Immigrant Dream and/or Educational Delusion?

Abstract

In 1929, the same year as the stock market crash in New York City, Last Choice High School’s imposing structure, one city block long and wide and five stories high, was completed. Since I started working there in 1995 and until the time of this writing, it was in disrepair, with scaffolding permanently surrounding the building. It was an outdated behemoth, well-known in the neighborhood where everyone had an opinion about it. Older, white people talked about its heyday and how wonderful it was “back in the day.” Younger, Puerto Ricans and Dominican Americans talked about their friends and relatives who went there and hated it. Some talked about the friendships they’ve maintained for years. They told stories about violence, unfairness, gangs, cutting classes, and low graduation rates. It was, to most people, including those in the present study, a place to avoid attending. However, academic failure did not always define LCHS; initially German and Irish students were the dominant ethnic groups and throughout the 1930s and 1940s Jewish as well as Eastern and Southern European immigrants also graduated from the school and eventually moved out of the neighborhood. By the 1970s, the students were African American, Chinese American, Bengali, and Latino and for a short period of time Vietnamese.