In 2002, the New York State Legislature gave the mayor’s office control of New York City’s public schools. Mayor Michael Bloomberg claimed that this system was more democratic than one in which voters elected local school board members, because voters elected the mayor, and could vote him out if they did not like his performance in leading the school system.
At the 2012 United States Conference of Mayors, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg reflected on the first ten years of mayoral control in New York City’s schools. He shared his thoughts on the purposes of schools in the US and his concerns about them. He explained why he believed mayoral control had been a success in New York City. He also highlighted his belief that the expansion of charter schools - which were new schools funded with public dollars but governed by private groups outside of the New York City Department of Education - had improved education in New York City.
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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.)
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.
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.
New York State’s 1969 decentralization law drew strong opposition from many Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers who had been advocating for community control. United Bronx Parents was based in the South Bronx and had been founded in 1965 by Puerto Rican organizer Evelina López Antonetty. United Bronx Parents had worked for years to support Puerto Rican mothers in pushing for better education for their children. Community control fit within this agenda.
During the 1968 teacher strike, community control advocates continued to participate in leading local school districts and arguing for self-determination in education. UFT teachers protested during the strike in public spaces like in front of City Hall. Here, community control advocates walk across the Brooklyn bridge to show their support for local democratic power in education. One of the figures in the front is Rhody McCoy, who was the superintendent of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville community control district in Brooklyn, where a controversy over whether local districts could fire teachers prompted the strike.
Over 1 million new Black Southern migrants and Puerto Rican immigrants had settled in New York City by the 1950s. Most resided in Harlem, the South Bronx, and Central Brooklyn. They faced many barriers, including poverty and discrimination in employment and housing discrimination, and often attended schools that the Board of Education had long neglected. The city’s centralized school system had often ignored Black residents’ demands while prioritizing the needs and wants of white students and their families.1
Who should have made decisions about what happened to the hundreds of thousands of children in New York City’s schools? Increasingly in the 1880s, 1890s, and in the first decades of the 1900s, social reformers celebrated the idea that experts should be the ones to make key decisions. These social reformers - primarily white people from middle-class and wealthy backgrounds - saw many problems in the city around them. They were concerned about crime, public health, food safety, and children’s lives, among other areas. And they felt confident that they had the knowledge and skills to address these problems effectively, rather than the many thousands of working-class and poor New Yorkers, many of them immigrants, who made up the majority of the city’s population.1
