Recruitment Films Show the Worst, Seek the Best

In the forthcoming documentary “The First Year,” rookie Los Angeles teacher Nate Monley tries to reach Juan, a fifth-grader who gives the camera a series of chilling looks.

When a guest speaker to the classroom talks of violence, Juan, whose mother died when he was little, smiles. When the student is caught tagging a bathroom, he is remorseless.

After Monley showers him with extra attention, Juan responds by bringing in a picture of a rat on a toilet. The rat is labeled: “Mr. Monley.”

“It’s just so frustrating, so maddening,” says Monley. “I don’t know what to do.”

This scene comes not from another TV expose on public schools. Strangely, it is part of two documentaries whose stated purpose is to inspire young people to become teachers.

Directed by veteran TV director Davis Guggenheim, “The First Year,” to air Sept. 6 on PBS, and a companion videotape, “TEACH,” are key parts of an effort to fight the statewide teacher shortage. The videotape won’t be televised but will be used as a recruitment tool.

“There’s tremendous need for people who care,” says Guggenheim, 37, who also produced “The First Year” with Julia Schachter. “There’s a life that you can lead that can fill you up.”

Funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust and California State University, the $1-million documentary project comes at a critical time. With baby boomer teachers reaching retirement and the student population rising, America will need at least 2 million new teachers over the next decade, according to the federal government.

While films have long been used to recruit teachers, none has offered quite so risky an argument for entering the classroom.

“What struck me watching it was the realism and yet the challenge that was represented,” says Margaret Fortune, the project’s director. “I guess I think that using this film for teacher recruitment is gutsy.”

The 90-minute “The First Year” and the 30-minute “TEACH” seek to inspire by emphasizing precisely the frustrations that have driven so many teachers away from the classroom.

There are no scenes of adoring faces staring up at teachers. The documentaries, which follow six Los Angeles-area teachers through their first year, dwell on the difficulties: the closed-minded administrators, the lack of supplies and school support, low pay, disconnected parents and disruptive students.

Sections of both films are framed with long, dramatic shots of an empty school corridor, images that reinforce the isolation of these teachers. Each of the instructors gets intimately involved in the lives of students; meaningful emotional connections ensue, but many of the story lines end in heartbreak.

“I hope it accomplishes what it wants to accomplish, and I hope it doesn’t discourage people,” says Georgene Acosta, 31, a teacher at Santa Monica High who appears in the film. “I think it’s a beautiful film, and it really captures the tragedy that teachers face: You see a problem, obvious problems, and it takes so long to do anything about it.”

For the films, Guggenheim and Schachter interviewed dozens of prospective Los Angeles Unified School District teachers, selecting 10 to follow. Those instructors, while diverse in age, race and gender, are not a representative group. The teachers were chosen for “compelling” and “empathetic” traits, the filmmakers said.

The six shown on screen are strikingly poised for first-year teachers. Three of the six were products of Teach for America, a small program that draws heavily from elite colleges.

“We followed a couple of teachers who were really, really struggling,” says Guggenheim. “But you don’t see them in the film. The idea is to inspire people. . . . Everyone knows what a bad teacher is like.”

If anything, the intelligence and idealism of the six teachers make their struggles all the more maddening. Guggenheim says that while he worries that the longer film in particular is “too dark,” he was more concerned with being true to the teachers’ experience.

“Teachers who go in with a fantasy of what it’s about disappear anyway,” he says.

“The First Year” will explode any fantasies.

Joy Kraft, teaching at Santa Monica High, can’t get a proper classroom of her own. Acosta has to fight the school board to preserve funding for the bilingual class she teaches. (“Why did I choose this?” she wonders.)

Maurice Rabb, a kindergarten teacher in South Los Angeles, struggles to pay off student loans and live in Los Angeles County on take-home pay of $1,871 per month.

In the classroom, he is badly frustrated as he tries to get the speech therapist to help a kindergartner named Tyran. The therapist, when not out sick, has a habit of skipping appointments. In the end, Rabb sits down and works with Tyran himself.

Genevieve DeBose, a sixth-grade teacher at Samuel Gompers Middle School on 112th Street in South Los Angeles, has trouble controlling her classroom. She spends extra time with a particularly disruptive student only to see his parents remove him from Gompers.

“I feel so overwhelmed,” she says.

Such moments could just as easily come from a film depicting the challenges of teacher retention. Nationally, half of new teachers in urban districts leave the profession within the first five years.

Backers of the film are undeterred.

They have set up a Web site, https://www.teachersdocumentary.com, to drive film viewers to information about becoming a teacher. They’re looking for $2 million in donations to fund screenings and videocassette giveaways.

Project Pipeline in Northern California, one of the state’s six regional teacher recruitment centers, plans to show the film at colleges, recruitment workshops and at new high school academies geared to preparing students for teaching careers in their home districts.

The question is whether the films’ narrative wallop can attract new teachers without overwhelming them with the difficulties of classroom life.

Both films conclude with Rabb reflecting on the end of his first year. “I feel the pain of my students. I feel hope,” he says. “Please don’t let me forget this type of feeling.”