Amorphous Putz

(To the left, a quote from the Baltimore News Editor about a planned Education series and my imagined thought from Clarke Johnson) I'm quite honored that the highly regarded Eduwonkette linked to my clip from the Wire. I found that only the previous week there had been a debate on her blog about the validity of the Wire's reality a commentator named John Thompson took up the baton for my point of view

Five years ago I made a friendly bet to my principal that within five years the concept curriculum alignment as the locomotive of educational reform will seem laughable. Obviously my time frame was off, but The Wire used it as a punch line. And there is a whole lot more wisdom on reform in that show than in the think tank's proposals. As I have written elsewhere, I see the personalities of so many of my students in the characters of The Wire. My Marlow was a younger version of their Marlo; my "Buffalo" was a younger version of Prop Joe, our real assistant principal is the spitting image of the real life character that was Ed Burn's assistant principal, and Bunny's trip with Namond was just like our comparable trips. The show's extreme psychopaths are exaggerated or it seems to me but I don't run in those circles. Two types of scenes are absolutely perfect. They reveal the truth of how our "puzzle palaces" respond to NCLB, expending much more energy in "juking the stats" than making improvements. As in the Wire, the resemblance of NCLB to the 1986 Drug Law that filled our prisons with so many nonviolent Blacks is uncanny. Those of us who understood "the Hood" knew that those perverse effects were inevitable and the dynamics would be institutional racism not personal racism. Sure enough, reformers took discretion away from the sentencing judges and just added to the damage of drugs and the failed drug war. The reformers just didn't know what they didn't know. Equally great are the portraits of students in class. The "blingk" scene is must viewing for teachers who need to recognize and honor the types of knowledge that our poor kids have. The Wire portrays the pain and degradation imposed upon kids by high stakes standardized tests. It is not an exaggeration. You can not fool teenagers. They know that their dignity is being stomped and ground into the dirt. Porn? When my student from Bed Stuy was mourning his murdered uncle, he told me about his murdered cousin in Brooklyn. Then. he student mourned by smoking marijuana, watching Animal Kingdom reruns, and looking out the window of the projects ,observing the human drama as being the same as the animal behavior in the documentaries. I did have a couple of experiences with the children of former kingpins. An emotionally disturbed middle schooler nearly started a riot by killing a turtle. Kids who had seen so much human suffer ring went wild over the "murder" of an innocent turtle. But even the members of the opposing gangs had sympathy for this kid, saying that his father had been a millionaire dealer and I would understand when I saw him. If true it was revealing because I then encountered a completely broken-down alcoholic who looked several decades older than his actual age. I had an honors student who had received a great education before her father was incarcerated for a highly profitable drug ring. She challenged a guest speaker who had been a scholar for the Heritage Founding saying, "George Bush is hypocritical because he says that the government is too incompetent to fix Social Security, but he claims that the government had been perfect in proving that everyone on death row was guilty." But there was a happy ending to that story. The education theorist listened, debated, reflected, and decided that my kids had a point. He agreed that politicians and scholars need to listen to the students.
If you can't take time to visit your local inner city school and converse with the kids, at least you should watch The Wire. And if you question its realism, read the recent Washington Post series on D.C. schools or last years series by Chicago and Philadelphia newspapers.

Where The Problem And the Solution Can Be Measured

Making it real on the Wire. Baltimore Sun, City Editor Augustus "Gus" Haynes (Clarke Johnson) has to listen to the BS of his superiors who don't want to hear about big social problems and how they impact on schools, but rather where "the problem and the solution can be measured."

The Wire: The Bump In Test Scores

From Episode 52: Mayor Thomas "Tommy" Carcetti, his Chief of Staff Michael Steintorf and Norman Wilson discuss the third grade "bump"in test scores and how that can leverage itself into a future gubernatorial run. Sound familiar?

Celebrate The Wire

from an excellent article in the New Yorker Stealing Life, The crusader behind “The Wire.” by Margaret Talbot October 22, 2007 some excerpts and does this sound familiar?:

Of course, in producing “The Wire,” Simon and his colleagues did make a lot of shit up. And yet nearly every scene is grounded in documentary truth. This became clear at the writers’ meetings, which were equal parts urban-studies seminar, reporters’ bull session, and Hollywood story conference. The writers’ office is in a former bank in an old out-of-the-way waterfront district of Baltimore called Canton. Simon, Ed Burns, Bill Zorzi, and a young writer named Chris Collins sat around a table. Simon had a laptop open in front of him. In the middle of the table was a basket full of dried cranberries, Fig Newtons, and jelly beans. On the wall was a long sheet of butcher paper, divided into a grid: the name of each member of the show’s ensemble was written in marker on the side; the episodes, identified by number, were notated along the top. Above the butcher paper were head shots of all the major actors on “The Wire.” As the writers decided what would happen to each character in a given episode, Collins would write a brief description of that plot point, or “beat,” on a colored index card and pushpin it to the appropriate box on the grid. But a lot of the discussion on the days I was at the writers’ office had to do with the larger political themes of the show.

One morning in February, Simon—his hands laced behind his head, elbows jutting out—talked about the character of Tommy Carcetti, a venal pol with an idealistic streak, who by Season Five has been elected mayor of Baltimore. Carcetti faces any number of challenges, from bad crime statistics and floundering schools to the fundamental fact that—as he put it during his run for mayor—“tomorrow morning, I still wake up white in a city that ain’t.” (Carcetti is deftly played by the Irish actor Aidan Gillen.) That morning, Simon and his colleagues were analyzing how Carcetti’s ambitions to become the governor of Maryland are molding his agenda in the mayor’s office. Simon noted that Carcetti had promoted education reform in Season Four. “He’s gotta show that test scores have gone up,” he said.

“For the first and second grade,” Burns said sarcastically.

“Right,” Simon said. “It’s always just the first and second grade.” Simon was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, his standard outfit. (His lone sartorial affectation is a black porkpie hat of the type favored by jazz musicians in the nineteen-fifties.) He looked as if he could easily play one of the cops or a longshoreman. Every once in a while, he got up, thrust his hands deep in his pockets, and paced in front of the window, with its distant view of downtown Baltimore. Burns is silver-haired and pink-cheeked, and, in his homey cardigan, might suggest Mr. Rogers, if Mr. Rogers were a brainy, cynical, and profane former homicide detective.

Burns said, “Carcetti is, like, ‘I don’t want to be the education mayor—the numbers aren’t good.’ His advisers go down the list: environmental mayor, this, that, and the other thing. He tries on a few roles, and they just don’t have the juice.

If Simon’s characters were to deliver the kind of doomy social criticism that Simon does, “The Wire” would, as he likes to say, “lay there like a bagel.” Fortunately, his characters bristle with humor, quirks, private sorrows; his drug dealers express intricate opinions about Baltimore radio stations, chicken nuggets, and chess. One reason for this is that the writers knew people like them. Burns knew plenty of drug dealers as a homicide detective and plenty of inner-city teen-agers when, like Detective Pryzbylewski, he left the force and became a teacher in the Baltimore city schools. Zorzi knew plenty of city and state politicians when he was a tough, cranky Sun reporter who would never eat so much as a carrot stick from a buffet paid for by a candidate. As a crime reporter for the Sun, Simon knew plenty of junkies, snitches, cops, and people just trying to keep their heads down and get by in violent neighborhoods. Simon can be scathing, even righteous, about other television shows that presume to depict urban America without the benefit of direct knowledge. As he told the audience at Loyola, “So much of what comes out of Hollywood is horseshit. Because these people live in West L.A., they don’t even go to East L.A. The only time they go downtown is to get their license renewed. And what they increasingly know about the world is what they see on other TV shows about cops or crime or poverty. The American entertainment industry gets poverty so relentlessly wrong. . . . Poor people are either the salt of the earth, and they’re there to exalt us with their homespun wisdom and their sheer grit and determination to rise up, or they are people to be beaten up in an interrogation room by Sipowicz. . . . How is it that there’s nobody actually on a human scale from the other America? The reason is they’ve never met anybody from the other America. I mean, they could ask their gardener what it’s like.”