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If you haven’t read the New York Times recent A Failing School? Not to These Students, you really should. It discusses some issues around public schooling that have been, in my opinion, neglected in mainstream media debates over education.

The article begins by pointing out that “[e]veryone knows Jamaica High is a bad school,” receiving D’s on its report card from the city and being labeled persistently dangerous by the state. It is scheduled to close in three years, when the last of its current students graduate.

But the article goes on to celebrate the accomplishments of students at the school, including valedictorian Afsan Quayyum, who has been accepted into an engineering program that will allow him to earn two degrees in the next five years; salutatorian Doreen Mohammed, who has a full scholarship to Columbia; Kevin Gonzalez, who earned a 5 on the AP US History exam; and other students who are heading to top-tier colleges across the country.

The article also takes issue with the media’s portrayal of Jamaica’s representative to the teachers’ union, James Eterno, as someone who cares more about preserving jobs than children. It paints a picture of Mr. Eterno as a dedicated educator, staying late to tutor students and going above and beyond in helping them apply to colleges.

These two narratives – that there are successful students at struggling schools and union leaders who care deeply about students – are often glossed over in the desire for black and white in education debates. But they each make up an important part of the daily happenings at public schools across the country, and they deserve at least as much recognition as their “negative” counterparts (struggling students and union leaders with adult interests in mind) get in the media. So I was pleased to see one of the nation’s leading newspapers take care to spread the word about them.

But there was another narrative in the piece that concerned me greatly. To quote:

The mayor and his schools chancellors have sent letters encouraging students to enroll elsewhere, and the shrinking of the student body has led to a decline in financing, squeezing the juice out of Jamaica High.

There was no money for lab lessons in advanced biology, which upset Doreen Mohammed and Tonmoy Kabiraj, who hope to be doctors. Courtney Perkins’s advanced math class did not have graphing calculators until eight months into the school year. The last music teacher was sent to another school, which really frustrated Mills Duodu, who plays violin, trumpet, drums and piano. 

To be sure, Jamaica seems to be struggling – only about 50% of students graduate. And while the article doesn’t say so, I would assume that most who do graduate don’t go on to strong colleges.

But I was disheartened to hear that the response to the challenge of Jamaica was not to help those at the school do more. It wasn’t to provide additional support to ensure that students and staff at the school had the resources they needed to succeed. Instead, it seemed to be to give up. To spread the message that there is no hope here. To permit a struggling school to operate under conditions that further disadvantaged the students who for whatever reason did not heed the call to jump ship.

Of course, I am a bystander. I don’t know what strategies have been used to attempt to improve the school over the past few years. Yet more broadly, to me it appears that this general theme of defeat in the face of these challenges – the sense that we can just give up on a school and therefore the students in it, at least for a period of time while the school transitions to closure or charter management or a new principal and staff – is nationwide, though rarely articulated.

The students featured here overcame not only the challenges of attending a struggling school, but of attending a struggling school that seemed to be considered hopeless. And that was a challenge they should not have had to face.