AMERICAN PROMISE: Did Private School Really Fail These Black Boys?
Documentary Review
American Promise is an important documentary, theatrically released after a major Sundance Film Festival award and festival run. The film is important both for its subject matter — elite private education for Black children — and for its vast scope. Filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson follow their own son and his best friend from age five, when both are first admitted to The Dalton School, an elite Manhattan private school, through high school graduation thirteen years later. It is a film essentially impossible to replicate, and at least, a commendable and candid effort.
American Promise is a film with an avowed mission: Joe and Michele are actively campaigning to improve the prospects, perception, and treatment of Black children, especially boys, through an education system in which misunderstanding and discrimination, large and small, have been historically rife, and persist to date. At an opening week screening at Manhattan’s IFC Cinema, the filmmakers asked audience members to sign up and join their efforts, and postcards for the couple’s upcoming book on the subject were distributed. The couple has done an extensive press tour, including a video profile in the New York Times and appearances on MSNBC, PBS, HuffPost Live, and elsewhere.
To be clear, I take no issue with this mission’s validity, based in no small part on my own personal public and private school experiences as an African American male. But having put this mission front and center, this documentary and its makers must be judged by how well their film serves this mission, on their accuracy in depicting events, and accuracy of the film’s internal analysis, especially as many parents will use this documentary to inform their own life-altering choices in an extremely challenging education “market.”
On this basis, I find that American Promise contains severe shortcomings that significantly limit its ability to serve Joe and Michele’s laudable mission.
THE ISSUE
As it happens (SPOILER ALERT), American Promise has a tragic aspect, because neither boy fully succeeds at Dalton. Both end up in acceptable and appropriate college circumstances, but neither boy flourishes. Joe and Michele’s son, Idris, struggles academically before being diagnosed with ADHD in high school. His friend, Seun, is diagnosed as dyslexic, also struggles academically, and leaves to attend a local public high school.
Here, then, is the essence of this film’s entire story: both boys are diagnosed with specific learning disabilities: ADHD (Idris), and dyslexia (Seun). Idris does not get diagnosed until tenth grade after more than six school years of struggling at Dalton, and struggling at home with his unaware parents. Seun is diagnosed in middle school, but leaves after eighth grade for academic reasons that appear to result directly from dyslexia. Result: while both boys fit in reasonably well with Dalton’s culture and social environment, neither fully succeeds there academically, as a direct result of their learning disabilities.
American Promise, therefore, is really a film about two African American boys who attend an elite private school and struggle there, not primarily because of socio-cultural issues, but because they have clinically diagnosed learning disabilities. The problem: filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson do not seem to understand that this is the central issue in their son’s story.
THE DISCONNECT
Joe, in particular, takes the view that Dalton itself has failed both boys, and has failed Black boys generally. Joe expresses this view in the film, and also expressed it at a post-screening Q&A. A Dalton administrator expresses a similar, generalized concern roughly midway through the film’s thirteen-year chronology, notably right as the school was substantially expanding minority enrollment as part of a deliberate effort (Dalton is now roughly 50% nonwhite in its lower grades).
But if the takeaway is meant to be:
Dalton, like other elite private schools, fails Black boys
then we must ask: does the factual record, both depicted in and omitted from this film, plainly support this damning conclusion? Or is something else at work?
IMPORTANT BACKGROUND INFORMATION OMITTED
Big clues can be found in two essential background facts American Promise ignores entirely. These all-important facts come together to spotlight the couple’s own shortcomings in managing their son’s education, what they might have done differently, and where blame, if it is to be assigned at all, should be primarily laid.
First, there is Joe and Michele’s own backgrounds. These Baby Boomers are not working class or lower middle class African Americans. Joe is a psychiatrist, with degrees from Harvard Medical School and Stanford. Michele herself is a Columbia-trained lawyer. They own a home in a gentrifying, prime Brooklyn neighborhood. These distinctions are significant, because they should give the couple access to information, social networks, cultural familiarity, and peer-level social status that would enable them to much more readily navigate a world of private school administrators, and often super-rich families.
Incredibly, there is no mention of any of this background until midway through the film, when Joe mentions he’s a psychiatrist. Michele’s education and profession are never mentioned at all, we never see her going to work or dressed clearly for work, and the film provides not a clue as to whether she even works outside the home at all. Joe’s Harvard education is mentioned only late in the film, in discussing Idris’ college applications, and no mention of Joe’s Stanford degree is made even when Idris is filmed in an on-campus Stanford visit. Why were the parents’ backgrounds not mentioned at the film’s start, since this plays an unquestionably large role in their choices, perspectives and expectations, and indeed, in the place they occupy in New York City?
Second, the film never mentions that Idris’ commute from Ft. Greene, Brooklyn to Manhattan’s Upper East Side takes nearly an hour each way by bus and subway, or by car. Idris plays basketball, and stays late as a result. Two hours of commuting is rough on a child: it takes valuable time away from study and sleep, and it makes it vastly more difficult to maintain strong friendships with classmates outside of school. It is hard on parents in early years, who must take the child to and fro. Friends and their parents will be reluctant to travel far away for Brooklyn play dates. This distance also puts parents far out of the social loop of information flow among parents: the kind of talk, gossip, and information sharing that helps give parents a more complete, inside view of what is really happening at the school, and what a child has to do to prosper.
Note that both of these factual omissions require special outside knowledge from the viewer, as this information can’t be gleaned from watching the film alone. [By way of background, I am an African American male who attended a prestigious New York private high school, to which I commuted 2 hours roundtrip every day. I have also navigated the New York City private and public school system as a parent, and know many people, Black, white, Asian, Latino and otherwise, with children in private schools, including Dalton. These experiences inform my own perspective, but I write with allegiance neither to any school, nor to NYC’s private school system.]
Thus, Joe and Michele have the educational and social/cultural background that should have enabled them to gather information effectively about the school they were paying so dearly to send their son to, but the constraint of geographic distance and social proximity served as info-gathering/sharing obstacles. And Joe himself is a Harvard psychiatrist who one might think has a certain edge in evaluating and understanding his own child.
So, what do Joe and Michele do?
DENIAL AND LAYING BLAME
Following a promising start, by grade three or four, Idris starts to struggle. Teachers note problems with organization, preparation, and time management. The school soon suggests Idris may have ADHD. At the time, Joe says on film that he’s a trained psychiatrist familiar with ADHD, and says unequivocally that Idris does not appear to have ADHD. Notably, Joe does not have his son tested!
Instead, Joe plays the hard-driving, Joseph P. Kennedy-playbook father. When an elementary-age Idris’ team loses a weekend basketball game and Idris is in tears in the car home, Joe plays a contained kind of hardball with his son. He accuses Idris throughout the film of not applying himself, not working hard, and being lazy. Indeed, Idris seems often distracted, unfocused, and head-rolling bored. The child seems mildly miserable through much of this film, at least when interacting with his parents.
Sadly, the Harvard-educated Dr. Brewster, psychiatrist, takes an approach to his son’s discipline and learning that is exactly the WRONG approach to take with a child who actually does suffer from ADHD. Finally, after his tenth grade clinical diagnosis, Idris starts taking meds, his grades improve, and so do his college prospects, but not after years of needless, intense suffering and damage. (Sidebar: I don’t necessarily agree with widespread use of stimulants to treat ADHD, but some people seem to benefit.) And Michele shows she too is part of it, even if more softly: she complains on camera, near tears, about how at age sixteen, she herself was far more independent and focused than Idris is at the same age, and rails that she doesn’t understand why — even though the symptoms she describes in her own son are classically ADHD; even though she is a highly-educated and thoughtful woman married to a Harvard psychiatrist.
We know it can be extremely difficult to be objective and to accept uncomfortable truths when it involves the people closest and dearest to us. But Joe’s own mammoth failure here (harsh but true) is, frankly, unforgivable. Now, it might be forgivable if Joe himself at least acknowledged his own primary responsibility. But that is exactly what we do NOT get in American Promise, nor do we get it from Joe in his public appearances, statements, and activism surrounding the documentary’s release.
Instead, Joe and Michele have been traveling the country on a media and screening tour, putting forth the view that it was Dalton, and by extension perhaps elite private schools generally, that failed Idris and that fail Black boys. The reality in at least Idris’ instance is more the OPPOSITE: the school identified indications of ADHD in Idris and plainly advised his super-educated parents, and Idris’ psychiatrist father quashed any effort to have the boy tested, instead repeatedly pressuring his son with a kind of misplaced tough love.
In fact, in a post-screening Q&A, a young man asked in his own polite, nineteen-ish way whether Joe would have handled things differently with hindsight (i.e., be less hard driving and overbearing). Joe's answer was lengthy and entirely lacking in contrition. Joe should know better. Even worse, in two lengthy live television interviews, on HuffPost Live and MSNBC with Melissa Harris Perry, neither Joe nor Michele ever even MENTION that their son had a clinically-diagnosed learning disability that was evident by the fourth grade. Instead, the couple appears to blame the school for not handling their son and his friend properly based on race.
Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson’s flagrant omission of these boys’ clinically-diagnosed learning disabilities from the discussion in nationally-televised interviews is misleading and irresponsible, especially when they seek to lay blame on others. Many parents (in particular) will view American Promise, or simply read about it and see the interviews, and use this widely-praised film to inform some of the most important decisions they will ever make. Those parents deserve better.
Joe and Michele’s interviews, clearly and deliberately, invite the conclusion the boys’ difficulties were the result of bias, discrimination, and cultural disconnect, but American Promise does not present any direct evidence to support this position. The boys do complain onscreen, in middle school years, that they feel misunderstood by teachers and administrators based on race, but beyond these statements and generalized perceptions raised by Joe, Michele, and Seun’s mother, the film does not adequately probe this issue.
OUT OF THE LOOP
Joe and Michele’s missteps are not confined to Idris’ ADHD. When the school recommends that the struggling Idris get tutoring, Joe resists, expressing surprise and consternation upon learning that, in addition to paying sky-high tuition, many Dalton families are “spending up to $30,000” annually just on tutoring. The reality is that tutoring is commonplace and extensive among Manhattan private school kids of every race and ethnicity, with an entire flourishing market of premium-priced independent tutors and services like Kumon. This is simply an unfortunate but very real part of the private school and elite colleges game today, one that of course favors families who can pay.
Not to be harsh, but Joe and Michele should have known this. The reason they do not may owe to their being geographically out of the parental social loop, but this could have been remedied by persistent information-gathering and mingling among Dalton parents — access to these information loops is one of THE main reasons to fork over the cash to send one’s kids to these kinds of schools in the first place. Had Joe and Michele not been Ivy League professionals themselves, then we might understand if they were more reticent to connect with other parents. But in reality, this couple is not socially unconnected, and should have had access to useful social networks even away from Dalton (e.g., other Harvard doctors with kids in elite schools, Black professionals with private school kids, etc.).
Some clue as to just how important this information access is comes in a scene in which Joe and Michele sensibly invite several other Black parents over for a kitchen-table discussion about navigating Dalton. One parent, who lives much closer to the school, notes that many white parents complain of similar problems with their kids’ ability to cope with Dalton’s rigorous academic demands. This cogent comment should have clued Idris’ parents into the need to network further, and to the greater nuances of their son’s experiences, but there’s no evidence in the film that this insight had any effect on Joe and Michele’s outlook, nor is there any evidence that they regularly shared this kind of insight beyond this seemingly one-off meeting.
AND SO…
One key takeaway is obvious, even from American Promise’s trailer: getting one’s child admitted to an elite grade school does not mean that the child is on an escalator to lifelong success. It certainly does not mean that one can follow the old-school model in which Baby Boomers were usually raised: send your kids to a good school, maybe help them with homework once in awhile, but let the school take care of the rest. We know by now that that just does not work; the evidence is all around us. But what exactly have the Brewsters learned from this experience, and what do they mean to communicate about this issue to their audiences? This much is unclear.
In the end, American Promise’s particular facts don’t provide an especially useful insight into how one’s Black or brown children might fare at an elite NYC private school: both Idris and Seun have clinically diagnosed learning disabilities that, while not uncommon, are not at all representative of any group of gifted children, minority or otherwise. How might they have fared with their talents and amiable personalities absent ADHD or dyslexia, or absent parents (at least in Idris’ case) in denial about these disabilities? Did Dalton treat white students with learning disabilities differently? We don’t really know, and the film does essentially nothing illuminate these issues. (Well-educated physicians and lawyers are specifically trained to seek and identify exactly such comparisons — i.e., whether persons of similar circumstances are treated the same or differently — but Joe and Michele do not bring that analysis to bear in this documentary).
None of this is to harp on any human frailties, nor on these particular parents/filmmakers’ shortcomings. Rather, because American Promise is intended to highlight a particular set of problems and to inspire specific corrective action, it must be held to a high standard of accuracy, as inaccurate ideas and analyses often inform bad individual and policy decisions.
An earlier version of this review was published in CounterPunch, www.counterpunch.org
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