Educational TV

The most scabrous critique of Bush's education policy isn't coming from a think tank or newspaper but from the grittiest drama on television, "The Wire."

Editor's note: This essay discusses episodes of "The Wire" that haven't aired yet.

By James Hynes

Read more: Education, TV, Life

Jim True-Frost as Roland "Prez" Pryzbyleski in "The Wire"

Sept. 20, 2006 | Early in the superb new season of HBO's "The Wire," Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski, disgraced cop turned rookie math teacher at Edward J. Tilghman Middle School in Baltimore, attends a meeting with several veteran teachers. Fans of "The Wire" already know Prez's back story as a perennial fuck-up who turned out to be a surprisingly gifted investigator of the drug trade's paper trail, but who in the end had no instinct for the street; his police career ended last season when he accidentally shot and killed a black undercover cop. Now he's the new guy in the teacher's lounge, sitting on a hard chair in an overlit room with three gimlet-eyed women.

"Keep your windows closed," one advises him about the hard-case students he hasn't even met yet. "Makes 'em drowsy, and drowsy's good."

"Build in lots of activities in your lesson plan," says another. "You keep them busy, you keep them off guard."

As the three women file out, the camera lingers on poor, stunned Prez (the excellent Jim True-Frost), and you can see he's already wondering if he might be better off back with the violent young hoppers on the drug corners of West Baltimore. Built into this scene is a good deal of verisimilitude. Informed by the experiences of producer Ed Burns -- who, like Pryzbylewski, was both a detective and a schoolteacher in Baltimore -- "The Wire" is taking on the crisis in urban public education, the same way it has in previous seasons examined such highly charged issues as the futility of the "war on drugs," the institutional corruption in the police department, and the slow strangulation of the industrial working class, from a political point of view best described as Old Testament liberal in its rage for social justice.

We all know the Stations of the Cross for the inspirational-teacher film by now: the naive young teacher's disastrous first class; the staff meeting that devolves into a bitch session about unruly students, pointless paperwork and the idiotic directives of the administration; the embittered veteran teacher condescending to the idealistic rookie in the teacher's lounge; a climactic confrontation that either threatens violence or delivers it; and a final, tear-jerking moment of redemption as the teach finally reaches the kids. Some of these moments show up even in "The Wire," but it has ever been the collective genius of the show's writers to reinvent stock situations and characters through brilliant storytelling and a pointed intelligence. What's remarkable about the new season of "The Wire" is how they modify and transcend these tropes to deliver a passionate and remarkably detailed and incisive critique of public education in the era of No Child Left Behind.

Thus, in Episode 3 of "The Wire," written by the novelist Richard Price, we get a sly reference to the story's genealogy as Ms. Donnelly, the school's unflappable assistant principal, barks, "Don't go up the down staircase," at the stampede of kids on the first day, and Prez's canonically disastrous first class that same day vividly recalls Sandy Dennis' in the 1967 film "Up the Down Staircase." But then in Episode 4, "The Wire" ventures into more politically charged territory with the return of the formidable Robert Wisdom as Howard "Bunny" Colvin, the veteran police commander who last season trashed his 30-year career by, in effect, legalizing the drug trade in certain neighborhoods of his district, in an ambitious and finally disastrous plan. This season he teams up with a nebbishy academic to try something similar at Prez's school, namely separating "the corner kids" (the ones already implicated in the drug trade) from "the stoop kids" (the ones who still obey their parents and teachers). Colvin argues that the regular classes will be able to learn now that the mouthiest kids are gone, and the corner kids will get extra attention from a special program devoted solely to socializing them. Right from the start, the administration is skeptical.

"Isn't this just tracking?" asks one administrator, invoking the discredited educational strategy of segregating students by aptitude and (by implication) likelihood of success. To which Colvin replies -- just as he replied last season when he was asked if he wasn't just legalizing drugs -- So what? Kids are going to learn something, somewhere, so why not teach them what they need to know in school, instead of holding them to a standard they cannot possibly hope to meet? The scheme is tentatively approved, but the administrator tells Colvin and the professor not to "do anything that makes us look bad." At first, Colvin's experiment shows good results, as the corner kids slowly learn that there's more to social interaction than fight or flight and Pryzbylewski's classroom calms enough to allow his native intelligence and decency to work on his students -- allow him, in the parlance of "The Wire," to show some flex. He makes progress by improvising a curriculum, teaching his kids probability, for example, by letting them play dice in class, a game they know from the corner. Then a couple of obstacles are thrown in his path, one institutional and one sociological, bringing the show to the crux of its diagnosis of what ails the urban school system.

The institutional obstacle is the No Child Left Behind policy. With the approach of the annual, NCLB-mandated Maryland State Assessment test, Pryzbylewski's hard-won progress stalls as he's forced not only to teach to the test -- basically giving the kids the answers in advance -- but even to turn his math class into an English class for a time, to improve the school's low language arts scores. In the meantime Colvin's kids, who are only just learning to say "please" and "thank you" and not to call each other "bitch" and "motherfucker," are forced to take the same test, for which they are not, and cannot realistically be, prepared. It becomes clear that the school has more to gain by simply "disappearing" these hopeless students (aided by a creative truant policy that only requires offenders to show up one day a month) than by trying to teach them anything.

Next page: Forget "Law and Order"; it's "The Wire" that's ripped from the headlines