Abstract
How can one of the nation’s largest school districts in, arguably, one of the most progressive and cosmopolitan cities in the world continue to maintain a de facto racially segregated school system? In The Battle Nearer to Home: The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City, Christopher Bonastia takes up this question by exploring the deeply divided racial history of the fight for school integration in New York City from the mid 1950s to the present day. Bonastia uses a historical and organizational perspective to understand the various ways community leaders, parents, and students have called for racial integration in the city’s school system and how school leaders, parents, the Board of Education, and the teachers’ union have resisted any substantive change. Readers are left with an understanding of how deeply entrenched racism, along with political and administrative inaction, has resulted in a school system in the 2020s that has made little progress toward any true racial integration at a building level in New York City.
Bonastia begins his “Acknowledgement” by explaining how he, as an Associate Professor at CUNY, relates to this story and reflecting on his positionality as a white man married to a Black woman, and the parent of a Black, biracial son attending New York City public schools. He describes the questions and challenges that he and his wife faced as they negotiated the daunting high school admissions process in New York City and how they weighed racial composition, school quality, and the competitiveness of the entire endeavor. This helps situate the perspective that Bonastia brings as he examines decades of history and the inclusion of the views of parents, teachers, political leaders, and community activists. Particularly, as a New Yorker, Bonastia decries that “New York City can do better than it is doing” (p. 11) on the integration front.
Bonastia argues that New York City maintains a “diverse-but-segregated school system” (p. 11), not unlike other big cities. However, what makes New York City unique in its struggles to address school integration are the historically white teaching force, the need to grapple with what integration means in a racially and ethnically diverse school system, its sheer size, and the illusion New Yorkers have that they are more “progressive” than others, particularly compared to Southerners (pp. 12–13). Bonastia shows that New York City was decidedly non-progressive in making substantial steps toward true racial integration in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, the Board of Education acted in ways that were designed more for show than to make any real steps toward change. Bonastia terms these “border checkpoints”—some were administrative (e.g., commissioning reports, then taking no action) and others were meritocratic (school screening and admissions testing). All were ways for the Board of Education in New York City to effectively manage a minimum level of racial integration in such a way as to appease white parents, students, community members, and politicians who rallied against any meaningful level of integration.
Bonastia takes readers through decades of struggles to integrate New York City schools and provides significant detail on the actors who were intimately involved. We dive deep into the struggles that occurred across the city, with Bonastia focusing in on key district cases such as Ocean Hill-Brownsville, a district that experimented with community control as a reaction to the largely white teaching force in schools that were majority Black and Latinx. This case highlights how parents, teachers, and administration were frequently at odds with many aspects of integration.
The last two chapters connect the history to the present day. These chapters are essential and help the reader to see the importance of understanding the details about the steps that were taken (or that were attempted) in the 1960s and 1970s. It is both disheartening and jarring to see how similar the struggles of today are to those of decades ago. Importantly, Bonastia focuses attention on the efforts of student-led organizations that call for meaningful integration in New York City schools.
The Battle Nearer to Home illustrates the dynamics of the fight for racial integration in New York City, which helps us make sense of why we are where we are. The details and history presented here can help readers develop a more nuanced understanding of the struggle within New York City. The checkpoints typology helps readers see the ways bureaucracy and policy contribute to the persistence of a segregated school system. Deep-seated prejudice and systemic racism also abound, and these are illustrated in the ways in which white parents and communities frame their integration protests and how districts are drawn.
Bonastia calls our attention particularly to how residential segregation and then district lines contribute to persistent school segregation. These factors are critical, providing fuel for segregation to continue on so easily, with protests and community-based efforts yielding little action. The text addresses these larger issues but focuses more on historical content than on explicating and connecting the contextual, systemic, and ideological forces that contributed to the phenomenon or on using conceptual frameworks to draw connections that might span across cases. Instead, the focus here is on an in-depth, historical account of the players, institutions, and communities of New York City. Across time and place, racism is deeply entrenched in schools, neighborhoods, institutions, and polices. The case of New York City schools exemplifies the limits of progressive ideology when faced with systemic racism.