The Battle Nearer to Home: The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City

By Christopher Bonastia

Despite its image as an epicenter of progressive social policy, New York City continues to have one of the nation's most segregated school systems. Tracing the quest for integration in education from the mid-1950s to the present, The Battle Nearer to Home follows the tireless efforts by educational activists to dismantle the deep racial and socioeconomic inequalities that segregation reinforces. The fight for integration has shifted significantly over time, not least in terms of the way "integration" is conceived, from transfers of students and redrawing school attendance zones, to more recent demands of community control of segregated schools. In all cases, the Board eventually pulled the plug in the face of resistance from more powerful stakeholders, and, starting in the 1970s, integration receded as a possible solution to educational inequality. In excavating the history of New York City school integration politics, in the halls of power and on the ground, Christopher Bonastia unearths the enduring white resistance to integration and the severe costs paid by Black and Latino students. This last decade has seen activists renew the fight for integration, but the war is still far from won.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jul 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781503631984

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The Battle Nearer to Home

The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City

Christopher Bonastia

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2022 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bonastia, Christopher, author.

Title: The battle nearer to home : the persistence of school segregation in New York City / Christopher Bonastia.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2021039233 (print) | LCCN 2021039234 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503628472 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503631977 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503631984 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Segregation in education—New York (State)—New York—History. | School integration—New York (State)—New York—History. | Education and state—New York (State)—New York—History.

Classification: LCC LC212.523.N496 B66 2022 (print) | LCC LC212.523.N496 (ebook) | DDC 379.2/6309747—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039233

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039234

Cover graphics: Street map of NYC, Library of Congress. Graphic inspired by New York Times chart, 1977, Changing Composition of City’s Public Schools.

Typeset by Newgen North America in Minion Pro 10/15

To my Lehman College students, past and present

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Prominent Individuals

Map of Manhattan and the Bronx

Map of Brooklyn and Queens

1. Diverse but Segregated

2. The Case for School Integration

3. Good Neighborhoods Do Not Just Happen

4. Inflamed

5. The Roots of Community Control

6. Ocean Hill–Brownsville’s Afrocentric, Multicultural Vision

7. Race and Education after Community Control

8. The Renewed Demand for Integration

9. Learning from the Past and Moving Forward

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book completes a trilogy of sorts on the politics of racial segregation. The Battle Nearer to Home, to my sad surprise, took the longest to write. This is partially due to the vastness of New York City history and politics. But I think this lengthy journey can also be traced to the fact that this project hits closer to home than my prior two books. The title, however, is not a personal reference: it alludes to school integration activist Milton Galamison’s observation that white New Yorkers’ commitment to racial justice withered when the focus moved from the South to their own backyards.

I live in Brooklyn, as I have for most of the last twenty-five years. When I first began researching this book, my son was seven. Now he is sixteen, attending a public high school. As the white parent of a Black, biracial child, the spouse of a Black woman, and a believer in integration, I often wondered how the school choices my wife, Rebecca, and I made for him—and later with him—might best reflect our wider beliefs about social justice and equity. We wanted him to be surrounded by students from a broad range of backgrounds, but particularly Black peers. Of course, we wanted him to attend a school that nurtured him, that challenged him, that sparked him. When we were navigating New York City’s exhausting and stressful high-school admissions process, I researched. I scheduled school visits. I created spreadsheets. (I’m an academic—that’s what we do.)

Like many parents, I had qualms about the hypercompetitive admissions process that sorts students into sought-after, acceptable, and last-resort schools. Rebecca and I wondered whether we should focus on predominantly Black schools or the more coveted schools with disproportionate numbers of white students. We certainly would not send him to a school where he was one of a few Black students, but what percentage was acceptable? We didn’t have an exact number. Moreover, anyone familiar with New York City middle and high school admissions knows that as a parent you aren’t exactly choosing schools. You rank them, they rank you, and you see where the algorithm matches you. We got our fifth choice and are mostly happy with it. Not everyone is so fortunate.

I hope that this book offers readers a nuanced understanding of how New York City education officials historically have addressed—or more often danced around—the issue of integration. I hope it gives readers a better grasp of where the politics of school integration and equity stand today, and where they may be going. And I pray that it prompts readers to think about integration far more broadly than an outdated focus only on body mixing.

I would like to thank Asia Bailey and Shereka Matthews for their help with research assistance. Courtney Essien’s honors thesis on contemporary colorblind racism helped me to refine some of my own conceptual points. Sara Rosado went above and beyond in offering thoughtful, constructive feedback on several iterations of the manuscript. Jane Jones at Up In Consulting provided valuable commentary on an early draft of the manuscript, which was a mess.

In spring 2017, I had the opportunity to be a fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Advanced Research Collaborative. During that time, I received detailed comments from faculty and student fellows on an early draft of a book chapter. (That chapter was not included in the final manuscript, but I still appreciate the feedback!) Thanks to Don Robotham, Kay Powell, and Christie Sillo for their efforts to make my time there enjoyable and productive.

In fall 2019, I presented a chapter (which made it into the book) at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History annual meeting in North Charleston, South Carolina. This conference is always inspiring and captivating. Special shout to Devin Fergus, Nichole Nelson, and my Lehman colleague Nick Boston for joining me on the panel and responding to my work. I’d also like to thank another Lehman colleague, Shehzad Nadeem (aka Shezzy Nice), for providing comments on a chapter in progress. I want to acknowledge all my departmental colleagues for their support and friendship, especially the chairs under whom I have served: Madeline Moran, Elin Waring, and Kofi Benefo. I also must recognize Miriam Medina, our administrative assistant and a dear friend, and Dean Pam Mills, who has been very understanding as I continued this research after taking on the post of departmental chair in July 2020.

As I was immersing myself in the history of school integration politics in New York City, I almost missed the story of what is happening right now: beginning in the early 2010s, high school students here have been waging an impassioned campaign demanding that the city finally act decisively to foster integration. Their conception of integration reaches far beyond body mixing, incorporating responsive and demographically reflective teaching staff, equalization of resources across schools, decriminalization of students of color, and an end to the screening practices that sort students into schools by race and socioeconomic status. The opportunity to interview some of these young activists and their adult mentors was the highlight of my research. I thank members of IntegrateNYC and Teens Take Charge for taking the time to share their inspiring vision for the future of education. I also wish to recognize Charlie Isaacs, whose firsthand account of community control in New York City proved highly influential to me, and who graciously shared pizza and insights with me at his home upstate. Much gratitude to Nyah Berg, Matt Gonzales, Taylor McGraw, and the late Zipporiah Mills for speaking with me and to the numerous archivists who helped me navigate historical materials.

Black scholars are still marginalized too often. If they kept their distance from white scholars, particularly those who study race, I wouldn’t blame them. Thankfully, the vast majority of Black scholars whom I have crossed paths with have been unfailingly supportive and generous. Aldon Morris, Tiffany Joseph, Assata Kokayi, Bertrade Ngo-Ngijol Banoum, Waldo Martin, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor are just some of the many to whom I am indebted.

My editor at Stanford University Press, Marcela Maxfield, took an early interest in this project, and I am thrilled that I was able to collaborate with her on this project. She is a star. Marcela’s editorial assistant, Sunna Juhn, patiently answered my annoying questions about formatting endnotes and other matters. Copyeditor Barbara Armentrout and the two anonymous reviewers read the manuscript with great care, and this book is better for their efforts. Thank you to the entire staff at SUP for helping this project come to life.

Rebecca, Kofi, and I weathered the pandemic surprisingly well in our tiny Brooklyn apartment. I am so grateful for their love, good humor, and grace during this stressful and extraordinary time. Much love to our chosen family, which includes Caryn Rivers, Anwar Alcide, Davira Jimenez, and Dorlan Kimbrough.

My students at Lehman College have been a replenishing source of joy and inspiration since I arrived on campus in 2004. (During the COVID-19 pandemic, I have missed Lehman’s beautiful campus, and the electric energy of our students.) Several of them, including Asia, Shereka, and Sara, have contributed in direct ways to the manuscript, and hundreds of others have offered valuable insights and a sense of community inside and outside the classroom. In the face of a pandemic that hit the Bronx with particular fury, their resilience and determination are extraordinary. I dedicate this book to them.

Prominent Individuals

NYC School Superintendents and Chancellors during the Years of Study

William Jansen, 1947–58

John Theobald, 1958–62

Calvin Gross, 1963–65

Bernard Donovan, 1965–69

Harvey Scribner (Chancellor), 1970–1973

Carmen Farina (Chancellor), 2014–18

Richard Carranza (Chancellor), 2018–2021

Other Prominent Public Figures

NOTE: All the individuals listed below are men. Women—among them, Ella Baker, Babette Edwards, and Annie Stein—played key roles in the battle for school integration and equity. Many of their adversaries were also women. However, during the integration disputes from the 1950s through the 1970s, men were the public faces, while women played crucial but underappreciated roles as organizers and foot soldiers. See Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long?: African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

James E. Allen: New York State Commissioner of Education, 1955–69. Subsequently appointed US Commissioner of Education.

Kenneth B. Clark: Psychologist whose testimony in Brown v. Board of Education proved pivotal to the plaintiff’s victory. Became a long-term advocate for school integration and educational equity in New York City and State. Served on the New York State Board of Regents from 1966 to 1986.

James Donovan: Board of Education President, 1963–65.

Reverend Milton Galamison: Brooklyn minister who became the most prominent advocate for school integration in New York City during the late 1950s and 1960s.

John Lindsay: Mayor of New York City, 1966 to 1973, a period that included the fierce battle over community control of schools.

Preston Wilcox: Long-time Harlem advocate who became known as the father of community control.

MAP 1 Manhattan and the Bronx. Neighborhoods in bold are discussed within the text. Inset: The five boroughs of New York City.

MAP 2 Brooklyn and Queens. Neighborhoods in bold are discussed within the text.

1

Diverse but Segregated

AT A SPRING 2019 event for student activists, New York City schools chancellor Richard Carranza fervently insisted: No, we will not wait to integrate our schools, we will not wait to dismantle the segregated systems we have! But by August of that year, he conceded: If I integrated the system, the next thing I’m going to do is . . . walk on water.¹ Carranza was following a path worn by NYC education officials who, for decades, promised to integrate city schools before inevitably explaining their failure as a product of popular resistance, logistical complexities, and demographic realities. Such roadblocks, they’d say, were too imposing to surmount.

The vows to integrate New York City schools began in earnest following the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Brown, the NYC Board of Education insisted, reminds us that modern psychological knowledge indicates clearly that segregated, racially homogenous schools damage the personality of minority group children. These schools decrease their motivation and thus impair their ability to learn. White children are also damaged. Public education in a racially homogenous setting is socially unrealistic and blocks the attainment of the goals of a democratic education, whether this segregation occurs by law or by fact.² In retrospect the board’s claims of personality damage, subdued motivation, and learning impairment as result of segregation are problematic, given the implication that schools with entirely Black and Brown student bodies are doomed to failure. Nevertheless, the board admitted for the first time its obligation to dismantle school segregation in New York City.

Four years later, the board-appointed Commission on Integration addressed the issue even more directly: Whether school segregation is the effect of law and custom as in the South, or has its roots in residential segregation, as in New York City, its defects are inherent and incurable. In education there can be no such thing as ‘separate but equal.’ Educationally, as well as morally and socially, the only remedy for the segregated school is its desegregation.³ Yet over the ensuing decades, while top school officials were happy to advocate integration in principle, they chafed at appeals for the city to implement integration in practice. In 1964, amid threats by local civil rights organizations to launch a massive school boycott against segregation, Board President James Donovan unleashed his exasperation with their demands: We are running a board of education, not a board of integration or board of transportation.⁴ Over the next few years, weary pro-integration activists would conclude that city officials were unwilling to prioritize integration in the face of white resistance and searched for alternatives to secure quality education for Black and Puerto Rican students.

The New York City school system remains highly segregated. A 2012 New York Times report found that among large urban school systems, only those of Chicago and Dallas were more segregated than New York’s. Two years later, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA concluded that at the state level, New York had the most segregated school system. A 2021 update to that report found that New York remains the most segregated state for Black students, and lags behind only California in the segregation of Latino students.⁵ In the decades since the Brown decision, New York City has failed to advance integration and equity in a meaningful manner, despite its reputation as a proudly diverse and tolerant city and one leading in scientific and industrial progress.

In some respects, the lack of progress on school integration is unsurprising. While the benefits of liberal interventions such as hospitals and transportation seemed to be universal, school integration efforts—particularly as more whites left and more Black and Puerto Rican residents arrived—were perceived by whites as a zero-sum game.⁶ To this day, no big city has successfully integrated its school system, much less one that was under no judicial or federal agency mandate in the two decades after Brown v. Board of Education. Maximum school integration in a city the size of New York would have been an enormously complex, voluntary, and largely unpopular effort that most, if not all, top officials in the Board of Education and city government did not believe in. (Some education officials did seek to increase integration incrementally, where possible.)

The Battle Nearer to Home assesses two periods in New York City history when issues of integration and equity were on the agenda of the Board of Ed and activist groups: from Brown v. Board (1954) to the city’s fiscal crisis (mid-1970s), and from the early 2010s to the present. Why the gap between the mid-1970s and the 2010s? In order for an integration-and-equity program to have an authentic chance of enactment and implementation, integration and equity have to be on the docket of the Board of Education, elected officials, and activist groups. During the forty-year gap, as well as prior to 1954, these issues were not foregrounded in public discourse. The placement of an issue on the agenda is not sufficient to ensure enactment and implementation, but it is essential. With its exploration of the contemporary wave of pro-integration activism, this book reveals how the current New York City school system, with its strengths and faults, came to be. It will also enable readers to understand current pro-integration activism in historical context.

Throughout these pages, I examine policies and practices of the New York City Board of Education that perpetuated a system in which Black and Puerto Rican children often attended substandard, segregated schools that fundamentally failed them, but a system that also retained the glint of integration and inclusion. Perhaps the most crucial obstacle to fashioning an exemplary school system in New York was that virtually all the stakeholders in the system—politicians, school officials throughout the massive bureaucracy, the teachers union (the United Federation of Teachers), and the clear majority of white parents—were only willing to support policies and arrangements that required them to make minimal (or no) sacrifices, while offering token concessions to those demanding comprehensive changes to a broken system. The board’s mode of operation was to maintain high-quality education and a semblance of measured integration in a limited number of schools, with whites remaining the distinct numerical majority in those venues even when they became less than half of the school population. I describe how the Board of Ed, with the support of city officials, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), and the majority of white parents, sustained limited, numerical integration and rampant segregation simultaneously. These groups had decisive advantages over Black and Puerto Rican parents who were calling for meaningful steps to increase integration and equity. In addition to possessing greater political influence, integration opponents were aligned with the sprawling Board of Ed’s proclivity for resisting change.⁷

The board, then, was largely swimming with the tide of public opinion—or at least the views of those with greater influence: the working-and middle-class white families who had little interest in the transformation of a system that seemed to serve most of their children relatively well and teacher organizations that were unwilling to relinquish any power in order to improve the education of poorly served students. Because the city was never under an order from federal courts or agencies to address the segregation of students, any solution would have to come from New Yorkers. Thus, the actions by the Board of Education must be assessed in relation to the influence of pro-and anti-integration activists, political officials, the UFT, and other actors. In accounting for the very limited steps that the city took to confront school segregation, I assess how the board and other supporters of the status quo attempted to legitimate or justify these actions and inactions in the most cosmopolitan of cities. These rationales did nothing to mitigate the racist indifference to Black and Puerto Rican educational aspirations that left many of these students alienated or abandoned by the school system.

Desegregation and Integration

The terms desegregation and integration are often used interchangeably, which can result in a lack of clarity. According to Jennifer Ayscue and Erica Frankenberg:

Desegregation refers to a legal or political process of ending the separation and isolation of different racial and ethnic groups. Desegregation is achieved through court order or voluntary means. Integration refers to a social process in which members of different racial and ethnic groups experience fair and equal treatment within a desegregated environment. Integration requires further action beyond desegregation.⁸

In this book, I refer primarily to the concept of integration for two reasons. First, the push for reduced racial isolation in New York City schools did not occur under legal compulsion, and its advocates confronted a system where pockets of numerical integration did occur. (In some instances, I use the terms numerical integration and statistical integration to emphasize that particular proposals or initiatives narrowly focused on adjusting school demographics rather than more expansive conceptions of integration.⁹) Second, the activists who demanded the reduction of racial isolation in schools were not merely seeking demographic changes to school populations. While early demands for integration did largely focus on creating more diverse classrooms, integration evolved to incorporate a deep educational commitment to Black youth and other students of color, a curriculum free of cultural bias, and a teaching staff that reflected the diversity of the student body. Ironically, the scope of integration widened during the late 1960s experiment with community control of schools, often viewed as a rejection of integration. In brief, community-control advocates concluded that the Board of Education and the UFT were not interested in the education of Black and Brown students, so Black and Brown communities should be authorized to operate local schools themselves, with authority over teacher hiring, curriculum, budget allocations, and so on.

What community-control activists often rejected was not integration per se, but how it was practiced. As Leslie Campbell (who later renamed himself Jitu Weusi), a pivotal figure in the community-control movement, observed, the type of integration pursued by the Board of Education was often focused narrowly on a mixing of bodies, with no tangible changes to the larger educational system.¹⁰ Skepticism about integration as it happened on the ground was common. The Black social worker Preston Wilcox exemplified this ambivalence. At the same time that he was becoming a prominent voice advocating for community control of schools in Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods as an alternative to integration, he enrolled his son in an integrated private school (see chapter 5). He described integration as the sharing of a mutually self-reaffirming educational experience by students of a variety of ethnic, religious, social, and economic backgrounds . . . designed to enable students to establish co-equal relationships and to understand the true nature of society.¹¹ By true nature, Wilcox presumably meant that such education must incorporate a frank assessment of the rampant racial oppression and exploitation that have scarred the United States from its earliest days, as well as a rigorous exploration of the vast contributions that African Americans and other marginalized groups have made to the nation’s political, social, cultural, and economic life.

The purpose of this book is not to build a case for the benefits of school integration; the evidence is clear. Most recently, the economist Rucker C. Johnson makes a highly persuasive case that school integration, when thoughtfully implemented and accompanied by equitable school funding and robust pre-school investments, is the most potent weapon against educational inequality.¹² These caveats are crucial: curating a demographically diverse classroom or school is insufficient to create a meaningfully integrated environment. We will see numerous examples of this constricted brand of curated integration in the pages that follow.

Border Checkpoints

In a 1971 article, the educational activist Annie Stein characterized the Board of Ed’s strategy as containment through segregation. One-hundred-percent segregation was not possible logistically or legally, and there is no evidence to suggest that this was a concealed goal of Board of Ed members or other influential city officials. Nevertheless, they did have ample incentive to minimize integration, given their fears that white, middle-class families would exit the public schools, or the city altogether, if their children’s schools became too integrated. The Board of Ed maintained segregation through school zoning policies, limits on student transfers for integration, and placement of most new schools in segregated neighborhoods. They attempted to chip away at the legitimacy of the integration movement by regularly affirming the board’s commitment to integration, enacting carefully limited integration experiments, and blaming failure on the parents, other agencies, and lack of funds.

As Stein observed, multiple stakeholders jealously protected the benefits they accrued from racial segregation in schools, neighborhoods, and the workplace:

Roughly half a billion dollars a year is involved, and many fingers are in the pie—the construction workers’ unions, the real estate owners and speculators, the dozens of contractors and suppliers, the Catholic Church which must protect the value of its large land holdings, the politicians whose power rests on the patronage they can command, and organized crime.

Any break in the rigid color line means loss of real estate profits; residential segregation is highly profitable on both sides of the line. Whites can be sold houses at high prices if they are assured that their schools will stay white. House-hungry Blacks can be charged higher rents because they cannot move out of the ghetto. An integrated school is thus a foot in the door of housing segregation and a serious threat to profits.¹³

The BOE strategy can be understood as utilizing border checkpoints to manage integration. Historically, the BOE used some of these checkpoints to actively block integration or help white parents avoid it. In many cases, however, the BOE used these checkpoints to support integration in principle, while limiting it sharply in practice. These checkpoints were not of the George-Wallace-standing-in-the-schoolhouse-door variety. Rather, they served to sharply restrict the number of low-income or Black and Brown children who were offered access to middle-class, predominantly white school spaces with far greater resources.

I identify three primary categories of checkpoints. The first is physical, which most prominently incorporates the selection of school construction sites and zoning decisions. For example, the board often selected sites for new schools in the heart of segregated, low-income neighborhoods, arguing that these new schools would do the most to relieve school overcrowding where the problem was most acute. Zoning exemplifies the porosity of checkpoints. While there are egregious historical examples of the board zoning for segregation, in many cases it was virtually impossible to maintain rigidly segregated school zones. Instead, the board might carve out some intensely segregated zones in order to create other zones that had some numerical integration but maintained a white majority.

The second checkpoint is administrative. In these instances, the board would convey its support for integration, while delaying or limiting action that would foster widespread integration. One-way, voluntary transfer programs allowing students in overcrowded, segregated Black and Puerto Rican schools to transfer to underutilized, primarily white ones provide one example of an administrative checkpoint. Said transfers were limited in number, sometimes attached to specific time frames, promising receiving schools that students of color would pass through the checkpoint in reasonable proportions and eventually exit. Nevertheless, white parents often objected, sometimes furiously. Another prominent tactic was to commission a study, await recommendations, then bury the report once it was delivered. This bureaucratic burial has endured. Most recently, the extensive recommendations of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s School Diversity Advisory Group yielded minimal action to address school segregation in the city.¹⁴

The Board of Ed also tended to launch limited demonstration projects, then pull the plug on them before anyone could assess the results fairly or make a case for expansion. In a smaller number of cases, particularly committed Black parents refused to enroll their children in low-achieving, segregated public schools. After intimidation tactics (such as threatening to remove the children from parental custody) failed to dissuade the parents, the board agreed to place the children in a school the parents found acceptable. That school was rarely the one parents had identified and was never part of a more comprehensive attempt to improve schools serving low-income students or afford other children in blatantly inadequate schools the opportunity to enroll in higher-quality, integrated schools. If all else failed in appeasing angry parents, the board would claim administrative impotence, pleading that the obstacles to integration were too onerous. These included residential segregation, the threat of increasing white flight, changing neighborhood (and city) demographics, and the logistics of transporting children outside their neighborhood in a crowded and at-times chaotic city. While these impediments were real, they did not preclude the board from strategically advancing integration while improving education in schools that remained segregated.

The third checkpoint is meritocratic, enacted through school screening and tracking. It is the most enduring and the most jealously guarded by its direct beneficiaries—parents whose children are admitted to good public schools—as well as the Board of Education (now Department of Education) and politicians at the local and state levels. Currently, New York City high school activists are leading a sustained and passionate campaign to end various forms of school screening, which sorts students into schools with vastly differing resources, prestige, and levels of racial and socioeconomic diversity. As school admissions policies have changed over the decades, so have some of the details. However, the basic sorting mechanisms remain as effective as ever. Historically, elementary school students would attend their neighborhood school. The quality of the education—including school resources, the experience of the teaching staff, and teacher beliefs in their students’ ability to learn—correlated highly with the location and demographics of the school. Children in mostly white, middle-class schools typically did well. Children in low-income, primarily Black and Puerto Rican schools often faced low teacher expectations and fared poorly; many became estranged from the school system.¹⁵ When students attended their zoned middle school, the outcomes were repeated.

As geographic assignment receded, middle schools increasingly screened and sorted students on the basis of standardized test scores, grades, and attendance. By the time students applied to high schools, which were then less frequently zoned (and are now primarily unzoned), the sorting was complete, with white students (and, later, Asian students) filling disproportionate numbers of seats in the most prestigious and well-resourced, screened schools. These schools all include Black and Latino student populations: in some, a mere smattering (as in the well-known Stuyvesant High School), and in others, upwards of 30 percent (as in Beacon High School).¹⁶ Disproportionate numbers of Black and Latino students continue to be tracked into vocational high schools, schools serving students with low grades and/or standardized test scores, and schools for students alleged to have behavioral or emotional issues.¹⁷

At a May 2020 commemoration of the Brown v. Board decision, one high school student crystallized the sorting of students in NYC schools: People say numbers don’t lie. Good, smart students get good grades and are thereby entitled to the city’s bulk of resources. The rest of us are left to fight over the scraps. This is the logic of our school system. Or, as current integration advocate Taylor McGraw observes: We have some schools that are built for kids with As and Bs, and then we have a whole lot of schools that are built for kids with Cs through Fs.¹⁸ Whereas students at specialized and screened high schools typically enjoy well-maintained, modern facilities and a lengthy menu of courses and extracurricular offerings, students at unscreened high schools often endure unkempt and outdated facilities, vermin, fewer academic and extracurricular programs (including fewer sports teams), scarce and/or outdated textbooks, and congested hallways and classrooms. Moreover, at high schools that serve a primarily Black and Latino student body, students may wait as long as forty minutes outdoors to pass through metal detectors before gaining access to school facilities.¹⁹

The sought-after, statistically integrated schools could not exist without a much larger number of segregated, low-income, Black and Brown schools. (I use the term statistically integrated here to indicate that Black and Brown students at elite public schools often report feeling alienated and out of place and in that sense do not feel that they are in an authentically integrated environment.²⁰) In 2021, colorblind meritocracy through admissions screening, which New York does far more than any other American city, is the legitimator and linchpin of school segregation and inequity in the Big Apple. Screening effectively sorts students by race and class without using these criteria explicitly, shrouding segregation beneath the veneer of fairness.²¹

Checkpoints are not always centralized. As we see in Glendale-Ridgewood (Queens), Jackson Heights (Queens), Canarsie (Brooklyn), and other neighborhoods examined in subsequent chapters, local white residents at times contested the NYC Board of Education’s ability to be the sole checkpoint for enrolling students. Their primary recourse was physical, such as trying to intimidate incoming students or picketing schools. Local school boards also resorted to administrative checkpoints to prevent the enrollment of students or hasten their exit. At the school level, administrators and teachers enforced meritocratic checkpoints by sorting students into different academic tracks, often at a very early age. This sorting typically mapped onto racial and class distinctions, but not always. Some Black students—among them, Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and the psychologist Kenneth Clark, whose research proved key in the Brown decision—passed through NYC’s educational checkpoints, serving to legitimate the system for its defenders.²²

While previous scholars have sought to unravel the mechanisms of segregation in various realms of public and private life, my border-checkpoints typology is distinctive in documenting how an urban school board maintained a manageable degree of integration in the face of widespread segregation, rather than vying for maximum possible segregation. My typology highlights the role of inaction (for example, commissioning studies without implementing their recommendations) in attempts to maintain orderly inertia, and it explains how meritocracy evolved to become the central legitimator of limited school integration.²³ The border-checkpoints framework also sheds light on the historical demographic composition of the New York City teaching and supervisory force, which was far less diverse than in other large cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia.²⁴ Although the UFT pointed to the hiring and promotion system as an exemplar of colorblind meritocracy, often it was neither. Teachers commonly obtained supervisory positions through personal networks rather than proven merit.²⁵

Border checkpoints are the mechanisms through which a white veto can be imposed upon educational measures that constrict the educational options or contradict the preferences of white families. Camille Walsh draws the connection between the white veto and rhetorical claims that white families deserved a disproportionate voice in educational matters due to their status as taxpayers, a vague, racially and economically coded designation. In New York City, educational officials implicitly acknowledged the white veto by claiming that aggressive integration policies would prompt more white families to leave the city, resulting in loss of tax revenue and a more difficult road to school integration.²⁶

The white veto implies that educational decision-makers did, in some instances, make strategic choices to approve halting (and often inadequate) concessions to Black demands, as in the optional-transfer and community-control experiments. They felt secure in the knowledge that they subsequently could discontinue any of these experiments if the white heat—from families, the teachers union, politicians, or school officials themselves—rose to a worrisome degree. The concept of a white veto captures the preference for the status quo (which accrued benefits to white families), the flexibility to make occasional concessions to Black and Puerto Rican demands, and the ability to pivot from these concessions if the backlash became significant.

Why New York City?

While the gulf between ideology and practice in New York has always been especially wide, its status as a diverse-but-segregated school system remains the norm among large cities. In fact, historically diverse districts such as New York City are less likely to be integrated than districts that have recently become diverse. The latter group mainly comprises small cities and suburban towns that had been historically white but have experienced increasing enrollments of students of color, who in most cases are Hispanic or Asian. Researchers often measure district integration by gauging the extent to which schools within their boundaries reflect the racial and ethnic makeup of the district as a whole. In a city with over 1.1 million public school students (including charter schools) and where four racial/ethnic groups each have at least a 15 percent share of the school population, it is hardly shocking that many schools in the five boroughs vary substantially from these proportions.²⁷ Still, New York City can do better than it is doing.

In the decades since Brown v. Board of Education, white students have gone from a majority to 15 percent of public school students. Black students are around 25 percent in the most recent data, though the proportion of first-and second-generation Black immigrants has risen sharply. Latino students, who in earlier decades were overwhelmingly Puerto Rican, hail from an array of nations and have become the largest racial/pan-ethnic group in the school system at 41 percent. Asian students, who through the ’50s and ’60s constituted a very small percentage of the overall student body, are considerably more prominent, constituting 16 percent of the city’s public school population. Roughly 70 percent of students face