In one particularly gripping scene of HBO's new documentary, Hard Times at Douglass High: A No Child Left Behind Report Card, Principal Grant tells her faculty, "If only 3 out of your 25 students can pass the test, we simply can't give you a proficient rating."
When the teachers respond alternately with glares, eye-rolling, and emphatic rebuttals, the principal holds her ground. "You've got 22 out of 25 students failing. That does not equal proficiency for a teacher."
On the face of it, Grant's point is hard to argue. A 12% pass rate is awful. Something is wrong. But is it substandard teaching? Unmotivated students? Meddling bureaucrats? A poisonous ghetto-culture environment? Absent parents? Out-of-touch federal legislation? Learned helplessness?
Academy Award-winning filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond are too smart to offer up any magic bullets. Their fascinating new feature-length documentary, premiering Monday, June 23 at 9 p.m. on HBO, puts viewers inside West Baltimore's Frederick Douglass High School for a full school year. Hard Times at Douglass High delivers urgent subject matter with a punch; the medium of film brings a power to this story that no article or essay quite can.
Douglass High has history; it was one of the first all-black high schools in America and boasts Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall as an alumnus. At the time of filming (the 2004-2005 school year), still-segregated Douglass held 1,100 students. Of those 1,100, five hundred are ninth-graders and only two hundred graduated twelfth grade. Nearly a third of those two hundred graduates required special last-minute academic considerations to be allowed to receive their diplomas.
The dropout figures are staggering, brought to vivid life by the Raymonds' honing in on several students as they struggle through the year. Seventeen-year-old Audie is in ninth-grade. He baffles teachers and administrators by coming to school, then refusing to enter a classroom. Occasionally he cracks a witty comment when one of the school's various disciplinarians attempts to collect him from his hallway roost. Audie's brain is sharp, but he has clearly decided that school has nothing to offer him. When teachers appeal to him, he shuts down. His future is terrifyingly bleak.
Early in the film, we meet Mr. McDermott, an impassioned ninth-grade English teacher in his third year at Douglass. His lessons resemble ones I've seen work well in schools in the Bronx. However, he receives blank stares from what he describes as the most challenging, unresponsive class he's ever had. His self-described finest moment was when he had five parents (out of twenty-five) visit him on Back to School Night. He's gone by second semester.
It's not all failure and dejection. Hard Times at Douglass High introduces us to Shanae, a tough-as-nails rapper (who contributes the driving song that plays under the opening titles) who is determined to succeed. We meet Jordan, a champion debater and first-class charmer, who speaks candidly about growing up without a father. We watch the defending state champion basketball play their biggest game of the season. We see the award-winning Cab Calloway (an alumnus) music program in action. And we see a lot of the loving, West Baltimore-born-and-bred principal, Isabelle Grant.
Ms. Grant, in her fourth year leading Douglass, is working her heart out just to get kids to show up (getting them in the door on time is an entirely different battle), let alone graduate and thrive. Only one student in the school had scored about 1000 on the SAT the previous year.
The challenges are immense. The students are struggling. The teachers are exhausted. The administration is stretched thin. The school is under-resourced. Many students are literally asleep with blank test packets in front of them on the day of the all-important High School Assessment exam.
Coming back to Ms. Grant's exhortation at the faculty meeting, is it the teachers' failure to teach proficiently that explains Douglass' abysmal test scores? Whatever the reason, at the year's end, the state fired Ms. Grant and her administration, took over the school, and installed metal detectors.
See the movie Monday at 9 p.m. on HBO.
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Our children deserve better. And until we, as a people and as a country, decide to make it better, to demand better, and work for better, we will not have better. We will continue to have what is now euphamistically called "education."
Are you angry yet? No? Well, think about this. There are places in America, AMERICA, where children go to school everyday and have written wills and have purchased insurance. Why? Because of the situations they face each day-------in school!
Appalled yet? I was when I witnessed it in one of the schools where I provided reading workshops. One of the girls showed me her will and her insurance and said that all of her friends have the same thing. I had to go into the bathroom (oooops, sorry the place where there were supposed to be toilets, facebowls, toilet paper and paper towels. Not to mention hot and cold running water and mirrors on the wall. None of which were available that day!) and cried. I cried for all the lost lives and futures of these children. Children who only want to be safe and learn. And who deserve no less than that!
I've never been more frightened in my life especially at a school. Just walking up to the front door felt like any second the guns and knives would come out. They did the second day in a race fight between latinos and blacks.
Some people can try to just show the problem and then walk away after being there for so long and pretend they don't know what could be changed.
From what I saw, nothing is going to work unless the parents give a damn. Teachers can only do so much but if they don't have the support of the parents nothing will change.
Most parents actually encourage a lot of students to make sure teacher don't give them no guff and if they do, they gonna call a attorney and sue that school for all it's worth.
Then there is the "neigborhood" culture that tells the black kids that getting an education is just more Whitey Tryin' to tell ya what to do. And to resist. I saw more of that than anything.
Everytime one of these blowhards spouts off about "typical liberal thinking - let's just throw money at the problem - chuckle" then you reply with, "so where do you send your kids to school?" If it isn't the local school then tell them that throwing money at the problem seems to be the solution they have chosen for THEIR kids.
Yes. Plus a host of other things not mentioned in that set of questions - overuse of drugs, a culture of available welfare, plain old laziness, insufficient funding, insufficient everyday role models, a culture of hopelessness, etc., etc.
Yeah, metal detectors oughta do the trick. And they're MUCH cheaper than hiring enough teachers to have a student-teacher ratio of 1 to 5, something necessary for excellence in "one-on-one"-style education, which is what those kids need.
But our government instead spends billions a day in Iraq.
What a country we could have...
Such a shame that the children are the ones that are suffering.
Congrats to the Raymond's for at least trying to share this bleak story with the country.
Truth is that the US needs to dump all of the Educational Testing Services (corporate-controlled testing - for profit) and get rid of the SAT, the GRE, and all such tests that are expensive and absurd as they are not really predictors of students' capabilities at all. When will our country learn how to 'do' sound educational practices. Dump the standardized tests and totally overhaul the education system from K-12 and higher education as well. Many of our universities have insane prerequisites and some of the courses and majors were established half a century earlier and have not been revised for decades. Yes, we can do better.