Blog: Lessons in Education From ‘The Wire’

I’m going to take the long way around to get to the subject of Education in Eagle Rock and the U.S. today. I’ll start off by telling you about one of the great television shows of all time—a show that was, is, up there with the great novels in the breadth and reach of its subject. The show is called The Wire, and I speak in the present tense because it lives on in DVDs. I got my copies of all the episodes through NetFlix.

The Wire is the brainchild of David Simon, a winner of the McArthur award, usually referred to as the Genius Award. The Utne Reader, an intellectual journal of the highest order, recognized him as a “visionary.” That, I think justifies, for me, thinking about him in the same way that I think about Dickens, whose work was serialized like a television show. Different medium, same results, same fine insight into the society of its time. Where Dickens was looking at London, Mr. Simon took a good, long look at Baltimore.

Education doesn’t come up in The Wire until the third or fourth season, and then here is what happens. A young detective comes in to “disgrace with fortune and men's eyes” by accidently shooting a fellow officer. He resigns from the force and comes back in the next season as a teacher. He’s assigned to an inner city school, and while he is helped by other teachers and administrators with his classroom management skills, he’s left on his own to be creative and work up some interest in learning in his young teen students.

He is creative and resourceful and develops a number of moves that make him look like a winner. He engages some of the students in math by having them calculate odds, he rummages through closets for materials and finds and sets up a computer for his classroom, he spends his own money on things he deems necessary for his classroom—and he’s a benevolent, male authority figure in a world where that is far from the norm. All of this reminded me of when I started out as a teacher 30 years ago.

This all happens over numerous episodes, and his story is only one thread among multiple story lines. The problems he deals with are the problems of the lowest socioeconomic level—hunger, inadequate clothing, violence—and we clearly see the connection to the street through the eyes of the students. When a student is hungry and under-clothed, it’s hard to get them to see the benefit of deferred gratification when they can hit the corner, be a runner, and knock down a couple of hundred a day.

I still remember the sadness of having to arrange for child services to intervene and take children from the only parent they knew, or the pain of watching children shiver and pull their arms inside the oversized dirty, borrowed or stolen t-shirt they had worn to school that day. The show hit home—anybody who had been there recognized the truth of the portrayal.

The Wire bounced around to the crime unit, the Mayors office, the Docks and Real Estate machinations, and weaved the actions together as they told the different stories. Then, in one episode, we were back in the classroom, which by now was humming along and showed great progress by the teacher and the students who were, for the most part, engaged and learning.

Then the principal walked in and told the teacher that all activities other than test prep were suspended until the tests were done in a couple of months. That really hit home. We have been wrestling with that demon for quite a while now. The next time the show featured the students in his class, they were arranged in neat rows, bickering and fighting, complaining about test prep.

This numbers game was a recurring theme throughout the show, and it permeated all of city life just as it does here in Los Angeles. Mark Twain said that he had heard from Disraelli the quote, "There’s lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics." I couldn’t verify that Twain got the quote right—I’m absolutely positive he got the meaning right.

The damn statistics drives our politics, and that, in turn, drives our policy. In the case of Education, in order to find out whether that young teacher was going to turn the corner, find his or her way and not drop out of teaching—over 50 percent don’t last five years—you could have looked at lots of already existing markers to tell you. But then you wouldn’t be making any money.

If you want to make money in Education you need to get out of the classroom and convince the people with money, Grant money, Government money, people like Bill and Melinda and Eli, that you have the silver bullet and that you can prove it with "Stats," test scores. There’s no money to be made in the classroom—great rewards but no money—and Education has been taken over by people who don’t have much interest in the children in the classroom and a great interest in making money.   

Speaking of—and for—those of us in the classroom, Prop. 30 is the last chance to stop further cuts to teachers' pay this year. Prop 30 will also restore funding for many of the programs that have been cut at the High School and College level. I'll have more on Ed money and testing, but in the meantime, please vote yes on Prop 30.