The New Yorker Analyzes the End of Jamaica High

8/24/2015

Last Graduation, 2014. Courtesy of: iceuftblog.blotspot.com

The current edition of the New Yorker contains a terrific article by Jelani Cobb about the fate of our mutual alma mater, Jamaica High School in Queens.

(Brian Savin notes the article is available on the New Yorker site, so I am showing the link here. Subscribe anyway.)

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/class-notes-annals-of-education-jelani-cobb

Cobb has been working on the article since he sat in my family kitchen for a few hours on a snowy day in February – or perhaps I should say, since his mom made sure he attended Jamaica because of a teacher she respected.

That teacher was Herb Sollinger, from a family I have known for many decades -- the bonds to that beautiful building on a hill, bonds that New York City, under Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein, went out of its way to atomize.

The building still stands – built to last forever – and four small schools take the place of the entity known as Jamaica High School. I hope they are doing well -- and I visited a couple of smaller schools in Queens last year that seemed to be excellent.

Cobb does a wonderful job detailing the education JHS gave to generations. He also fairly represents the problems, the challenges, the occasional violence, in the new era.

But I was in Jamaica High quite a lot in its last generation, as the guest of dedicated teachers and students who reminded me of my era.

I visited Josh Cohen’s honors English class, where a young African-American woman quizzed me about freedom-of-information laws. (I tensed up because she knew more about it than I did.) She was a bright light and now works for a union in the city.)

Another time I visited Cohen’s class, and a young man with an Islamic name was reading his term paper on “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller.

The city tried to scare off students, distributing flyers about violence in the area. Two young women in chadors told me how their parents had transferred them to another old school, but the girls soon told their parents they were getting a better education at Jamaica, and transferred back.

Education was happening. Some young people were going on to college.

I got to know teachers like Sue Sutera, who held the place together as a teacher, as a coach, as a mensch. When Jamaica High was blown up, there was no institutional memory; she had to scramble to find a job elsewhere. I suspect union-busting as a motivation, also.

I’ve written about Jamaica on this web site – just click on the tab for Jamaica High.

The subject could not have found a better and fairer journalist than Jelani Cobb. I am a huge fan from watching him on MSNBC and reading him in the New Yorker, as he wrote about Ferguson and Charleston – and now our own high school.

I originally did not include the free link out of respect to Cobb and David Remnick, the editor, who has installed new energy and gravitas to a grand institution. I wish New York’s leaders had found the courage and wisdom to do the same for Jamaica High.

Jamaica had a grand tradition of a cardboard boat race. Courtesy of the Queens Courier.

Janet Vecsey

8/24/2015 04:11:58 am

Very sad indeed. Where are all the students in that area going? I don't get it. I know how involved you have been, and I'm sure it's difficult to see the end of an era.

George Vecsey

8/24/2015 04:27:28 am

Jane, thanks for noticing. These days in NYC, kids have to be booking agents for themselves. Catchment areas don';t mean anything. Immigrant families have to sort out all these little boutique schools -- do they take a bus for 30 minutes to the school for Restaurant Trades (I made it up) or two buses for 40 minutes to the school for Potential Plumbers. Jamaica, you went, and you found something or did not. But that was where you went. Mom sent me off to Jamaica...that was our big thing in common. Love, G

Josh Rubin

8/25/2015 05:11:25 am

Booking agents, indeed. The options (and pitfalls) of the current processes for students and high schools to find each other are dizzying and require more savvy than should be reasonably expected. Our daughter goes to a selective HS (but not one that uses the specialized exam) and has some friends from lower-income immigrant backgrounds and it is impressive how those kids found her school and knew to apply.

On one hand, the many higher end high schools, specialized or general, create opportunities for kids who would not otherwise have had good, functional cachment area high schools like Jamaica to attend. This also helps reduce segregation because so many of the City's neighborhoods are racially, culturally and economically segregated. On the other hand, this creates a brain drain from would-be neighborhood schools, making it harder to sustain the neighborhood high schools, and in a panic the City creates more boutiques, some of which work and some of which do not. Bottom line is that a good school needs not only a good principal and good teachers, but a critical mass of students who come in prepared to learn. The City does a good job now creating HS opportunities for, say, the top third of students, but not such a good job creating a good learning environment for the middle let alone finding good ways to help the poorer students catch up and be prepared for the next step.

Brian Savin

8/24/2015 01:09:17 pm

I will take the liberty of including it because in an unusual move the New Yorker seems to have made it publicly accessible, as makes sense given its broad public interest nature. Interesting, and complicated.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/class-notes-annals-of-education-jelani-cobb

John

9/1/2015 04:22:24 pm

I agree that the essay is complicated. Have been tempted to ask the author to simplify his summary, as there seems to be a contridiction or two in it. Very thought provoking, which is perhaps, the highest complement.

Brian Savin

8/24/2015 01:27:56 pm

By the way, the author's Principal at Jamaica High, was also my son's in another place and time. She was first rate. See, e.g., http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/reading-writing-racism-greenwich-bias-history-article-1.690083

Alan Rubin link

8/24/2015 03:16:57 pm

Another update on the saga of Jamaica High School which should also be of interest to non-alumni.

All the educators, researchers, politicians, etc. who are continually wringing their hands about what is needed for our children's education should look no farther than Jamaica High School at its best.

Andrew Sollinger

8/29/2015 02:12:12 am

George, Thanks for connecting us to Jelani, who did Jamaica proud. His anecdote about my dad - "a brilliant, quirky figure...with an encyclopedic knowledge of world affairs" was spot on. He wore red socks every day so students would want to come to his class - not just because it made him quirky...they wanted to see if he was going to wear the socks again!

Long before he taught at Jamaica, Herb was a student there in the mid 1940s, so he became a real life "Gabe Kotter," sans Sweathogs. My mom and most of my aunts, uncle and parents' friends (whose kids are now my friends), went to JHS, too. And one of my sons is Jesse Harry Sollinger: he's got great initials!

I drove my boys and my nephew past Jamaica earlier this year on our way to a basketball game at St Johns. They had never seen anything like it. "That was a high school?," my 13 yr old asked. "It looks more like a college."

"That's exactly what it was like", I answered.

George Vecsey

9/2/2015 01:03:21 am

Andrew, a belated thank you for your note. Your dad is a legend to Jelani Cobb and thousands of others. I have driven our kids mad over the years, purposely driving past the school just to show them. Of course, we gravitated to a town where the high school is on the hill. But nothing is as majestic as JHS. I had teachers who had studied Greek and Latin in Depression-era NYC. And brilliant classmates. It was indeed like college. GV

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

The New Yorker Analyzes the End of Jamaica High

Categories

Buy the Book