First Days of School, Decade by Decade

Even the relative idyll of the classroom was not untouched by World War II. Students at New York City public schools had to perform periodic air raid drills; some required high school students to gather in a building’s central corridor, while in others, younger students, grouped by where they lived, were escorted home by teachers.

At 11 a.m. on Nov. 13, 1941, three weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the entire school system, all 1.1 million students at 1,000 schools, participated in a simultaneous drill.

On the first day of school in 1957, The Times reported that 351,500 pupils were expected to attend New York City Catholic schools, or about one child for every three in a public school.

But in the last half-decade, enrollment in Catholic schools has plummeted. In the 2014-15 school year, nearly 90,000 Catholic school students were enrolled in the five boroughs, according to the two dioceses that oversee them, compared with 1.1 million students in public schools.

The lowest moment for the system may have come in 1968, when most city schools were closed on the first day because of a teachers strike.

After 19 teachers and administrators in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville area of Brooklyn were transferred out of their positions by local school officials, the United Federation of Teachers responded with a series of strikes.

The strikes shut most city schools for several weeks during the fall of 1968, and left deep racial and religious divisions between black and Jewish New Yorkers.

The 1970s were a time of fiscal crisis in New York City, and teachers played an important role in averting potential disaster.

In 1975, the city avoided default — by a matter of hours — when the United Federation of Teachers agreed to use $150 million from its pension fund to buy city bonds, furnishing New York with desperately needed cash.

About two weeks later, President Gerald R. Ford declined to give the city financial assistance, which led to the famous Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

An article on the city's first day of school in 1980 described budgets as so strained that classrooms “by current schedules will not be painted for the next 100 years.”

Later that decade, amid rising concerns about safety, New York City began using hand-held metal detectors at entrances to five schools in the 1988-89 academic year, and 820 weapons, including knives, box-cutters and five guns, were found. The program was expanded to other schools the following year.

In 1994, Long Beach, Calif., began requiring all of its elementary and middle school students to wear uniforms. The next year, officials said crime in district schools had dropped by 36 percent.

News of that shift was widely publicized and set off a national wave of enthusiasm for school uniforms, with President Bill Clinton praising them in his 1996 State of the Union address.

In New York City, a series of bruising fights broke out in the 1990s over social issues, including the distribution of condoms to high school students, and content in a “Rainbow” curriculum that encouraged acceptance of gay men and lesbians. That curriculum was focused on racial tolerance, but it suggested three gay-themed books, including “Heather Has Two Mommies.”

State lawmakers gave Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg control over New York City public schools in 2002, doing away with elected community school boards and giving him the power to appoint the chancellor. It was a significant shift that placed oversight at City Hall.

This year, Mayor Bill de Blasio asked the state to make mayoral control of schools permanent, but the Legislature granted him just a one-year extension.

New York State was one of the first in the country to adopt demanding tests aligned to the Common Core standards, a rigorous set of learning goals designed to prepare students for college.

In 2013, the first year the exams were given, test results plummeted, with less than a third of the city's third- through eighth-grade students passing the English or math tests.

Throughout Mr. Bloomberg's tenure, the number of charter schools grew at a robust rate, which, with strong support from state lawmakers, has continued since he left office nearly two years ago. There are now 95,000 students in New York City charter schools, according to the New York City Charter School Center.