56 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020
ANNALS OF EDUCATION
TEST CASE
Prep for Prep and the fault lines in New York’s schools.BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM
The program conducts a citywide talent search for high-aA
little more than half a century
ago, New York City attempted
an experiment in a handful of
its public schools. In the thirteen years
since Brown v. Board of Education, the
city’s public schools had become more
segregated. Many black parents decided
that hope for their children rested in
self-determination rather than in wait-
ing for integration. Under pressure from
grassroots groups, Mayor John Lindsay,
a liberal Republican, approved a plan to
create three locally governed school dis-
tricts, in which community-elected
boards would assume a degree of con-
trol over personnel and curriculum.
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. Starting in the fall of 1967,
the new Ocean Hill-Brownsville district
deëmphasized traditional grading, added
curricular units on black identity and cul-
ture, and, in predominantly Puerto Rican
schools, adopted bilingual teaching. The
new arrangement was popular with par-
ents, and was supported by a surprisingly
heterogeneous coalition that included
Black Power separatists and the liberal
Ford Foundation. 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. Near the end
of the school year, the district’s govern-
ing board dismissed thirteen teachers and
six administrators—nearly all of whom
were white, and critical of the new ar-
rangement. Rhody McCoy, the district’s
administrator, said that “the community
lost confidence in them.” The union in-
sisted that the dismissals were illegal.
Local teachers went on strike. In Sep-
tember, 1968, the strike went citywide.
Gary Simons, the son of a house-
painter and a homemaker, had just been
hired as a teacher at P.S. 140, an elemen-
tary school in the Bronx, his home bor-
ough. 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 neighbor-
hood of Riverdale. 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 stu-
dents, albeit unofficially. In the South
Bronx, the schools were simply closed.
“That bothered me,” Simons said re-
cently. I’d gone to see him in New Mil-
ford, Connecticut, where he has lived for
a decade, a late-in-life refugee from the
city. 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. 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. The walls are
packed with pictures, many of alumni of
Prep for Prep, the educational nonprofit
that he founded ten years after the strikes.
Prep, as its alumni call it, conducts an an-
nual citywide talent search for high-achiev-
ing students of color, then administers a
battery of exams and interviews. 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 eve-
nings and all day on Saturdays during
the intervening school year. In exchange,
the program secures spots for them at
New York’s most selective private schools.
(The organization’s Prep 9 program sends
high-school freshmen to boarding schools
in the Northeast, such as Deerfield Acad-
emy and Choate Rosemary Hall.)
Simons speaks in a nasal and faintly
sibilant Bronx lilt, allowing his vowels to
accommodate extra syllables mid-thought;
sometimes he ascends to a high, gravelly
whine when remembering surprise, or