Near the end of the school year, the district’s governing board dismissed thirteen teachers and six administrators-nearly all of whom were white, and critical of the new arrangement. It was opposed by the United Federation of Teachers, which was largely white and Jewish the union’s leader, Albert Shanker, considered the community-control effort to be a veiled attempt at union-busting. The new arrangement was popular with parents, and was supported by a surprisingly heterogeneous coalition that included Black Power separatists and the liberal Ford Foundation. Starting in the fall of 1967, the new Ocean Hill-Brownsville district deëmphasized traditional grading, added curricular units on black identity and culture, and, in predominantly Puerto Rican schools, adopted bilingual teaching. One of the school districts was in Brownsville, a Brooklyn neighborhood that had once been Jewish and middle class but was, by the late sixties, mainly black and poor. Under pressure from grassroots groups, Mayor John Lindsay, a liberal Republican, approved a plan to create three locally governed school districts, in which community-elected boards would assume a degree of control over personnel and curriculum. Many black parents decided that hope for their children rested in self-determination rather than in waiting for integration. Board of Education, the city’s public schools had become more segregated. ![]() A little more than half a century ago, New York City attempted an experiment in a handful of its public schools.
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