The historical documents found on this website are primary sources: historical records produced in one moment in time, that help us understand that moment in time. This podcast is a primary source that shows how two people living today - the podcast producers - understand how and why schools are changing in their neighborhood. Their work also includes other primary sources, including historical recordings and interviews with people who reflect on their personal experience with schools in their community. They share their perspectives on charter schools, district public schools, and their impact on children and communities in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
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 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.
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.”
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.
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
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.
Ella Baker was an influential organizer in New York City struggles against segregated schools, police brutality, voting restrictions, and more. She pushed for freedom. Baker saw the pursuit of liberation as a collective effort, and she valued the views and passions of young people. As historian Barbara Ransby put it in her biography on Ella Baker, Baker believed “people had many of the answers within themselves; teachers and leaders simply had to facilitate the process of tapping and framing that knowledge, of drawing it out…Baker’s pedagogy was democratic and reciprocal…her view of teaching for liberation was based on the need to empower ordinary people to dig within themselves and their collective experiences for the answers to social and political questions. She did not want her students to see her as the repository of all knowledge but to discover their own insights and knowledge base.”1
As part of the New Deal, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the National Housing Act of 1934. Many Americans were living in unsafe or low-quality housing, while the economic downturn caused by the Great Depression threatened the banking and construction industries. Congress passed the National Housing Act to “encourage improvement in housing standards and conditions, to provide a system of mutual mortgage [or home loan] insurance, and for other purposes.”1 Lawmakers hoped to reinvigorate the banking industry and encourage banks to make more housing loans by guaranteeing that home loans, or mortgages, would be paid back. If potential homeowners could no longer afford their mortgage payments, the federal government agreed to pay the remaining principal balance.
On April 16, 1937, Lucile Spence and the Teachers Union of New York organized a conference at the Hotel Pennsylvania in downtown Manhattan to discuss schools in Harlem.
At the beginning of the 20th century, New York City required more and more students to attend school and prohibited them from working. In these years, the school system created a variety of special classes and schools for Disabled children, as well as for students who skipped school or otherwise got into trouble. Deaf students went to specialized schools for a few years, and then were expected to join their non-disabled peers in general education classrooms. Blind students were also intended to learn beside their non-disabled peers with the help of special instructors. The Board of Education created ungraded classes for children with intellectual disabilities, who educators thought should be segregated from other children and learn different subjects. Though not specifically mentioned in this document, some children with physical disabilities received home instruction because architectural barriers kept them from accessing school buildings.
New York City’s Public School 47 opened in 1908. It was the city’s first public school for Deaf children, and students came to the school on East 23rd Street from all over the city. Some lived at the school, while others commuted from their homes.1 Other Deaf students in New York City attended other private or religious schools, but they did not typically attend schools alongside hearing pupils.
Special education classes for children with intellectual disabilities were pioneered in New York City by a social welfare reformer, Elizabeth Farrell. Farrell had been working with Lillian Wald and other reformers at the Henry Street Settlement in the Lower East Side. Henry Street was built to provide community support and education to new immigrants to New York City, most of them from southern and eastern Europe.
Photography has an important place in African American history. When racist practices and beliefs denied Black people’s dignity and humanity, Black individuals and families with the means to do so could go to a photography studio and present themselves as they wanted the world to see them. Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist and writer who had been born into slavery, used photography to spread the powerful image of himself that he wanted the world to see and recognize. Douglass made himself the most photographed person in the US in the 19th century, in a time when cameras were large, cumbersome, and expensive, and could be accessed only by going to a photography studio.1
Mrs. Cisco’s activism brought attention to segregated schooling in New York, and the state adopted a new law that ended legal segregation in schools. This legislation was regularly referred to as the “Elsberg Bill” because state Senator Nathaniel Elsberg introduced the bill. This Brooklyn Daily Eagle story narrates the events leading up to the bill’s passage, different responses after its signing, and the response of Mrs. Cisco’s attorney George Wallace.
Samuel B. Cisco, a Black man, lived in Jamaica, in Queens County. At the time of this newspaper article, in 1896, Queens was not yet part of New York City, and Jamaica was a small town surrounded by a rural landscape. Mr. Cisco ran a successful scavenger business. He and his wife Elizabeth had six children.1 Although Mrs. Cisco is less visible in the article, she worked alongside her husband and continued their fight for years after his passing.
New York City’s rapid growth in the 1880s and 1890s meant a dramatically increasing number of children in the city, and in schools. Not every child in New York attended school. Starting in 1874 New York State had laws that required students of some ages to attend school, but there was little enforcement and there were loopholes that allowed families to keep children out of school if the family said they needed the child to work. Continued racial segregation by law in some parts of the city limited Black students’ access to some schools. Meanwhile some Disabled children were not considered eligible for schooling, so these young people were excluded from school.1
