I am a Promise: Documentary on Public School Paradox
By Alicia Benjamin-Samuels
If you are concerned at all about the decline of public school education in America, you'll want to see the documentary I am a Promise: The Children of Stanton Elementary School. But beware. You may shed some tears as you watch the radiant children of this North Philadelphia neighborhood happily walking and running to school on the first day of school with such hope and excitement. You'll feel great sadness as you guess that many of them will not graduate from high school—not because they can't do the work—but because the madness and trauma of their everyday lives will prevent them.
The subjects of the film are M. Hall Stanton Elementary School's principal, Deanna Burney, and the young students of the school, located at 16th and Cumberland, just a few miles from Philadelphia's bustling Center City.
The students' struggle to learn in a highly dangerous and deeply depressed environment in I am a Promise, released on DVD earlier this year and shot in the early 1990s. The film is alarmingly relevant today and poignantly points to the obstacles that many young people must face to get a quality education in America.
In the film, abundant trash and boarded up homes decorate the neighborhood and sloppy graffiti is painted everywhere. This was the last phase of the tragic crack epidemic. Lots of people are aimlessly walking the streets and hanging out on the corners.
The area is littered with crack viles and used hypodermic syringes that the students, 4- to 10-year-olds, pick up sometimes on their way to school, on the playground and inside the school. School officials have instructed the children to give the drug paraphernalia to the janitor so that he can properly dispose of them.
The film opens on the first day of school for Deanna Burney. This is her third year as Stanton's principal. In a voiceover by Susan Raymond, the film's director, we learn that all of the 725 students are African-American, 90 percent live in poverty, most live in single-parent homes and a large percentage of the parents have drug or alcohol abuse problems.
Burney is hard-nosed yet compassionate as she talks to all of Stanton's students in the auditorium on the first day of school. "What kind of students are you?" she asks. They reply in unison, "Talented, intelligent and gifted." Then she tells them, "You have gifts and talents to give the world. We call you that because we know you are genius children."
But the positive message and feel-good imagery of Burney's morning speech is shattered as Raymond tells us in a voiceover that "a good part of each day is spent by the principal dealing with discipline problems." Cut to Burney moderating an argument between two boys who were caught fighting. Cut to the school nurse wrestling with Cornelius as he's fighting one of his classmates. Cornelius is described as a bright and intelligent third grader who takes Ritalin twice a day to control his hyperactive and aggressive behavior.
Burney, who has a tactile hands-on approach with her students, comes to school at 6 a.m. most days and leaves at 7 p.m. on many nights. We see her standing, touching her students gently and directing them across the street as she watches them walk home. At the same time, we see police cars passing by and sirens loudly ringing.
"I pray everyday that nothing ever happens at dismissal time or in the morning," she tells Susan. At the end of one day, school officials try to allay the fears of a father who is afraid his 9-year-old daughter has been raped. Police report that a child, indeed, has been sexually assaulted but nobody knows the child's identity. After frantic phone calls to the local police precinct and the girl's hangout places, the father learns that his daughter is at a friend's house.
Hope does periodically peek through the gloomy climate of the film. John Coats, a committed African-American male teacher who has been given an all-male class to shape, obviously loves his students. He was assigned 19 boys who were designated as discouraged learners in kindergarten. In a voiceover Raymond tells us, "It is hoped that Mr. Coats will be a positive role model for the boys who have very little male influence in their lives." This impoverished North Philadelphia public school is surprisingly implementing very progressive tactics—survival tactics.
As Coats touches one of the boys' on the head he says, "I told him to go look in the mirror and he saw that he had brown eyes. He never knew that he had brown eyes. He never knew that he had beautiful brown eyes."
As he talks to the boys about issues that they themselves bring to class—racism, alcoholism and drug addiction—Coats occasionally places his hand gently on their heads. "They want to learn. But before they are able to learn they want someone to understand them … not so much to pamper them, but to show that they care and love them," Coats tells the director.
As the director talks to Burney at the end of the school year, the principal holds back tears when Raymond asks her what lies ahead for the graduates. "It's depressing that I don't have any control and I know there's massive indifference to kids in the inner city," she said. "There's such inequity," she said. "I don't think it's gonna get better, I think it's gonna get worse."
As you watch the film, it's not difficult to predict that Burney will soon burn out. Shortly after the Raymonds shot the film, Burney left Stanton. But during the commentary section you can hear that she still cares about the students. "This is a very strong community," she said. "I received a lot of support from the parents and the community. … I saw myself as the gatherer of gifts. The students brought the gifts of wanting to learn."
Sadly, I am a Promise was prophetic in many ways. Student performances on state-mandated tests have shown the dismal job schools are doing. In some parts of the country, including Philadelphia, schools are in such disarray that states have stepped in and assigned management of some low performing schools to private corporations.
In July 2001, Pennsylvania's department of education hired Education Management Organizations to step in and run 45 of Philadelphia's lowest scoring schools. Philadelphia's city and state governments disbanded the city's school board and created a five-member School Reform Commission. The SRC hired Edison Schools, Inc., the University of Pennsylvania, and Temple University to run the 45 schools. In addition, 46 schools in Philadelphia were changed to charter schools and 22, including M. Hall Stanton Elementary, have been restructured which means that they were given new materials, academic tutors, extensive teacher training and monthly testing of students.
Today, Philadelphia's school system, the 7th largest in the nation by enrollment, has shown some improvement. In March 2005 Philadelphia Weekly reported that the first year after the NCLB was signed, 22 Philadelphia schools met the target scores, and in 2004, 160 schools met AYP requirements. But over half of Philadelphia's public school students continue to perform below grade level.
Stanton, which still educates an all African-American student body, is one of the schools that has made significant improvements, according to the School District of Philadelphia's Web site. The site reports that at Stanton, the percentage of students scoring at the advanced or proficient level on the test went up in reading from 13.1 to 70.7 percent, and in math, from 18.7 to 46.7 percent.
Stanton's current principal, Barbara Adderley, told the Philadelphia Weekly in March that suburban schools still get more money per child than Stanton. But that's no excuse for poor teaching, she said. "Teachers have to do their job," she said.
Blog on: What impact has the No Child Left Behind law had on education in inner city and under-funded school systems? What can parents, teachers, and other members of society do to help improve the quality of education for students in public school? Why are student scores on state-mandated tests so low?
