From the film's website: The gap in opportunities for different races in America remains extreme. Nowhere is this more evident than our nation’s top public schools. In New York City, where blacks and Hispanics make up 70% of the city’s school-aged population, they represent less than 5% at the city’s most elite public high schools. Meanwhile Asian Americans make up as much as 73%. This documentary follows a dozen racially and socio-economically diverse 8th graders as they fight for a seat at one of these schools. Their only way in: to ace a single standardized test. Tested includes the voices of such education experts as Pedro Noguera and Diane Ravitch as it explores such issues as access to a high-quality public education, affirmative action, and the model-minority myth. http://www.testedfilm.com/To my surprise, the film tested was not about the standardized tests that have been plaguing my kids at home. This film by Curtis Chin and Adam Wolman revolves around a controversial test taken by middle schoolers that allows them to enter one of three 3 elite high schools in New York City. The burning question for me after watching this was, what are these 3 schools doing right that everyone else is not? The film follows a gaggle of middle schoolers who are burning the midnight oil and consuming large chunks of their family's income preparing for the SHSAT test. The core controversy explored in the film was not necessarily that there was a test but that there is a huge under-representation of minority students being placed in these elite schools.
I'm certainly not the kind of a film viewer that wants everything spelled out for me and frankly, there was no danger of that happening from this film's rather neutral and informational point of view. The film lacked any real drama other than a few testy exchanges between proponents and opponents of the test at a press conference. Unlike the much larger controversy of standardized testing in all public schools for federal funding what we saw in this film was a highly regarded test being supported by an establishment and a frustrated population of minorities looking at the test as a way for their children to transcend their birth place. The children and the families were less concerned about the disproportionate representation of minorities in the final placement as they were more concerned about the rather blank opportunity that the high schools represented. There seem to be a lot of magical thinking on the part of the parents that entry into the high school was a ticket to a better life. Perhaps it is, perhaps it is not. But, the real meat of the subject should have been whether or not white privilege is part of the problem in the New York City school system and how resources are allocated to poorly performing schools. This issue is a real problem nationwide. As a film the story was a straightforward telling of the prep, testing, and waiting with some statistics thrown in to show the disparity in minority placements. I was disappointed as an audience member that in the final summary there seem to be no way to engage in the debate. The stakes for this particular test are high for a few and non-existent for most. Unlike No Child Left Behind and the mandated testing there is a true purpose of this test. And it can be argued as it was in the film, that entry to the elite schools is based on merit. What will become of this test and the process? Several people involved in this issue rejected the idea of quotas as degrading of the value of the system. Others argued that the system is broken. As one activist gave a statement to the effect that everyone is a little right about how it's broken and how to fix it. After legal appeals were knocked down it looks like the fight will continue but, for me, the real question is how do we fix the dilapidated house and not just the exit door. -GJG Leave a Reply. |
AuthorGregory J. Golda started Media Matrix in 2015 ArchivesCategories |