.....behind the public rhetoric needed to create the consensus that it sought, there is evidence that the Foundation’s support for community control was rooted in a desire to take education out of the hands of the public system altogether, prefiguring the motivations of today’s champions of charter schools and school vouchers. The Foundation’s preferred, if unpublicized, decentralization plan would have created hundreds of small, competitive, independent school systems run by such entities as universities, corporations, teachers’ unions, and parents. The Foundation even worked with some of the community control activists to come up with a plan for an independent school in Harlem that would demonstrate this approach....... the Foundation was anything but an impartial player during the schools crisis. Instead, all of its meddling in New York’s schools was predicated on the liberal assumption that if only the schools and teachers were better, opportunity would flow, and poverty and inequality would end, without ever reckoning with the heart of black inequality and the very real material power that underlay the exploitation that created philanthropic fortunes. This mindset persists among today’s liberal philanthropist “disruptors,” who follow in Ford’s footsteps by pursuing top-down efforts to fix the schools based on contempt for the public system and its personnel, faith in private solutions, and hubristic conviction that they hold the answer to solving the crisis in education for poor children of color.When I see commentary from the left on the '68 strike, the UFT is universally condemned. But the rhetoric then was so similar to today's neo-liberal ed deformers. Do we need to re-examine some of the UFT militant response in '68 as containing elements in defending some fundamental union won rights? I was an unthinking striker in '68 and my first activism in 1970 was with people who crossed the lines but I also heard some rethinking on their part -- that the Ford Foundation was pulling anti-union strings.
I also note the calls from the leftists in MORE for a militant UFT. Beware what you wish for as this may have been the highest level - and the last time the UFT was militant. Note that the contract following the strike in 1969 won major concessions on class size. The lessons of '68 for the UFT leaders was to never be that militant again.
This Jacobin assessment doesn't go that far but is worth reading.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/09/ford-foundation-ocean-hill-brownsville-philanthropy?utm_source=Jacobin&utm_campaign=85f388f9d5-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_09_24_04_39&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_be8b1b2846-85f388f9d5-85061857&mc_cid=85f388f9d5&mc_eid=ccfe96fecf
The Ford Foundation’s Reform From Above in Ocean Hill-Brownsville
Black activists might have initiated the
fight for community control in Ocean Hill-Brownsville in 1968. But the
Ford Foundation not only played a key role in the idea’s conception;
they shaped its execution according to elite, liberal aims.
