National Debt and Public Education in Jamaica: "Glocal" Challenges and Responses

This dissertation is a transnational case study, designed to capture how structural adjustment and austerity have affected public primary schooling in Jamaica, and the response(s) of alumni associations in the Torontonian-Jamaican Diaspora to this phenomenon. Using ethnography, auto-ethnography and semi-structured interviewing qualitative methodologies, data were collected in a rural primary school in Hanover, Jamaica in order to ascertain the everyday experience narrative of structural adjustment. Subsequently, semi-structured interviews were conducted in the Greater Toronto Area in order to determine how and why members of the schools alumni association support the school through group educational remittances. Framed by an anti-colonial discursive framework, this study explicates the transnational-diasporic nature of public schooling and draws attention to the Government of Jamaicas inability to provide an adequate and appropriate public school program, as well as its controversial tendency to claw back funding from schools who have active alumni associations abroad. This dissertation also provides a window into the efficacy/inefficacy of non-financial educational remittances which, although well-intended, are, sometimes, more harmful than helpful to their recipients. In contrast to this, the everyday tenacious hope that exists at the poorly resourced primary school that was selected for this study is illuminated.