The 'other' community control: The two bridges demonstration district and the challenges of school reform, 1965 -- 1975.

摘要

In the spring of 1967, with the support of Mayor John Lindsay and the financial backing of the Ford Foundation, a thrilling new experiment in community control of local schools was optimistically undertaken in three districts around New York City: Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn, Harlem in northern Manhattan and Two Bridges in Manhattan's Lower East Side. In each of these districts, the New York City Board of Education purportedly relinquished control over the local schools, turning over authority to a locally elected board. The experiments in Ocean Hill-Brownsville and Harlem were the more dramatic by far, fomenting protest and marking a turning point in race relations in New York City. The Two Bridges district, on the other hand, has remained the outlier in the historical narrative, resisting easy categorization and scholarship.;The district was an anomaly because of its multi-ethnic and multi-lingual character: the local was 35% Chinese and Chinese American, 40% Puerto Rican, 12% white and 12% African American. These diverse constituencies took an active part in the planning and implementation of community control of local schools. Community residents and parents in Two Bridges had difficulty in coming to consensus around basic questions, such as the validity of local control itself, Governing Board electoral politics, principal appointment, administrative leadership and the distribution of funding. My research revealed that Two Bridges was an unlikely example of late-1960s and early-1970s multiethnic conservatism in New York City. Rather than being pushed and pulled by 1960s liberalism, Two Bridges, for the most part a devoutly Catholic neighborhood, was overwhelmingly hostile to the mostly female community organizers who supported community control. This was a neighborhood that valued adherence to traditional school-community relationships and male-dominated households, and was therefore threatened by the reforms proposed by the main community organization.