Searching for Common Ground

  Searching for Common Ground: Rick and Pedro Go to the Movies
Again

Pedro Noguera, the dean of the University of Southern California’s Rossier
School of Education, and I have a podcast (Common Ground: Conversations on
Schooling) in which we dig into our disagreements and seek to identify common
ground on some of the thorniest questions in education. I thought readers
might enjoy perusing snippets of those conversations every now and then.
Earlier this week, we explored just a few of our favorite education-themed
movies. Today, we cover some more movies and TV shows as well as some of the
common themes they depict. Here’s Part 2:

Rick: One recurring theme that strikes me in many education movies is the
“fish out of water” meme. “Dead Poets Society” is a terrific illustration.
Now, I’m a huge Robin Williams fan, but I’ve got deeply mixed feelings about
his character here. In this movie, he struck me as a leech. Here’s what I
mean: He went into a school where others had forged a culture marked by norms,
tradition, and respect. It was also, obviously, a repressed and stultifying
place. So it needed some work! But Williams didn’t tell the headmaster he
wanted to come in and make some changes. He didn’t say, “All right! Here’s how
we take care not to destroy what’s working while we change things up.” He
didn’t go to a school where they embraced his philosophy. Instead, he just
broke his employer’s rules, urged the kids to break the rules, and wound up
contributing to a student’s suicide. His general attitude seemed to be, “You
guys worry about the institution so that I have a platform to do my own
thing.” That’s a, umm, complex legacy, at best. And yet the movie treated him
as this heroic avatar. As much as I love Robin Williams and wanted to kind of
cheer for him, I had big problems with all of that. But I think I’m an outlier
there. I’m curious about your take.

Pedro: I liked the role and what he did. He was cultivating a passion for
learning among his students and pushing them to do more than simply focusing
on getting good grades. That moved me, because I think that developing a love
of learning is a goal that is missing in a lot of schools. This is true
whether we’re talking about elite private schools like the one depicted in the
film or regular public schools. We don’t spend enough time showing teachers
how to cultivate a love of learning among kids. Just think how different our
society would be if more Americans had a love of reading or didn’t develop a
fear of math. The character Williams portrayed subverted the rules to pursue
that objective. I think more teachers should be willing to do that. Within
reason, of course.

Rick: I’m with you on that. But I tend to think he should go to a school where
pursuing his kind of pedagogy doesn’t mean trying to dynamite the institution.
You know, another movie we haven’t touched on is “Lean on Me.” That’s the one
where Morgan Freeman plays high school Principal Joe Clark while waving the
bat. It strikes me that it’s one of those movies that gives the viewer an
adrenaline rush even though it’s such a profoundly stupid movie. I mean, the
hero’s journey is this relentless race to get enough tests over the minimum
passing level in the course of a 100 days in order to forestall a state
takeover. I just remember thinking, “Whose idea of educational heroism is
this?”

Pedro: I agree. The message you can take away from a movie like that is: If
you walk through the hall with a baseball bat, you can inspire everybody
through intimidation, turn the school around, and get high test scores. That
simplicity of it really always troubled me about the film despite the
feel-good message. Another film we talked about on our list is “Remember the
Titans.” It’s also based on a true story about T. C. Williams High School, a
school in Arlington, Va., and their first attempt at integrating the school
through the football team. This is a real case where what’s at stake really
does matter for these communities. I think what some of these films do,
particularly “Remember the Titans,” is they show us how school becomes a place
where the issues in society are being acted out. Even as conflicts about race
and integration were playing out through the football team, similar events
were occurring throughout the country. The film shows this team coming
together. The scene on the Gettysburg battlefield is particularly powerful.
It’s so sad that there is so little commitment and interest in coming together
across racial differences in this country right now. I think this film
provides a good example of how movies can serve to help the public work
through tough issues constructively.

Rick: Football frequently gets grief from folks who have problems with it, but
it’s such a powerful crucible for forming character. The movie version of
“Friday Night Lights” was fine, but the TV series starring Kyle Chandler just
did an extraordinary job of capturing that. The five seasons were up and down,
but it also offered a terrific window into the relationships, frustrations, and
sacrifices that are at the heart of any educational endeavor—on the field or in
a classroom. And Chandler’s Coach Taylor ranks right up there with the most
inspiring educators I’ve ever seen on screen.

Pedro: I liked “Friday Night Lights.” Have you seen “Abbott Elementary” yet?
It’s a comedy series set in Philadelphia. At first, I was a little troubled by
it because it seems to be making a comedy out of kids who are disadvantaged
and receiving a really subpar education. It’s an under resourced school in a
poor neighborhood. But, I was struck by the fact that my 10-year-old daughter
loved it, so we stuck with the series. After a while, I started really liking
the show for two reasons. First of all, it’s funny as hell. Second of all, it
does expose the inequities in education in a really profound way. I’ve come to
appreciate the show as a way of illuminating complex issues.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. To hear the rest of
the conversation, check out Episode 12 of Rick and Pedro’s Common Ground
Podcast, “ Rick and Pedro Go to the Movies.”

From A Nation at Risk to CRT. How’d We Get Here?

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Forty years ago, A Nation at Risk sounded a grave warning about the threat
of educational mediocrity and gave rise to a bipartisan school reform
movement focused on academic achievement, educational choice, and
accountability. Today, that coalition has unraveled and given way to a
series of heated culture clashes over school masking, critical race theory,
gender identity, and parental rights.

What happened?

Over at National Affairs, Checker Finn and I try to sort it out in “The End
of School Reform?” (Be forewarned, it’s on the long side.) In the essay, we
argue that the unraveling of the reform coalition and the current hot-button
fights over CRT and parental rights can best be understood as a product of
long-standing tensions.

In 1983, A Nation at Risk declared the country to be imperiled by a “rising
tide of mediocrity” produced by low standards, poor teaching, and lousy
schools. It observed that if a hostile nation “had attempted to impose on
America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might
well have viewed it as an act of war.”

In the wake of that dire warning, a school reform coalition took shape, one
that would dominate education before ultimately coming apart in the face of
polarization and populist backlash. That coalition hit its stride in the
early 1990s because leaders on both the left and the right had political and
cultural incentives to embrace a vision of bipartisan reform.

On the left, Democrats won the White House in 1992 by eschewing the old
tax-and-spend liberalism in favor of a new compact with those who “worked
hard and played by the rules.” As liberals had spent much of the 1980s
decrying American callousness, Bill Clinton’s campaign depicted America as a
good and fair place. (He was the man “who still believed in a place called
Hope.”) For Clinton Democrats, education was a way to expand opportunity
without getting embroiled in grand societal critiques.

On the right, Republicans had spent most of the Reagan years winning
elections by riding critiques of family fragmentation, “welfare queens,” and
out-of-wedlock births. In the post-Reagan years, however, the GOP began
seeking ways to promote opportunity and personal responsibility, without
centralizing everything in Washington. School reform was well-suited for
this project.

Of course, making bipartisanship work required concessions from both sides.
Democratic reformers tacitly agreed to set aside grand spending and
social-engineering plans, to challenge teachers’ unions, and to cease
dismissing their conservative partners as heartless or racist. Meanwhile,
Republican reformers stopped talking about parental responsibility, dropped
the Reagan-era focus on values and school prayer, and agreed to consider a
more ambitious federal role in education.

This tacit agreement held through much of the Clinton-Bush-Obama era,
surviving the ferocious partisan fights that marked Clinton’s impeachment,
the 2000 election, the invasion of Iraq, and the Affordable Care Act. As
Checker and I recall, during this period, “reform developed its own
narratives, its own heroes, and even its own Hollywood arm, as movies like
Waiting for Superman and The Lottery gained national prominence. Led by the
East Coast trifecta of Jeb Bush, Joel Klein, and Michelle Rhee, with the
support of West Coast philanthropists like Bill Gates and Eli Broad, the
forces of reform seemed ascendant throughout the Bush and early Obama
years.”

Yet, just when reform seemed to be flying high, it was losing its footing.
While reformers embraced the Common Core and teacher evaluations in the
early Obama years with a sense that they were only gaining strength, the
subsequent pushback would ultimately mark the beginning of the reform
coalition’s end.

The reform coalition had succeeded by making school reform a “policy”
debate, largely insulating education from cultural tides. Reformers insisted
that they were simply committed to “leaving no child behind” (making their
opponents, obviously, “anti-child”). So long as this mantra was repeated by
a chorus of influential business leaders, civil rights groups, governors,
foundations, and advocates, critics could be dismissed as cranks.

This approach was effective but inherently unstable. It left no room to
compromise with critics or even acknowledge that critics might have valid
concerns. The relentless focus on closing achievement gaps meant that reform
didn’t have much to do with many middle-class or affluent parents. And as
reforms grew increasingly high-handed, many Americans recoiled from what
they saw as the handiwork of elite foundations and Washington bureaucrats.

All the while, the larger nation was becoming more polarized and
distrustful. In the 1990s, politicians saw great benefit in playing to the
center. In the early 2010s, however, politicians saw increasing rewards for
playing to the base and heightened risk in being seen as catering to the
middle. Where the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama had used education to court the
middle, the education agendas of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Joe
Biden could’ve doubled as the wish lists of party activists.

As the nation’s discourse became consumed by our culture wars, it became
harder to focus on policy rather than culture. And, as the lion’s share of
education advocates and foundations opted (or felt obliged) to embrace
progressive causes, such as “anti-racist” education and gender fluidity,
they were eventually answered by mobilization on the hard right against CRT
and for an expanding notion of parental rights.

In this way, the old reform coalition expired, giving rise to an education
landscape dominated by woke teacher trainers, “anti-racist” foundations, and
angry right-wing activists—all consumed by contempt for the other side and
spoiling for a fight.

Checker and I have much more to say on all this, of course, on how it
happened, why it happened, and what it may mean. So, if you’re curious, give
it a look.