PARTISAN REVIEW
641
institutions which were to counteract the ravages of industrialism and exploi–
tation. This second school war was about the application of new knowledge to
the problem of the schools: new ideas about teaching methods, about curricula,
about centralized school administration, new criteria for competence, a merit
system for teachers.
The third school war, only a generation later, was in many respects a
continuation of the second, ignited by an even sharper increase in immigra–
tion , and in a school system which had only superficially yielded to the pro–
gressive reforms of the earlier battles. Reform itself had been limited and
short-sighted, indifferent to the complex class emotions developing in the
newly consolidated metropolitan area. The third school war was fought over
efficiency and the politicization of the schools, and was summed up in the
struggle and failure of Mayor John Purroy Mitchel and the civic-minded
reformers to institute the controversial Gary plan (after the system in Gary,
Indiana) in the New York schools. The chief consequence of this war was
increased centralization and a universal wish to insulate the schools from
politics. As a result, the schools, agents of socialization in an increasingly
complex democracy, were unprepared for the eruption of the fourth of the
great school wars. The immigration associated with this conflict was that of
Blacks and Puerto Ricans after World War II, and the issues were integration,
racism, poverty, and community control. By the end, the public school system
was decentralized, was attempting to educate a student population more than
half Black and Puerto Rican, and, iri the turbulent series of events associated
with busing and the 1968 teachers' strike, ethnic and class divisions in the city
were sharpened and brutalized as they had not been for more than a century.
As always, the schools were charged with the responsibility for social change,
and when assimilation and integration were discarded as methods or goals,
power and poverty became the prominent concerns.
Combatants in this most recent school war thought they were greeting a
new dawn, even as they proceeded to reinvent the wheel. Didn't anyone
realize that community control had led to the corruption of the 1840's? Or
that it could be as important a code word for Queens as for Ocean Hill –
Brownsville? For every Rhody McCoy there is a Rosemary Gunning, and
there were others before them. Did no one question the wisdom of permitting
the Ford Foundation to participate? Scattering largesse, encouraging some
groups to seize power, ignoring others, acting covertly to influence the course
of events-it was a little like the CIA, and as unaccountable, as elusive. But
the Public Education Association, the City Club, the Urban <;:oalition, and
other benevolent agencies had intervened ever since the founding of the
school systeml And where did the ideas come from, and who should accept
responsibility for their powerful effects? I mean, the ideas about the power
