| 
Public Schools and Education
School attendance in early 19th century New
York City was not universal. Although most middle-class children
went to school, most poor and immigrant children did not. Arising
from the Public School Society's Free Schools, the city's first
public schools were nondenominational in name only as their curriculum
incorporated readings from the Protestant King James Bible, Protestant
Hymns, and gross caricatures of the Catholic religion into basic
instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic.1
The arrival of thousands of poor Irish Catholic immigrants during
the 1830s and 1840s sparked a crisis in the early school system.
As immigration increased their numbers, New York's Catholics protested
against the overtly Protestant curriculum and demanded that it either
be removed entirely or that the state fund Catholic Schools. In
1842, in an attempt to satisfy both parties, the New York State
legislature passed the Maclay Act, which created a new city-run
school system while allowing the Public School Society to continue
operating its own schools. Both sides were dissatisfied with the
outcome, the Catholics disappointed that the legislature would not
finance Catholic schools and the Protestants disturbed by the state's
capitulation to the Catholics.2
Mass immigration from southern and eastern Europe during the last
quarter of the 19th century swelled the number of potential students
to over a half million. Although New York State had passed a compulsory
school law in 1874, the city's facilities remained inadequate to
serve this growing population of children. Nevertheless, the idea
took hold that the public school was uniquely responsible for the
Americanization and assimilation of the largest foreign immigration
in the nation's history. In addition to basic instruction in reading,
writing, and arithmetic, schools promoted loyalty to a new homeland,
provided children with American forefathers and foremothers, and
illuminated the virtues of a democratic government.3
Despite an intensive school building program, including the construction
of the city's first high schools, by the 1940s New York's public
school system remained unable to meet the needs of its students.
Now populated by second and third-generation immigrant pupils, the
schools had merely survived the problems of immigrant absorption
rather than overcome them. When a new immigration crowded the city's
schools in the decades after World War II, a new crisis ensued.4
As thousands of African-American and Hispanic children were placed
on school rolls, the city responded with a program of integration.
Thwarted by white resistance and the fact that black and Puerto
Rican children had become a majority of the school register, the
city eventually abandoned the school integration program. In response,
black and Hispanic parents initiated a community control movement
reminiscent of the separatism of the Catholics in the 1840s. In
1969, the conflicts of the 1960s came to an end with the passage
of a law decentralizing the New York City public school system.5
1 Kenneth T. Jackson,
The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1995), Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: A History
of New York City Public Schools (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1974).
2 Tyler Annbinder, Five Points:
the 19th Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance,
Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum
(New York: Free Press, 2001); Jackson, The Encyclopedia of New
York City; Ravitch, The Great School Wars.
3 Hasia Diner, Jeffery Shandler,
and Beth S. Wenger, eds., Remembering the Lower East Side: American
Jewish Reflections (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000);
Ravitch, The Great School Wars.
4 Ravitch, The Great School Wars.
5 Ravitch, The Great School Wars.
|
|
