Over the past decade, New York City’s history of segregated public schooling has received renewed popular attention, owing to a combination of alarming reports on the city’s educational inequality and resurgent local organizing to address it. One of many New Yorkers who turned to the past in these years was sociologist and New York City public school parent Christopher Bonastia. An accomplished historian of desegregation, Bonastia began studying his hometown, as he writes in the opening acknowledgments of The Battle Nearer to Home, in search of a “nuanced understanding of how New York City education officials historically have addressed—or more often danced around—the issue of integration” (p. x). Having finished his study, he hopes that such an understanding also “prompts readers to think about integration far more broadly than an outdated focus only on ‘body mixing’” (p. x). The resulting book offers an effective synthesis of the history of segregation and resistance in New York City between 1954 and 1975 across seven chapters, with two chapters at the end linking this history to the campaigns of the past ten years.
As his opening comments indicate, Bonastia aims both to revisit the history of school segregation in New York City and to reconsider the meaning of educational equality today. To understand the city’s persistent segregation, he introduces an analytic framework of “border checkpoints,” which were, and are, employed by city educational leaders to “support integration in principle, while limiting it sharply in practice” (p. 6). This Janus-faced behavior is well documented, Bonastia notes, but he believes the “border checkpoints” framework allows us to better document the development and interaction of mechanisms that maintain segregation in New York City, from physical separation (mainly through school zoning), through administrative decisions that limit programs of integration, and on to the use of “meritocratic” checkpoints (screening and tracking). These last, he contends, have become the primary mechanisms of segregation at the secondary level today, though, as he notes, screening has long segregated New York’s high schools and continues to work in tandem with physical and administrative checkpoints, particularly at the primary level.
In charting the evolution of these checkpoints, which have allowed New York City to “maintain a ‘manageable’ degree of integration in the face of widespread segregation” (p. 10) for nearly seventy years, The Battle Nearer to Home treads much familiar ground. Bonastia guides readers through the Board of Education’s initial studies and surveys after the Brown decision and its token efforts toward voluntary open enrollment and the pairing of a handful of schools for student exchanges across neighborhood boundaries in response to civil rights activists. He details the backlash to these minuscule programs that ensued in White neighborhoods, and narrates the citywide boycotts of 1964 organized by Milton Galamison and Bayard Rustin. Throughout, it is crystal clear, as it was at the time and has been ever since, that the city’s educational leaders aimed to integrate only so far as they believed necessary to keep protest at bay.
Bonastia then revisits the community-control movement, which he uses to rethink the meaning of integration and educational equality writ large. “Ironically,” he writes “the scope of integration widened during the late 1960s experiment with community control of schools, often viewed as a rejection of integration” (p. 5). This view, Bonastia argues, ignores how community-control activists correctly diagnosed the limits of city-sponsored integration and how they practiced an “Afrocentric, multicultural” program of education with a diverse group of educators inside community-controlled schools. Bonastia illuminates these practices with a combination of archival sources, Charles S. Isaacs’s firsthand account in Inside Ocean Hill-Brownsville: A Teacher’s Education, 1968-69 (2014), and interviews conducted for Season 1 of the School Colors podcast (2019). Bonastia directly links this new interpretation—of community control as a form of integrated education—to the present day, arguing that “the community control experiment in OHB [Ocean Hill-Brownsville] provided hints about how integrated schools might flourish” (p. 170).
After a chapter discussing the city’s move to school decentralization and the federal retreat from enforcing desegregation—which ends with Bonastia noting that “school segregation was low on the list of priorities confronting the city” between 1975 and 2010—The Battle Nearer to Home offers thirty-five pages documenting fights for educational equality over the past decade. Bonastia reviews community-district-level plans to promote integration in Brooklyn’s Park Slope and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan before exploring the efforts of two new, youth-led organizations, IntegrateNYC and Teens Take Charge. Their influence on Mayor Bill de Blasio’s School Diversity Advisory Group, which in 2019 adopted IntegrateNYC’s framework, the “5 Rs of Real Integration” (p. 219), leads Bonastia to end on a hopeful note, even as he recognizes that any progress toward school integration requires “a mayor who is firmly committed to this objective” (p. 236). Such a mayor, Bonastia concludes, should also recognize that the “Five Rs” show how “the purportedly separatist community-control movement laid the foundation for twenty-first century integration” (p. 237). These goals, which include the decriminalization of students, culturally inclusive curriculum, and the hiring of educators representative of, and connected to, the communities they serve, constitute “an expanded vision of integration that does not limit itself to curated, statistical integration and does not depend on changes to the racial and ethnic composition of New York City students” (p. 237).
Bonastia’s reinterpretation of community control as an “expanded” form of integration with contemporary relevance will surely generate debate, as all discussions of 1968 in New York City do, but the past-present connections he makes are clear enough. The limiting analytic factor for The Battle Nearer to Home is not a sin of commission, but omission: the decision to bypass the years between 1975 and 2010. Bonastia is not wrong that integration was “essentially moribund” (p. 205) as a concern for citywide leaders, but within the decentralized system, many efforts for integration and educational equality took place. Some looked like earlier struggles, including the federal order to integrate Mark Twain Junior High School in Brooklyn in the 1970s and the fight over the changing composition of the Roseland Intermediate School in Queens in the 1980s. Other efforts laid the groundwork for the rise of new educational reforms, particularly the small schools of choice that emerged in many New York City districts.
These projects not only kept the fires of integration burning; they also revealed the limits of school- and district-level programs of integration, in ways that have tremendous relevance to today’s efforts. This is important both because struggles over integration remain, as Bonastia shows, at the community-district level (at least for now), and because the language of educational equality is still regularly repurposed by advocates of reforms—schools of choice, gifted and talented programs, charter schooling—that do not, as currently constructed, promote integration or equality. Those who fight for educational equality in New York City should indeed look back to the heroic, highly visible struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, but they also have much to learn from those organizers and activists who carried the torch for school justice in the many lean years since.
