Marc Epstein taught at Jamaica High School in Queens, New York City, for many years. The school is under a death sentence, which means the end of many programs that served children with different needs. Here he makes a plea to Mayor de Blasio to save some of the doomed schools.
A De Blasio Clemency?
This is the time of year that governors and the president issue pardons and clemencies. They are issued to prisoners who have either been exemplary citizens during their incarceration or set free because extenuating circumstances indicate that their punishment didn’t fit the crime.
Mayors aren’t granted this kind of executive power, but this year Bill De Blasio does have the executive power to call a halt to the systematic elimination of several of New York’s comprehensive high schools that have had their fate sealed by Michael Bloomberg’s school closing policy.
Ostensibly, these school closings were to result in improved student performance in small schools that were placed within buildings occupied by the traditional high schools. It was an idea hatched by Bill Gates, an idea that he abandoned long ago.
In the waning days of his mayoralty, Bloomberg has embarked on a citywide tour, touting his legacy. The papers have dutifully transmitted City Hall’s talking points, with hardly a demurral finding its way onto the printed page.
The Wall Street Journal’s 3,000 word “Bloomberg Reshaped The City” article credited the record high 60% high school graduation to Bloomberg’s stewardship of the schools and politely left out the inconvenient statistic that shows a record high number of New York’s high school graduates are unprepared for college and require remedial courses in math and English.
In an interview with Joel Klein, Bloomberg’s schools chancellor for over 10 years, that appeared in the Scholastic Administrator, Klein expressed his hope that the next schools chancellor will continue Bloomberg’s education legacy.
If only Mayor De Blasio will pick “someone who is committed to building on the progress of the last 11- plus years,” Klein’s tenure won’t have been in vain, at least according to Klein.
If that should be the case, we should prepare for record numbers of meaningless diplomas, more school closings, an unstable teacher work force, and a school system where academic apartheid defines education opportunity.
Record numbers of students now use mass transportation to get to the “school of their choice.” Why have 250,000 students using mass transit when many of them could walk to school instead, is a question that has gone unasked and unanswered by reporters and politicians for over a decade.
The community has been de-coupled from the neighborhood high school, because hardly a neighborhood high school exists anymore. The result is that parental participation suffers, after-school activities suffer, and the community suffers.
A record number of students attend boutique schools that screen their applicants. I estimate that close to 10% of the seats available to high school students are now reserved for these students. Most of these students used to help make up the population of the traditional high schools.
When Jamaica High School was handed its death warrant, the Department of Education, fearing a backlash from parents who simply didn’t buy the line that Jamaica was a failed school, cleverly carved a Gateway School out of the Gateway program that had existed in Jamaica for about 20 years.
And then, miracle of miracles, the new Gateway High School received an “A” on its report card!
Is there a serious argument that can be made for a public policy that is perpetually closing and reopening school houses because they are “failed”?
We’ve all heard of the Amityville Horror, but does that mean we should treat the schoolhouse as we would a haunted house? But if closing and opening hundreds of schools is the new normal, we’d do better to hire Shinto priests to exorcise the evil spirits in these buildings rather than renaming and re-staffing them.
Our lowest performing students usually carry baggage that includes unstable home life, poor to no healthcare, limited language skills, and physical impoverishment.
If instead of further destabilizing their school environment, Mayor Bloomberg had thrown his energy and resources into creating schools along the “Comer Model,” he might actually have had something to show to the public.
The Comer school model developed by Dr. James P. Comer at the Yale Child Study Center has been around for close to fifty years and has a proven track record in addressing the problems of low achieving students in the inner city. But the lure of the well-meaning philanthropist with no expertise proved irresistible.
Instead, we are left with the tired litany of the teachers and union as villains, and the mayor and his minions as heroic for taking them on. But beneath the surface Bloomberg has created a highly segregated school system that keeps the disadvantaged far away from the middle classes and the upwardly mobile.
If Mayor De Blasio wants to reverse this death spiral, he’d do well to grant clemency to schools like Jamaica High School and Beach Channel High School and give them the resources they need to make them work for the children and their communities.
In their heyday comprehensive high schools included students who were on multiple career paths. There were differentiated diplomas and a multiplicity of choices. The students might not have attended all the same classes together, but they played on the same teams, shared the same teachers, and developed mutual respect for one another.
Inexplicably that has been destroyed, and instead of these students existing side by side with each other in the same community, they live and learn as peoples apart.
When this consideration is no longer a part of our education system we all become impoverished. Clemency is one way to begin turning this around.
The mayor should NOT, I repeat NOT re open public schools unless they have a plan. The system was not designed to serve all and kids were ranked and sorted in the classroom since slavery days. A plan begins with assessment http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/accountability-with-honor-and-yes-we.html
This whole school choice thing has been a disaster for NYC students. School choice for whom? A small percentage of high achieving students. The rest get “placed” into low-performing schools where they often have to travel over an hour to get there. These students are below grade level in almost all subjects, not very motivated and likely have very little support at home. The idea of such a student taking two trains and a bus to get to a 7:15 class and being successful is ridiculous. They begin their high school careers with two strikes against them. These children need community schools.
A small percentage of high achieving students would seem to describe Stuyvesant High School. Is it a charter school? I know Stuyvesant High School fails Dr. Ravitch’s test for what is a public school, but I am not sure if that test is widely accepted.
Cap Lee.. the “plan” would be the restoration of community schools and to stop the closing of even more community schools while opening unregulated charters. This is assuredly a much better plan than the “Bloomberg” privatization one (at the expense of students).
I’m a Special Ed high school teacher (NYC District 75). We have severely disabled students being bused in from all over the Bronx, some traveling on a school bus for over an hour to get to school by 8 a.m. Wouldn’t it make more sense for these students to be able to attend a community school in their neighborhoods?
Not to mention all of the General Ed high schools that have been closed in the Bronx, considered to be the poorest borough of all. Talk about a “Tale of Two Cities”. Hopefully, the new Mayor will be true to his word, and put the PUBLIC BACK into NYCs’ school system.
It has bothered me of late – how in the current model do students make and maintain friendships?
If students both don’t live near each other, and, have to choose different schools at both middle and high school levels, then it seems what many of us would consider typical socialization would be stymied by distance after school hours. And that there would be almost no continuity of people or classes during the transition years.
How do students gain a stable feeling of community with that much transition?
That’s a feature, not a bug. If people started forming communities, just think, they might start pushing back against all this top-down “reform”.
That makes sense for the parents – but we know that one of the main roles of schools is to socialize children. How do we teach children to be parts of democratic communities if literally the only thing that stays constant in their lives is their parents, of which we know not all children even have that. That seems to me to reinforce a kind of self serving mentality for children unless there are significant parental efforts to counteract it.
I guess I’m cynical, but I think the purpose of the “reformers” is to turn out a work force that is just social enough to say, “Welcome to WalMart. Did you find everything okay?” If we let kids grow up learning social skills, they just might learn to unite and maybe they’ll even form, ugh, unions.
I don’t think that’s their purpose because that is very malicious.
I prefer to think of their intentions as being very self centered and that people who can’t make it in the “wilds” of the markets deserve what they get. Similarly, people should be able to educate their children within their means and I don’t think they see education as a social good. If they did, they’d at least make sure that the special needs children in their “free market” schools get enough funding to succeed.
Their intention is to develop markets for themselves and for what they belief is an inherent good for society – they have no responsibility for the outcomes except that they’re driven by “free choice”.
Frankly that’s how things were in NYC for decades before Bloomberg (although things then got much worse.) Sometimes the local grade school was good, or at least OK, but many patched through with some private middle school (or did Catholic 1-8), & there was much planning, studying, & competition required to find a hs that worked, often requiring young teens to make long, quasi-safe commutes. I loved the city & lived there a long time, but the families I knew (including my own extended inlaw family) had, I felt, a great deal more stress in raising kids– & their kids in growing up– than they would have had with the extended buffer zone of unsplintered community I enjoyed growing up. I felt fortunate to be able to move to such a place as my kids grew to school age.
I’m astounded, as a long-time progressive educator and activist for student-centered learning, that I had never before heard of Dr. Comer’s work. Thanks so much for bringing up the Comer Model – why can’t Gates and peers fund this kind of intervention: collaborative, community enhancing curriculum development by teachers on the spot! Administrators whose priority really is to know each child and give them what they need to learn! And authentic assessment built into the process, no testing not designed by teachers needed, thank you very much.
I agree with you Fred. The Comer model makes sense and it looks like an excellent system for ALL children. Combining the Comer experience, with more choices within the schools – not just a college prep course – would definitely lead to success.
I don’t live in NY, but you have to cheer his hiring someone with some experience.
I have no earthly idea why a lawyer was running public schools, and I’m a lawyer. Sorry, but that’s ridiculous. I’d like to see Mr. Klein’s reaction if a public school teacher had been hired to “reform” the legal system.
Three cheers for the general idea that people earn credibility and trust, and that years of experience is valuable, because it is.
Old fashioned, I know, and not currently fashionable, so good for the mayor for bucking “the status quo” and recognizing what should be obvious to reasonable people 🙂
James Eterno and I, at the time of the closing, wrote a piece about how all the stats on which the closure was based were false.
http://gothamschools.org/2010/01/13/save-jamaica-high-school/
As of this date, no one at the DOE or anywhere else has contradicted us.
It’s amazing they take a piece of something working well at Jamaica, chop it off, and leave the school without it. One more thing that was about to happen at Jamaica before its closure was the addition of a JROTC program. That program has worked very well at Francis Lewis, and the same people who started our program were going to initiate the one at Jamaica.
Unfortunately, John White, having gotten out of the wrong side of his coffin that evening, decided to close Jamaica after having ignored dozens of community members who passionately plead for its survival. It was a bad day, a bad decision, by a very bad administration that cared nothing for the community it ostensibly served.
Instead of closing schools and then re opening them again with a new name, but the same model – why not talk to the administrators, staff, parents, and students to determine what the school needs to be successful.
It’s not rocket science. If you keep doing the same thing over and over, you will get the same result. Some might call that stupidity. I prefer to think of it as arrogance. Too many people who know nothing about education have way too much to say.
The problems in NYC are not unique. The teens in the Buffalo Public Schools apply to high school (it’s very similar to the college application process). They take public transportation to the schools, transferring at least once. If the suburban kids didn’t have home to school bus service, I’m sure their attendance would also suffer, especially on cold, snowy days. There is both good and bad about the system, but the upshot is that some schools get the “leftover” students who don’t qualify for a better school. It won’t surprise you to hear that these schools are the ones who have been identified as “failing”.
Changing a school name won’t change the status of these students. Programs such as the Comer model might, although using it in the early years would be a better plan.
What we need to hear is ideas from the education specialists, not from politicians or businessmen. We need pilot programs to test theories, without fear of a label. We need to keep greedy CEOs away from the public school systems, as well as from Charter Schools.
We need a common sense approach, and right now, the closest I’ve see is DeBlasio’s vision for changes. It’s a start. I hope he gives Jamaica HS that reprieve.
Thanks for writing this Marc. Thanks for posting it Dr. Ravitch. One point about Jamaica Gateway School: Dr. Epstein quite correctly points out that Jamaica Gateway received an A on their first two report cards. Part of that grade was based on their excellent graduation rate. The students who made up their first two graduating classes were taken right from Jamaica High School’s junior and sophomore classes. Therefore, the statistics used to give Gateway an A were based in large part on kids Jamaica High School educated for three and two years respectively. Nothing against Jamaica Gateway but those pupils would have all graduated if they stayed at Jamaica High School. We were never a failing school.
James Eterno
UFT Chapter Leader
Jamaica High School
I taught at Jamaica High School for 19 years. It was a great school. As Epstein stated, we had differentiated programs that served a wide variety of students. Many of my students, particularly those in the Gateway program, were accepted to great colleges and universities and went on to successful careers, many in teaching. Jamaica High School was not a failing school, it was a complex school that was systematically dismantled by the Bloomberg administration, not the least because we had a strong and vocal union and a great campus. After I retired I founded a UN NGO that brought atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to schools in an oral history initiative. Out of loyalty we conducted programs at the Jamaica campus until it became so dysfunctional that programming there became impossible.
DiBlasio’s first job with the schools is triage. Although Jamaica is in shreds, I for one would offer my services to see it come back to life as a comprehensive high school and a model neighborhood school that not only offers a variety of educational opportunities for high school students but services for the entire community, day, night and weekends.
GreeNYC. End the daily educational diaspora. Create and defend neighborhood schools.
What so many of the newly created small schools lack, is precisely what makes a good high school, and that is a sense of community and belonging on the part of the students and staff. This has been lost in the large buildings with 4 or 5 small schools housed within its walls. The atmosphere that has been created is one of rivalry, not only among the students but the faculty and administration as well. I may be wrong but I don’t see how an adversarial culture creates a quality learning environment for the students. I for one would be happy to return to a functioning Jamaica High School and face the challenges of reviving her, and once again serve her community. Former Jamaica staff member of 16 years.
Jamaica HS has a lot of support from its staff. It sounds like a school worth saving.
Nonsense, small schools can get into their community even more if done right. Small schools allow an environment that is conducive to individualized education as well as going into the community of a regular basis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czlySqs4tVI&feature=youtu.be.
Cap – lots of schools get out into the community, not just small schools. Internships are standard in many high schools – even large ones. Also volunteer work is sometimes a graduation requirement. Small schools have their place, but that does not take away from the affinity felt by many towards Jamaica HS.
Thank you
NYC has a big enough school system to have small schools and large schools co-exist easily. No need to have a battle over school size. However, there should be quality neighborhood schools for every area of the city. Comprehensive schools served that function and if properly supported, could do that again.
Ms. Klock- I couldn’t agree with you more about Jamaica’s staff. Great people. Most have been moved on to other schools as we have downsized but dozens still came out to celebrate the holidays together on Dec 20.
Great Blog. Jamaica High School was never a failing school – the only thing that failed was Bloomberg. How dare he label the school as such. I just returned from overseas and in the airport across the Customs floor I spotted a former student of mine who also remembered me as being one of his favorite teachers from 10 years ago.. He has a great job as a customs agent – did he fail? did Jamaica fail him? did I as a teacher fail him? The only thing that will definitely fail are all on the maggot cockroach infested small schools that Bloomberg has created. How many of them will be around in 10 years let alone over 100 years.? The small schools off the the kids NOTHING! Mayor De Blasio: I also plead with you to reopen the large community high schools that offered something for every type of student as well as school pride, tradition, and community. This is a necessity.
As someone who has taught in small school East West School of International Studies and at Jamaica High School a large neighborhood based high school. I can state with confidence the new schools created by the Bloomberg administration lack a culture of community and continuity. The small school I was at had 1/3 of its teachers turn over every year, no ties to the neighborhood or community it serves, and constantly shifts strategies and priorities based on the whims of the principal or “new” assistant principal. East West School of International Studies had 4 new and different assistant principals in the three years I was there. The principal, Ben Sherman spent more time teaching English in Japan then in a New York City public school.
The school had no sense of tradition. The principal actual declares every new activity a tradition. Many of these traditions are never repeated. For example, the school talent show, a successful event run by student government was discontinued after 5 years. The school play ended when the principal fail to support the drama teacher. The drama subsequently left the school. As with most small schools their were not enough students to supports any PSAL team.
Jamaica provided students with a well-rounded education. In my time ten+ years the school had numerous champion seasons. I would be proud to return to Jamaica and help rebuild this 100 year community institution!!
If small schools are such a success why do less then half of the incoming class make it their first choice during the high school selection process. With most deciding on a large comprehensive high school.
LETS GO BEAVERS!!!!!!!
For years NYC comprehensive high schools had excellent programs and graduated students, many who went to fine colleges and became prominent both locally and nationally. With the proper funding and support, comprehensive high schools can again become institution of hope, opportunity and success.
Jamaica High is grate i love jamaica high school.Jamaica high school teacher’s are very good.they teach nicely i love all my teachers.
i like and love this jamaica high school because, this school all teachers are really nice with their student and i don’t want to this school off. this school is really important for every students……..Thank you….!!!
Jamaica High School is a great school. Jamaica High School’s teachers are very nice and they have taught us very well, . I love all my teachers and I don’t want to see the School close.
Jamaica High School is a great school. Jamaica High School’s teachers are very good. They always helps us; I love all my teachers .I love Jamaica High School.
I am an alumni of Jamaica High School and I will stand proud for the years to come as such. Jamaica High school was my beginning, an institution that taught me everything I needed to know about the real world. It prepared me well for college and the teachers that were employed cared about the students and what happened to them.
This was and still is a school that gives meaning to : No child left behind”. Attempting to fade out the school was one of many bad decisions that the past chair holders of the DOE made. I Graduated Jamaica high school in 2008 and moved on to John Jay college of Criminal Justice. I completed my degree this past May 2013. Now I am a forensic Toxicologist working in a lab that works with clients across the USA.
I would not be where I am and who I am with out the help, support and encouragement of those individuals in Jamaica. What the DOE needs to remember is that every school has has a few rotten eggs but that doesn’t mean that everyone is spoiled. Stop looking at the five or six impolite students and look at the hundreds of amazing. insightful and inspirational ones. Jamaica is my second home, I stood by this school in 2007 and I will stand by this school until the state realizes that it’s making a big mistake.
P.S. Statics from 5 years ago does not inform you of the progress of the school in the present. Here is a little tip DOE, stop looking at the past and take a look at the present. Once you see what the present holds then determine if there needs to me a change.
Thank you
Also, I would like to welcome the new additions to the DOE. WELCOME!
I hope your time with the DOE will be a great one. I look forward to meeting you in the near future.