In early 1979, the Board of Education decided to change the rules for private bus operators in a way that would have lowered wages for many drivers. More than 2,000 bus drivers went on strike for over 13 weeks.
Many major changes in education have come through federal legislation. The GI Bill of 1944 provided support for college tuition for former soldiers, many who would not have been able to afford it otherwise. Title IX of the Civil Rights Act led to the expansion of women’s access to sports in schools.
Please note: This is work in progress. Please keep that in mind as you read. We are sharing this work in progress because these materials are relevant to discussions of school governance underway right now in New York. Please share your feedback at [email protected] and check back for updated versions soon.
In 1977, the New York City Board of Education was the focus of the “largest civil rights investigation of a public educational institution ever undertaken.” The Office of Civil Rights in the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare studied the New York schools and found that the school system had “violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin; Title IX of the Education Act of 1972, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex; and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibits discrimination against physically or mentally handicapped individuals.”
Under decentralized school governance, each community school district had its own school board, and members of that board were elected by parents and voters who lived within the community school district’s boundaries. (It’s important to specify parents and voters because parents who were not citizens, and therefore could not vote in most elections, could vote in community school board elections where their children attended school.)
According to New York’s Black newspaper the Amsterdam News, Double Dutch is “a skip-rope activity in which two ropes are turned in eggbeater fashion by two rope turners while a third person jumps within the moving ropes.”1 Double Dutch was a joyful form of exercise and in some cases competition. This image likely came from a Double Dutch tournament at Lincoln Center in New York.
When Judge Jack Weinstein initially issued a court order to integrate District 21 schools, he proposed a wide-reaching plan that called for the Board of Education, District 21’s school board, and private real estate developers and housing officials to integrate the district’s neighborhoods and schools. White parents were furious with the decision and threatened to subvert the court order, leave the city, or withdraw their children from public schools. The district school board, whose members were all white, shared the white parents’ preference for segregation, but also felt that they had to meet the requirements of the court.
Judge Jack Weinstein ruled Mark Twain unconstitutionally segregated in 1974. He identified actions taken by various public and private actors to segregate Mark Twain and the surrounding District 21 schools. He concluded that, “The evidence shows that Mark Twain is segregated … [partially] due to deliberately zoning out of the school white middle-class children, enhancing segregative tendencies and leading to gross under-utilization of Mark Twain’s physical facilities… Both the Community School Board of District 21 and responsible city educational officials recognize that they have the power to desegregate Mark Twain. They have refused to do so.”
Jeffrey Hart was a student at Mark Twain Junior High School in Brooklyn. Hart’s mother and her attorneys brought a suit against the local school board, arguing that the school was unconstitutionally segregated.
The all-white board of Community School District 21 in Brooklyn approved a proposal to desegregate Mark Twain Junior High School by making it a school for “gifted and talented” students - or, in the language of the day, students in “special progress” or “rapid advancement” classes. Historically, because of limited educational opportunities for Black students and racism in the tests and processes that decided whether a student was “gifted,” most of the students in these special classes were white students.
What do schools try to teach their students? A curriculum is a school’s plan for what its students should learn. In the early 1970s, the curriculum at Mark Twain Junior High School offered fewer challenges and less opportunity to its students than those at other nearby schools. Additionally, teachers and administrators at Mark Twain sorted students into different academic tracks along racial lines. White students at the school had access to advanced academic courses, but most Black and Latinx students did not.
In this segment of a 1974 news program, journalist Richard Kotuk introduces Mark Twain Junior High School. He records Black, Puerto Rican, and white students and families sharing how they feel about a judge’s recent order to desegregate the school. White students and parents express racist ideas about children at the school and its neighborhood.
In this video excerpt, reporter Richard Kotuk attempts to explain how what he calls “central Coney Island” has become predominantly “poor, Puerto Rican, and black.”
In 1970, about one quarter of all New York City public school students were Puerto Rican. And in some parts of the city, like the South Bronx, that proportion was much higher, around 65 percent.1 Many Puerto Rican students spoke Spanish at home, but the local public schools operated almost exclusively in English.
Please note: This is work in progress. Please keep that in mind as you read. We are sharing this work in progress because these materials are relevant to discussions of school governance underway right now in New York. Please share your feedback at [email protected] and check back for updated versions soon.
Preston Wilcox was a human rights activist and professor at Columbia University who supported Black studies on college campuses and community control for K-12 schools. Wilcox became deeply involved with East Harlem’s community control district.
Like many Puerto Rican parents in the South Bronx, Evelina López Antonetty was frustrated that so many Spanish-speaking children were not learning to read. Many were being placed in classes intended for students with disabilities because they spoke Spanish. “I began to see the schools as an island,” Antonetty recalled, “After 3 o’clock, the school officials closed the doors and left the community. They made no input into the community. There were no teachers in the school from the community.”1
This map illustrates the boundaries of Community District 21, which includes the Coney Island, Brighton Beach, and Gravesend neighborhoods of Brooklyn, among others. The map also shows the junior high (or intermediate) schools within the district. Each dot on the map represents 50 people. Using 1970 Census data, the map on the left uses pink dots to represent the reported white population of the area, and the black dots represent the reported “black” population of the area. The map on the right uses red dots to represent the “Spanish Origin or Descent” population. Those identifying on the Census as “Spanish Origin or Descent” may have also identified as “white” or “black” on the Census.
In 1969, parents in the South Bronx were concerned about what their children ate at school. A group of parents, mostly mothers, came to Evelina López Antonetty for help in addressing the issue. Antonetty and her organization, United Bronx Parents, agreed to help.1
