The Ideological and Organizational Origins of the United Federation of Teachers’ Opposition to the Community Control Movement in the New York City Public Schools, 1960–1968

In The Strike That Changed New York, historian Gerald Podair argues that race was the fundamental issue that divided the city during the United Federation of Teachers’ (uft) strike that shut down the New York City public schools for weeks in the fall of 1968, idling more than a million students.¹ Running along a black-white (or, more pointedly, a black-Jewish) binary, Podair’s analysis depicted the largely Jewish teachers union,² led by Albert Shanker, in opposition to black militant (and increasingly black nationalist) elements in several poor communities in Brooklyn and Manhattan that supported community control and opposed the uft strike. Inflected by a then relatively new “whiteness” studies interpretation, Podair’s analysis of the uft’s success in winning the strike focused on its and Albert Shanker’s efforts to generate a sense of fear among public school teachers and their white allies about black anti-Semitism and to use that fear as one of the key justifications for the hard-line tactics the union used during the strike. The uft’s determined emphasis on black anti-Semitism was quickly picked up and enshrined in contemporary writings about the strike by Martin Mayer and Diane Ravitch. It also figured in speeches by political figures, including Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and became an established historical “truth” absorbed into many “revisionist” interpretations of the strike, typified by Podair’s 2002 book, which attempted to understand the larger political implications of the teachers’ job action in starkly racial/religious terms.³ Ask most white New Yorkers of a certain age if they have memories of the 1968 uft strike 45 years later and they are likely to respond with something to the effect of: “Isn’t that the strike where there was all that black anti-Semitism?”

For those who do not know the broad outlines of the fall 1968 strike or the specific sequence of events that led to Shanker’s and the uft’s charges of rampant black anti-Semitism, a brief summary of the relevant context is in order. Following a huge influx of African-Americans and Puerto Ricans into New York City in the postwar period and after more than a decade of half-hearted and wholly unsuccessful efforts by the immovable New York City Board of Education (nycboe) to desegregate the city’s massive public school system, poor and working-class parents of colour and community activists across the city began after 1966 to shift their focus and actively fight for community control of neighborhood schools. The nycboe, formed in 1901 and largely controlled by the office of the mayor, exercised rigid authority over who taught in and administered the public schools (through a highly structured examination process, which had resulted by 1965 in an almost all white teaching and administrative staff), dictated what was taught and what books were used, and set policy for the expenditure of all state and city funds earmarked for public education. With the emergence of the uft in 1960, the nycboe was forced to collectively bargain teacher salaries and fringe benefits, working conditions in the schools, and policies and procedures about teacher transfers and general employee protections. Community control advocates argued that the only way schools could be improved and a modicum of equality realized for the system’s growing numbers of black and brown students was for local communities to be able to determine who taught in and administered their neighbourhood schools, what subjects were taught, and evaluate the quality of the teaching taking place. With support from the city (whose new progressive mayor, John Lindsay, first elected in 1964, tried to respond to growing community concerns about a number of pressing issues, including the public schools) and powerful philanthropic organizations (especially the Ford Foundation) which embraced the community control idea, several demonstration districts in East Harlem, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville (oh-b) were established. These demonstration...