Background on Monty Neill
An educator and scholar of educational assessment and the Executive Director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest), Monty Neill is has led initiatives across the nation focusing on educational reform and accountability. He has published prolifically, including Implementing Performance Assessments: A Guide to Classroom School and System Reform (1995) and Testing Our Children: A Report Card on State Assessment Systems (1997).
As a graduate student at Harvard's Graduate School of Education in the mid-1980s, Neill analyzed the impact of desegregation on Boston's public schools, focusing particularly on the period after the height of the busing crisis and the struggle for quality education among Boston's Black community and the impact on the educational system. By 1965, a systematic campaign of legal challenges and grassroots civil rights agitation had secured passage of the Racial Imbalance Act in the Massachusetts state legislature, theoretically mandating an end to racial inequities in education. The intransigence of school officials and city government in Boston, however, ensured that in practice the law was little more than a dead letter. Frustrated by such official intransigence, the local branch of the NAACP lodged a class action suit in U.S. District Court, Morgan v. Hennigan (379 F., Supp. 410), accusing the Boston School Committee of violations of the 14th Amendment. District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity concurred, writing in June 1974 that the School Board had taken "many actions in their official capacities with the purpose and intent to segregate the Boston public schools," affecting students, teachers, and school facilities alike.
In his ruling, Garrity laid out a plan that included redistricting and wide-spread compulsory busing to go into effect that fall with the beginning of the school year. Instantly controversial, the plan was met in Boston's white community with furious resistance, including walkouts, mass protests, and frequent violence, requiring intervention by the police and National Guard to preserve a fragile order. Lasting more than a decade, the crisis shook up city and state politics and helped spur white flight, even while inequality continued within and across the schools. The dissertation concludes the primary reason for a continued lack of quality education and school improvement, as well as discrimination, was white racism. The interviews available here reveal how the battles developed over the years.
While Boston's Black community united solidly to repel white racism and to assert the right to attend any school in Boston, the desegregation effort proved controversial within the city's African American community as well. Heightened by the extreme response from most whites, debate at the time centered on the seeming [or apparent] dichotomy between "community control" of schools and integration as preferred avenues for improving the schools for Black children. Neill's dissertation, The Struggle of Boston's Black Community for Quality and Equality in Education: 1960-1985, was completed in 1987.
