This essay focuses on the politics of public education for the disadvantaged. Specifically, an attempt is made to describe the conditions under which the disadvantaged have sought to change the public schools by adopting one of two political strategies--integration or community control. The discussion of the first strategy, integration, includes an analysis of the chaos of large urban school systems, the specialized high school, and integration of small groups of disadvantaged children. The discussion of community control includes topics such as local resistance to integrated schooling, tracking, federal failure to enforce integrated schooling, and teacher accountability. It is held that although community control is no panacea for all the problems of public education, it is a very promising possibility. (Author/JW)