Why Did Hollywood Make ‘Music of the Heart’ a Solo Effort?

To Hollywood, “Music of the Heart” was horror movie wizard Wes Craven’s touching attempt at “Scream”-free fare. But to people who care about education, the film was a horror of a familiar kind.

“Music,” just out on video, is billed by Miramax as the “extraordinary and inspirational true story” of Roberta Guaspari, a music teacher at Harlem’s Central Park East Elementary School. In a fight to save her violin program (and her job) from budget cuts, she led a remarkable campaign that culminated in her kids playing at Carnegie Hall alongside the likes of Itzhak Perlman and Isaac Stern.

All of that is true, and genuinely heroic.

But there’s another battle that runs through the movie as well: Guaspari’s (played by Meryl Streep) effort to liberate poor black children from the basement-level expectations set by the school’s permanent music teacher, Dennis Rausch. The character is modeled, down to the wardrobe, on Barry Solowey, who has taught music at Central Park East for two decades.

In the film, Dennis is a menace to the children’s education, representing everything that’s wrong with inner-city teaching. “I think I know these students,” he tells the newly hired Guaspari, “and I can tell you right now their attention span doesn’t go past do-re-mi. On a good day I can get them to fa.” When Guaspari vows that they will “play as well as any other kids,” Dennis snivels, “Oh, I’d like to see that.” We later visit Dennis in his own classroom, where he absently conducts bored kids on the recorder, his eyes in a grade book where he is inscribing D’s.

After several scenes that play the heartstrings more than the violin strings, Guaspari produces a class full of virtuosi. Then she loses her job and confronts Dennis, demanding to know why he gets to keep his. Still sniveling (he does a lot of that), he answers, “Uh, I have tenure.”

The nasty caricature mirrors what the film does to the school as a whole, transforming one of America’s great small innovative schools into a stereotypical, depressing ghetto institution of non-education.

The real Solowey, however, is the sort of teacher we all pray our kids will get: an inspiration whose class resembles a Juilliard for 10-year-olds. Sitting erect on the edge of their seats, the youngsters run through choral performances in English, Spanish and Hebrew, with strikingly good pronunciation. But for Solowey, pretty good performances aren’t good enough. He gives rations of “beautiful!” and “magnificent!” when they are deserved, but unhesitating criticism when he knows the kids can do better.

His teaching reflects his view of music as a route not just to joy and discipline, but to greater humanity. “I see the function of music as not just to uplift people, the finest parts of them, but also to unite people,” he says. Of his students, he adds, “When they grow up, they’re going to be able to break barriers.”

Deborah Meier, the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” winner who founded the Central Park East school, called Solowey “the most perfectionist [teacher]--the most demanding of every kid in the school.”

The most puzzling part of the trashing of Solowey and his school in “Music of the Heart” is how unnecessary it seems. None of what Guaspari accomplished is lessened by the fact that she did it with the support of--and not in defiance of--her school. Her creation of a fine music program that survived board-ordered cuts is inspirational, even if her colleagues weren’t idiots. Indeed, Meier--a progressive education visionary who is mother to the nation’s small schools movement--has argued persuasively that it was the school’s excellence and high standards that laid the foundation for Guaspari’s triumph.

Sadly, however, that notion of schooling gets an F in Hollywood. What gets high marks there is the idea that one person--armed with a bullhorn and a baseball bat, or training from the Marines--succeeds alone in an educational jungle.

Perhaps some in Hollywood cannot think beyond the one-woman-against-the-world conceit, or believe that we, the audience, can’t handle anything more complex. (This is not directed at Streep, who is active in social causes, including education.)

But the lesson that effective education is achieved by sustained, cooperative efforts, and not just by isolated, Jaime Escalante-esque heroes, is one this country desperately needs to learn. As long as we continue to regard inner-city educational success as a weird, surprising lightning strike, we will be paralyzed in spreading lessons that would make everyone more successful.

As Solowey himself says, Guaspari changed children’s lives, “but the story of the school is a larger story. So many people working together for a quarter of a century--somehow, that didn’t get in the script.”

Jonathan Schorr is an Oakland-based education writer and fellow of the Open Society Institute. He is writing a book about inner-city charter schools.