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“We Can't Let Chicago Outdo Us, Can We?” Sex Education and Desegregation in New York City's Public Schools

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Kurt Conklin*
Affiliation:
Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), New York, NY; e-mail: kconklin@siecus.org

Extract

Faced with demands for racial desegregation of its public schools, and grasping at half measures to appear responsive, New York City's Board of Education took action in 1967 by ending medical discharges for unwed pregnant students and authorizing the curriculum “Family Living, Including Sex Education.” Approving sex education in part to avoid action on school desegregation, Gotham's school board relied on a resolution written by a parent advocacy group in 1939—a resolution the 1939 school board had rejected following months of debate on the merits of providing instruction on mammalian reproduction for junior high biology students. By the time the Board of Education revisited the issue of sex education in the 1960s, popular understanding of sexuality and sex education had changed considerably. Yet the resolution supporting sex education, submitted by the city's United Parents' Associations (UPA), had not changed at all.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 History of Education Society 

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References

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89 Ultimately 166 of the city's 700–plus public schools signed on to pilot the sex education curriculum. Training began in Fall 1967 with a planned rollout in Fall 1968, but the storied teacher strikes of 1967–1968 delayed implementation further. The first evaluations of the curriculum's impact appeared in 1969. See “Family Living, Including Sex Education: Interim Report” (The Public Schools of New York City Staff Bulletin, 7 April 1969), NYCMA-BOE, papers of Rose Shapiro (Box 7, folder 119).Google Scholar

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