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FORWARDEVER MEDIA CENTER

Writer Alex Haley writing The Autobiography of Malcolm X with Brother Malcolm.

"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses."
- Malcolm X

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The Forwardever Media Center is 100% committed to providing unconventional writing workshops and media literacy training to "at-risk" Black youth, particularly males, ages 14 through 24. Working in partnership with The Mentoring Center in Oakland, CA., the Center's writing workshops, website internship, and film forums, help students develop critical thinking skills and discover their creative talents. We recruit youth for our programs from the California Youth Authority (the state's largest prison for youth) as well as from universities and high schools. This cross-pollination of young minds creates dynamic shared experiences.

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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?

Posted on May 26, 2005 8:16 AM

Comments (135)

Julia Mallory:

Lemme just begin by saying this: I am a product of an inner-city public school system. I have watched many of my peers not make it, and I have also watched as measurable academic standards have decreased. Improving our public schools will have to be a collective effort. Collective of who? First parents, even poor parents have got to understand the importance of education. Even if they have been failed or failed themselves, they need to embedd in their children that they expect nothing but greatness, not perfection, but greatness! I understand that many parents in certain areas cannot help their children academically, but they can help them morally, emotionally, etc. As far as teachers are concerned, they need to understand the challenges their students face, not to give them a free pass to failure, but rather so they don't expect any less than greatness from them, because in the long run, these children are gonna need it, they might not get a second shot. Also the administration these teachers work for need to be supportive of teachers who refuse to look the other way when their students can't read or write a complete sentenc in the 6th grade. The governement at all levels need to support changes that will bring about the most progress, life is changing, therefore, with regard to education we can't keep doing the same things and expect different results. As far as members of communities, they need to let the children know they care about them and that they have faith in them and that they will not turn a blind eye to the destruction in their path. Also I encourage those who are successful to routinely visit schools and talk to the children and share their paths to show the children that we all face challenges, but our goals are obtainable. I don't think Pres. Bush had a terribly bad thing with NCLBA, however it is sorely underfunded and their are dozen of loop holes that allow schools to further fail to properly educate students. He was right about the accountability, someone has to be accountable, and it is all of us.

Posted by Julia Mallory | August 31, 2005 4:55 AM

Posted on August 31, 2005 04:55

Tom Day:

Congratulations to John Coates, who has been at Stanton Elementary for all of these years.... He is still there doing what he does so well. His dedication and commitment to these children and the neighborhood is admirable. I show the video to my University students every semester. It is a real wake-up call to my students, who have limited exposure to how difficult and challenging life can be for many young children in the inner city. I am impressed with the recent progress at the school (2004-2005) in reading and math. The school reform and the work of Principal Adderley has made a big difference. Again.... A BIG CONGRATULATIONS TO STANTON ELEMENTARY...

Keep up the good work.

Posted by Tom Day | October 29, 2005 5:53 AM

Posted on October 29, 2005 05:53

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