Esther Cyna’s maternal grandparents were doctors who came to France from Vietnam during the long-running conflict in the latter country. They completed medical school all over again — and thrived.

Cyna’s paternal grandparents are Jewish and survived the Holocaust. Her grandfather on that side graduated from a prestigious engineering school and built some of the first highways in France.

“On both sides, the narrative that ran in my family was that education would always be the key and that it could be the solution to the darkest of problems,” says Cyna, who is receiving her Teachers College doctorate this spring in History & Education. “But as I grew older, I realized that education itself was not always equal, or equalizing. I was always interested in American history, and therefore sought ways to explore these issues in the United States.”  

On both sides, the narrative that ran in my family was that education would always be the key and that it could be the solution to the darkest of problems. But as I grew older, I realized that education itself was not always equal, or equalizing.

— Esther Cyna, recipient of the 2021 Louis Pelzer Prize, who is receiving her Teachers College doctorate in History & Education

Cyna is making good on that ambition. This month, the Organization of American Historians announced that her paper, “Schooling the Kleptocracy: Racism and School Finance in Rural North Carolina, 1900-2018,” is the 2021 recipient of its Louis Pelzer Prize for Best Graduate Student Essay on U.S. History. The paper will be published in the March 2022 issue of The Journal of American History. 

The Pelzer Award committee praised Cyna’s entry for providing “hard evidence about how Southern counties stole critical resources from Black citizens” and called the paper’s emphasis on theft “a bold conceptual entry point” that treats civil rights “as something owned, not to be earned.” The committee also lauded Cyna, who cites the historian Henry Gilbert’s characterization of the county, as an entity, as “the dark continent in American politics,” for making “a significant contribution to scholarship” through her focus on “county-level political and financial decisions.” 

Cyna’s adviser, Ansley T. Erickson, Associate Professor of History & Education and Co-Director of TC’s Center on History & Education, calls Cyna’s work “excellent and innovative.”

“Esther demonstrates how studying schools and education policy in the past leads to new insights not only for educators, but for all citizens looking to understand our unequal nation,” Erickson says. “Some U.S. historians see the history of education as a minor concern, but Esther's work proves them wrong. I am so pleased to see the Organization of American Historians give this well-earned recognition." 

For her part, Cyna credits Erickson for pushing her to think “more about school district lines and the question of educational resources” — a topic she became interested in after hearing a lecture by Michael Rebell, Professor of Law & Educational Practice, on school finance.

“My advisor encouraged me to think about my topic within a longer history, which inspired the article,” Cyna says. “The main difficulty for me was to change my own understanding of what the causes of resource inequalities were, and to truly see the sources for what they were and the story they told: a story of racism and theft.” 

Cyna also cites the historians Camille Walsh, Elizabeth Todd-Breland, Tracy Steffes and Columbia University’s Stephanie McCurry as influences.

The main difficulty for me was to change my own understanding of what the causes of resource inequalities were, and to truly see the sources for what they were and the story they told: a story of racism and theft.

— Esther Cyna, recipient of the 2021 Louis Pelzer Prize, who is receiving her Teachers College doctorate in History & Education

Beyond being rich in data culled from local records, Cyna’s writing also is highly readable, in the mode of investigative journalists such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Nikole Hannah Jones. Her award-winning paper opens with a description of Estelle Wicker, known as the “First Lady of Finance” for her role in the budget, tax levies, valuation and debt of North Carolina’s Moore County from 1926 to 1978.

“Estelle Wicker’s house smelled of warm cookies and fresh flowers,” Cyna writes, but goes on to assert that “in the lines, columns and figures of Mrs. Wicker’s folders and boxes were the decisions that created chasms between her hometown of Carthage and nearby impoverished Taylortown; between the special tax schemes of Pinehurst, Aberdeen, and Southern Pines, and the financial struggles of the rural county schools.”

More specifically, Cyna notes, a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court officially struck down school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, Wicker “signed the board of county commissioners’ statement that they would support the construction of ‘only one white and one Negro high school’ in the southern part of the county, despite the requests of Black families whose children attended overcrowded schools, because the ‘tax burden would be unfair’ if any more construction was to happen.”

Cyna goes on to show that in Moore, Robeson and Halifax counties, public officials “implemented discriminatory school finance policies to protect and boost the value of White property.” These measures contributed to Black people in North Carolina paying an average of six times more taxes than White citizens as a percentage of assessed property value during the period of 1880 to 1910, even though the value of school property for Black people was eight times lower overall in 1910. Per child, the value of school property in 1910 was 3.4 times higher for White children than for Black children.  

Cyna’s paper concludes with evidence that — due in part to laws that are still on the books — the picture today is not all that different:

“Between 2006 and 2014, county commissioners in Halifax County funneled four and a half million dollars from a sales tax to the wealthiest school district in the county, the predominantly White Roanoke Rapids Graded School District, while the larger, poorer, and predominantly Black Halifax County Schools did not receive any of these countywide funds,” she writes. “The funding discrimination built on a 1901 law that allowed school districts to levy supplemental tax, and thereby become ‘taxing entities’ — a status that allowed them to gain privileged access to county funds.” A subsequent lawsuit to rectify that injustice failed thanks to a particularly ironic twist: “State courts refused to recognize the authority of county commissioners and ruled that the state was the only entity responsible for the educational rights of children under the state constitution.”

Cyna, a recipient of TC’s General Robert Anderson Scholarship and, this past semester, a TC’s Provost Doctoral Dissertation Grant, has ample experience in honing her craft. With NYU Associate Professor of History Kim Phillips-Fein, she co-authored a chapter in Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, the 2020 book by Erickson and former TC faculty member Ernest Morrell, tracing the impact of the 1975 New York City fiscal crisis on Harlem and the protests that residents waged to protect their schools and institutions from closures and other austerity measures. (Cyna also assisted Erickson and Morrell with the editing of the volume.)

I intend to continue pairing my own activism and scholarship. Because the two complement each other and inform my understanding of what responsible scholarly work entails.

— Esther Cyna, recipient of the 2021 Louis Pelzer Prize, who is receiving her Teachers College doctorate in History & Education

Next year, Cyna will be teaching American history as an adjunct professor at the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle in Paris. She’ll also be hunting for a postdoctoral or tenure-track faculty position in either France or in the United States and working on turning her dissertation ( “Shortchanged: Racism, School Finance and Educational Inequality in North Carolina, 1964-1997,” also focused on the theme of “kleptocracy”) into a book in the next few years. 

But it seems likely that she’ll be active outside of academia as well. Cyna’s time at TC has included volunteer work as an educator for the People’s Education Initiative, a nonprofit organization that facilitates classes for incarcerated women through the Rose M. Singer Center on New York City’s Rikers Island. 

“I’ve been fortunate at TC to be part of a community of scholars and activist-educators dedicated to engaging with social justice and education policy,” she says. “So, I intend to continue pairing my own activism and scholarship. Because the two complement each other and inform my understanding of what responsible scholarly work entails.”

— Joe Levine