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  • Inside Ocean Hill–Brownsville: A Teacher’s Education, 1968–69 by Charles S. Isaacs
  • Jonna Perrillo
Inside Ocean Hill–Brownsville: A Teacher’s Education, 1968–69
Charles S. Isaacs
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. xvii + 346 pp., $29.95 (paper)

So many books have been written about the 1968 teacher strikes in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Ocean Hill–Brownsville (Jerald E. Podair’s The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville Crisis, Daniel H. Perlstein’s Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism, and Maurice R. Berube and Marilyn Gittell’s classic Confrontation at Ocean Hill-Brownsville: The New York School Strikes of 1968) that it can be difficult to imagine what more there is to say. And yet Charles S. Isaacs, a former teacher at Junior High School 271, the school at the center of the strike that shut down all of New York City’s schools for much of the fall of 1968, offers our first extensive insider’s view into the strikes themselves and into far more unknown territory: what it was like to teach in the school. This entrée into JHS 271 and how its teachers responded to education challenges we still face today is the greatest strength of the book. From it, we can ascertain the context and possibilities of teaching and learning in many schools with similar student and teacher populations then and now. Told in an engaging style that draws on published documents and statistics far more than most first-person accounts, this book offers readers a fresh perspective on questions about teaching, unionizing, and how micro or personal history can shed light on larger, community-based events.

The cause of the strikes is a well-known story. A largely Jewish, almost entirely white unionized teaching force—itself only recently having gained any sort of real political authority in the city’s education system—clashed with a black and Latino movement for community control over neighborhood schools. Parents in Ocean Hill–Brownsville and other parts of the city organized against the stigmatization of racial minority children by individual teachers and by a discriminatory school system. A substantial and long-standing racial achievement gap and the consistent tracking of minority students into remedial classes stood as evidence for parents’ critiques. So too did the activism of teachers like JHS 271’s Albert Vann and Les Campbell, who, like half of the city’s four thousand black teachers, by 1968 had joined the Negro Teachers Association, an organization committed to addressing concerns that it believed the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) ignored if not fostered (33). Isaacs, a born and bred Brooklyn Jew, quickly decided he, too, would “defect” from a union that stood behind incompetent and undedicated teachers and that exploited (or fabricated) claims of black anti-Semitism to discredit minority parents. Instead, he sided with the parents, educators, and community leaders who fought for grassroots school improvement. In their fight for “self-reliance, self-respect, and community empowerment,” community-control activists petitioned for a voice in school spending, in the hiring, firing, and training of teachers, in curricular design, and in the designation of merit pay (20, 28).

The conflict between the UFT and community-control activism resulted in three citywide strikes in the fall of 1968, just when Isaacs had left law school and joined the faculty at JHS 271, seeking to “make a difference” (47). Though he “had no real reason to think any white teacher would be accepted” in a community-control “district spawned by the Black Power movement,” he was hired as a math teacher and found that it came easily to him (49). He describes to readers some of the methods and lessons he devised through [End Page 125] trial and error. For example, he helped students to develop their own teacher evaluation form, the first like it in the city’s schools. Even more important, however, is the larger portrait he draws of teachers in the school. To be sure, he was shocked by the high levels of illiteracy and underpreparedness he found at JHS 271 (51). Like many parents, he encountered “teachers among...

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