This collection of articles revolves around the struggle for full racial equality through community control of schools by the black and Puerto Rican people of New York City. The opening chapter describes the city Board of Education's deliberate policy of intensifying and consolidating segregation during the very years when it was most volubly committed to integration. The second article recounts the bitter struggle of the local school board in Harlem with the community. The three chapters that follow respectively focus on the way in which schools have failed and are failing to teach poor children, "the pathological bureaucracy" of the city school system, and the treatment of "difficult" and "disruptive" children. The collusion between the Board of Education, two favored construction companies, and the "virtually lily-white" construction unions is the topic of another chapter. The "financial rise and the human fall" of the United Federation of Teachers is described as an insider's story. Community control and its effects on Harlem and Ocean Hill-Brownsville, and the state of community control experiments throughout the country are surveyed in three consecutive articles. The concluding article analyzes some of the economic factors involved in the intransigent opposition of local power structures toward any improvements in education for black children. (RJ)