"School" and "Only a Teacher" - Reviews - Television Program Review

Radical Teacher, Winter, 2002 by Kate Rousmaniere

"School" tells a narrative of political history, and in so doing, it presents a specific message about American education, even as it claims to present a neutral truth. One way in which this illusion of objectivity happens is that each hour-long episode is essentially a self-contained package. While this makes the film a useful one for educators who can use chunks of the film in class, it also continues the unfortunate effects of a poor textbook: historical events are not connected to one another. Indeed, all of Episode 4 exists as if it were made in a vacuum from the ideas presented m earlier episodes, and this leads to the kind of analysis that cripples most current debates about educational reform. Most notably, a recurring theme of the entire series is that American education has become more equitable as the result of government initiative or collective democratic organization. The film argues that it was such democratic struggles, and not competitive private interests, that furthered both excellence and equity in American public schools. But in Episode 4, the filmmakers drop this theme and try to present free market school reforms as simply an honest debate between people with different opinions. How much more provocative the filmmakers would have been had they turned back to history and asked what Horace Mann or the Chicano student organizers at Crystal City High School would have thought about school vouchers--a concept which goes against all principles of common schooling for all children. How interesting it would have been to apply the originating motives for religious freedom in early America to current debates about the use of vouchers for religious schools. Instead, the filmmakers present these contemporary debates as if they were irrelevant to the historical context of American public schooling. The filmmakers thus abandon the history project that they set out to do: history has apparently taught us nothing, except that Thomas Jefferson thought one way and Ronald Reagan thought another. This is histo ry at its most textbook-like: a litany of events following the time-line, with little connection between each period, and little acknowledgement of the stories and perspectives that were excluded.

Nonetheless, other parts of the film work much more successfully as discrete historical case studies. In episode 1, for example, we learn about an otherwise obscure African American family in early 19th century Boston who successfully sued the city to stop racially segregating public schools. The Roberts case led to the first law abolishing racial segregation in the nation. In a dramatic segment on the effects of IQ testing on Mexican American students, we hear two brothers recall their experiences at school in Los Angeles in the late 1930s. When the elder brother enlisted in World War II, he observed the way that poorly educated soldiers were more likely to be sent to the battlefront. He returned home to pressure the school counselor to move his younger brother out of the vocational track (to which most Mexican American students were automatically relegated) into the college preparatory track. This happened, and the younger brother grew up to earn a Ph.D. in history at Harvard, a position on the Los Angeles board of education where he fought to ban IQ testing, and in 1979, was appointed as United States Ambassador to Mexico. This is a powerful story about how testing has historically limited the possibilities of students of color, except for those who stood up to fight. In a similar story about Title IX, we learn about the high school student who in 1974 sued to have a girls' basketball team at her school. She won, and also won one of the first college athletic scholarships for women, and later went on to success as an economics professor, thereby leaving the viewer with the inspiring message that citizens can challenge inequities in schools--either as an individual or through the courts--and that change can happen. What makes these sections so appealing is that they draw on the lives and experiences of actual people, and they describe not educational prescriptions but actual change.