In the push for community control, we see an antecedent to so many of today’s school reform battles. Just as the Ford Foundation in the late 1960s funded parent activists in Brooklyn who eventually took over their school district and tried to fire tenured teachers, today Bill Gates donates to “parent trigger” efforts in California and other states, in which school reformers go to low-income communities and help parents organize petition drives in favor of overhauling the management and staffing of their children’s schools, sometimes turning them into nonunionized charter schools.*2 Both then and now, reformers who describe themselves as progressives believe unions impede quality schools. Howard Kalodner, an NYU law professor and member of the Bundy commission, spoke for many in 1967 when he professed the desire “to destroy the professional educational bureaucracy. Seventy-five to 80 percent of the educators do not believe that black and Puerto Rican children can learn. You can’t have a professional educational system like that.” Today’s reformers have coined the term “the Blob” to refer to the same tangle of bureaucracies—teachers unions, school boards, and teacher education programs—that Kalodner denounced, and they too equate loyalty to these institutions with a belief that minority students do not have intellectual potential.
This vilification of union teachers misses a much more complex reality. Even as unions argued—often in a tone-deaf way—for job security protections that few parents could support, organized teachers were (and remain) potent advocates for many of the education policies that most benefit disadvantaged children, from tuition-free pre-K to better training for teachers. Regardless, as hopes for President Johnson’s vision of an integrated Great Society curdled in the late 1960s, the community control and Black Power movements loomed with a powerful critique of union teachers—a critique that was eagerly adopted by the liberal elite within philanthropy and government, and that remains salient today.
As Richard Kahlenberg points out in his indispensable biography of Al Shanker, Tough Liberal, the idea of community control of urban schools originated in Queens in 1964, among white opponents of school desegregation who believed parents should band together to prevent busing. Within two years, however, the Left adopted the concept. In 1966, twenty-five-year-old Stokely Carmichael, a proponent of black separatism, burst onto the national political stage when he defeated the moderate John Lewis to become head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the vanguard of the civil rights movement. Carmichael’s election represented the ascendance of Black Power. His lanky good looks and conservative outfits—slim-cut suits and ties—were paired with revolutionary politics inspired by his anticolonialist philosophical studies at Howard. Carmichael was deeply concerned with education policy. He had attended integrated public schools as a child, including New York’s elite Bronx High School of Science, but had come to believe that far too much time had been wasted on futile school integration efforts. In 1966 Carmichael delivered his most famous speech, in front of an audience of ten thousand largely white left-wing students at Berkeley. He talked about Vietnam and civil rights legislation, but also about public schools. “We cannot afford to be concerned with the 6 percent of black children in this country whom you allow to enter white schools,” he said. “We are going to be concerned with the 94 percent” who attend majority-black schools—which he believed should be staffed entirely by black teachers and principals. “We cannot have white people working in the black community—on psychological grounds.… [B]lack people must be in positions of power, doing and articulating for themselves.” The white crowd cheered. In front of black audiences, he was harsher. At a birthday party for Black Panther defense minister Huey Newton, Carmichael declared that black youth “are more intelligent than all those honkies on those school boards … We have to understand that until we control an educational system that will teach us how to change our community, there’s no need to send anybody to school.”
Martin Luther King called this philosophy “nihilistic” and said it made more sense to advocate for poor people overall, not just blacks. “In a multiracial society,” he wrote, “no group can make it alone.” But black separatism quickly gained momentum in inner cities, mostly because of broken promises about the integration of housing and schools. In Ocean Hill—Brownsville, an economically depressed neighborhood in central Brooklyn, the city had recently opened Junior High School 271. The low-slung redbrick and blue-tile building was like dozens of others constructed across New York City in the early and mid-1960s to accommodate a surging student population and, the Board of Education hoped, to stem the exodus of working-class white families from inner-city neighborhoods. That hadn’t worked. Over the previous decade, almost all of the remaining white families in Ocean Hill—Brownsville had fled, lured by cheap mortgages in the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey. Apartments that had housed three- or four-person, mostly Jewish families were now packed with eight or ten people each, immigrants from Puerto Rico and black migrants from the South. Across nearby Rockaway Avenue, practically a highway, stood a number of massive public housing developments, clustered together, as the city was wont to do, in a neighborhood and school district already filled with poor residents, and with no grocery stores, movie theaters, or other basic amenities. JHS 271 and other nearby schools became 98 or 99 percent black and Hispanic.
Though life in Ocean Hill–Brownsville could be difficult, the neighborhood had a well-established community services sector, anchored by churches and social welfare organizations. After Brown v. Board of Education, these groups had hoped to address the problem of overcrowded, underperforming schools by busing children out of the neighborhood. Father John Powis, a white Catholic priest, helped arrange for seventeen hundred Ocean Hill–Brownsville elementary school students to enroll in majority-white schools in other Brooklyn neighborhoods. The aftermath, he said, was “very sad.” Neighborhoods and schools that received children of color rarely made the children feel welcome, nor were teachers in those schools prepared to work with students who were several years behind academically. Back in Ocean Hill–Brownsville, parents like Dolores Torres were dismayed by what they saw at their children’s schools. Teachers were essentially babysitting, Torres remembered. The curriculum included little writing. Parents pressed for a longer day and more help for their children, yet when the afternoon bell rang, Torres said, “Teachers were out of there before the kids were.… We felt we couldn’t put up with it anymore.” Even the United Federation of Teachers agreed that neighborhood students were not being taught well. In 1967 the union assigned one of its most effective organizers, Sandy Feldman, to work with teachers in the area. “You’d walk in, and the kids were out of control,” she said. “The hallways were wild. They were dirty.” Teachers seemed to react to the poor conditions by closing themselves off in their individual classrooms.
Powis, Torres, and other Ocean Hill–Brownsville activists began to wonder if the solution to these malfunctioning schools was not to bus children to hostile neighborhoods, but to do what Stokely Carmichael had suggested: cut white bureaucracies entirely out of the equation when it came to determining what happened to poor students of color. If parents in affluent suburban New York towns like Chappaqua or Scarsdale could directly elect school boards to set policy for just a few thousand students, why couldn’t parents in teeming Ocean Hill–Brownsville, with nine thousand children?
The union’s solution was different: It believed the neighborhood should be part of a program called More Effective Schools, which the UFT had designed and convinced the city to adopt. The MES program provided select schools in poor neighborhoods with extra funding for smaller classes, pre-K, and more support staff, such as social workers and reading specialists. The directors of the program, like many progressive educators, also aimed to end tracking by training teachers in how to work with “heterogeneous groups”—classrooms in which students had diverse family backgrounds and academic ability. (Today this strategy is often called “differentiation.” It is a lot easier to do with small
er class sizes.)
But the MES program wasn’t given a chance in the neighborhood. In the spring of 1967 New York City mayor John Lindsay granted community control to Ocean Hill–Brownsville and two other majority-black and Hispanic neighborhoods, Harlem and the Lower East Side. Even though More Effective Schools and community control were in no way contradictory to one another and could have been implemented simultaneously, the city denied the three “demonstration” districts MES funding, saying that if community control were to prove itself an effective school governance strategy, it would need to do so operating under regular budgetary constraints. Barbara Carter, a journalist who published an early book about the Ocean Hill–Brownsville upheaval, wrote that in keeping the districts out of the MES program, “school officials deprived the community of one of the few points … around which teachers and parents, growing ever further apart, might have rallied.” This was even more tragic considering the MES program’s impressive track record. Over a year, students enrolled at MES schools gained 2.5 to 4.5 months more in their reading comprehension than did peers who did not participate in the program. Test scores went up in math, speech, and oral communication.
Yet at the city level, support for community control didn’t have much to do with teaching and learning. It was about money, political alliances, and power. Mayor Lindsay, who had presidential ambitions, was eager to avoid busing controversies and to ally with black civil rights leaders, who were abandoning the Brown v. Board of Educaton consensus. The nation’s most prominent civil rights organizations—the NAACP and Urban League in the former integrationist camp, and SNCC and CORE on the Black Power Left—supported community control. Lastly, the language of school decentralization anticipated a shifting tone in national politics. When Richard Nixon took office in 1969, he proposed a “New Federalism,” turning policy-making power over to state and municipal governments where possible.
Under the initial experiment in community control, voters in each of the three demonstration districts won the right to elect a neighborhood school board, which was established with funding from the Ford Foundation and organizational assistance from CORE. In Ocean Hill–Brownsville, the board selected Rhody McCoy, the critic of the union’s positions on student discipline, to oversee the entire project. He was a forty-six-year-old black principal with experience in the city’s “600 schools,” which served children with social and emotional problems. As a young teacher he had experienced trouble, like many black candidates, in passing exams to become an administrator and join the white-dominated principals union. So he came to the community control experiment with long-standing frustration toward union-negotiated work rules. He spoke movingly about what black and Hispanic families could contribute to their own children’s education. “It was a joy to go to board meetings” when parents were in charge, he recalled in 1988. “It was always on a positive note: How do we help the youngsters?… We were able to get an enthusiasm. The entire community came together around the schools.”
McCoy had close ties to the city’s activist Left, despite his seemingly moderate lifestyle as a father of eight in suburban Long Island. He hired Herman Ferguson, a Black Panther and former assistant principal in Queens, as a paid educational consultant, even though Ferguson had recently been charged with conspiring to murder Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the Urban League, supposedly in retaliation for their moderate “Uncle Tom” politics. At a February 1968 memorial rally for Malcolm X, held at a Harlem public school, Ferguson delivered a frightening speech. He likened American inner cities to the battlefields of Vietnam, advising the crowd of adults and teenagers, “To die takes only a split second, and you don’t feel anything. But if you can’t do anything at all, take someone with you. Make yourselves gun fanciers. Get a gun and keep it out of sight. Use it at the appropriate time.”*3 In the audience that day was Les Campbell, a tall, dashiki-clad black teacher in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, who taught history from an Afrocentric perspective. Campbell had defied his supervisors by bringing middle school students to the rally, and within a few weeks, lost his job.
He wasn’t out of work for long. On Ferguson’s recommendation, McCoy hired Campbell to work in Ocean Hill—Brownsville. Campbell became a charismatic and infamous presence at JHS 271, where some of his most committed Black Studies pupils began rejecting their “slave names” and referring to themselves with new names borrowed from black Muslim cultures. (Theresa Jordan, for example, became Karima Jordan, a name she used into adulthood.) Campbell’s politics were so extreme that even some black parents in the neighborhood were uncomfortable with his teaching. One of them was Elaine Rooke, the school’s PTA president and a harsh critic of the UFT. She told her son to avoid Campbell, whom she considered a troublemaker. Not every community control supporter was a separatist radical, but the presence of figures like Ferguson and Campbell in Ocean Hill–Brownsville’s public schools enraged Al Shanker, and the district kept supplying the union leader with fuel for outrage, with which he was able to build opposition to community control. The morning after Martin Luther King’s assassination, an assembly was called at JHS 271. As Rhody McCoy stood by, cries of “Black Power!” and “Kill whitey!” rang out, and then white teachers were encouraged to leave the room. Campbell delivered a speech to the students that some interpreted as an incitement to riot. “If whitey taps you on the shoulder, send him to the graveyard,” he said.
All in all, the first school year of community control, 1967–1968, was a struggle. McCoy and the community board moved quickly to hire black and Puerto Rican administrators for each of the district’s eight schools, and in doing so ousted several popular principals. Teachers were restive. Students still often left class and roamed the hallways. McCoy and his deputies were determined to get the situation under control. Sometime in early May 1968—the exact date is lost, for the school kept few records—a hall monitor named Cecil Bowen observed Richard Douglass’s art class at JHS 271. Bowen later reported that when he stepped inside the classroom, he saw students shouting and flinging paint at one another as Douglass stood by helplessly. Bowen broke up the fight. Several days later, McCoy and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville community board dismissed Douglass and eighteen other white teachers and administrators. Some of the shocked teachers were called out of their classrooms to receive the dismissals in the form of a telegram. The dismissals were not terminations—they simply asked the selected teachers to report to city school board headquarters for new assignments. But McCoy clearly intended to send a message—that black parents and administrators deserved veto power over the employment of white teachers. “Not one of these teachers will be allowed to teach anywhere in this city,” he predicted of the group he dismissed. “The black community will see to that.”
Long before collective bargaining, it had been difficult to oust an experienced teacher. Teacher tenure, after all, had existed in New York since 1917, and in other cities since 1909. Only in rare cases (or during moral panics, like the Red Scare) would districts pursue an expensive and time-consuming trial to terminate the employment of a tenured teacher. This “due process” was the bedrock principle of teacher unionism, the protection that could help prevent teachers from being fired because of their political leanings, gender, race, religious beliefs, pregnancy, or opposition to administrative policies.
But what could be done about teachers who were just plain bad at their jobs? Working around tenure rules, administrators and the UFT had established an informal, backstage process for removing—or, more accurately, juggling—ineffective tenured teachers: A principal would put in a request with the Board of Education that a teacher be transferred to another school, and as long as the principal removed no more than one or two teachers per year, the union would not typically raise objections. In this way, bad teachers hopped from school to school, often ending up at the schools in the poorest neighborhoods with the least political clout.*4
The history of American public education had shown that teachers nee
ded some sort of protection; female, black, gay, and radical teachers had experienced wave after wave of ideologically motivated dismissals, unrelated to professional competence. But by the late 1960s, education reformers feared the pendulum had swung too far in the opposite direction. One of the most cited statistics by supporters of community control was that over a five-year period in the mid-1960s only 12 out of 55,000 teachers in New York City were fired for cause. Everyone, even the union, agreed there were more than 12 bad tenured teachers. Shanker and the UFT argued that the low termination rate obscured the fact that many others were urged to leave the profession through private conversations. In Ocean Hill–Brownsville, McCoy had willfully ignored this tacitly accepted, slow-moving way of doing business, telling the media that time was of the essence. “We’ve got to make them learn,” he said of his district’s disadvantaged students. “They’ve been so deprived so long that they’ve tuned out.”
Could neighborhood schools hire and fire based on community instructional and even political preferences? The union argued they could not, and it sent several of the dismissed Ocean Hill–Brownsville teachers back to work, where they were met by activists, some affiliated with black separatist groups, who physically prevented the teachers from entering school buildings. Two weeks later when 350 UFT teachers walked out of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville schools in solidarity with their dismissed colleagues, the community board attempted to terminate all their contracts, too. Mayor Lindsay hadn’t approved McCoy’s plans and did not know how to react. Did a neighborhood community board have the power to terminate teachers en masse?
This seemingly local event triggered not only the most infamous and largest teachers’ strike in American history, but also a political and racial crisis of national proportions, which continues to reverberate in almost every debate about contemporary school reform. On one side, community control advocates argued that the education of poor black and brown children was too urgent a matter to bother with labor protections, bureaucratic protocol, or even basic politesse—much the same argument we hear from today’s opponents of teacher tenure. On the other side, the United Federation of Teachers worried that allowing parents and non-educator activists to essentially fire teachers they did not approve of would devalue the professionalism of educators and return them to a climate of constant job insecurity. What’s more, the unionists feared that a community control movement affiliated with Afrocentrism could potentially turn neighborhood schools into places of political indoctrination. The moderate wing of organized labor had succeeded in vanquishing a strong challenge from radical communists in the old Teachers Union. Now the UFT worried that Black Power, funded by the powerful Ford Foundation, posed a similar threat. A May 22, 1968, union ad in The New York Times, responding to the Ocean Hill–Brownsville dismissals, summed up the UFT’s fears:
The Teacher Wars Page 17