Hard Times at Douglass High
About the short review that Coby kindly mentions: I wrote it for a lay audience, one not tuned in to every shift in k-12 minutiae, and so I didn’t dive into the issues as much as perhaps I could have. I also didn’t write about the positive things going on at Douglass High circa 2004 (the debate program, the choir); alas, word count restrictions made it so, and it was more important to note how the positives were undermined by the negatives. The documentary shows a staff that seems to care about its students and is generally well-intentioned. It doesn’t seem so very different, in fact, from staffs one might encounter at suburban public high schools. But whereas suburban schools may be able to get away with employing people who are kind but in many ways incapable, urban schools such as Douglass cannot. After watching Hard Times at Douglass High, one would be hard-pressed to argue against more mechanisms—results-based mechanisms—for holding teachers and administrators accountable.
Update: Here’s the New York Times review.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
June 24th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Mr. Julian:
While I agree with much of your global criticism in the NRO article, I find your view of the teachers and staff distressingly shortsighted. All the teacher training and certification in the world cannot fully prepare you for what you’re walking into each day at a school like Douglass. It’s a constant give and take of expectations, discipline, and academic rigor. If you push too hard, the kids drop out. If you don’t push enough, they run wild. Factor in the empty mandates from politicians that every child must succeed, add to it the diminished authority of the classroom teacher, and multiply it all by the impotent curricula created by educrats who are disconnected from the realities of classroom implementation, and you’ve got a formula for failure.
You think I wasn’t pining to make literary allusions during my lesson they profiled in the documentary, to elevate it above the concrete here and now that these kids are mired in? I was following curriculum, sir. Curriculum that I, as a certified teacher, was mandated to work from by the state of Maryland. Curriculum passed down from on high by the same pedantic wonks who feel they have the answers to what ails public education, but don’t have the constitution take their philosophies to the front lines to apply in person.