The New Yorker magazine has published a moving article about the closing of Jamaica High School in New York City, once one of the best high schools in the nation. The author, Jelani Cobb, graduated from Jamaica in 1987. He remembers his years there with great affection and pride, recalling a school where students from many ethnic and racial backgrounds worked and played together.
Jamaica High School was a victim of many converging trends: white flight from the city; the Gates-funded infatuation with small schools; choice policies that encouraged the departure of successful students; the faddish belief that closing a school would magically solve the problems of the school; the faddish belief in cookie-cutter small schools; New York City’s policy of dumping the neediest students into large schools like Jamaica while draining away resources, students, and programs. This was how a school that had served generations of newcomers and striving students died.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Bill Gates is a big, rich wrecking ball. History will not be kind to him.
Perfect description, thanks for the metaphor, exactly right. A very good example of why this whole private war on public education is not about “good schools,” or student achievement, or learning, or improving teaching, or making kids “college and career ready,” but has always been about looting the public sector to transfer wealth to private hands and tech-testing biz, and to destroy the last two large unions still providing some protections and benefits to the nation’s 3 mil teachers.
I am glad the author took time to interview James Eterno. James was one of the main organizers who tried to save the school. He was the union rep, yet got very little help or support from the union. Even the Queens borough president fought to keep Jamaica open. Although this process was started under Klein, it was Farina who plunged the knife into the heart of the community. James always contended that the school was making great strides and couldn’t understand why those efforts weren’t being recognized. It was because Bloomberg wanted to destroy yet another public school and by doing so put the staff into the ATR pool. The fact that a great teacher like James was serving as a daily sub instead of having his own classroom is just a reminder of the lack of common sense by those in charge. If this was also a plan to put James out of the picture (he ran for UFT president), it didn’t work.One of the schools he was assigned to asked him to serve as its delegate even though he’s not on staff. A great teacher and union rep rolled into one!!
… a free – public – local – education…with the emphasis on local…where have you gone?
A powerful, devastating article about once was an extraordinary high school, a “hotbed” of creativity, imagination and willingness to experiment.
At the same time I read an even more powerful, compelling series of articles on North Charleston High that should also be mandatory reading. http://data.postandcourier.com/school-choice/. Entitled “Left Behind: The unintended consequences of school choice; Kids with toughest hurdles stuck in gutted schools”. So many heroes, so much compassion, success stories despite overwhelming odds told from the student’s perspective.
This is a great depiction of what is happening. School choice is a license to discriminate allowing the poorest of the poor to remain in under funded under resourced schools. School choice is a ticket to increased segregation, which from my understanding, is against the law. Parents or guardians of the “leftovers” should contact the Southern Poverty Law Center to see if there are grounds for a lawsuit.
Barbara –
Thank you for sharing this link – excellent reporting & writing makes this riveting reading – how can anyone who reads this not understand why choice is a problem?
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
The closure was based on false statistics, and the city never refuted that.
http://ny.chalkbeat.org/2010/01/13/save-jamaica-high-school/#.VdxZXrfqlE5
Murry Bergtraum High School is another of the great large schools destroyed by the same forces that killed Jamaica HS.
Yes, and like James Eterno at Jamaica, Bertraum has a heroic Chapter Leader by the name of John Elfrank Dana who has fought to save the school and fought the vicious incompetents at the DOE and the looters, mischaracterized as education reformers,” every step of the way.
And, like James Eterno, he has received little or no support from the Vichy administration that controls the UFT.
This was an extraordinary place. I attended Jamaica HS, as did my mom. As long as “reformers” keep solving “problems” with solutions that have no demonstrated success, we will continue heading towards the privatization abyss.
The “problem” they are trying to solve is the “problem” of public schools. Much like the Germans tried to solve the “Jewish problem”.
(For the tone troll police: yeah, yeah, Godwin and all. But in ten years or so when public schools are as scarce as Jews in Nazi Germany, don’t say I didn’t warn you.)
Time and again we were told that old “industrial” model the comprehensive high school was based on was obsolete and that justified their destruction. The solution was a computer-age inspired Bill Gatesian small school inspiration from the mind of the computer guru of our age.
But Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, and Joel Klein, are nowhere to found now that their “creative destruction” of public high schools in New York have amounted to nothing.
Ironically our post-industrial politicians who were so eager to jump on the Gates bandwagon are flummoxed by the crumbling tunnels that lasted over a century and helped make New York, America’s greatest city. You don’t hear them lambasting the industrialists who built them, do you?
Someone should suggest that Gates champion the closing of the tunnels and fund motor boats for the and barges for the daily commute and shipping of freight?
After all smaller is better, right?
Plenty of “destruction” to be found everywhere… And the only things being “created” are the personal fortunes of the so-called reformers…
I am weeping now. How awful. It’s about $$$$$ and control of those who are less fortunate. It’s SIC.
To clear up a few misconceptions: every single child in New York City has the option of attending a traditional district high school that is located close to his or her home. Some of these are zoned; others are either entirely open admissions or require nothing other than attending an open house or signing in at a fair. Jamaica High School, the organization, no longer exists, but Jamaica High School, the building, never closed. It is currently home to four NYC DOE district high schools that admit students via open enrollment—no charters, no privatization.
The fate of Jamaica (and schools like Clinton in the Bronx or Lafayette in Brooklyn, among many others) was written in the decades following WWII, when white families fled New York City by the millions. What disappointed me about Cobb’s essay was his omission of the role that *black* flight played in Jamaica’s demise. Sure, it didn’t help matters that Townsend Harris and QHSS creamed off some of Jamaica’s best students (mostly Asians). But the death blow was the sustained loss of black middle class families to the suburbs and to the South. This reverse migration was already occurring during Cobb’s time there and has accelerated rapidly in the last three decades.
I agree with many of the objections to the Bloomberg-Klein strategy for dismantling large comprehensive zoned high schools, but I’m not sure whether it has negatively affected any students (teachers are another story).
This is marvelous research. It’s my book, “The Elephant in the Classroom,” except from the student’s point of view and without the solutions which include neighborhood career education programs — and advanced academic work for the few who can still handle it..