L.I. How Did We Get Here? Education

A Timeline of Education on Long Island

When it comes to excellence in education, based upon many accepted metrics, Long Island is at the head of the class. Long Island’s highest performing public schools’ districts outperform most schools in New York State, however, there is a lack of equity in the delivery of educational services to school districts in low and moderate-income communities. 

In order to come together to address today’s challenge in bringing educational excellence to all students, it can be instructive to first consider our shared history and ask the question: Long Island, how did we get here?

This 15-minute video presents the history of the public education system on Long Island, explaining some of the events and forces that led to it having some of the best schools in the country, as well as having high levels of segregation and inequity. 

As part of the Long Island How Did We Get Here? project, Molloy University created an hour-long documentary entitled “Long Island Education — Seeking Equity in Excellence” on the background of public educational inequity on Long Island.

Regional leaders and experts interviewed for this documentary include:

• Dr. John Coverdale, President of the Center for Workplace Solutions
• Elaine Gross, Founder & Past President of ERASE Racism
• Dafny Irizarry, Founder of the Long Island Latino Teachers Association
• Dr. James Lentini, President, Molloy University
• Dr. Lorna Lewis, Superintendent, Malverne School District
• Dr. Allison Roda, Assistant Professor, EdD Program, Educational Leadership for Diverse Learning Communities, Molloy University
• Dr. Thomas Rogers, Superintendent, Syosset Central School District; Former Executive Director, New York State Council of School Superintendents
• Edward Thompson, Vice President of Advancement, Molloy University
• Roger Tilles, New York State Education Department, Regent for the Tenth (Long Island) Judicial District
• Dr. Paul Van Wie, Historian & Professor Molloy University

Below is a six-minute trailer of excerpts from the full video. If you are interested in screening the film, please contact Andrew at 516-323-4512.

EDUCATION ON LONG ISLAND — TIMELINE OF EVENTS

1787 — First School Established in Suffolk County

Town of Brookhaven One-Room Schoolhouses (Farmingville Historical Society)

https://farmingvillehistoricalsociety.org/town-of-brookhaven-one-room-schoolhouses/

1784 — New York State passed legislation to create a system of “common schools.”

1812 — Common School Districts Created

On June 19, 1812, New York State passed the Common School Law directing that each township of the state be divided into common school districts and providing monetary aid to school districts that consolidated. Common school districts were meant to serve small localities and were not authorized to operate high schools. Common Schools stressed the teaching of the three basic skills, or “3 R’s” in education (readin’, ‘ritin’, ‘rithmetic). 

1853 — Union Free School Districts Established

With the increase in common school districts throughout the State, New York State set out on an ambitious restructuring of its public school system in 1853. Part of that restructure included the formation of so-called "union free school districts" authorized to operate secondary schools. To lessen the expansion of common school districts and to achieve some economies of scale, New York State endorsed the consolidation of common school districts into union free school districts authorized to operate high schools and steadily replace local academies.   

1867 — Dissolution of School Tuition

Proceeds from state land sales helped advance the public school system in the early 1800s under the Common School Fund. In 1814, a system of funding that included state aid, local taxes and “rate bills”, which were a form of tuition, kept schools operational. By the 1830s, however, New York schools were underfunded and often in poor condition. Tuition eventually disappeared in 1867, making the way for state aid and local taxes as the sole source of funding for New York’s public schools.

1896 — Plessy v. Ferguson

Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision enshrining the constitutionality of racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. The case stemmed from an incident in 1892 in which African American train passenger, Homer Plessy refused to sit in a car for Black people. The Supreme Court rejected Plessy’s argument that his constitutional rights were violated, the court ruled that a law that “implies merely a legal distinction” between white people and Black people was not unconstitutional. As a result, restrictive Jim Crow legislation and separate public accommodations based on race became commonplace in the United States.

1904 — Unification Act Places NY Education under Board of Regents and State Education Department

A joint state legislative commission in 1904 advocated that a three-member committee be established to oversee elementary secondary education in the New York State. The committee would consist of one Regent, and two other members appointed by each of the two parties in the State Legislature. Governor Benjamin Odell and a Republican legislative caucus brought forth their own, different unification bill. This bill became law and established a New York State Education Department, effective April 1, 1904. Headed by the first-ever Commissioner of Education, Andrew S. Draper, the new department was responsible to the Board of Regents. Regents were elected to serve fixed terms by joint ballot of the legislature. The term was originally eleven years, but some of the sitting Regents continued in their positions. The board was made up of one Regent from every Supreme Court judicial district. As time went on, members-at-large were added. Three after 1909 and four after 1965.

1914 — The Central Rural Schools Act

The Rural School Code Act passed in 1914 and revised in 1925 placed school districts under the authority of county boards, or Central School Districts. This removed schools from local oversight and shaped the process by which standardization of education was to be achieved. The act, however, had very little impact on combining school districts. A provision of the law also set the minimum teacher’s salary at $40 per month. The Rural School Code Act also mandated that teachers are required to have advanced specialized training, which facilitated the establishment of teacher training schools like The New York Training School for Teachers/New York Model School built between 1924-26 at West 135th Street in Manhattan, NY.

1917 — Town-wide School Districts attempted

The New York State Legislature passed legislation creating township-wide school districts, but the Township Act proved unpopular and was repealed the next year.
https://chqgov.com/sites/default/files/document-files/2019-09/The Common School System in New York State (PDF).pdf and https://archive.org/details/townshipsystemdo00fineuoft/page/n117/mode/2up (The passage of the Township law in 1917 is documented starting on page 95.)

1920s–1960s — School District Consolidation

Following the repeal of the Township Act, the Committee of 21 was organized. As a result of its findings, the Cole-Rice Act was enacted amending State Aid laws. Under the Cole-Rice Law of 1925 financial incentives provided for the formation of “central rural school districts,” first authorized by a 1914 statute. The generous 50% transportation aid and 25% building aid drove a steady growth in the number of centralizations, especially during the economic depression of the 1930s. The Department’s bureau of rural education worked with the District Superintendents to promote centralization of rural schools and developed a “master plan” for school consolidation.  Statutes passed in the 1950s permitted consolidation of common school districts with smaller city districts, and by the 1960s centralization was essentially complete.

1948 — BOCES Created

In 1948, the New York State legislature created Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) to provide shared educational programs and services to school districts within the state. Today 37 BOCES are located around the state, each functioning as an extension of the local school districts and as a liaison between those districts and the State Education Department. The BOCES system is designed to permit the sharing of certain educational and administrative service costs by school districts. When two or more districts unite to purchase a service from BOCES they become entitled to additional state funding, subsequently reducing the costs to local taxpayers.

1954 — Brown vs. Board of Education

At the end of the 1940s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched a concerted campaign to oppose the segregated school systems in a number of states, including Kansas. Several African American parents were encouraged by the NAACP to try enrolling their children in all-white schools in Topeka. Oliver Brown's request, as well as those of the parents, were all turned down. He was informed that his daughter would have to attend an African American school far from her home instead of the nearby white school.  Following that, the NAACP brought a class-action lawsuit. Despite the fact that it asserted that the education (including facilities and teachers, the NAACP's main argument was that segregation, by its very nature, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because the services provided to African Americans were inferior to those provided to Whites. In the 1951 case of Brown v. Board of Education (video link), a district court in the United States ruled against the plaintiffs. Although it was sympathetic to some of the claims made by the plaintiffs, it found that the schools were similar and cited Plessy v. Ferguson and Gong Lum v. Rice (1927), which upheld Asian American segregation in grade schools. The NAACP then went to the Supreme Court of the United States.

The Court combined Brown with three other NAACP class-action school-segregation lawsuits in October 1952: Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (1952) in Virginia, Briggs v. Elliott (1951), and Gebhart v. Belton (1952) in Delaware; A fifth case, Bolling v. Sharpe (1951), was also brought separately in the District of Columbia. Similar to Brown, the plaintiffs in Briggs and Davis were denied equal protection by U.S. district courts, who ruled on the basis of Plessy that the schools they attended were comparable to all-white schools or would become so after the district court ordered improvements. However, in Gebhart, the Delaware Supreme Court upheld a lower court's decision that the original plaintiffs' right to equal protection had been violated due to the fact that African American schools outperformed white schools in nearly every relevant area. A U.S. district court ruled in Bolling v. Sharpe (1951) that school segregation did not violate the Fifth Amendment's due process clause (the Equal Protection Clause did not apply because the Fourteenth Amendment only applies to states).While the plaintiffs in Gebhart and Bolling were each granted certiorari—a writ for the reexamination of an action taken by a lower court—the plaintiffs in Brown, Biggs, and Davis appealed directly to the Supreme Court.

On December 9, 1952, the case of Brown v. Board of Education was argued. Thurgood Marshall, who would go on to become the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court from 1967 to 1991, represented the plaintiffs. On December 8, 1953, the case was reargued to determine whether the Fourteenth Amendment's authors would have considered it to be incompatible with racial segregation in public education.

On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously (9–0) that racial segregation in public schools was against the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that states can't deny equal protection of the law to anyone in their jurisdiction. According to the decision, separate educational facilities for African American students and white students were inherently unequal. According to the "separate but equal" doctrine, which was proposed by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson, laws mandating separate public facilities for whites and African Americans do not violate the equal protection clause if the facilities are approximately equal, it was therefore rejected as not being applicable to public education. Despite the fact that the 1954 decision only applied to public schools, it implied that segregation was not allowed in other public facilities. Brown v. Board of Education, one of the Supreme Court's most significant decisions, served as a model for and to motivate the American civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

1974 — Milliken v. Bradley

Twenty years after the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that the United States Supreme Court made, school desegregation became law everywhere, Milliken v. Bradley, a busing case based in Detroit came before the Supreme Court. The case had a significant impact on the city's population and altered the course of school desegregation in the United States.

In 1970, a bill to decentralize the Detroit school system was passed by the Michigan legislature. On behalf of Richard and Ronald Bradley, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People filed a lawsuit to overturn the statute, claiming that public officials had deliberately segregated the city of Detroit’s schools.

A new plan to include 53 of the 85 surrounding, mostly white school districts was ordered by Federal District Judge Stephen Roth, who ruled that integration was not possible within the city's boundaries. The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld Roth's decision despite the tense protests that were sparked by this plan.

The case came before the Supreme Court of the United States in 1974. The court ruled that it "could not impose a multidistrict, area-wide remedy upon local districts in the absence of any evidence those districts committed acts causing racial discrimination," overturning the lower courts in a contentious 5-4 vote. The ruling found that the solution approved by lower courts could modify the structure of public education in Michigan and acknowledged the tradition of local control over schools. The decision was a setback for forced desegregation and limited Brown's authority to declare state laws unconstitutional that set up separate public schools for black and white students.

On Long Island, the small school districts provide ready-made borders to segregate white and minority students, as well as wealthy and poor communities. 

One illustration of this striking contrast: Garden City Union Free School District and Hempstead Union Free School District, respectively. New York state says that only 2% of students in Hempstead's schools are white, while 84% of students in Garden City's school district are white. The high school in Hempstead is about a 15-minute drive from the high school in Garden City.

The Rockville Centre school district, just south of Hempstead's district line, has 74% white students, according to the state.

Additionally, funding is significantly different. Garden City schools receive almost $5,000 more per student per year than Hempstead schools, while Rockville Centre schools receive approximately $7,000 more.

These subtle but significant district lines result in schools with disparate resources because school funding is largely dependent on the wealth of the locality, i.e. property taxes. Despite decades of funding formulas designed to do so, states have not been able to make up the difference in that local money in most cases.

1970s-80s — Desegregation Protests

The U.S. Supreme Court landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education unanimously found that racial segregation in schools to be unconstitutional and to violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

In some districts, busing began just a few years later to transport Black and Latino students to white schools and white students to predominantly minority-student schools. The controversial program was designed to make classrooms more diverse, close achievement and opportunity gaps, and create more diverse classrooms.

In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld busing in 1971. The decision effectively accelerated the slow progress of school integration.

Following the passage of the General Education Provisions Act of 1974, which forbids the use of funds appropriated by the federal government for busing, busing programs became voluntary in many communities.

Programs for voluntary busing continued into the 1970s and reached its height in the early 1980s. In the 1990s, however, a series of court rulings freed school districts from court-ordered desegregation plans, deeming them unnecessary. This marked the beginning of a shift toward greater integration.

Local, voluntary busing programs even started to be curtailed by the courts. In Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District #1, a 2007 Supreme Court decision limited districts' options for promoting desegregation.

Desegregation busing remained limited despite the outcomes. In the end, court-mandated busing did not completely desegregate public schools because it was only used by less than 5% of students in the country's public schools. Today, many school districts across the nation remain largely segregated. This is because politicians, school administrators, the courts, and the media largely prioritized the needs of parents over the rights of minority students.

More than half of U.S. children attend schools in districts where the student population is either more than 75% white or more than 75% nonwhite, according to a 2019 report from the nonprofit EdBuild.

2002 — NY State Takeover of Roosevelt School District

Then Gov. George E. Pataki signed a bill allowing the education commissioner to take over the Roosevelt school system, which had 3,000 students. The takeover eliminated the elected school board in the town for a minimum of nine years with the option of an additional two years and granted state education commissioners unprecedented authority over Roosevelt.

Over time, commissioners appointed three distinct superintendents, vetoed local spending, replaced elected school board members, and removed them from office.

Local school board elections were allowed to resume gradually as a result of a law provision, which frequently led to disagreements between elected trustees and state appointees. In 2013, the state gave control back to the district.

During the eleven years of intervention, the State of New York contributed additional funds. In addition to what districts typically receive, Roosevelt received over $210 million in state commitments for school reconstruction and $90 million in operating aid.

At the time of the takeover, Black or Latino children make up 99.5 percent of Roosevelt's students. They read out-of-date textbooks and attend decaying schools. Each year, 20% of teachers in the system left, and by middle school, students performed poorly on state tests - 9 out of 10 eighth graders read below grade level.

Because the 1 1/2-square-mile town lacks any kind of commercial tax base, homeowners Roosevelt pay some of the highest property tax rates on Long Island to support the failing school system. 

Roosevelt's coming of age coincided with the enormous demographic and suburban boom that followed World War II. In search of the promise of homes in a tranquil county with parks, parkways, and beaches, thousands of veterans and their new families fled New York City.

Another migration from New York City, this one of middle and working-class blacks, occurred two decades later in the 1960s. These families established themselves in towns like Roosevelt along the south shore of Long Island. The influx of black families triggered another exodus of whites in response to Roosevelt becoming more racially diverse.

Additionally, during the 1970s, Nassau County social service agencies began steering families receiving welfare and housing subsidies toward Roosevelt. County inspectors averted their eyes as landlords let two, three and even four families crowd into homes zoned for a single family.

Moreover, with the assistance of county subsidies and zoning regulations, the massive and successful Roosevelt Field shopping mall was constructed five miles to the north in Garden City in 1956. Tax revenue not being shared between towns meant that stores and businesses in Roosevelt perished as Roosevelt Field Mall flourished over the succeeding decades. Roosevelt schools withered as tax revenue dried up from the closure of local businesses.

2004 — Most recent school district consolidation on Long Island

Eastport UFSD (K-6), South Manor UFSD (K-6), and Eastport-South Manor Central High School District (7-12) reorganized to create the Eastport-South Manor Central School District.

In the middle of the 1990s, the two districts and a number of others took part in a study to see if the many local districts could be combined into one centralized district. Since a combined district would have a significantly higher enrollment than any of the individual districts, proponents suggested that this would benefit the schools through lower central administration costs and permit significantly better programming for students. In addition, the study's scope had expanded significantly, particularly in Manorville, where the population had more than doubled in ten years. Neither East Moriches UFSD nor South Manor UFSD, a nearby district that also participated in the study, had their own high schools and were paying high tuition to send their students to other high schools. In the end, only South Manor and Eastport decided to combine to form a new district.

In 2014, reporting on school consolidation, Newsday quoted then Eastport-South Manor superintendent, Mark Nocero, who stated that the 3,700-student system has been able to provide enriched academic and sports programs that would not have been possible without consolidation. He added that student participation in interscholastic sports has increased by more than 50% since 2004 at the district's high school, offers more than 25 courses that are eligible for college credit. "It's not something that could have happened with two small districts," Nocero said.

Long Island currently has 125 public school districts.

2006 — Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit

The 13-year landmark legal battle over education funding came to an end on November 20, 2006, when the highest court in New York State ruled that at least $1.93 billion more must be spent annually on New York City's public schools. It was significantly less than the $4.7 billion that a lower court deemed necessary to provide city children with a sound basic education.

The Court of Appeals noted in its 4-2 decision that in 2004, a commission appointed by then Governor George E. Pataki considered a variety of spending options for the state to fulfill its constitutional obligation to the city's nearly 1.1 million schoolchildren, with $1.93 billion being the lowest option. The $1.93 billion was declared to be "reasonable" by the court.

The amount was to be increased to more than $2 billion annually after it is adjusted for inflation and other factors.

In 1993, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) was founded by Robert Jackson and Michael A. Rebell. They collaborated with a group of parents, members of the community, and advocates for education to sue the state of New York, claiming that children were not getting an adequate education. The plaintiffs won, and the court ordered New York State to pay billions of dollars to be on par with other districts. When the financial crisis hit at the end of the 2000s, however, the state just stopped paying its bills.

In 2021 the state agreed to compensate schools with back pay, beginning with an initial infusion of $1.4 billion known as Foundation Aid.

2018 — Wyandanch School District budget crisis

After a contentious November 14, 2018 board meeting, then Wyandanch schools Superintendent Mary Jones confirmed in a letter to the community that the school district was facing a $3.3 million budget deficit after an audit commissioned by the district revealed overspending and overestimating revenues.

Key findings of the audit included, Wyandanch's expenditure of $1,296,989 above its annual budget to be in violation of state education law. Employee benefits, bus transportation, and programs for students with disabilities were among the primary areas of overspending.

The district's reserve funds fell by 68%, or nearly $3.3 million. Overspending and optimistic revenue projections contributed to the decline.

Wyandanch's unassigned reserve, also known as the "rainy day fund" and intended to cover unexpected expenses, was depleted, leaving the district with a negative $1,185,812 balance in that area.

The result is one of Long Island's poorest school districts issued a warning to residents that they may face either a cap-busting tax hike or reductions in the educational services provided to students the following year.

On June 19, 2019, legislation allowing the State Commissioner of Education to appoint a monitor to oversee the Wyandanch Union Free School District passed the New York State Legislature. The legislation was sponsored by Assemblywoman Kimberly Jean-Pierre, Senator John Brooks, and Senator Phil Boyle. The legislation came after two budget votes that tried to raise school taxes by 40.9% and 20%, respectively. Both failed.

The legislation authorized the Education Commissioner to appoint a monitor to directly oversee the superintendent, board of education, and school district's fiscal policies, practices, and decisions. The monitor would be an ex-officio member of the school board without the right to vote and have prior experience managing the finances of the school district. Their term would end at the end of the school year in June 2024.

The legislation was signed into law by then-Governor Andrew Cuomo on January 22, 2020.

2020 — "Distinguished Educator" appointed to monitor Hempstead Union Free School District

Then Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a first-of-its-kind bill into law that gave the state education commissioner the authority to appoint a monitor to oversee, direct, and provide technical assistance to the superintendent, the board of education, and the Hempstead Union Free School district's fiscal and academic decisions.

Along with the influx of undocumented students, rising operating costs, staff cuts, and low graduation rates the school district endured budget chaos and years of financial mismanagement. The 7,600 students in the district will be monitored until 2025.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 6.6 percent of Hempstead's population falls below the poverty line and the district is considered to be the poorest on Long Island in terms of family income and taxable property value.

In order to increase community input and transparency within the district, the monitor is tasked with holding three public hearings within the first sixty days of their appointment. State intervention, academic performance, and finances will all be the focus of each hearing.

Based on the results of the public hearings, the educational board must collaborate with the monitor to develop academic and financial plans for the coming years. Additionally, the monitor will examine each budget before submitting it to the state education commissioner for final approval.

The new law grants the monitor the authority to alert the commissioner in the event that the district disregards a plan, enabling the commissioner to compel the district to comply. Additionally, the monitor is able to settle disputes between the superintendent and board members. Moreover, the monitor is required to attend each and every executive session and board meeting, as well as prohibit any district-paid out-of-state travel.

2021 — New Yorkers for Students' Educational Rights v. New York State Lawsuit Settlement

On October 21, 2021 Governor Kathy Hochul announced that New York State has ended its opposition to a 2006 decision from New York's highest court that required additional annual allocations of billions of dollars to schools to address educational disparities.

New York must completely comply with the court's order as a result of the legal settlement.

15 years prior, the New York Court of Appeals ordered the state to provide the additional funds to the poorest schools, but lawmakers never fully implemented the decision.

Along with the state school boards association, the PTA, and individual parents from New York City and Schenectady, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, which won the initial case, filed a second suit in 2014 to try to get the governor and Legislature to actually carry out the court order and allocate the funding. Previous Gov. Andrew Cuomo had been battling the claim.

The Legislature included full funding for schools in the 2021 state budget, as required by the 2006 court ruling. In the ensuing three years, it will be implemented in stages. Hochul, New York will spend an additional $23.2 billion on education annually by fiscal year 2024, or at least $3.5 billion more.

The settlement also gave the plaintiffs the right to restart their lawsuit with a faster trial schedule in the event that the governor and Legislature fail to implement their three-year funding plan this time around.

Summing Up

The centuries-long development of Long Island’s public education has created a system in which most schools provide educational opportunities that are above average for the state and the nation, and many are among the top-performing schools in the country and the world. Small school districts allow for robust public input, reward responsiveness, and foster a spirit of competition among districts that encourages innovation and adoption of best practices. However, these small districts also allow for highly segregated schools and inequitable conditions for low-income communities and many students of color. Calls for the consolidation of school districts have emerged periodically to reduce administrative costs and ease the property tax burden. But history shows that consolidation efforts have consistently met resistance, often from communities concerned about losing local control, identity, or the quality of their schools. As the region faces continued demographic and economic shifts, the challenge remains: how to balance the benefits of localism with the pressing need for greater equity and efficiency across the educational landscape.