CUNY Academic Commons

Community Control Struggles over Education in New York City, 1950-1972

This interdisciplinary research seminar, offered to M.A. and PhD students at the Graduate Center in the Spring 2013 semester, will focus on the historic struggles over community control of education that wracked New York City neighborhoods and schools during the “long decade” of the 1960s. The seminar will start with the sustained, but ultimately failed, efforts by parents and activists, black, white and Latino, to integrate the NYC public school system and many other public institutions and aspects of New York city life beginning in the 1950s and extending through the mid-1960s. We will then focus closely on the epochal 1968 UFT strike against community control of the public schools that shut down the entire school system in the fall of that year. Finally we will examine the battles in the City University of New York, beginning in the late 1960s, for open admissions that would encompass a broader, more representative cross section of the city’s public school graduates in the city’s public university system.