No More Fast Times At Ridgemont High

Washington Monthly, Jan, 2001 by Michael Schaffer

What if Molly Ringwald had gone to a charter school?

JOHN HUGHES TAUGHT ME HOW TO BE American. The king of the 1980s teen flick, Hughes made millions, and helped establish a genre, with sweet comedies of adolescent manners like Sixteen Candles and The Break, st Club, set in and around the high schools of Chicago's northern suburbs. The movie plots ran like Archie Andrews comics, updated--though not very much--for the MTV generation.

Like most of Hughes' audience, of course, I didn't live by Lake Michigan. Unlike most of them, I lived in Bangladesh, where my parents had been assigned by the foreign service--and where, with the help of an endless supply of pirated videotapes, I tried desperately to keep up with the American pop culture my folks' career had so viciously denied me. I knew, sort of, that Archie's Riverdale High was absurd. But Hughes' suburbia I consumed uncritically. When your only friends are the equally bewildered offspring of Danish, Dutch, or Korean globetrotters, you take what certainty you can get.

And so thanks to Hughes and his colleagues, I knew exactly what to expect when I moved home at age 14. High school would be big and crucial; my standing in its hierarchy of jocks and brains and losers would determine my happiness. Like any true, red-blooded American kid, I knew I would care desperately about the football game, the dance afterwards, and the big, drunken party to follow. Hey--I'd watched the instructional video.

My parents, as it turned out, had other ideas. They sent me to a small private school and a life devoid of the events that provided the climactic moments of the high school movies that once served as my cultural umbilical cord. I'm sure I put it somewhat more impolitely at the time, but I felt, again, somehow disconnected from the common terrain of my country. And like a good 14-year old, all I wanted was to be as normal a part of that terrain as possible. Just as I'd felt that moving to South Asia wasn't normal, I knew that not having cheerleaders and homecoming games wasn't normal, either.

Today, I might not be so sure. Like everything from TV to fruit juice, schools in America have undergone a revolution in the '90s, morphing from a world of few choices to a veritable rainbow of individual options. We have hundreds of satellite channels and almost as many variations--pulp-free, calcium-rich, mango-spritzed--of orange juice. And the education marketplace doesn't seem to be far behind. Magnet schools lure the best and brightest (or, sometimes, the worst and most hardened) to one central location. Vouchers, the controversial program to allow public-school dollars to pay students' private-school tuitions, have gotten the most attention. But the biggest practical impact may yet come from the charter school movement, which creates specially focused new public schools that are independent of the public school system's bureaucracy and regulation.

Nationally, charter schools operate in 34 different states, according to the nonprofit Center for Educational Reform. Half a million students attend charters, a number that's growing rapidly. Last May, President Clinton declared the first ever National Charter Schools Week. A second one is already scheduled for this coming spring, to be declared by President Bush.

In the District of Columbia, meanwhile, the movement is perhaps at its strongest. Ten percent of the city's 70,000 public school students now attend charters such as the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, the Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom School, and the Techwofid Public Charter School. With public oversight hampered by a convoluted school-governance system, it's actually quite easy to get a charter--and the tax money that comes with it. Nearly everyone on either side of the debate agrees that D.C.'s charter population will grow even bigger in coming years.

Predictably, the charter experiment has spurred considerable speculation among education experts. Proponents say it'll free teachers from bureaucratic red tape. Opponents say it'll wreck teachers' standard of living while channeling tax dollars to educational hucksters. What no one has talked about, though, is the movement's cultural impact. From inner cities to suburban tract districts, the big general-interest high school has for decades been a common piece of the American educational landscape, and more importantly, of the adolescence of most Americans. For all the differences between Hughes' Highland Park, Illinois and most other places, his movies appealed to wide audiences because they took place in an arena whose rituals and stock characters most viewers could relate to.

But that's not an arena a theater audience could very well understand if, say, half of them had attended small schools dedicated to science, foreign languages, or even--this one already exists--"the hospitality industry" Who'd make sense of the hulking football teams (at a school of just 300 kids, even regular-sized people could play), the lunch-table segregation by activity group (the band dorks would all be at the special music school anyway), and even the hallways so long that the teachers don't notice when the greaser stuffs the nerd into a locker?