Photograph by Brian Finke for The New Yorker The students take courses in writing, history, science, math, and, usually, Latin. (The organization’s Prep 9 program sends high-school freshmen to boarding schools in the Northeast, such as Deerfield Academy and Choate Rosemary Hall.) In exchange, the program secures spots for them at New York’s most selective private schools. The kids who are accepted by the program agree to spend the summers before and after sixth grade in classes five days a week, and to attend classes on Wednesday evenings and all day on Saturdays during the intervening school year. Prep, as its alumni call it, conducts an annual citywide talent search for high-achieving students of color, then administers a battery of exams and interviews. The walls are packed with pictures, many of alumni of Prep for Prep, the educational nonprofit that he founded ten years after the strikes.
#EVER FORWARD GARY SIMMONS FULL#
His house is full of glass-enclosed wooden bookcases, in which he keeps a growing collection of hardback first editions of the books he considers to be the most important in the world. Simons has a wide face and a John Bolton-like mustache he had recently had surgery to remove cataracts from both of his cloudy-day-colored eyes. I’d gone to see him in New Milford, Connecticut, where he has lived for a decade, a late-in-life refugee from the city. “That bothered me,” Simons said recently. In the South Bronx, the schools were simply closed. As the days passed, he noticed that teachers in Riverdale and other rich areas were convening in synagogues, churches, and community centers, continuing to educate their students, albeit unofficially. When the strike reached the Bronx, he was living with a roommate about a half hour north of the school, in the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Riverdale. 140, an elementary school in the Bronx, his home borough. Gary Simons, the son of a housepainter and a homemaker, had just been hired as a teacher at P.S. In September, 1968, the strike went citywide. Rhody McCoy, the district’s administrator, said that “the community lost confidence in them.” The union insisted that the dismissals were illegal. Near the end of the school year, the district’s governing board dismissed thirteen teachers and six administrators-nearly all of whom were white, and critical of the new arrangement. It was opposed by the United Federation of Teachers, which was largely white and Jewish the union’s leader, Albert Shanker, considered the community-control effort to be a veiled attempt at union-busting. The new arrangement was popular with parents, and was supported by a surprisingly heterogeneous coalition that included Black Power separatists and the liberal Ford Foundation. Starting in the fall of 1967, the new Ocean Hill-Brownsville district deëmphasized traditional grading, added curricular units on black identity and culture, and, in predominantly Puerto Rican schools, adopted bilingual teaching. One of the school districts was in Brownsville, a Brooklyn neighborhood that had once been Jewish and middle class but was, by the late sixties, mainly black and poor. Under pressure from grassroots groups, Mayor John Lindsay, a liberal Republican, approved a plan to create three locally governed school districts, in which community-elected boards would assume a degree of control over personnel and curriculum. Many black parents decided that hope for their children rested in self-determination rather than in waiting for integration. Board of Education, the city’s public schools had become more segregated. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.Ī little more than half a century ago, New York City attempted an experiment in a handful of its public schools.
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