“The Class”

François Bégaudeau plays himself in this French movie about the trials of teaching middle school students in the working class 20th arrondissement, Paris. The movie, France’s nominee for best foreign film Oscar, is based on Bégaudeau’s own book and seems extraordinarily real. His students are Arab, African, Caribbean, Chinese, and white—a mixture on the scale one finds in urban public middle schools throughout the U.S. Bégaudeau tries to connect with his teenagers by being their friend. It doesn’t work. He tries and tries, and they don’t learn. Well, some learn, but the characters who dominate the story [picture, hands up] don’t seem to.

I loved “Stand and Deliver” (1988), a movie about Bolivian teacher Jaime Escalante who was able to connect with his East LA Hispanic math students. Escalante was successful, in part, because he was of their culture, of their world. France wants its students to be French, to embrace one grand (and it is) culture. Bégaudeau’s troublemakers are having none of that.

I’m seeing urban public schools as a dumping ground, where children end up because their parents can’t or won’t pay for a private education—an education that works. Some children will make it out; their parents insist that they do. The majority correctly see they are parked in school by a system that has nothing better for them to do between childhood and adulthood. Naturally, they don’t like it.

In France, in the U.S., the system is broken. We know the solution is to create public schools of choice, schools students go to because they want to be there. Many of the successful teachers in these choice schools will be people of their own culture, and they will learn together, parent, teacher, student.

The old way: top-down, middle class to working class, white to minority. The only way: schools that serve their customers or go out of business.