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The chaos that those families were fleeing seems unimaginable today. Here’s Vincent Cannato, in “The Ungovernable City,” describing what happened in Franklin Lane High School, on the border of Brooklyn and Queens:
Franklin Lane had 5,600 students enrolled in 1969 — though the issue of overcrowding was a problem only on paper, since attendance at Lane was never more than 60 percent. Fights between black and white students were common in the school, and the school administration was unable to keep control. As one Village Voice journalist wrote of Franklin Lane: “Every day there is a riot on the subway or a fight in the bathroom or an arrest in the halls or a brawl in the cafeteria or a suspension of more black students…Lane is a time bomb, and everyone — blacks, whites, teachers, Board of Ed — admits it could explode any day. Yet no one has marshaled the power or imagination or trust to head off disaster.”
The school’s neighbors resented the influx of black students into their neighborhood and formed the Cypress Hill-Woodhaven Improvement Association to protest student disorders. (The group was headed by Michael Long, who later became the powerful head of the New York State Conservative Party.) The worst incident at Franklin Lane occurred on January 20, 1969, when a teacher, Frank Siracusa, ran down the stairs to see who had thrown a rock through his window. In the stairwell he was confronted by three black youths who sprayed him with lighter fluid, kicked and punched him, and then set him on fire. After the attack the school was shut down for several days. When the school reopened, fifty New York City policemen were stationed inside the school to maintain order, but their presence only exacerbated tensions.
I’ve read quite a bit about the school disorders of the period, and this still floors me. Cannato presents it as a product of integration, but I don’t see how even really nasty racial tensions cause kids to set a teacher on fire. The long-time residents who resented the new black students were prone to put this down to something wrong with black people. That’s of course ludicrous, both because white kids were also getting out of hand and because kids in all-black schools weren’t setting teachers on fire in 1962 — or in 2002. Something went deeply wrong in the city’s school system in the late 1960s, and it’s hard to say what it was. Maybe it was environmental lead, or maybe it was a series of public policy failures. Whatever it was, it was devastating.
Now, Benedikt could lecture you until the cows came home about your moral obligation to public schooling, but you still wouldn’t leave your kids in a school where the teachers were being set on fire (and neither, I imagine, would Benedikt). If you couldn’t send your kids to private school, you’d just move. That, in fact, is what happened to most urban school systems; any resident who had any means at all picked up and moved outside the city’s borders, beyond the legal limits of busing so that there could be no question of bused students importing these problems to their kids’ schools.
In the outer boroughs where residents had been dependent on public schools, that’s in fact what happened. But in much of Manhattan — and in Catholic and Jewish neighborhoods where many parents sent their kids to parochial schools anyway — many stayed. Those neighborhoods provided enough of a tax base to support the magnet schools that kept a thin layer of middle-class parents in the city. By the time I went to public school in New York, in the early 1980s, any kid in a regular New York City high school in Brooklyn or the Bronx or even Manhattan was pretty much definitionally a kid whose parents could not afford better. If that had been the only option, the middle class and wealthy families would have left the city entirely — and the schools would have been even worse, because the tax base to support them would have eroded even more dramatically than it did.
And as the great crime wave of the 1970s and 1980s receded, those places formed the base from which gentrifiers such as Benedikt spread out. They kept New York City’s middle-class urban culture alive, along with the network of services that supported it. They loved New York passionately. But they loved their kids more.
Benedikt’s dictum makes sense only if parents can’t move. If they can — and bid up the value of real estate in good school districts — then making parents send their kids to the local schools probably doesn’t mean that all the parents in mixed-income neighborhoods will put their children, and their effort, into the local school. It probably means that they’ll leave the mixed-income neighborhood, taking their tax dollars with them.
This is nominally public schooling, but in fact, as I once remarked, parents who think that they are supporting public schooling by moving to a pricey district with good schools are actually supporting private schooling. They’re just confused because the tuition payment comes bundled with hardwood floors and granite countertops.
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