Blog Post #3
Welcome to the third installment of Max’s Blog on Shame of the Nation. In this week’s chapters, Jonathan Kozol goes deep into the middle and high schools and shows how the problems for students in inner cities get worse as the students progress through the system. He talks about the fights, dilapidated infrastructure, and lunchtime, which is referred to by some interviewed in the book as “Lunchroom Hell.” He presents all of that against the background of intense discipline and looming state tests.
In my house, my parents sometimes pull up a movie from the 1980s or1990s that they think that my brother and I would like (e.g., Hoosiers, Dead Poet’s Society, Breakfast Club). Kozol’s chapter about life in an inner-city high school made me think of one of these movies, Lean On Me. But, as I will explain, it made me think of the movie in a different light than when I first watched it.
Lean On Me takes place in Patterson, New Jersey at East Side High, a once-great school that had fallen into the type of disrepair that Kozol describes in his book. The school was filled with wild students, dilapidated rooms, collapsing ceilings, frames without doors, and walls covered in graffiti. With nobody to take the job as principal at East Side, the school enlisted its former teacher, Joe Clark, played by Morgan Freeman, to turn the school around before the New Jersey Minimum Basic Skills Test. To turn the school around, Clark instilled a culture of fear and discipline as he walked around with his trademark bullhorn and baseball bat, yelling at teachers and students if they dared not follow his every command. He also has painted all over the school inspirational slogans about passing the test that are similar to some of the signs Kozol saw during his school tours.
At the end of the movie, the students pass the state test and Clark is presented as a hero for having turned the school around. The movie is supposed to make you think that it was a happy ending because the students passed. And when I saw the movie that is exactly how I felt. However, when I thought of the movie again through the lens of Kozl’s book, it starts to look very different.
One of Kozol’s major problems with schooling is the focus on standardized tests. In Lean On Me, there was no suggestion that the tests were a bad idea. The whole movie was about how Clark would do whatever he could so that the students would pass. The obsession with testing that Kozol harshly criticizes was glorified in the movie. The movie also glorified Clark’s use of discipline and slogans, which Kozol identifies as a technique used by inner-city schools to avoid teaching students how to think and enjoy learning. In short, Lean on Me glorified almost everything that Kozol says is wrong with the schools that he visits. Kozol’s message is that we have to change the way we teach to help students out of the cycle of rote learning for a test. But the movie reinforces exactly that type of thinking.
Maybe even worse, in retrospect, the movie seems racist. It suggests that all a terrible school needs is a leader wielding a baseball bat and a bullhorn and everything will work out well. The students indeed passed the test, but what did Clark do to attack the real problems of racism that led the school to be in such terrible shape? Nothing. Clark never even questioned how the school got to the shape that it was and chastised anyone who did. Thus, the movie makes a hero of the man who said that it could all be fixed with some extra discipline and a focus on testing. The movie’s message completely ignores the systemic problems that caused the school to be so terrible in the first place. When shown to a mostly white audience, it could be seen as sending the message that more discipline toward minority students is all that is necessary to get a school on track. That is the racist attitude that I think Kozol is attacking in his book when criticizes white school districts for blocking any kind of real move toward integration.
Thus, Lean On Me, while a feel-good movie in the moment, sends the wrong message. It suggests that, with enough discipline, a seemingly lost group of minority students can pass a standardized test. But, as Kozol makes clear, that means very little if (as I think was true at East Side) there is nothing for these students on the other side of the test.
Works Cited
Kozol, Jonathan. The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Three Rivers Press, 2005.
Avildsen, John G. Lean on Me. Warner Bros., 1989.
It's fascinating (not in a good way) to me to see what it's like on the inside of a city school. I am not a fan of cities, and I've definitely never experienced anything like a kid living in a city would. It seems awful, and to me growing up in a small town, near impossible to deal with. While some city schools feed from rich neighborhoods, the ones your book focus on are the ones taking from the poorest parts of the city where people are already in bad situations. Schools like this don't help these kids get the things that they need that they weren't born with. It's clearly a problem that needs to be fixed.
ReplyDeleteA great comparison between the two texts, and a great example of how the same text can change meanings over time. Does the book or movie explore the significance of testing, and how, usually, it is so important for the funding of the schools?
ReplyDeleteWhen you compare the description of the high schools to what you've experienced at Hopkinton, what do you notice?
In the movie, they portray it as if the state was going to come in and take the school over if the kids did not pass. The book makes it seems as if the teachers and the school have a lot riding on the test including whether the teachers keep their jobs or get bonuses which seems nuts to me. Some classes are going to need more help than others so that is putting way too much emphasis on a test score.
ReplyDeleteHopkinton is different in that we do not have the major discipline problems described in the movie or book and I would not say that our educational approach is defined by test preparation for the most part. But I would say that if you look around our school you do see dilapidated facilities. Just like some of these inner city schools, we too are short on a cash and therefore have had to defer keeping up our facilities.