Marilyn Gittell, Advocate for Local School Decisions, Dies at 78
Matthew Kruk
Marilyn Gittell, Advocate for Local School Decisions, Dies at 78
By MARGALIT FOX
Marilyn Gittell, a political scientist and education reformer who in the
1960s was an outspoken advocate of decentralizing New York City's public
school system, died on Feb. 26 at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.
The cause was cancer, her son, Ross Gittell, said.
At her death, she was a professor of political science at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York, where she had taught since
1978. She was also the director of the Howard Samuels Center, an arm of
the graduate center that studies public policy.
Professor Gittell was previously an assistant vice president and
associate provost at Brooklyn College.
Throughout her career, Professor Gittell (pronounced git-TELL), was both
an activist and an analyst on a range of social issues. Prominent in the
debate on school decentralization that riled the city for years, she
came to wide attention in 1968 amid the Ocean Hill-Brownsville
controversy, a turbulent experiment in decentralization in a largely
black Brooklyn neighborhood.
Decentralization was born of growing public dissatisfaction with the
quality of city schools, and with the concentration of power in the
hands of the New York City Board of Education. Parents in the city's
black and Hispanic districts in particular perceived the board as being
unresponsive to their concerns.
Professor Gittell, who had conducted studies that found New York's
school system hidebound and hopelessly top heavy, was an ardent
proponent of transferring control of schools to local communities.
In 1969, the New York State Legislature passed a law decentralizing
public schools citywide. As a result, control of the city's elementary
and junior high schools was assumed by 32 community school boards.
Other issues Professor Gittell studied over the years included the role
of higher education in ending welfare dependency.
Marilyn Audrey Jacobs was born in Brooklyn on April 3, 1931. She earned
a bachelor's degree in political science from Brooklyn College in 1952,
followed by a master's of public administration and a Ph.D. in political
science, both from New York University. In the 1960s and early '70s she
taught at Queens College.
With T. Edward Hollander, Professor Gittell conducted a study of the
city's school system for the City University Research Foundation.
Released in 1967, it charged the system with inertia and called the
Board of Education a "congested bureaucracy."
The same year, as a prelude to decentralization, the city set up
experimental, locally controlled school districts in East Harlem, the
Lower East Side of Manhattan and Ocean Hill-Brownsville. As the director
of the Institute for Community Studies at Queens College, Professor
Gittell administered Ford Foundation grant money to the three districts.
With other supporters of decentralization, she incurred criticism after
the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment resulted in a bitter series of
teachers' strikes in 1968. Her most vociferous public opponent was
Albert Shanker, then the president of the United Federation of Teachers.
Mr. Shanker had called for the strikes after the local school board
dismissed more than a dozen white teachers and administrators in the
district.
Professor Gittell's husband, Irwin Gittell, whom she married in 1950,
died in 2005. Besides her son, Ross, she is survived by a daughter, Amy
Gittell Gallagher, and four grandchildren.
Since its inception, citywide decentralization had been criticized for a
spate of perceived failings, both administrative and educational. Some
local school boards have been investigated on charges of corruption.
In 2002, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg won state legislative approval to
take control of the city school system, abolishing the 32 local boards
and instituting a far more centralized model of governance.
This did not sit very well with Professor Gittell. "It went against what
she worked for in the '60s," her son said in a telephone interview on
Friday. "She was very much in favor of community control and parental
participation. So a centralized system under Bloomberg, she saw that as
a step backward."