The Sundance Channel recently wrapped their six-part series “Dream School,” which features 15 kids who either quit their last schools or were kicked out, and will attend The Dream School filled with celebrity teachers in hopes of graduating high school. [Or something like that, we learned last night that the big test they took didn’t mean they actually graduated in real-world high schools, and nearly all of them will have to re-enroll to a regular high school to finish, so I’m not entirely sure what they were there to accomplish.] And even though this program is supposed to be aspirational, it left me with a very scary vision of actual schools and flashbacks to my (thank God) limited time teaching. I see Dream School as representative of what’s wrong in our culture towards education, and thought I’d list 5 reasons the show gave me acid reflux…
5. It’s Always “The Schools Failed These Kids,” not “The Kids Failed These Schools.” A big part of the problem in our attitudes towards modern education is that we seem to think the kids are always right. [Even the phrase “the customer is always right” seems a little outdated given the attitude anyone can expect from their fast food and retail service these days.] Even the Dream School teachers and principals perpetuate this myth by constantly putting down regular schools for “failing” these students even as 2 out of the 15 students in the Dream School quit before the show is over (despite being begged not to), and most of the others aren’t shown to be particularly motivated in academics. It just seems to keep perpetuating the myth that if a student is lazy or completely disinterested in a topic (even a history class taught by Oliver freakin’ Stone) then that is somehow the fault of the teacher, and students should be constantly coddled and bribed into actually studying for a test or staying awake in class.
4. Rage Against “the System.” Even the way public education is talked about these days is framed as students vs. “the system.” There’s a lot of talk on Dream School about “the system” treating students like numbers and not individuals and we all know that European/American societies prize individuality over petty things like competency or something actually working. It would be impossible to scale Dream School (where there’s one principal for 15 students, only one class at any given time, celebrities teaching kids how to dance instead of algebra, and more than ten percent of the kids still quit before the final test) to work for anything close to the large numbers public schools have to work with, and all of the kids who graduated still had to go back to a regular high school to actually graduate. All this talk of “the system not working” is unfair to a “system” that will have at least ten times the size of Dream School in just one grade at any given time yet have far fewer resources to work with.
3. Feeding the Kids the Answers. For all this talk of how innovative Dream School is, the kids still overwhelmingly failed the first test they were given. Then for the second test, the school did something really innovative: they fed the kids the answers, taught them the test before it was given, and the kids all did better! Damn, what a fresh idea! Of course, public schools are all but forced to rely on the same methods so they don’t get their funding slashed but they just don’t have David Arquette to help them do it.
2. Disinterested Black Parents, Overindulgent White Ones. We only get to meet a handful of the parents of the Dream School kids, but from what we’re shown the kids are mirror images of the parenting styles they were raised with. Black students like Mary can’t find anyone to look after her two year old son (who she charmingly calls “Phat Daddy”) while she attends Dream School. And Tyla has about the worst attitude you could imagine (she’s also four months pregnant): she can’t seem to be bothered with things like staying awake in class, studying for any of the tests, speaking to a teacher when asked a direct question, showing up to class half the time, explaining why she’s almost never there, treating any of the celebrity mentors with an ounce of respect, or even eating the right foods for her baby (she only eats fast food, soda, and actually shrieks when someone eats an onion in one episode about fresh vegetables). Her mother is brought in as a last resort, and seems equally disinterested in Tyla’s education. She winds up giving weirdly dispassionate stock answers like “I can’t make her do anything,” “she gonna do what she gonna do,” “she’s not with me most of the time, so how can I tell her what to do?” “maybe she’ll wake up and smell the coffee one day,” and “I’m only here because you just insisted I come here.” Suddenly, Tyla’s inertia and disinterest in her own life starts making more sense, and it’s no wonder Tyla quits before it comes time to take the final test.
Then there are the white parents who seem to think asking their kids to have even basic manners or sociable behavior is “putting too much on them.” Lucca’s mother lets her skip two days of class to go to Coachella because “she’s just so stressed right now,” at the fucking Dream School! Then Kyle’s dad seems to think it’s asking a lot to ask his son not to explode with anger in the middle of the class. Kyle (who seems to think he’s a tough kid because he punched his principal who can’t fight back, but cries like a bitch the real tough kids would eat alive in a few different episodes) also quits Dream School when they “push him too far” by asking him to do the assignments instead of talk all through class. Needless to say, his dad doesn’t suggest he stay in school and gladly comes to get him when it’s time to quit.
1. General Mediocrity is Praised as Exceptional. In all the studies done to measure exactly where American students fit on the world stage, there’s only one area they rank first in: confidence. The teachers at Dream School constantly say things like “these kids are so smart, they don’t even know how smart they are, they just need more confidence.” I really, really, really don’t think confidence is the problem for most of these kids. If a high school student can barely read, write, divide numbers, or pay attention to anyone for more than 5 minutes at one time, I’m not so sure they’re that smart either. But at Dream School, a student merely doing some bogus assignment like making their own freestyle rap, telling a story about themselves, or preparing a sandwich leads to praise of how awesome they are merely by completing the task.
Obviously, a real world school where grades actually matter and students have to take a standardized test every year can’t give out A’s for effort and A++ for self-esteem, and I’m not so sure that kids who are several years behind their peers really need to be more focused on confidence than calculus.