the UFT favored decentralization in New York City schools, but not community control. In their scheme, local district boards would have only an advisory role vis-a-vis the City Board of Education, consulting with the BOE on matters of the budget, personnel, and curriculum. >> The Ocean Hill-Brownsville school board outraged the UFT when it moved to transfer 12 UFT teachers and six supervisors from junior high school 271. The large majority of UFT teachers were from working class backgrounds. In their view, they had earned the right to be teachers on the basis of their merit, as demonstrated by their successful performance on the city's competitive civil service examinations for hiring and promotion. Ostensibly objective tests administered by the Board of Examiners, that measured and rewarded achievement. Blacks in Ocean Hill-Brownsville believe that the system was anything but objective, that it was rigged, that Blacks and Hispanics were being denied access to teaching and administrative positions, through all sorts of machinations at every stage of the city's hiring process. Community control meant, among other things, control of the curriculum. The new district board, its appointed manager, Roddy McColl, and the board's supporters emphasized Black studies, the celebration of Black culture and the values of neutrality and cooperation that sustained that culture. Their agenda was Black power. They wanted teachers who, if they weren't Black or Hispanic, subscribe to the local board's agenda, and empathized with children of color. The local board would do its own hiring on the basis of criteria Ocean Hill-Brownsville's constituents valued. >> The UFT would not tolerate involuntary transfers of teachers by a local board, which it claimed violated the union's contract with the city. Nor would it tolerate a local board's hiring of teachers outside the civil service process, or introducing a homegrown curriculum, which flaunted the city-wide curriculum the Union had shaped. Opposed by Mayor Lindsay and his political allies, receiving no effective support from a weakened Board of Education, and facing the prospect of community control spreading to other districts, some 58,000 UFT teachers, rallied by Shanker, walked out of the city schools in the spring and fall of 1968. They staged three strikes, effectively shutting down the system for a total of two months. In April 1969, the New York State legislature, which held legal authority for all public schools in the state, ended the community control experiment in New York City, with the passage of a decentralization law. The law divided the city into 32 community districts, each with an elected district board and a superintendent. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville district was absorbed into a larger district. This was not community control. The law made the new districts fully accountable to the Board of Education, not to their constituents. The BOE will retain the Board of Examiner's system of competitive examinations for teachers and administrators. No district board would be allowed to transfer a teacher involuntarily to another district. This reorganization remained in place until 1996. As Podair's research shows, Ocean Hill-Brownsville had the harmful effect of severing the close ties New York City's Blacks had previously had with Jews since the Great Depression. Blacks lost the one powerful constituency that could be relied on to support their claims for equitable treatment and a fair share of the city's resources. In the ensuing decades, Blacks bore the brunt of deep cuts in the city's social services sector. A form of community control would appear in the Chicago schools in the 1990s, we'll take that up in an episode in our final module. In our final episode for this module, we looked briefly at the Women's Rights Movement, and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 [MUSIC] [SOUND]
