About Francine Almash

I came to this work as a parent before I came to it as a historian. I am a disabled scholar-activist and a white mother of biracial, Black-identifying, disabled sons. Through my children's schooling, I learned firsthand what it looks like when institutions not only fail children but harm them. What we lived through was educational failure, exclusion, and at times violence, all carried out in the name of help.

I came to academia to make sense of that story and, ultimately, to take control of it. I had no idea I would find what I was looking for in the archives, but it was there that I learned that as personal as our experiences were, they were not new.

The story of New York City's public schools has been a story of sorting and exclusion from its earliest days. The question of what to do with children who challenge the institutional order has always been a question of where to place them. In 1948, the city answered that question by creating the "600" schools. Children labeled "maladjusted" and "emotionally disturbed" were removed from their classrooms and sent to a separate system. Those children were disproportionately the children of immigrants, and by the 1960s almost exclusively Black and Puerto Rican. The system built to contain them became today's District 75.

In the records of the 600 schools, I found that there have always been parents like me and boys like my sons. As I sift through the boxes one file at a time, I want to find them and record their stories. This history is not a story of overcoming. It is an effort to tell painful truths about the past so that we can see more clearly what is happening in schools today.