Continuing the Fight: Deepening Abolitionist World-building & Community Control in NYC Education Justice Movement Organizing

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 3:45 pm - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Work in Hard Times: Challenging Carcerality in Schools

Abstract

This paper explores the historical and ongoing organizing efforts of Black, Latine, and low-income youth and families fighting for liberatory, community-governed education in New York City. We position the 1960s community control movement as a foundation for understanding current demands articulated by parents, educators, youth, and community organizers who resist the racial capitalist and carceral logics embedded in U.S. schooling (Stovall, 2024; DuBois, 1995). By analyzing the goals of both past and present organizers, we highlight lessons, tensions, and possibilities for abolitionist world-building within the context of school abolition (Gilmore, 2022; Stovall, 2018).

An abolitionist praxis calls us to confront the harms of carceral schooling and to draw on community organizing strategies that build liberatory educational structures. Community organizing is the collective process through which people build power to challenge shared injustices (Ganz, 2002; Brown, 2017; Ransby, 2024). Historically, Black, Indigenous, and poor communities of color have organized against unjust and carceral schooling through demands for desegregation (Highsmith & Erickson, 2015), community control (Green, 1970; Lewis, 2015), freedom schools (Howard, 2016), police-free schools (Li & Freelon, 2025), resistance to closures and budget cuts (Green, 2017), and an end to the school-prison nexus (Fernández, Kirshner, & Lewis, 2016). Today’s NYC organizers continue this legacy, not only seeking to repair the harms caused by schooling as an apparatus of enclosure (Sojoyner, 2016) but also to dismantle forms of carcerality that extend beyond the classroom walls.

Our research draws on archival analysis and participatory action research (PAR) methods to center the abolitionist praxis of NYC organizers fighting for community-controlled, liberatory education (Torre, Fine, Stoudt, & Fox, 2012; Hall, 2001). Our PAR team comprised nine educators, youth, parent advocates, and engaged local organizers in ten focus group community conversations held across Brooklyn, Harlem, Queens, and the Bronx. In these gatherings, organizers and advocates articulated their visions of abolition in relation to their ongoing strategies to challenge carceral and hierarchical structures within the education justice movement.

Findings show that NYC organizers emphasize that liberatory education requires both popular education on the carceral nature of schools and the development of community-controlled structures that address peoples’ needs such as food, housing, safety, childcare, afterschool programs, and access to public spaces. Organizers echoed themes from the 1960s, especially the importance of self-determined, community-governed education. They identified how systems of carcerality extend beyond schools into neighborhoods and everyday life, framing the fight for educational justice as part of a broader struggle for community control over safety, health systems, and essential resources. As Gilmore (2022) and Kaba (2021) remind us, carcerality is embedded in our social relations and ways of knowing. Therefore, abolitionist praxis demands not only structural change but also a reimagining of how we relate to one another, organizing toward a future grounded in care, justice, and collective freedom.

Authors

• Imani C. Wilson, New York University

• Sohini Das, New York University