Hard Times at Douglass High: A No Child Left Behind Report Card
by Alan Raymond, Susan Raymond
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DVD details
Director: Alan Raymond, Susan RaymondProducer: Alan Raymond
Producer: Susan Raymond
Writer: Susan Raymond
DVD: Region Code 1
Format: NTSC
DVD Release Date: 2008-07-08
Studio: HBO
DVD Reviews of Hard Times at Douglass High: A No Child Left Behind Report Card
DVD Review: Fogging the Glass
Summary: 1 Stars
I first saw this film at the Silverdocs festival. The velvet ropes outside the AFI theater in Silver Spring were strung, the red carpet unrolled, and the Frederick Douglass High School Marching Band ushered in the audience with gleaming brass pomp and pride at the recent world premiere of "Hard Times at Douglass High," a documentary by Alan and Susan Raymond chronicling a year in this struggling Baltimore high school.
The responsibility of a documentarian is to hold a mirror up to nature, steady and unflinching, and the Raymonds have a storied history as documentarians. They were the creators of the early 1970's look at suburban American life in the PBS series, "An American Family." And they won an Oscar for their 1990's film about the challenges of an elementary school in Philadelphia.
But "Hard Times at Douglass High," like their previous exploration of urban education, is an exercise in smoke and mirrors. Instead of sounding an alarm to stir public outrage and action in the face of devastating school failure, the documentary seems content to be an apologist's lullaby, singing a nation to sleep.
Susan Raymond told the Washington Post ("The ABCs of Failure," June 23), "If you're depressed [after seeing the documentary], it means that we've succeeded."
But succeeded at what, exactly?
In their examination of Douglass's underachievement--16 percent of students were proficient in English, and 5 percent in math--the Raymonds give short shrift to the leadership and instructional failures that are the primary determiners of student achievement. Instead, they turn the cameras to focus on the results, not the causes, of school dysfunction: disengaged students and fractured communication with parents.
To be sure, this film was created with tremendous sympathy for the adults who work in this school. When a ninth-grade English teacher departs mid-year and is replaced by a string of substitutes, among them a school counselor-in-training, the camera casts a compassionate lens toward the departing instructor and those who follow. When we learn that 60 percent of Douglass's teachers are not credentialed, we are asked to sympathize with a school struggling to keep warm bodies at the chalkboard. What isn't shown, however, is the impact of this unstable, underqualified teaching staff on the students and their learning.
When a 17-year-old ninth grader refuses to attend a remedial reading class and argues in the hallway with an administrator, the scene is offered as proof of student unruliness. We are never challenged to wonder why the school placed this young man in a remedial reading class rather than credit-bearing English with stronger instructional supports, a strategy known to produce greater student learning, less failure and a better shot at graduating.
Telling someone else's story comes with tremendous responsibility. It is clear that the Raymonds knew little about the world they entered when they walked into Douglass with cameras in tow and even less about the struggles and aspirations of students within the walls of schools like this one. Throughout, the symptoms of school dysfunction are misdiagnosed as the problems themselves, leaving the hope and power of real reform a daunting distance from the hands of the very people who stand to make change happen: the educators.
If the aim of this film was to perpetuate stereotypes about urban students, parents, and schools; to excuse Douglass's poor performance when similar schools across the country are steering students to success; and to suggest that American public education can't be the powerful equalizer that we believe it to be; then, I guess they did succeed.
And they succeeded in excusing a nation for allowing the dreams of too many of students to atrophy in struggling schools - students like those young marching band members last Friday, asked to play at their own funeral.
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