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

Review by Erika Kitzmiller

The Battle Closer to Home: The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City
By Christopher Bonastia
Stanford University Press
2022, 328 pp.

In his new book, The Battle Nearer to Home: The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City,  Christopher Bonastia provides a deeply researched and engaging narrative about the historical antecedents and current struggles to integrate New York City’s public schools. Bonastia shows that while officials “were happy to advocate integration in principle, they chafed at appeals for the city to implement integration in practice” (2). Despite its global reputation as a proudly diverse and progressive city, New York City public schools remain deeply segregated and inequitable. Bonastia covers two periods in which officials considered and local residents pushed for integration: from Brown v. Board (1954) to the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s and then from the early 2010s to the present. He asserts that he chose these two periods because they were the only times in recent history when there was any hope of enacting and implementing policies and programs to advance integration and equity. During the forty-year gap, Bonastia contends that “these issues were not foregrounded in public discourse” (3). Moreover, the decision to cover these periods, Bonastia suggests, allows him to highlight the historical decisions that contributed to the current system and to help his readers understand current pro-integration activism in a historical context.

In addition to his compelling history, Bonastia also advances a theoretical framework to consider why the push for school integration from educators, families, and youth never succeeded, particularly in the post-Brown period. Bonastia asserts that officials in the New York City’s Board of Education used “border checkpoints” to manage integration –- to support integration in principle while actively avoiding it in practice. He delineates three methods. First, he points out that officials engaged in “physical” checkpoints through new construction and zoning policies that sustained and, in many cases, exacerbated segregation in the city’s public schools. Officials routinely built new schools in the heart of low-income, racially segregated neighborhoods. Second, Bonastia notes that officials utilized “administrative” checkpoints -- the board often conveyed its deep support for integration but then implemented policies and practices to delay or curtain action that would have promoted systemwide integration. Officials provided voluntary transfer policies allowing students of color to file a transfer to attend a majority-white school but rarely approved these requests. More recently, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s created a School Diversity Advisory Group that, while touted throughout the city, produced minimal action. And finally, the third checkpoint that Bonastia identifies is “meritocratic,” which he describes as policies to create screenings and implement tracking. Bonastia shows how attendance policies moved from a system where children largely attended schools in their own neighborhoods to a metric-based system, where children largely attended schools based on results from standardized test scores, grade point averages, and other indicators. This shift hardened the lines of racial segregation (6 - 9). While the framework applies to New York City, one could imagine leveraging these ideas to consider other failed attempts to integrate public schools in Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, and other northern cities.

The book starts with a chapter that traces the advocacy and activism of Black civil rights leaders, including Kenneth and Mamie Clark as well as Ella Baker, who organized meetings to create a roadmap to push for integration as soon as the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional in the 1954 Brown case. These leaders and their allies hosted conferences and created committees like the Intergroup Committee of New York City’s Public Schools to pressure the Board of Education to desegregate and equalize resources in the city’s public schools. This advocacy also revealed the Board’s actions that intensified segregation and the “complex array of emotions that Black New Yorkers felt about integration” (35).  Chapter 3 traces the shifting racial demographics of the city as white residents moved into the surrounding suburbs and Blacks and Puerto Ricans moved into the city, dramatically affecting the demographics and segregation in public schools. Moreover, the latter’s increase also raised questions about the push to integrate the schools, especially as their children had to travel further and faced hostility in majority-white schools and neighborhoods (47). Bonastia also showed how the Board repeatedly dodged or stalled conversations and actions to integrate the city’s schools and how white residents engaged in counter-protests to show their support for the Board’s inaction. This apathy and resistance led to increased anger and frustration, particularly among civil rights leaders and activists pushing for integrated schools for decades, culminating in a giant, nationally pivotal boycott in 1964.

Chapter 4 illustrates how trust eroded between the Board and families of color who wanted their children to attend integrated, equally resourced public schools. Supporters of integration were increasingly concerned that voluntary, one-way integration placed an unfair burden on the youth of color who had already suffered for far too long in a grossly segregated and unequal system (81). The chapter demonstrates the ways that civil rights leaders attempted to heal the fractures between the communities of color and the white-dominated Board; how the nonwhite residents, fed up with racism and inaction, engaged in rebellions and protests; and how white residents, in return, intensified racist backlash and dissent.  Chapters 5 and 6 complicate the history of community control in New York City’s public schools by highlighting the fact that most leaders in these schools were Black educators and advocates; more than one-third of the teachers were Black, a much higher percentage than the average school. Moreover, inside the schools which implemented community control, Bonastia contends that the environment inside the schools, particularly those in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, “was one of interracial cooperation based on mutual respect” (107).

Chapter 5 examines the roots of the community control movement, which emerged from a critical but unsuccessful campaign to increase integration. A second chapter on community control (Chapter 6) examines the traditional depiction of Ocean Hill-Brownville as “a center of racial conflict and hatred.” These chapters show a time when community-control schools operated cohesively and peacefully and how that environment erupted when the teachers went on strike. Bonastia claims that Ocean Hill-Brownsville schools were, at least for a short period, “secretly” integrated but adds that this does not negate the importance of Black nationalism to the political atmosphere in these schools while “vigorously disput[ing] the argument that anti-white racism or anti-Semitism was the core cause of community control’s demise” (111).

Chapter 7 examines the history of the fight for integration and the frustrations among educational advocates who had fought for decades to improve public education for Black and Brown children in the wake of the destruction of community control. Bonastia asserts that integration advocates faced a crossroads: either they could fight to transform education offered in poor, Black and Puerto Rican schools to the level of educational resources and opportunities found in middle-class, white schools, or they could resume the “exhausting fight for integration against the wishes of a shrinking, resistant white population” (185). As they struggled to reconcile these pathways, integration advocates faced stiff opposition from white residents and reluctance among school officials to act on their demands. And “by the mid-1970s, the issue of increasing integration and equity in the school system was overwhelmed by a more fundamental issue: maintaining the school system during a severe fiscal crisis” (196).

In his final two chapters, Bonastia turns to the present-day fight for integration and the lessons one can learn from the history he presents and the current struggle to integrate and equalize schools for all children in the city he calls home. In Chapter 8, he traces the “remnants of the integrationist dream” through a case study of a long-delayed launch of an expansive educational park in the Bronx (205). He then turns to the policies to increase school choice and privatization under Michael Bloomberg and the subsequent policies to integrate and equalize schools under Bill de Blasio–two mayors who repeatedly used the city's history to dodge meaningful change. Bonastia highlights the central role that youth advocacy and activism play in today’s fight to integrate the city’s public schools and how educators facilitated this work. Despite deep disappointment with school officials, Bonastia notes that there has been “incremental progress” towards integration, especially the fact that in 2017 District 15 became the first community-led, district-wide integration program in the city and that in the 2019-2020 school year, district schools dropped meritocratic middle school screening. These decisions resulted in more racial and socio-economic diversity in the schools governed by these policies and practices (226 - 227). Chapter 9 discusses the lessons and ideas one might learn from the past to move forward. He notes the multiple ways that integration advocates pushed for integration only to be pushed back, over and over, by reluctant school officials and resistant white residents. Over time, even those who once believed in integration policies to enhance education sometimes now question its utility: “Pro-integration activism is not for the easily discouraged” (232).

Thinking about the future, Bonastia urges advocates to “focus on what school officials do, rather than what they say” (236). Officials repeatedly lauded the benefits of integration and rarely implemented policies and practices to enhance it. “The city’s education bureaucracy has a long history of creating a commission to study an issue, delaying the release of its recommendations, diluting the recommendations, then implementing them in a half-hearted fashion, if at all” (236). Given the COVID-19 pandemic, Bonastia asserts that the city, once again, finds “itself at a crossroads” (238). School officials can either implement meaningful policies and practices to increase school integration or repeat the past by telling taxpayers that they support integration and then failing to do so.

Bonastia’s book is essential for anyone engaged in the fight for integrated schools, particularly in New York City. His narrative raises critical questions about the history of school integration — the battle for meaningful integration from individuals on the ground and the reluctance among school officials and white residents to promote this work in their schools and neighborhoods.

Erika M. Kitzmiller is a Term Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, and author of The Roots of Educational Inequality: Philadelphia’s Germantown High School, 1907-2014.