Throughout the 1960’s segregation amongst whites, blacks, and latinos was still an issue for New York City public schools. The events that led to a protracted teachers’ strike in New York City have to do with conflict between the governing board and certain teachers. There were many issues with the schooling system, one of the problems being the act of short time schooling. Short time schooling is when students go to school either in the morning or the afternoon, thus, not allowing certain students to be full time students and get the most out of their education. Due to the parents of these children being fed up with their children being hindered from the potential education they could be receiving, the parents began to argue that they, along with other people in the neighborhood, should decide the curriculum and staffing of the schools in the neighborhood. This idea was called community control and was intended to integrate New York City schools, and it received a lot of attention focused on the controversy of whether parents should have power as opposed to the issues occurring in the Brownsville Community. “The demand for community control emerged from a two decade effort to achieve racial equality in New York schools,” (p223). It is unfortunate that so many efforts have been dismissed and not attended to by this point.
It has been an ongoing issue that schools with higher populations of blacks and latinos receive fewer resources, are overcrowded, and staffed with low quality teachers. I believe that these events happened the way they did because parents were frustrated with the lack of quality education their children were receiving, and because nothing was ever done to desegregate schools and solve the problems of the peoples needs. Some people were afraid that community control would push whites out of the public school system, meanwhile nothing was being done to spread out blacks and latinos across the public school system. The big issue was that the UTF felt that newly won teacher rights were now put at steak. If communities could choose anyone to be a teacher, then why do teachers have to take an exam and be put on a list in order to receive a job? This led to a lot of conflict with the governing board and the UTF. The teachers were angry that Rhody McCoy was selected as unit administrator because he was not on the board of education’s approved list for the position. This raised more issues as the UTF did not want to follow some of the decisions made by McCoy.
I believe that the original issue stemmed from segregation being a problem amongst public schools, to who teaches in public schools being the new problem. I think that community control was a good idea to start with because similar to other works we’ve read, smaller schools tend to be really good because the community has more control in what goes on in the school. However, I feel as though community control is not what the parents in Brownsville really wanted the focus to be on; The parents just wanted better schooling for their children and community.
I certainly agree with you in that it has been an ongoing issue where schools with higher populations of black and Latino receive fewer resources, are overcrowded, and are staffed with low quality teachers. These issues were an underlying factor in the 1968 Teachers’ Strike. In an attempt to combat these issues facing their children’s schools, parents and community leaders advocated for community control of local schools. Community control would allow for these parents and community leaders to have more control over what their children are learning and who the teachers and staff are. However, this caused tension with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). The UFT “feared that community control would threaten recently won job protections” (222). While the UFT was more concerned about their job security, parents for community control were fighting against a system that was not supporting their children.
Because the UFT was an already established organization, community control advocates also needed to come together as one larger force. Parents and community leaders for community control united to form the Brownsville Community Council (BCC). The BCC “provided organizational support for community control advocated, and many BCC leaders … were also leaders of the community control movement” (222). The BCC gained support from other local community groups such as the Christians and Jews United for Social Action (CUSA).
Rather surprisingly, the BCC did not receive support from some civil rights leaders. One such leader who questioned community was Bayard Rustin, one of the organizers of the civil rights 1964 school boycott. Rustin argued that community control offered “the illusion of ‘political self-determination in education,’ to those ‘so alienated that they substitute self-expression for politics’” (227). He believed that there was power in numbers, and they should unite themselves with other groups and organizations instead of separating from them. Despite his status as a civil rights leader, Rustin’s suggestions were not adopted by the community control advocates.
I agree that some teacher resistance to cries for community control were a result of racist ideologies. But, although the UFT seemingly had more power than the black and Hispanic communities in this situation, they did not have much of a choice in their protest of community-controlled schools. They felt that as a newly-formed organization, they did not have enough leverage to pick a fight with the education system. As a union, the UFT’s responsibility was to negotiate on behalf of its members. If it could not protect teachers, then it had no purpose. It worried that siding with community-control would hurt teachers by decreasing their job security. Despite a lack of proof that minority communities would fire white teachers and hire black and Hispanic ones instead once given the chance, the UFT’s concerns are still valid. They had a job to do and they were merely trying to do it, which is why teachers went on strike for months in 1967. Unfortunately, this made it seem like these teachers were overwhelmingly opposed to integration as well as to black and Hispanic rights.
In addition, I do not think that community control was the best option to improve black and Hispanic students’ educational realities. I believe that students should be exposed to people of different backgrounds in order to further develop themselves. Thus, closing a group of students off from the rest of the school system because of their race, does not seem like a solution that would benefit them. In addition, having parents in charge of student curriculum and staffing does not make sense. Although it would be helpful for parents to have more of a say in these matters, such important decisions should not be left entirely to their discretion. Most parents do not have enough knowledge about the education system and the topics that their children have to know in order to succeed in life, to make such important decisions about schooling.
Thanks for this robust discussion! Please note, Asimina, that community control was not a way to integrate schools. It was essentially a recognition that integration would not happen and a new strategy for achieving equity through local control of schooling. As Steven points out, while many civil rights activists were in favor of this movement, some were not. Steven quotes Bayard Rustin believing that the strategy would be ineffective for achieving equal access and equal rights. I wonder what you think, Steven? Was it a smart strategy given the opposition to integration Black and Latino families had experienced for so long? Annmarie suggests that the strategy was too narrow, but as Asimina points out, the schools in Brownsville and other Black and Latino neighborhoods were under-resourced and overcrowded. It did not seem that the rest of the city or district cared about equality of opportunity.