In 1969, after much controversy and the submission of many bills, the New York State Legislature passed--and the Governor signed--a school decentralization law. The law went into effect on February 16, 1970, with the major transfers of power operative on July 1, 1970. This report examines those aspects of the three-year school decentralization…

In New York the private and benevolent Free School Society began operations in 1805 because there were too few schools for the poor in the city, and it treated education as a regular separation from a seductive yet frightening world. Perhaps the most neglected and misunderstood period in the history of an organization whose activities have been…