The Wire as an Examination of the Public School System
The classroom is silent except for the voice of Roland Pryzbylewski. Most students wander in and out of attentiveness, their eyes either glued to the blackboard behind their teacher or to the numerous etchings and scratches on their desks. Few notice the stirring in the back of the room. There is a glance, one girl to another. There is the scratch of a desk chair grinding across the tile floor as one of the girls rises from her desk and goes to the other. And then there is a cry, a shrill cry that punctures the silence of the room. The students rise to see what is happening. On the floor lay one of the girls, her face drowning in a pool of her own blood. The other girl stands over her, knife in hand.
This is not out of the ordinary in the Baltimore public school system.
The goal of a school is to educate the youth and produce creative, logical minds that can be productive members of society. Unfortunately, in many inner city communities, this is not the reality. The reality is that inside school walls often lurks a dangerous culture that perpetuates a cycle of crime and poverty rather than steering studens away from it. The teachers are not at fault for this. Most of them are hardworking professionals who sincerely want what is best for their students. The problems can be traced to back to the administrative level. Like anything else, there is money to be made from schools. The better students do on standardized tests, the more funding that is received from the government and the better the city looks on paper. This system prevents real learning from happening. Students are taught to do well on tests as opposed to being taught how to handle real world problems and take care of themselves in their cruel environment. This lack of care about the students themselves has profound effects on Baltimore’s citizens and only goes to perpetuate a cycle of violence and loss. Because of this, some students turn their back on school altogether to focus on learning how to make money in the streets.
A lot of these issues come from a disconnect between administartion and students. Most students from Baltimore are African-American and from low income households, while most administrators are white men from middle class households. These administrators do not know the struggles the children of Baltimore deal with on a daily basis and try to act as if they can afford to focus on tests as much as other students. They understand numbers, but the students get left behind.
In this essay, I will use The Wire, a show created by David Simon, to look at flaws in the Baltimore school system and explore potential solutions. I will examine these flaws by looking at different characters on the show and seeing what teaching strategies worked for these students and which ones didn’t. I will also use Howard Colvin’s alternative program as an example of how to better tailor the school system to an inner city environment.
Prez is a character in the show who becomes a teacher after being discharged as a cop. Instead of just focusing on the numbers, Prez understands the cruel world that the children of Baltimore grow up in. He knows the dangers that await students out in the street, which allows him to have more compassion for them and more drive to help them out of their situations. He even designs lessons to be more relevant to his students’ lives. For example, he uses dice as the basis for his probability questions because he knows that is something his students are interested in. This teaching style allows his students to thrive. Unfortunately, his methods are forced to change as the standardized tests grow near. Instead of giving examples that relate to the students, he must give sample test questions that make no sense in the world of most of these kids. There is an immediate decrease in the students’ interest. They become indifferent to the learning and are not engaged in the class. Two of his students, Duquon and Randy, benefitted from Prez’s alternative teaching methods. They thrived under Prez in ways they were never able to before, but the indifference of the school system coupled with circumstances out of their control, force them down dark roads where their potential is diminished.
Duquon comes from a very impoverished family and cannot afford the necessities that other students have. He can’t afford to shower or buy new clothes, which gives him a stench that makes other students avoid him. With no family support system and very few friends, Duquon feels alone and isolated, preventing him from achieving his true potential. Prez, though, recognizes his intelligence and takes him under his wing. He gives Duquon clothes and lets him use the school showers, opening doors to Duquon he never had before. For the first time in his life, he has someone looking out for him, someone who cares. He thrives under Prez academically as well, reaching levels of new levels of engagement in his class. Never had he been assigned a teacher that understood him as more than just a number. Because Prez took time to talk to Duquon and make him feel worthwhile, Duquon’s performance in school reached new highs. This increase of performance in the classroom is a light at the end of a very dark tunnel for Duquon. It allowed him an opportunity to get out of his home and move past his troubled family life. The school system, though, impedes his progress by making him move up a grade before he is ready. Instead of recognizing that Prez is the reason Duquon is turning his life around, the school system just looks at the numbers and thinks Duquon is ready for high school.
Prez tries to stop this from happening because he knows that without the clothes and basic care self-care items he supplies Duquon with at school, things would go back exactly as they were before. Duquon would be bullied again, forcing him to retreat back into his shell and lose all the confidence he gained. The administrators didn’t care. All they saw was a student with high grades, not a suffering adolescent who is struggling to pull together the basic necessities for civilized life. There is no reason for them to know the details of Duquon’s life, but had they listened to Prez, someone who knew Duquon at a personal level, they could have a made a major difference in the trajectory of Duquon’s character. As it was, though, the transition to high school was too much for Duquon to handle, prompting him to drop out of school entirely. Alone and afraid, Duquon eventually starts hanging out with a group of junkies who pay him to help collect junk for them. These junkies eventually convince him to begin using heroin. Had the school system listened to Prez and focused on the individual instead of the number, Duquon’s fate could have been avoided.
Another character whose life was impacted by the mainstream school system is Randy. Randy was raised in a group home and lives with a foster family at the beginning of season four. From Prez’s first day as a teacher, Randy is one of his most respectful students. He helps Prez calm the class down when it is getting out of hand and often stays after class to talk. Prez and Randy begin to gain a deep, personal connection and a mutual respect.
About midway through the fourth season, Randy’s education came to a screeching halt. One day, as he was walking the halls, Randy is approached by a group of students who offer him a few dollars to watch the bathroom door and make sure no one enters. Coming from little money, any cash makes a difference for Randy, so he agrees to this favor without asking what he was doing it for. A few days go by and this event slips from Randy’s mind until he is called down to the principal’s office. He sits face to face with the principal, genuinely unsure of why he was called down. His face melds into one of pure horror and disgust when the principal tells him a girl was raped in the bathroom where he kept watch. Randy begs and pleads for forgiveness, explaining that he had nothing to do with it and he was deceived about the rapist’s’ motives. Instead of launching an investigation, the school decides to treat Randy as if he is a rapist simply because he was tricked into standing by a door. Prez testifies on behalf of Randy, claiming he would never commit such a heinous act, but the school does not listen. They were content with disparaging a student with no prior record without any hard proof that he was guilty.
Out of pure desperation, Randy tells the school administrators a secret that had been weighing on his mind for a long time: the location of one of the victims of Marlo, the leader of a violent street gang. Anyone who grew up on the streets of Baltimore knows that giving this type of information is extremely dangerous. If anyone found out that Randy snitched, he would automatically be a target. The school administrators ignore this fact and send Randy over to the police as an official witness. This means that Randy’s identity as a witness would be much harder to conceal. Word eventually gets out that Randy offered intelligence on Marlo, which resulted in Randy’s house being firebombed. His face is left disfigured, and his foster mother suffers serious injuries, leaving her hospitalized indefinitely. Without any immediate family, Randy is forced to move back into a group home.
The school system’s treatment of Randy shows how little they know about the lives their students are forced to live. Even after giving Randy to the police as a witness, they do not offer him any protection and made no effort to conceal his identity. Had the administrators understood the city they lived in, Randy may have been given the treatment he needed instead of being shipped off as a witness and put into a dangerous situation. The schools’ lack of understanding about the city they operate in prevents them from making a positive difference in their students’ lives.
In the cases of these characters, one reason why they were failed by the school system was because they were stuck in mainstream classes. Their friend Namond, though, was offered an alternative and benefitted greatly from it. Namond comes from a family of drug dealers and seems set to follow the same path. His father, Wee Bey, was imprisoned in the show’s first season, leaving Namond to take care of his mother. Instead of helping her son adjust to life without a father, Namond’s mother forces him to get out on the street corners and begin selling drugs. This lack of compassion and early exposure to the criminal world hardens Namond’s outer shell. He sees school as pointless because he’s just going to end up being a gangster anyway. What changes him is the experimental program of ex-cop Howard Colvin. Colvin’s goal is to isolate the “corner kids”, or students with a higher risk of falling into a criminal lifestyle. Colvin selects the kids he wants to work with, Namond being one of them, and puts them in their own class. At first, Namond shuns the program as stupid and is just glad to be out of his regular classes. He soon realizes, though, that Colvin is different from his other teachers. Instead of pretending like the outside world doesn’t exist, he integrates it into the classroom. He encourages his students to discuss the drug game to spark debates during class and uses this interest to teach students how to communicate effectively. These alternative methods strike a chord with Namond, and he begins to gain respect for Colvin. For the first time, he has a real father figure in his life, which allows his outer shell to crack. He becomes more sensitive and more empathetic. He no longer feels as if he must bully his way to the top. As a result of this newfound interest in school, his interest in the gang life wanes. When he fails to move a package as expected, he is physically beaten by Michael. After his mother kicks him out of the house for “failing” as a drug dealer, Colvin adopts Namond, for he sees his potential beyond the street corners.
Namond’s arc does not complete until the penultimate episode of the series. By this episode, Duquon and Randy are both completely victims of the corrupt school system, with Duquon a heroin addict and Randy living in a group home. The character of Namond was not heard from for a while after the fourth season, but in the penultimate episode he appears again, and under much better circumstances than before. Instead of embroiled in some drug war or struggling to survive in a group home, Namond is on stage, dressed in a suit and tie, having a formal debate with another student. This moment shows a changed character. While he once talked big game and wanted to be the most intimidating dealer on his corner, there he was on stage, a productive member of society. Simon uses this scene to show the effectiveness of Colvin’s program. He contrasts Namond’s situation with those of the other characters studied in season four to show how far Namond has come in comparison to his friends. Colvin’s unorthodox teaching methods save Namond’s life and give him a home where he can be accepted as something other than just a gangster bringing home money for the family.
Colvin’s program highlights the flaws in the school system. He begins to make serious progress with the students in his program, but it is shut down by the schools because it is not preparing students for standardized testing. Colvin’s partner in the endeavor, Dr. David Parenti, is a more traditional academic than Colvin and is not distraught by the closing of the program. He sees it as a great opportunity to publish a study, the idea of which sparks rage in Colvin. He scoffs at the idea of publishing a piece about their experiment, asking Parenti “What they gonna do, study your study? When this shit gonna change?”
Unfortunately, it is not people such as Colvin controlling the school systems. It is primarily controlled by white men from middle class or wealthy families who have no idea what goes on in their students’ lives. It is controlled by people like Parenti who just want their name attached to some illustrious study on how so-and-so increased test scores by this much. The school system is a very self-serving institution which shuns the very people it is supposed to educate.
References
Simon, D. (Creator) (June 2, 2002 — March 9, 2008). The Wire. Home Box Office.
