The 3 Rs: Rebels, Rock and Redemption

Who can blame the Big Screen’s newest teacher for taking matters into his own hands and giving those punk kids one final--and fatal--chemistry lesson?

The fictional Trevor Garfield first gets stabbed by a student in Brooklyn after giving him an F. Then he heads to Los Angeles and winds up teaching in the Valley, where the students are worse: They are tattooed hooligans who cuss him out, rape his one promising pupil and even slap their own mothers. Where’s the principal? Holed up in his office, worrying about lawsuits.

“New and drastic rules must be formulated,” advises a fellow teacher, a classic burnout.

Garfield comes to agree with that. “We can’t expect the system to protect us,” he says after rubbing out the biggest troublemaker in his class.

That’s the message of “187,” the classroom movie released last week. And while the film may be extreme for its genre--turning good ol’ “Teach” into a vigilante--it has the same fundamental point of view Hollywood has had for decades whenever it focuses its lens on America’s public schools.

From “Blackboard Jungle” and “Up the Down Staircase” to “Dangerous Minds,” movies have suggested that “the system”--policies, curriculum, administrators--is part of the problem. So are most teachers, having given up on making a difference. Most students are bad too, angry and preoccupied with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll . . . or, these days, rap.

Only a remarkable individual--driven by passion and a social conscience--can turn them around by the closing credits.

In 1955’s “Blackboard Jungle,” New York English teacher Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford) declares, “I’ve been beaten up, but . . . I’m not quittin’,” and persuades moody student Sidney Poitier to stick around until graduation. Richard Dreyfuss, as a high school music teacher in 1995’s “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” gives a gawky clarinet player the dose of confidence that propels her to become governor. And now in “187,” Samuel L. Jackson, playing Garfield, tries to save a macho gangbanger during a climactic game of Russian roulette.

Movies, of course, need drama, heroes and villains. Hollywood does not pretend to be a perfect reflection of our society and values.

Yet the depiction of schools on film has featured strikingly consistent themes: Success hinges on isolated, heroic efforts and not on a long-range educational philosophy; being a social worker is more important than teaching technique; and what works in the classroom comes not from a curriculum but teachers’ inspiration--to show a cartoon of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” for instance, to spur a discussion of ethics. (Was Jack right to steal the hen that laid the golden egg?)

From movie to movie, it’s an uphill struggle to overcome rule-bound administrators, work-to-the-contract teachers and social forces that leave promising students pregnant, stoned or dead.

“It’s no wonder that some members of the public think we need to do away with public education,” said Amy Stuart Wells, a UCLA associate education professor who has studied school movies.

In the films, she noted, fixing education is left to “superhuman agents, generally teachers, who come in and tame the wild beasts.”

So why has this portrait been so consistent through the years? And what do these films tell us about our attitudes toward schools?

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To some degree, film insiders admit, Hollywood is just being Hollywood--following a proven formula. Americans love heroes who battle the system, whether it is Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry thumbing his nose at police department rules or Jimmy Stewart as Mr. Smith railing against the corrupt old-boy network in Congress.

Such renegades can find a natural home--and adversaries--in the classroom, a world that is easy for audiences to identify with because school is part of our shared experience.

School also is where you find teenagers, the prime moviegoers. And where you find teens, you find the latest music--meaning a chance at a potentially hot-selling soundtrack.

“Education does travel,” said producer Jerry Bruckheimer, whose 1995 “Dangerous Minds” grossed $85 million in the U.S. and $100 million in other countries.

The pursuit of profits--and entertainment--also has inspired classroom comedies, especially sex-obsessed coming-of-age-films set in suburbia in which the kids are always outsmarting the teachers.

Aside from commercial interests, Bruckheimer and other movie makers say there are altruistic motives behind serious school stories--the desire to spotlight troubling conditions in urban schools, even if they create exaggerated heroes in the process.

“We’ve recently lost a couple of generations of kids, and part of the reason was that they weren’t getting educated,” said Bruckheimer. “We have to make teachers into heroes so the best and brightest will go into teaching.”

The genre started with “Blackboard Jungle,” which introduced mainstream America to rock music and the underbelly of youth culture. At a time when the country was flexing its muscles and not so prone to self-criticism, the producers felt a need to begin with an on-screen disclaimer:

“We in the United States are fortunate to have a school system that is a tribute to our communities and to our faith in American youth. [But] today we are concerned with juvenile delinquency.”

Neophyte teacher Dadier is hired at all-boys Manual Trades High School, after quoting Shakespeare’s “Henry V” during his employment interview. Only then is he clued in by a colleague, “This is the garbage can of the educational system.”

Indeed, it is. Shot in black and white, the school appears dark and shadowy, like a haunted house in a horror film. During a first-day assembly, an administrator shouts at the teenagers to “Shaddup!”

The humorless principal is never outside his office and is oblivious as students beat up, sexually assault and knife teachers. Instead of cracking down, he nearly fires Dadier because of a spurious allegation by a hoodlum student, relenting after Dadier pleads: “Don’t I have any rights at all? I know I don’t have any as a teacher any more. What about as a human being?”

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Later, in a memorable lunchroom scene that’s repeated in some form in most all such movies, Dadier dresses down his colleagues--introducing us to the stock characters seen time and again over the next 40 years.

One, he says, is a slumberer. Another, who fawns over students, a “slobberer.” Another a clobberer. And another a grumbler.

“I’m a fumbler,” he says. “I’m not any better than the rest of you.”

As with the heroes, the flawed teachers are also exaggerated. But “what’s frightening is that stuff doesn’t work unless [audience members] have had teachers who remind them of that,” said Harold Burbach, a University of Virginia professor who has written about portrayals of teachers in film.

In “Blackboard,” Dadier finally gets through to his students. All you have to do, he explains, is “get them to use their imaginations, get them to reach out for something.”

The hero of “Up the Down Staircase” (1967) is Sylvia Barrett (Sandy Dennis). Arriving at Calvin Coolidge High in New York, she’s perky and smiling. But her spirit is dampened by the rules--she is reprimanded for having her window open more than four inches and there’s paperwork for everything, including basketballs, even though she teaches English.

She’s chided, of course, for “going up the down staircase”--a metaphor for what all good cinema teachers must do in the end.

It’s an absurd world. “I’m not late,” says a student dropping out of school. “I’m not even here.”

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Speaking quietly, she too gets things under control. Soon her students are analyzing Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” relating it to the civil rights movement.

In later classroom movies, the fear of litigation--which is hardly fictional--makes administrators even more useless. In last year’s “The Substitute,” an implausible shoot-’em-up set in Miami, a teacher’s demand that a gang leader be disciplined for threatening her elicits a standard response from a celluloid administrator:

“I can’t kick him out without definite proof. I don’t want a lawsuit on my hands.”

To be fair, this principal is a little worse than the norm--he deals drugs out of the school basement with the help of the gang leader.

The principal is the hero, however, in “Lean on Me” (1989), which tells the story of real-life New Jersey educator Joe Clark. He’s clean--and mean. Appointed to turn around a failing school, he summarily expels dozens of students he says are drug dealers--he’s one guy not afraid of the ACLU complaining about due process.

His mission is to make sure the students pass a state test. He carries a bat. He bullies teachers. He embarrasses students. And he chains doors to keep the pushers out, defying the city fire chief.

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The real Clark’s story is a reminder that movie-makers are not the only ones infatuated with can-do mavericks. He was a media and public darling, as were others who inspired screenwriters, such as Chicago private school founder Marva Collins in the late 1970s, and East L.A. math teacher Jaime Escalante in the 1980s.

No one can dispute the fact that schools need strong leaders. You often can sense when you step on a campus if it has caring and competent leadership: Litter is picked up and the grass watered; students are in class, not loitering in the halls; and someone quickly asks a stranger, “May I help you?”

But, in the long run, no institution can work on charisma alone. There must be money for textbooks and smaller classes. And the kids won’t get far if every teacher has to be an innovative genius. There has to be an overall plan and teachers trained to follow it.

In film, the hero-teachers usually are newcomers, often right off the street. Any veteran can tell you, however, that instinct alone won’t teach reading to a first-grader struggling to learn vowels.

“Lean on Me” did offer something rare in movies--glimpses of strategies that might make a difference. Clark sets up remedial reading and peer tutoring programs and focuses the entire school on a goal--passing the test, which the students do.

The movies include only glimpses of actual teaching. Teachers more often are shown struggling to get things quiet. In “Dangerous Minds,” LouAnne Johnson (Michelle Pfeiffer) gains the respect of her toughest kids by showing them karate moves. Used to being labeled failures, they are shocked when she tells them they all start with A’s and only have to maintain them.

Other motivators? Candy bars for right answers and promises of a fancy dinner and a trip to an amusement park. Does it work? You bet. Almost immediately, ho-hum students are analyzing the works of Dylan Thomas, comparing them to songs of Bob Dylan.

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“In these movies, the hardest part is never shown,” said UCLA’s Wells. “The biggest challenge of being a teacher in low-income schools is that the students haven’t been taught to read.”

The most touching portrait of a teacher in recent years may be Dreyfuss’ “Mr. Holland.”

He also embodies the “progressive” philosophy that facts and basic skills will not take students very far. Music isn’t notes on a page, he tells the clarinet player who squeaks through her songs.

“It’s about heart and feelings and moving people and being alive,” he says. Close your eyes. Ignore the notes. That she does, and begins to play beautifully.

The sentimentalism and the success can be overwhelming--poor Mr. Holland until then had been trying to teach his students the fundamentals of music but couldn’t get them to do more than grunt. Most viewers have no idea that the film is embracing an approach--the emphasis on “enriching” experiences as opposed to drills and practice--that many educators view as one cause of America’s so-so performance on standardized tests in recent years.

States such as California now are insisting on phonics drills to teach reading, downplaying the “whole language” approach that said kids would pick up reading naturally if exposed to good stories.

Moviegoers saw the back-to-basics approach in “Stand and Deliver” (1987), which follows math motivator Escalante as he drills his Latino students--before school, on weekends and during vacations--until they pass the calculus Advanced Placement exam in unprecedented numbers.

But audiences probably were unaware that Mr. Holland and Mr. Escalante were educational opposites. For from a dramatic standpoint, their success seemed to grow from a quality they shared--passion. Technique was secondary.

“187”--named after the California penal code section for murder--seems torn between wanting to make a serious point about public schools and being a vigilante tale in the mold of “Death Wish.” It does fit squarely in the school movie genre: the remote principal and the two teachers who tug at Garfield from extremes, one cynically just collecting a check, the other clinging to idealism. The one student who represents hope offers her body to Garfield in return for tutoring in grammar, nearly gives up, then winds up speaking at graduation--delivering a eulogy to him as tearful as the testimonials to Mr. Holland when budget cuts eliminate his job.

“You can push a good teacher too far and he’ll break,” she warns.

As if to anoint it as reality, “187” ends with statistics on school violence and the note, “A teacher wrote this movie.”

Steven Yagemann was a substitute in the Los Angeles Unified School District for seven years. He said he wrote “187” to send a “wake-up call” about the way schools have become a “battle zone.”

Many of the incidents--students tossing textbooks out the window or threatening Garfield--happened to him, Yagemann said. So he felt cheated by other school movies, seeing them as too optimistic: “They gave you the false hope that teachers would always come through.”

Although the violence in “187” is extreme, Yagemann’s bleak view is reflected to a degree in daily news events.

A former student was arrested in the May torture-murder of Jonathan Levin, a popular New York teacher and son of the chairman and CEO of Time Warner Communications.

On the same day that “187” was being previewed on the Warner Bros. lot, a Compton teacher said students dumped human excrement on her.

Also that day, President Clinton announced a $350-million plan to entice people to teach in poor, urban areas--testimony to how unattractive such jobs are.

“187” generally was panned by reviewers. Whatever Yagemann’s intentions, fellow teachers have not exactly applauded his vision either. The American Federation of Teachers and United Teachers-Los Angeles declined to endorse his film.

Even though most people know that Hollywood exaggerates, some educators fear that the drumbeat of negative images sends the wrong message about schools.

“I don’t think we do ourselves any kind of service by portraying students as animals or subhuman and teachers equally as irrational at the other end,” said UTLA President Day Higuchi.

Some schools, he conceded, are out of control. They are places where the administrators do not back up teachers and discipline codes are meaningless. But most schools are not. And it’s hardly routine for teachers to tote guns into class, as one does in “187.”

Clearly, education and society have changed since the first school films. Movie makers today don’t feel the need for a disclaimer such as the one in “Blackboard Jungle.”

Schools do feel the broader impact of economic woes, social problems and the ease with which children can get drugs and guns.

Nevertheless, a greater percentage of students--especially minorities--are graduating from high school and going to college than in the 1950s.

A poll conducted in the Los Angeles district by the ACLU, released this year, found that students in many parts of the city consider their campuses safer than the streets they use to get to them.

“187” was filmed last summer at Verdugo Hills High School in the San Fernando Valley. The real principal there is Gary D. Turner, who spends much of his day walking around, talking to students, maintaining visibility. He may not be charismatic or wield a bat, but “the kids know who’s in charge,” he said.

The movie makers had to paint on the graffiti because you don’t find much on campus. No clouds of marijuana, either. Teachers don’t hide out, they watch out.

“We feel safe on this campus,” said senior Soha Bousleiman. “We feel protected.”

Education leaders say that’s the way it should be--and usually is.

In contrast to the movies, said Higuchi, “public education is really the salvation of this country and one of its foundation stones. It’s not some sort of curse.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Hollywood Classrooms

Maverick teachers. Indifferent administrators. Sneering students. And plenty of cutting-edge music. For more than 40 years, Hollywood has portrayed the classroom as a battleground where only extraordinary teachers can make a difference. “The system,” after all, is part of the problem. Here’s a sampling:

“Blackboard Jungle,” 1955

Teacher Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford) quotes Shakespeare but his students call him “Daddy-O,” carry knives and know how to use them. This was America’s introduction to juvenile delinquency and rock music, notably the scandalous “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets. Lesson: Don’t give in to the hooligans.

“Up the Down Staircase,” 1967

Among the most naive of cinema teachers, Sylvia Barrett (Sandy Dennis) manages to overcome her school’s Orwellian rules and insensitive ways. She nurses her students’ hurts and soon they’re deep into a discussion of Dickens’ “Tale of Two Cities”--no remedial reading lessons required. The hip dance is the boogaloo. Lesson: Thugs can be made to see the light.

“To Sir With Love,” 1967

Sidney Poitier’s Mark Thackeray might teach in London’s East End, but the film’s message struck a chord in America. Losers wouldn’t be losers if their teachers didn’t treat them like losers. The singer Lulu plays an adoring student and performs the title song, her only hit. Lesson: Even British thugs can be made to see the light.

“Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” 1982

Smoking marijuana only makes kids goofy. Sex is a riskless adventure, even for 15-year-olds, for $150 abortions are quick and painless. (Hey, this was before AIDS and “Just say No!”) As a history teacher, Ray Walston asks, “What are you people? On dope?” but demands respect and gets it. Except from zonked-out Sean Penn. Lesson: Sex, surfing and pot will win out over American history every time.

“Teachers,” 1984

Formerly an award-winning teacher, Nick Nolte’s character is now a drunken lout, beaten down by the system. And he’s the best teacher at his Los Angeles school. The worst is nicknamed “Ditto” because he merely hands out worksheets and snoozes. It takes a lawsuit filed by a curvy former student-turned-lawyer (JoBeth Williams) to pull Nolte out of his miasma. Lesson: The system sucks.

“Stand and Deliver,” 1987

Portraying Los Angeles’ real-life Jaime Escalante, Edward James Olmos teaches calculus by making it a matter of pride and machismo. Desire, that’s the key. Along with a teacher committed enough to show up after a heart attack. Lesson: Don’t let the nay-sayers get you down.

“Lean on Me,” 1989

Morgan Freeman, playing real-life New Jersey Principal Joe Clark, takes over a failing high school like the new sheriff in town--wielding a baseball bat as his six-shooter. The first thing he does is call an assembly to kick out the troublemakers. Then he makes everyone learn the school song. No disciple of shared decision-making, he also throws out teachers who balk. Lesson: If test scores go up, nothing else matters.

“Dangerous Minds,” 1995

A warm body is needed to teach and beautiful blond ex-Marine LouAnne Johnson (Michelle Pfeiffer) is hired on the spot. Johnson, who was briefly a real teacher in Northern California and wrote a book about it, quickly learns it takes more than niceness to gain the respect of rowdies. How about martial arts? Lesson: Show kids you can kick their butts and they’ll do anything for you, even analyze poetry.

“Mr. Holland’s Opus,” 1995

Music is not about notes on a page, it’s about “heart and feelings and moving people and being alive.” That’s the great insight of music teacher Mr. Holland (Richard Dreyfuss), who thrives for 30 years before being downsized by budget cuts, but not before being tempted by a curvy ... well, you know. Lesson: Beethoven bores. Rock rocks. Sentimentalism sells.

“The Substitute,” 1996

Ex-CIA operative Tom Berenger goes undercover as a sub when his teacher-girlfriend gets attacked by students. He handles them with the help of hidden cameras, bazookas and automatic weapons. Some cinema principals are rule-mongers who demean teachers. Berenger’s boss is out to kill and sell dope--unless guess who can stop him. Lesson: Don’t screw around with a teacher who packs heat.

“187,” 1997

Trevor Garfield (Samuel L. Jackson) is stabbed by a student who doesn’t like a failing grade. When he returns to teaching--in the smoggy, graffitied San Fernando Valley--he’s met with a class of stoned gangbangers and a single promising student, who comes over to his house for tutoring and takes off her clothes. Garfield turns her down and teaches the gang boys some fatal chemistry lessons. Lesson: If nothing else works with your students, off them.