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Ocean Hill-Brownsville and the Change in American Liberalism

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Ocean Hill-Brownsville and the Change in American Liberalism Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2008 Ocean Hill-Brownsville and Changes in American Liberalism Andrew Geddings Childs Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES OCEAN HILL-BROWNSVILLE AND CHANGES IN AMERICAN LIBERALISM BY ANDREW GEDDINGS CHILDS A Thesis submitted to the Department of Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts Degree awarded: Fall Semester, 2008 The members of the committee approve the thesis of Andrew Childs defended on August 21, 2008. Dennis Moore Professor Directing Thesis Susan Wood Committee Member Neil Jumonville Committee Member David Johnson Dean of Department of Humanities Joseph Travis Dean of College of Arts and Sciences The office of graduate studies and the college of arts and sciences has approved the thesis of Andrew Childs. ii I would like to dedicate this thesis to my parents and sister. Without their steadfast guidance, support and urging, many of my accomplishments would only be dreams. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge all the members of my Committee: Dr. Susan Wood, for all her keen advice into perspective and how to frame the issue, Dr. Neil Jumonville for his amazing breadth and depth of knowledge and insightful comments, and Dr. Dennis Moore. I have never met a more astute, kind, patient and thoughtful editor than Dr. Moore. I am truly thankful to him for allowing me to take some of his expertise with me. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………..vi INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………..1 EDUCATION: THE SAVIOR OF THE SOUL………………………………………….7 THE BLIGHTED LAND………………………………………………………………..14 SHANKER OR MCCOY………………………………………………………………..21 PROFESSIONALISM AND MERITOCRACY AGAINST COMMUNITY CONTROL……………………………………………………………………………….30 “INTEGRATIONIST LIBERALISM” OR NEOLIBERALISM………………………..38 CONCLUSION...……………………………………………………………………......47 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………..50 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH..…………………………………………………………...56 v ABSTRACT This thesis explores the relationship of the confrontation at Ocean Hill- Brownsville and a change away from New Deal liberalism and toward separatism. Through historicizing this issue, I also critique the changing nature of professionalism, the push for community control and decentralization of schools, and how these ideas influenced democracy in education. Various people involved in the confrontation during the summer and fall of 1968 represent the particular positions of each side of the issue. Further, these two sides are also personified in the AFT (American Federation of Teachers) and the advocates of community control and decentralization. Through my examination, I attempt to locate the importance of the experiment in community control in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district under the greater context of American liberalism. vi OCEAN HILL-BROWNSVILLE AND THE CHANGE IN AMERICAN LIBERALISM While the confrontation at Ocean Hill-Brownsville occurred four decades ago, the event’s importance to American liberalism is largely unexplored. A few scholars such as Marilyn Gittell and Richard Kahlenberg have commented on the incident’s significance to liberalism, I attempt to build upon their research and contextualize Ocean Hill- Brownsville’s role in the change in liberalism that occurred in the late 1960’s. Building on a synthesis of previous scholars’ work, I attempt to locate the confrontation as part of a change in American liberalism which is reflective of the changing culture of the 1960’s. Finally, I will explore the impact this change had on education As Gittell notes in “Community Control of Education”, “the Ocean Hill- Brownsville confrontation revealed an entanglement of strange alliances. For the most part, conservatives and the more radical left empathized with the black poor. The beneficiaries of the New Deal liberal social revolution were juxtaposed against them. These new political and social alignments caused by the school crisis indicate a confusion widespread in the nation. People most reluctant to change, those nostalgically yearning for the Roosevelt era, are reactionary liberals. Theirs is basically a quantitative social philosophy conceiving the root cause of poverty to be merely a lack of money. They naturally resist structural and qualitative changes” (9). She and other scholars illustrate how the Ocean Hill-Brownsville controversy brought friend and foe together and 1 simultaneously alienated traditional social and political partners throughout the summer and fall of 1968. It is important to note that when speaking of the incident at Ocean Hill- Brownsville, we must understand that the confrontation lasted several months throughout the summer and fall of 1968. Moreover, while I am interested in the event as a whole, the reader should also understand that during Ocean Hill-Brownsville, there were many smaller incidents that together, characterize the entire fiasco. As many before me have duplicated in detail, the events of that summer and fall, I am not going to simply summarize their reports. Rather, I suggest that readers wanting a detailed account of the events leading up to and including the confrontation at Ocean Hill-Brownsville should consult chapters 5, 6, and 7 of Windell Pritchett’s Brownsville Brooklyn: Blacks Jews and the Changing Face of the Ghetto. The new pacts and rifts created from the struggle at Ocean Hill-Brownsville resulted in a cultural smog, where accusations of anti-Semitism and racism, notions of jobs security, ideas about professionalism and meritocracy versus decentralization, and questions concerning the very tenets of liberalism and democracy, all hung like a pall over New York City. The teachers’ strike in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, born from this miasma of causes and sociopolitical forces, underscores the turbulent sixties. The controversy is an entanglement, not only of causal factors but of implications as well. To understand the social and political ramifications of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, we must endeavor to untangle the constituent parts from one another and trace their genealogy to the present. Through historicizing the issue, I seek to situate Ocean Hill-Brownsville as a pivotal point in the history of American liberalism from which modern concepts of liberalism in part, inherited their critical, social capital. This issue is important not only because 2008 is the fortieth anniversary of the strike but also because exploring the incident illuminates many of the contemporary issues surrounding education and professionalism within education. Further, I also believe that neoliberalism (admittedly a vague idea, yet one that many scholars use), can trace some of its ideological ancestry to the confrontation at Ocean Hill-Brownsville as well. While Ocean Hill-Brownsville occurred forty years ago, many critics continue to write about ways the relationship between race, civil rights, and labor is still contested; this is especially true in the wake of the movement away from what Gittell deems “a new 2 deal liberal society” (9) and toward new concepts of liberalism and even neoliberalism. Moreover, while Ocean Hill-Brownsville revealed the latent yet rumbling tensions of peoples’ associations to organized labor and racial identity, one must ask: How much has changed since the uneasy truce after Ocean Hill-Brownsville? Have we resolved the tensions between organized labor and feelings toward racial identities? How did Ocean Hill-Brownsville change the nature of professionalism and viewpoints on meritocracy? Likewise, what legacy did Ocean Hill-Brownsville leave for education and education policy? At the very heart of the matter, the incident raised questions about community control of education, and advocates of community control accused the professionals of being elitist and out of touch. Are professional educators any less elitist and more in touch with community needs than in 1968? To speak of changes in liberalism and neoliberalism invokes many branches of ideas. I am only interested in the braches that affect ideas about education or rather, their effect on education, and how those ideas have some of their roots in the Ocean Hill- Brownsville crisis. During the late 1960’s, no one used the term neoliberal or neoliberalism when describing the conflict at Ocean Hill-Brownsville. Nevertheless, if we speak of a change in liberalism, then neoliberalism is certainly part of that change and even grows from it. I am investigating neoliberalism’s social, economic, and political fabric but, only as it relates to ideas about education. For purposes of this paper, I agree with the article by Amy Wells et al., “Defining Democracy in the Neoliberal Age: Charter School Reform and Educational Consumption” where they define neoliberalism as “free-market policies that encourage private enterprise and consumer choice, reward personal responsibility and entrepreneurial initiative, and undermine governments’ incompetent bureaucracy” (343). I am interested in discovering neoliberalism’s history as part of the change in liberalism and how both relate to Ocean Hill-Brownsville. I contend that Ocean Hill-Brownsville, as a pivot point, offers insight into the formulation of neoliberal ideas and a division between classical ideas about liberalism and the new separatist liberalism of Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. Ironically, the shifting of emphasis toward race and
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