Jamaica High School, in Queens, was once the largest high school in the United States. For most of its history, it occupied a majestic Georgian Revival building on Gothic Drive, designed in the nineteen-twenties by William H. Gompert, who had begun his career at McKim, Mead & White. With east and west wings, granite columns, and an elaborate bell tower, the building looked like a state capitol that had been dropped into the middle of a residential neighborhood; it sat on the crest of a hill so imposing that planners would have been guilty of pretense had it housed anything other than a public institution.
One evening in June of last year, Jamaica students wearing red and blue gowns gathered with their families and teachers and with members of the school staff at Antun’s, a catering hall in Queens Village, for the senior-class commencement ceremony. Accompanying the festivities was the traditional graduation boilerplate—about life transitions and rising to new challenges—but it carried a particular significance on this occasion, because it was as applicable to the faculty and the staff, some of whom had been at the school for nearly three decades, as it was to the students. After a hundred and twenty-two years, Jamaica High School was closing; the class of 2014, which had just twenty-four members, would be the last.
The New York City Department of Education had announced the closure three years earlier, citing persistent violence and a graduation rate of around fifty per cent. Accordingly, the department had begun to “co-locate” four newly created “small schools” in the old building. Advocates argue that small schools can best resolve many of the ills associated with urban education, but the reorganization produced a logistical problem. The schools tended to operate like siblings competing for bathroom time. Access to the building’s communal spaces was at a premium. Unable to secure the auditorium for a graduating class of two dozen, Jamaica High School found itself, both figuratively and literally, pushed out.
Underscoring the indignities that attended the school’s last days was a difficult irony: for much of its time, Jamaica was a gemstone of the city’s public-education system. In 1981, the schools chancellor, Frank Macchiarola, decided to take on the additional role of an interim high-school principal, in order to better appreciate the daily demands of school administration. He chose Jamaica, and was roundly criticized for picking such an easy school to lead. Four years later, the U.S. Department of Education named it one of the most outstanding public secondary schools in the nation. Alumni include Stephen Jay Gould, Attorney General John Mitchell, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Walter O’Malley, Paul Bowles, and three winners of the Pulitzer Prize: Gunther Schuller, Art Buchwald, and Alan Dugan. Bob Beamon, who set a world record for the long jump in the 1968 Olympics, graduated with the class of ’65. The school’s closure felt less like the shuttering of a perennial emblem of stagnation than like the erasure of a once great institution that had somehow ceased to be so.
Jamaica had become an institution of the type that has vexed city policymakers and educators: one charged with serving a majority-minority student body, most of whose members qualified as poor, and whose record was defined by chronic underachievement and academic failure. Even so, word of the school’s closure angered students and their families, the community, and alumni. I was among them—I graduated with the class of ’87—and for me, as for many former students, the school was a figment of recollection, frozen in its academic glory. George Vecsey, the former Times sports columnist and a member of the class of ’56, accused Joel Klein, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s schools chancellor, of “cooking the books,” to make schools slated for closure appear worse than they were, and compared the Department of Education’s closure policies to the nihilism of Pol Pot. Vecsey later apologized for having slighted the suffering of Cambodia, but he held to his contention that Klein ruled by dictatorial fiat. He wrote, in a blog, “The city destroyed a piece of history because of its own failure.”
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. In 2000, the Gates Foundation began funding education reform, with an emphasis on reducing school size. Nine years later, in an annual newsletter, the foundation reported that its efforts had not met with significant success, particularly with schools “that did not take radical steps to change the culture, such as allowing the principal to pick the team of teachers or change the curriculum.” The foundation also said that it “had less success trying to change an existing school than helping to create a new school.” The reform movement nationwide increasingly saw closure and the creation of new institutions—as opposed to funding and reorganizing existing schools—as the way forward.
Joel Klein, who as chancellor closed seventy-four schools, disputes the notion that institutions like Jamaica failed owing to a lack of resources. Nor does he believe that size is the only issue. “Where there were thriving large schools, we didn’t try to replace them,” he told me. The real problem was that the schools had “started getting many kids who were low-performing and entering high school a couple of years behind.” The solution was to create “a much more intimate and personalized setting for them”—a phrase at odds with the disruption and the discord that often greet the end of a long-established community institution.
Jamaica’s demise became part of the litany of resentments voiced by opponents of school closure across the country. Rahm Emmanuel’s shuttering of nearly fifty schools in Chicago angered black voters and became a major issue in the city’s recent mayoral election. In 2010, Adrian Fenty, the mayor of Washington, D.C., was dispatched in an election that was also a referendum on his schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, who had closed two dozen schools. Yet that reaction raises another confounding question: Why do communities most in need of strong schools oppose shutting down institutions that are failing them? In demanding that a school remain open, are alumni hewing closer to nostalgia than to current reality? Or is the conversation about school closure really a proxy for something more subtle, complex, and intractable?
The impulse to reform public schools in the United States has existed nearly as long as the impulse to build them. The tides of immigrants arriving at the turn of the twentieth century, and the nativist hostilities that greeted them, imbued educators with an assimilationist mission. At mid-century, schools were instilled with Cold War anxiety; the subtext of films like “Blackboard Jungle” and “Rebel Without a Cause” was not only the perils of dissolute youth but also the dangers posed by families and schools that were seen as failing to meet the Soviet challenge. In the civil-rights era, American classrooms were called on to propagate racial equality in the broader society. But no mission completely displaced the one that preceded it, so that, by the end of the century, we expected public education to assimilate students, equalize them, and prepare them to compete globally.
The history of Jamaica High School roughly correlates with the evolving demands placed on public education in New York City. The school was founded in 1892, and, five years later, moved into a small building on Hillside Avenue, with an enrollment of eighty students. Rural Queens County was formally incorporated as a borough of the city in 1898. During the next fifteen years, the Queensboro Bridge opened and the Long Island Rail Road’s Jamaica station was expanded, becoming the largest in the system. Commuting presented a novel alternative to life in the uncorralled bedlam of Manhattan; Queens was transformed into a kind of suburb within the city, and the population boomed. Schools citywide struggled to keep up with the demands created by both immigration and population redistribution. In “The Great School Wars,” a history of public education in the city, Diane Ravitch writes, “In the early twentieth century the public school was transformed into a vast, underfinanced, bureaucratic social-work agency, expected to take on single-handedly the responsibilities which had formerly been discharged by family, community and employer. . . . The idea took hold that the public school was uniquely responsible for the Americanization and assimilation of the largest foreign immigration in the nation’s history.” Jamaica’s population reflected the demographic tides in Queens; its classrooms were laboratories for the shaping of better Americans.
In 1925, construction began on the new building, the school’s last home, on Gothic Drive. Jamaica took its name from the Jameco, or Yameca, Indians, who once inhabited the area where Kennedy Airport now stands. The name meant “beaver,” and the animal, a symbol of industriousness, was chosen as the school mascot. (When I enrolled, students were grumbling that it was time for a new mascot—particularly the cheerleaders, whose sweaters were emblazoned with the word.) The grand structure, completed in 1927, accommodated thirty-four hundred students.
Over the years, the walls of the east wing became an evolving exhibit of the school’s history, adorned with photographs of generations of students, faculty, and staff. Those from the first decades showed stern-faced young men in football uniforms; genial, avuncular-looking teachers in suits; and earnest Second World War-era teen-agers, many of them from the growing Greek, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods to the north and the west of the school. Though racially homogeneous, the student body drew from a cross-section of economic backgrounds. Kids from middle-class Flushing and Kew Gardens sat with students from working-class areas south of the school and others from more affluent enclaves, like Jamaica Estates. By 1950, the No. 7 subway line had attracted families to the formerly sparse expanses of northern Queens, and the school’s enrollment grew to forty-six hundred.
Yearbooks from the fifties show only a few dozen Latino and black students. In 1948, the Supreme Court struck down racially restrictive housing covenants, and a handful of African-American celebrities, including Jackie Robinson, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Roy Campanella, bought homes in the exclusive Addisleigh Park section of Queens. (Fame provided only partial insulation from racial resentment; in 1952, a cross was burned near the homes of Robinson and Campanella.) Still, eighty-five per cent of the new housing developments in the borough were closed to blacks. Today, the name South Jamaica includes any number of mostly black neighborhoods south of Liberty Avenue, but at that time it was a well-defined sliver of real estate between the more middle-class areas of St. Albans and Ozone Park. It was where most of the African-American population, including the students enrolled at the high school, lived.
During the nineteen-forties, in a series of landmark tests conducted around the country, the psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark demonstrated that black children associated virtue and intelligence with whiteness, and had correspondingly internalized racist stereotypes of inferiority. Robert Carter, an attorney with the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, heard of the Clarks’ work and brought it to the attention of Thurgood Marshall, who was then the legal fund’s director-counsel. Marshall made the Clarks’ findings central to the argument for school desegregation in the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education. The decision made Kenneth Clark famous (while largely overlooking his wife’s role in structuring the experiment). Clark, who had grown up in Harlem and was a professor at the City College of New York, then turned his attention to the city government, which, he charged, had fostered segregation in the schools.
Arthur Levitt, then the president of the New York City Board of Education, responded that the schools merely reflected residential patterns: children who attended overwhelmingly black schools lived in overwhelmingly black neighborhoods. A Commission on Integration was set up to examine the issue, with Clark as one of the commissioners, and Levitt as co-chair, and it issued recommendations, which were never quite translated into policy. (Clark resigned, but continued to push for integration throughout his career.) In 1959, the Board of Education experimented by sending four hundred students from overcrowded black schools in Brooklyn to under-attended white schools in the Ridgewood and Glendale sections of Queens. The move was met with rancorous opposition and a brief boycott that anticipated the riotous response to busing in the seventies.
In 1949, John Ward, an African-American student whose family had migrated to New York from Virginia after the Second World War, enrolled at the school. Ward’s father was a bus mechanic, and his mother worked as a domestic; between them, they earned enough to buy a home in Jamaica. Ward recalls the area as a place where Italian-Americans, Polish-Americans, African-Americans, and Jews lived in peaceful proximity. His house was not far from the grocery store that Mario Cuomo’s parents owned, and Ward, who played baseball as a boy, remembers the future governor from games in the neighborhood sandlots. The area had not yet entirely shaken its rural roots. “There were still people farming there,” Ward told me. “I remember seeing people butcher hogs on Linden Boulevard in the forties and fifties.”
Ward wanted to be a teacher, but Woodrow Wilson, the high school that most blacks in the area attended, was a vocational trade school. So he applied to Jamaica, which had acquired a reputation as one of the city’s strongest academic high schools. Ward initially found the rigor daunting. “My first semester, I failed about three major classes,” he told me. “My father said, ‘If you’re not going to work at school, you’ll have to get a job.’ ” Ward studied hard and spent an extra semester earning enough academic credits to apply to college. He played baseball well enough to be selected for the All-City team in 1954, his senior year. “I don’t really recall there being much racial tension,” he said of the school. “The blacks mostly hung out with other black students, but, being an athlete, I interacted with a lot more of the white students.” For a few years in the fifties, Jamaica’s integrated athletics teams, with their winning records, were a point of pride for the school. In 1954, Ward was elected the school’s first black class president.
He was accepted at Morgan State University, a historically black institution in Baltimore, but his family couldn’t afford the tuition, so he played D-League baseball for a few years, then applied to the New York City police academy, and, in 1960, became one of the first black members of the motorcycle corps. Of the more than three hundred graduates in Ward’s police-academy class, fewer than two dozen were African-American. In 1974, he was promoted to a plainclothes unit working out of the 114th Precinct. “Out of sixteen guys, I was the black on the street-crimes unit,” he told me. His career on the force was, at least demographically, a replay of his experiences at Jamaica, and Ward later credited the school with giving him not only an excellent education but also the skills that allowed him to navigate primarily white environments. “Jamaica being integrated in the fifties was something unusual,” he told me. “But it was also a place where I felt I belonged.”
South Jamaica’s black population continued to grow in the fifties and sixties, though not all of it was as economically stable as Ward’s family. In 1947, when the Olympian Bob Beamon was still a baby, his mother died, and he was eventually sent to live with a guardian in a rough part of the neighborhood. After a troubled childhood and a brush with juvenile court, which resulted in his being sent to a remedial, “600” school, Beamon became convinced that if he could get into Jamaica he could turn his life around. Four decades later, in a memoir, “The Man Who Could Fly,” he wrote of the school in nearly ecclesiastical terms:
It’s easy to wax idealist about the happy spaces of one’s childhood, but in Beamon’s case the assessment can’t be so easily dismissed. He traced his desire to compete in the Olympics to a visit that the track-and-field star Wilma Rudolph, a triple gold medalist in the 1960 Games, paid to Jamaica during his sophomore year. The school was a place where someone like him, who grew up poor in a crime-plagued neighborhood, stood a chance of encountering someone like Rudolph.
Beamon and Ward could have been case studies for Kenneth Clark’s advocacy of integration. Political salesmanship warranted that advocates speak of integration as a removal of racial strictures and a kind of democratic communion, but, at its core, it was meant to achieve a redistribution of wealth or, at least, of opportunity. If advantage tended to accrue in places inhabited by whites, integrationists like Clark hoped that by placing black students in physical proximity to whites the benefits would be spread around.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 insured that race could not be used explicitly to prohibit access to public institutions, but there was a big difference in the public’s mind between outlawing discrimination and engineering racial diversity. By 1974, when the Supreme Court ruled, in Milliken v. Bradley, that school districts could not be compelled to participate in busing programs, the push for integration had already begun to lose momentum. School districts across the country fell back on voluntary integration programs. (A 2007 Supreme Court ruling greatly weakened the ability to do even that.)
Meanwhile, successive tides of immigration in the seventies and eighties transformed Queens into the most ethnically diverse county in the United States. Greek enclaves in Astoria saw an influx of Brazilians, Colombians, Bangladeshis, Chinese, Guyanese, Koreans, Ecuadorans, Romanians, Indians, Filipinos, Albanians, and Bosnians, in addition to Lebanese, Egyptians, Tunisians, Yemeni, and Moroccans. The working-class white areas along Jamaica Avenue became home to Haitian, Jamaican, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Indian, and Pakistani populations. A South Asian community took root south and east of the school. Jamaica High School did not become “integrated” as a consequence of the implementation of a particular set of policy prerogatives. Rather, the school was something more uncommon and more notable: an institution whose diversity simply reflected the entirety of its surrounding communities.
My family moved to Queens about twenty years after John Ward’s did, as part of a nascent civil-rights-era black middle class. By 1967, my father, who was an electrician, was earning enough to buy a home. He and my mother left a tenement in Harlem for a yellow two-story house in Hollis, far enough into Queens that people referred to Manhattan as “the city.” The nearest subway stop was a twenty-minute bus ride away. My father considered the move a validation of his decision, at the age of seventeen, to leave his native Georgia and head north.
My mother, who had left Alabama for New York as a teen-ager, and took jobs in the city as a domestic and a hotel telephone operator, now no longer needed to work, and she enrolled in night classes, studying for a B.A. at Queens College. Her American-history class was taught by Herb Sollinger, an adjunct professor who was also a full-time social-studies teacher at Jamaica High School. Tall and fortyish, Sollinger was a brilliant, quirky figure who wore red socks every day and had an encyclopedic grasp of world affairs. My mother, who deeply resented how limited her educational opportunities had been in Alabama, decided that my sister, who was about to start her freshman year, should attend the high school where Sollinger taught. Hollis was not in the district, so my mother filed a less than accurate change-of-address form with the Board of Education, and, the following year, my sister enrolled at Jamaica. Three years later, my older brother did, too.
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. That part of Liberty Avenue, the northern boundary of the neighborhood, was home to automotive yards, laundromats, bodegas, and a significant number of bad reputations. Bob Beamon recalled seeing, as a boy, one teen-ager stab another to death there. But Bricktown was zoned for Jamaica High School, and I enrolled as a freshman.
Up to that point, I’d been the type of student who is frequently urged to “apply yourself,” but, in a fit of geekdom my freshman year, I developed an obsession with physics—specifically, quarks. A classmate and I started staying behind after science class to discuss subatomic particles with Mr. DeFelice, a wry, mostly gray-haired man who spoke in deliberate cadences that crescendoed at the end of each sentence. He began assigning us additional reading, and eventually recommended us for the honors science track. His affirmation of our potential, coming amid the normal adolescent anxieties and a host of socioeconomic ones, still stands out in my memory.
The school was by then a far more polyglot institution than it had been when Ward or Beamon attended. I played right field on a baseball team that included a Jewish third baseman, a Dominican pitcher, a shortstop from Colombia, and an Indian utility outfielder. We took the field looking as if team tryouts had been held at the Census Bureau. Jamaica remained academically rigorous, and was initiating an impressive array of programs designed to prepare students for careers in science and engineering, business and medicine. It was during my sophomore year, when Eileen Petruzillo was principal, that the Department of Education cited the school for its excellence.
In my senior year, the father of my friend Sherman Brown encouraged me and a classmate, Mark Mason, to apply to his alma mater, Howard University. Sherman played first base on the baseball team and lived in Jamaica Estates. His father owned a travel agency. His mother, who held a doctorate in psychology, was the first person I’d ever met with a Ph.D. Mark was the senior-class president and, like me, the first in his family for whom going directly from high school to college was a possibility. Sherman, Mark, and I wound up as roommates at Howard. My four closest black friends at Jamaica, including Sherman and Mark, earned master’s degrees, and two of them were later awarded doctorates. Mark, now a chief financial officer at Citigroup, summarized Jamaica’s impact: “We came from neighborhoods where very few people went to college, but went to school with a set of people almost certain to go to college, and the school had a bigger influence.”
My high-school years had coincided with a train of racially charged events in the city: the death of Eleanor Bumpurs, a sixty-six-year-old woman who was shot in her apartment by a police officer; the death, from injuries sustained in police custody, of the graffiti artist Michael Stewart; the arrest of Bernhard Goetz, in the shooting of four young black men who he claimed had attempted to mug him in the subway; and the death of Michael Griffith, in Howard Beach, Queens. Griffith’s death brought a roiling racial subcurrent to the surface: he was fatally struck by a car as he fled onto a highway to escape a mob of whites who were chasing him. Adults in my neighborhood who had grown up in the South called Griffith’s death a lynching, and warned me to stay out of white working-class enclaves like Howard Beach. Three days after Griffith’s death, I saw a group of black teen-agers attack a white teen-ager on Hillside Avenue, and rage through the streets shouting “Howard Beach! Howard Beach!” Yet neither I nor any of the teachers and alumni I spoke to recall those tensions as being particularly prominent at Jamaica. The school continued to represent an educational idyll. But it could not stand entirely outside the times.
Students usually gathered in the first-floor auditorium before the start of classes, but, on the morning of Wednesday, November 5, 1986, Principal Petruzillo announced over the P.A. system that the auditorium was off limits, owing to a construction emergency. Her story held up for just as long as it took for the police and ambulances to arrive. Earlier that morning, Gregory Evelyn, an almost fragilely small sixteen-year-old junior, with whom I had taken swimming class, had shot a sophomore named Stanley Pacheco, following what was said to have been a dispute over a girl. Leo Greenfest, a gym teacher certified in first aid, tended to Pacheco, but the bullet had severed his spinal cord, and left him paralyzed below the neck. Evelyn ran out of the building and was arrested at his home a short time later.
School shootings were not yet recognized as a common feature of American life, which meant that the incident generated an enormous amount of news coverage, and also that there were no established safety or emotional-health protocols with which to respond to it. The shooting and its aftermath hung over us the rest of the school year; for the graduating students, they remained a set of emotional ellipses never quite resolved. Outside the school, the shooting came to be seen as a vector of ill tidings, definitive evidence of an institution in decline. But to the teachers who returned the following year, and the years after, the shooting was a tragedy that presaged the coming violence in American schools more than it spoke to any particular trouble at Jamaica. On the morning of the shooting, Susan Sutera, a gym teacher, was leading a combined class with Leo Greenfest. She continued to teach at the school until the year before it closed. “The shooting was a crazy, tragic day,” she told me. “But, terrible as it was, it didn’t really define Jamaica as a dangerous place. It was something that we recognized we had to move on from.”
As late as 1998, Jamaica held a respectable standing among the city’s large high schools. Though it was no longer the élite institution of earlier years, more than seventy-five per cent of the students graduated on time. But, by 2009, the graduation rate had tumbled to thirty-nine per cent. A confluence of events brought about the decline. In that period, talented students in northern Queens were given the option of attending two other high schools, both based on college campuses. In 1995, Townsend Harris, a magnet high school on Parsons Boulevard, moved onto the campus of Queens College. With roughly half the number of students as Jamaica, Townsend Harris had graduation rates that fluctuated between ninety-nine and a hundred per cent. During the eighties and nineties, Jamaica allowed students to enroll in courses at York College, a liberal-arts institution about a mile south of the high school. In 2002, York became the location of Queens High School for the Sciences, which granted admission based solely on standardized-test scores.
In 2004, in the name of greater choice, the Bloomberg administration revised the districting rules to allow students to attend any high school in the city. Given the realities of residential segregation, and of school quality as a determinant of real-estate values, there was something almost radical in that idea. It’s even possible to see the Bloomberg plan as a long-awaited response to Arthur Levitt’s claim, in 1954, that the problem in New York was not segregated schools but segregated neighborhoods. But it also meant that students whose parents—owing to language difficulties or work demands, immigration status or a generalized fear of bureaucratic authority—could not or would not pursue other educational options for their children found themselves relegated to increasingly unappealing schools.
The demographic balance that characterized Jamaica during my years became impossible to maintain. In 2011, the year that the city formally decided to close the school, fourteen per cent of the student population had disabilities and twenty-nine per cent had limited English proficiency. In the year before the school closed, it was ninety-nine per cent minority, a demographic that would not in itself be a concern were it not also the case that sixty-three per cent of the students qualified as poor.
James Eterno taught social studies at Jamaica from 1986 until it closed, and was also a representative of the United Federation of Teachers. A trim, voluble man in his fifties, he speaks in a rapid-fire cadence and with precisely the accent you’d expect of someone who’d spent all but two years of his life in Queens. Eterno agrees with Joel Klein’s description of the school’s enrollment during its last decade. “We still had plenty of smart kids, but we had many more higher-needs kids, English-language learners,” he told me. Concentrations of high-needs students place a strain on schools, and, Eterno said, “We didn’t get the support. We were not prepared to deal with the changing population.” The tacit belief that large schools were unreformable meant that Jamaica’s sliding numbers looked to some experts like predictable educational failure; to the faculty, those numbers looked like what happens when a school is asked to educate a challenging population without the necessary tools. (This is what George Vecsey was referring to when he wrote about “cooking the books.”) In the battle over the school’s future, many came to see those changing demographics not as happenstance but as a purposeful way of insuring that the creation of small schools in the building would be a fait accompli.
In a way, the protests over school closure are a bookend to the riots that broke out over busing four decades ago. Like “busing” and “integration,” the language of today’s reformers often serves as a euphemism for poverty mitigation, the implicit goal that American education has fitfully attempted to achieve since Brown v. Board of Education. Both busing and school closure recognize the educational obstacles that concentrated poverty creates. But busing recognized a combination of unjust history and policy as complicit in educational failure. In the ideology of school closure, though, the lines of responsibility—of blame, really—run inward. It’s not society that has failed, in this perspective. It’s the schools.
In 1954, Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s arguments about the pernicious effects of racism on black children implicated white society. Sixty years later, arguments that black students associated studiousness with “acting white” were seen not as evidence of the negative effects of internalized racism but as indicators of pathological self-defeat among African-Americans. The onus shifted, and public policy followed. The current language of educational reform emphasizes racial “achievement gaps” and “underperforming schools” but also tends to approach education as if history had never happened. Integration was a flawed strategy, but it recognized the ties between racial history and educational outcomes. Last year, a study by the Civil Rights Project at U.C.L.A. found that New York has the most segregated school system in the country, a reflection of the persistence of the housing patterns that Arthur Levitt talked about in 1954 but also of the failure of the integrationist ideal that was intended to address it. From that vantage point, the closure of Jamaica seemed to be less about the interment of a single school than about the impeachment of a particular brand of idealism regarding race and, by extension, American education.
Ninety years ago, the City of New York broke ground on a huge, beautiful building as a symbol of its commitment to public education. Last year, it closed the school that the building housed, purportedly for the same reasons. The people who gathered angrily outside Jamaica High School weren’t really protesting its closing; they were protesting the complex of history, policy, poverty, and race that had brought it about.
When I visited the old building on Gothic Drive, a few months ago, it was undergoing renovation and was obscured by scaffolding and tarps. It looked as if it were draped in a shroud. Then I drove a mile southeast to my old apartment building in Bricktown. The area had never been beautiful, but now it sagged in a way that it hadn’t done in the early eighties, when I lived there. Rows of boarded-up properties lined the street. Our building was now windowless and abandoned. For the first time in many years, I understood myself to be from Bricktown, even as the glare from a man across the street, as subtle as an eviction notice, told me that I no longer belonged there.
Education was central to the gamble at the heart of my parents’ migration north. My mother began her adulthood cleaning houses for whites in Alabama; she ended it as a holder of two degrees from New York University—a trajectory that said as much about the possibilities she found in Queens as it did about her own determination. Bricktown’s declining fortunes said everything about what is at stake in public education—about what happens when a place like Jamaica ceases to be great and then ceases to be at all. It was obvious that a good portion of the homes in Bricktown had been foreclosed. What was less apparent was that so had a key route—the one I took thirty years ago—to get out of there. ♦
