“The Life and Death of Jamaica High School”
“There are two broadly competing narratives about school closure. The one commonly told by teachers, students, and many parents at underperforming schools centers on a lack of financial and material resources, which insures that the schools will be unable to meet even minimum standards. Strongly connected to this version is a belief that closure functions as a kind of veiled union-busting: shutting a school allows reformers to sidestep contracts and remove long-term teachers.
Reformers view closure as a necessary corrective to what they see as bloated bureaucracies, inept teachers, and unaccountable unions. They argue that urban schools are often too large to give students the attention they need…
The narrative of individual ascent in America often elides the many frail contingencies that make success possible. In the late seventies, my father found it increasingly difficult to compete with larger electrical contractors. Then, in 1981, my oldest brother — who had served in Vietnam, had come home addicted to heroin, and had been clean for several years — died, one of the earliest victims of AIDS. My father’s business collapsed amid the grief that followed. The contingencies piled up. We moved from the yellow house into a second-floor apartment on a dead-end street in Bricktown, a forgettable stretch of South Jamaica alongside the Long Island Rail Road.”
An America that doesn’t exist anymore.
This is a beautiful essay about the history of a neighborhood and the schoolhood of the author.
